The Philosophy of Horror

From Domestic Nightmares to the Nightmare of History: Uncanny Eruptions of Violence in King’s and Kubrick’s Versions of The Shining

From Domestic Nightmares to the Nightmare of History John Lutz The past is never dead. It’s not even past. —William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Jack Torrance: Mr. Grady, you were the caretaker here. Delbert Grady: I’m sorry to differ with you, sir. But you are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. —The Shining Early in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Dick Hallorann assures the apprehensive Danny Torrance that there is nothing in the hotel that can actually hurt him and explains that the terrible events of the past can leave behind a trace of themselves that is visible only to those who shine. As it turns out Hallorann is profoundly mistaken. In an ironic twist, he overlooks the one thing in the Overlook Hotel that will eventually kill him, Danny’s unstable, alcoholic father who, in the final shot of the film framing the photograph of the Fourth of July celebration in 1921, proves to have always been there. Hallorann’s mistake is based on the assumption that the past has no power over the present. Nonetheless, both Kubrick’s film and King’s novel each investigate the complex ways in which the past acts upon—indeed, lives 161 Uncanny Eruptions of Violence in King’s and Kubrick’s Versions of The Shining 162 John Lutz on in—the present. In King’s novel this past manifests itself through Jack’s growing abuse of Wendy and Danny, an abuse that is ultimately revealed to have its origin in Jack’s victimization by his own father. In Kubrick’s film the scope of victimization is much broader and encompasses the forms of systematic violence inflicted by American institutions upon oppressed and exploited groups. In effect, in Kubrick’s adaptation of the novel the frightening , evil world perceived by the victimof child abuse undergoes an allegorical transposition to the nightmarish violence lying hidden in the foundations of American society. In both the novel and the film the vehicle for depicting this hidden violence is what Freud described as the uncanny, or that which “belongs to the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread.”1 Kubrick’s overt interest in Freud’s work on the uncanny has been commented upon by Diane Johnson, who collaborated with Kubrick on the screenplay. Johnson notes how she and Kubrick sought explanations in the works of Freud in general, and his essay on the uncanny in particular, for the key elements that make something frightening.2 Although it has been commented upon less frequently, some of the most terrifying moments in the novel—the jiggling handle of the door of Room 217 once Jack has locked it, the entity in the concrete ring in the snow-laden playground—conform equally to Freud’s description of the uncanny. These episodes can be connected ,asinFreud’sanalysis,withsomethingfamiliarthathasbeenrepressed but returns as a terrifying element.3 The woman in Room 217, “long dead and reclining in her bath, a bar of Lowila in one stiffening hand as she waited patiently for whatever lover might come,” has a clear connection to Jack’s submissive and abused mother, just as the child entity Danny encounters in the concrete ring with its head split open, “crawling after him in the dark, grinning, looking for one final playmate in its endless playground” evokes the history of child abuse lurking beneath the appearance of normality in the Torrance family.4 In each case, the past is, to paraphrase William Faulkner’s frequently quoted assessment of history, neither dead nor past but a concrete material force constantly threatening to emerge in the present . A similar process is at work in Kubrick’s film, where evil is consistently represented as “a disembodied, vague state of cosmic affairs” and “the world as an evil and forbidding place” where violence can erupt unexpectedly at any moment.5 As Brigitte Peucker points out in her analysis of the uncanny in Kubrick’s film, “The ghost materializes and is revealed to have a body; Kubrick’s uncanny is decidedly corporeal.”6 Indeed, Kubrick’s use of the uncanny is concerned with rendering the past corporeal and registering the ways in which the nightmare of history continually impinges upon and defines the present. Taken together, both King’s novel and Kubrick’s film [3.143.228.40] Project MUSE (2024...