Michael Sicinski
University of
California, Berkeley
The Shining as Vertical Time Study
The complete text is forthcoming in the 2004 publication The Cambridge Companion to Kubrick. Complete data to come.
Jameson / Deleuze
By way of attempting to tease out some of the
complex temporal structures at work within The Shining, I want to begin
by considering two illuminating takes on Kubrick, that of Fredric Jameson in
his outstanding reading of the film, “Historicism in The Shining,” and
some of the discussions on Kubrick’s work in Gilles Deleuze’s book Cinema 2:
The Time-Image. While I will
address Jameson’s argument first, and reinflect and elaborate it using some
critical categories from Deleuze’s film theory, this should not be taken to
mean that I find Jameson’s analysis wanting.
Rather, I am interested in building on it, and taking it in a slightly
different direction. Jameson’s primary
interest is in understanding how the various historical times represented in
Kubrick’s film relate to a master plot regarding the role of class
consciousness in U.S. history. Jameson
moves in this direction based in part on a consideration of the role of genre
recoding in late-1960s and 1970s New American filmmaking. For Deleuze, however, Kubrick’s cinema in
general, and The Shining in particular, enact a mode of cinematic
thought which operates at a pitch which exceeds its local investment in genre
tropes or the collision of distant historical epochs.
Jameson begins his discussion of The
Shining by contextualizing Kubrick’s career within the American scene, such
as Altman, de Palma, Polanski, and Penn.
On page 94 of his essay, Jameson offers a succinct breakdown of how
these filmmakers adopted pre-existent cinematic genres, in order to comment
critically upon the historical status of those genres. In this regard, Jameson is marking a
difference from his earlier argument about pastiche in cinema, in which old
film genres are cited, but only “in quotes,” mimicking their gestures, styles,
and forms, but with no obvious connection to the culture at large. His example:
original film noir might’ve been an expression of cold war anxiety, the
alienation of European immigrants exiled in the United States after
fleeing the Third Reich, or of a growing skepticism about the possibility of
safety of the efficacy of police. Today,
however, that style is simply “film
noir,” or “neo-noir,” just a
ready-made, easily understood style which can be cited for the recognition of
movie buffs. It expresses only its status as a “genre movie.” It is possible to perhaps see some of the
more obviously tongue-in-cheek efforts by the Coen brothers in this light – Blood
Simple as “noir;” The Hudsucker Proxy as “screwball;” O Brother,
Where Art Thou? as “Sturges,” etc.
Jameson finds Kubrick interesting, though, in
part because he sees Kubrick’s adoption of genre codes as entailing an immanent
critique, not only of the codes themselves, but of their contemporary
viability. In this regard, Kubrick’s
genre work seems to create instructive dissonances, rather than holding up
film-savvy citations and smirking quotation marks. As Jameson says, The Shining acts like it will be an
occult film, but becomes a ghost story. But who are these ghosts? As we, along with the Torrances, are given
our first tour through the Overlook Hotel, we learn that it “was once a stop
for the jet set, before there even was a jet set.” We also learn that the hotel
was built between 1907 and 1909, and was even allegedly built atop an ancient
Indian burial ground (cf. Poltergeist).
What does all this mean? For Jameson, these
statements allude to layers of history and privilege, from the expropriated
soil of America to the Gilded Age through to the Roaring Twenties, the hotel’s
apparent heyday. These layers of
competing time should in turn draw our attention to the question of class
consciousness. Jameson argues that the Roaring Twenties were the last age in
which U.S. class relations were blatant, outsized, and seemingly intractable.
(1992, 95). Jack Torrance (Jack
Nicholson) encounters class consciousness as suppressed history upon entering
the Overlook Hotel. Jack is coded as a
lower-class man from Vermont, who’s hired to “look after” the Overlook. When he
encounters the ghost of butler Delbert Grady, the ghost tells Jack that he has
“always been the caretaker.” That is, Jack’s fantasy of social mobility through
writing is short-circuited by the hardwired class relations of the Overlook.
Earlier, in Jack’s interview with hotel manager Ullman, we learn that a man by
the name of Charles Grady murdered his family while serving as the hotel
caretaker in 1970. This complicates our understanding of just who Grady is, and
what historical time he might have occupied. However, the party scenarios which
Jack infiltrates in the Golden Ballroom are from the 20's. The music,
the decor and the fashions all attest to this, inasmuch as such markers are
reliable. So, according to Jameson’s reading, Grady and Torrance are ensnared
by the ghosts of the hotel, made to recognize their subordinate status, in a
much more conscious way than current social relations allow. The hotel puts
them in the 20s to dramatize their lowly rank for them (ibid).
Jameson argues that The Shining is an
implicit comment on Kubrick’s previous film, the literary period-piece Barry
Lyndon. As Jameson interprets it, the very project of a contemporary
“restaging” of an “historical” period (such as Barry Lyndon) can in
today’s world only be nostalgia – making an “18th century,” out of
antiques and doodads which will merely be symbols of our own stereotype of “the
18th century.” The Shining can be seen as a corrective
comment on the stakes involved in revivifying the past. According to Jameson, Kubrick uses the ghost
story to represent the revenge of history, a set of relations between
past and present, these relationships being visible only at certain horrifying
moments, in the form of the past’s domination of the present. The past compels
actions in the present, and they are brutally destructive. For Jameson, The
Shining tells us that “history films” are nostalgic possessions, exercises
in collapsing past and present, but on the present’s terms. The ghostly
possession of The Shining performs the same collapse, but on the past’s
forceful terms.
It becomes difficult to sort out the
historical specifics of haunting in The Shining. After all, we never really know what
relation, if any, existed between Delbert and Charles Grady, or if in fact they
are different people who have been conflated by the hotel’s bent
chronology. It is possible that either
Delbert Grady is Charles Grady’s grandfather (but then where is his son?), or
they are part of a trans-generational ghost force (then why the shared name?).
In either case, such concrete facts as who was the caretaker when, or when such
newsworthy events as quadruple-homicide actually occurred, become subject to a
complex and multilayered chronology. And this is but one example of the
conflicting and interpenetrating time structures at work within the film. While Jameson’s analysis is absolutely
convincing on broad thematic terms, the problem of temporality is slightly more
convoluted when considering relations between (and even within) characters,
places, and non-corporeal entities. In
order to attempt to establish a framework for discussing these multiple
durations, I’d like to turn to the film theory of Gilles Deleuze.
Deleuze’s discussion of elastic temporality
and “sheets of time” in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, as well as Deleuze’s
specific discussion of Kubrick’s cinema, make it possible to reread The
Shining as a study in vertical time.
Rather than seeing the ghost-story genre as enabling an allegory,
however complex, of class relations across American epochs, Deleuze describes The
Shining as establishing an “identity of brain and world” (205) In so doing, Kubrick creates a structure
wherein past and present are fully coterminous time-images to which the
Overlook Hotel-as-mind has equal access.
Following Deleuze, we can see in a form of historical thought at work in
The Shining, one which is articulated not only across epochs but across
spatial, gender, and racial divides, as well as through Kubrick’s attention to
the specific properties of the film medium.
My discussion of Deleuze’s theories will of necessity be brief – they
more than constitute an object of study in themselves, and it is an unfortunate
fact about this rich theoretical material that virtually any concrete
application of it tends to elide its nuances and blunt its overall force. But I hope to provide a sketch of how
Deleuze sees differential temporalities as countervailing forces which drive the
modernist film text.
One characteristic of Deleuze’s writing is
that he seldom spends too much time analyzing a single film or filmmaker. In the whole of his second Cinema
book, Deleuze allots no more than four pages to Kubrick. But those pages are key, because Deleuze
makes a concrete connection between Kubrick and Alain Resnais, who is the
single filmmaker on whom Deleuze expounds at some length. So, by way of describing Deleuze’s concept
of cinematic temporality, I’ll rely somewhat on the Resnais discussions,
opening them onto Kubrick when possible.
In discussing the cinema of Resnais, Deleuze
introduces the concept of the “sheet of time.”
In short, films such as Je t’aime je t’aime and Last Year at
Marienbad contain multiple, discrete and interacting temporalities, each
which unfolds with its own logic. The
sheet, as Deleuze describes it, is like a roll which unfurls, in that the time
structure (what we might conventionally think of as a narrative) exists as
total potential, a synchronic mass wherein past, present, and future are all equally
available, and can potentially all be “present.”
In thinking about The Shining, we
encounter questions, such as: Who is Grady?
Why has Jack “always been the caretaker”? Why does the Overlook’s “curse” or “ghost life” afflict Jack and
Danny (Danny Lloyd), but not Wendy (Shelly Duvall)? And most importantly, how can these elements coexist within the
same film, intersect and interact? For
Deleuze, Resnais’s cinema is an example of a multiple-past structure which
exceed the simple fact of differing private pasts. The same sets of events in the past actually, objectively occur
in totally different ways for the characters of Resnais, making an objective
“past” impossible for the characters and the spectator to determine. He briefly sketches this development in
Resnais’s career. In the earliest
films, Resnais begins with the most radical proposition regarding multiple time
structures – that world-historical time functions in this manner, and there are
“sheets of time” which ensnare subjects differentially across time and
geography. Deleuze writes
Resnais
had begun [in his early films] with a collective memory, that of the Nazi
concentration camps, that of Guernica, that of the Bibliothéque Nationale. But he discovers the paradox of a memory for
two people, or a memory for several: the different levels of past no longer
relate to a single character, a single family, or a single group, but to quite
different characters as to quite unconnected places which make up a
world-memory. He attains a generalized
relativity, and takes it its conclusion what was only a direction in Welles:
constructing undecidable alternatives between sheets of past (Deleuze
1989, 116-117).
As I hope to explain below, The Shining partakes of these
macrolevel time differentials as well.
Those shopworn categories of post-1960s academic analysis, “gender,”
“class” and “race,” can actually be thought about in news ways, by considering
them as concrete historical temporalities which unfurl into radically different
presents, creating collisions at their points of intersection.
But part of the affective force of The
Shining comes from witnessing the individuals involved, trapped in
different scripts, fundamentally opaque to one another as familial relations
shift into an animalistic battle royal.
Not unlike Resnais’s Mon oncle d’Amerique, which creates
analogies through cross-cutting between social actors and tormented laboratory
mice in a maze, The Shining is a field of forces in which a family –
those who should be more capable than any others of possessing a shared “sheet
of past,” become supernaturally estranged.
Deleuze again finds in Resnais a contest of claims to the past, but on
the private level of two lovers, in Last Year at Marienbad.
Last
Year at Marienbad is a more complex
figure, because here the memory is for two characters. But it is a memory which is still shared,
since it refers to the same givens, affirmed by one of them and refused or
denied by the other. What happens is
that the character X revolves in a circuit of past which includes A as shining
point, as ‘aspect’, whilst A is in regions which do not include X or do so only
in a nebulous way. Will A allow herself
to be attracted into X’s sheet, or will the latter be shattered and unhinged by
A’s resistances which are rolled up in her own sheets? (Deleuze 1989, 117)
Likewise, in The Shining, we discover incommensurable claims
about the familial past, and, as with Resnais’s work, we are given no objective
criteria to evaluate their truth claims, and we do not know for certain whether
a schism split once-coterminous sheets of time apart, or whether they were
fundamentally but imperceptibly separate prior to the intervention of the
Overlook. And, as Deleuze makes clear,
these incommensurate time structures create fissures in the film which are not
mere formalism, but concrete demonstrations of the fractured present.
Did
X know A or not? Did Ridder kill
Catrine, or was it an accident, in Je t’aime je t’aime? Was the letter in Muriel sent and not
received, and who wrote it? These are
undecidable alternatives between sheets of past, because their transformations
are strictly probabilistic from the point of view of the coexistence of ages. Everything depends on which sheet you are
located on (Deleuze 1989, 120).
What follows below are a set of readings of The Shining from a
number of angles of vision, all loosely organized around the question of
temporality. When I call the film a
“vertical time study” in my title, I mean to imply that within The Shining
there are discrete envelopes of activity, organized by differential access to
the ability to narrate events, the relative speed of action, and specific
accretions of the past. The Overlook
Hotel both accommodates and orchestrates distinct timeframes, and by
structuring my analysis around individual characters, I hope to give a sense of
different possible temporal modes which overlap and intersect within the film. This entails character analysis, but is
quite different from it, since each character serves as a formal principle
through which the film can organize conflicts in the form of temporal
collision. Also, in several cases
(especially Danny and Tony), the clash of incommensurable timeframes is worked
out on the level of film form, and as such touches upon the viewing time of the
spectator as well. I discuss her or him
when necessary, although not so much as a concrete, embodied audience member,
but more as a textual function or potential, an available time structure which
is offered for audience acceptance / rejection. Calling The Shining a ghost story, ultimately, cordons it
off within genre boundaries, and assigns those sheets of time which haunt it to
the role of momentary anomalies in the field of the present. Following Deleuze, I hope to explain some of
the ways in which Kubrick’s film articulates
“the strict contemporaneity of the present with the past that it will
be, of the past with the present that it has been” (274).
Danny / Tony
Shortly after coming to, following a blackout
at the bathroom sink, Danny Torrance describes “Tony” to the doctor who has
made a housecall to the Torrances’ apartment.
“He’s the little boy who lives in my mouth,” Danny explains, and
sometimes Tony “hides” by retreating into Danny’s stomach. The doctor inquires as to whether Tony
“tells [Danny] things,” following up on a likely audience assumption – that
Danny is experiencing some form of schizophrenia. Danny refuses to elaborate further, and, in one of the most
implausible moments of medical analysis depicted in the cinema, Danny’s doctor
assures Wendy that there’s nothing to worry about, that Danny simply lapsed
into a state of “self-induced hypnosis.”
What the physician cannot know, and what Tony
cannot or does not communicate to Wendy, is that Tony is not merely a
discursive function but also a visual force.
Danny and Tony hold conversations, such as the one at the sink prior to
Danny’s blackout. But the act of
narration which sends Danny into a trance state consists of a series of visual
inserts which, in filmic terms, represent flash frames intruding onto the space
of diegesis. Like a good director, Tony
doesn’t tell, he shows. We see brief, decontextualized snippets of the main
elevators of the Overlook Hotel, gushing with tidal waves of blood; we also see
the two little girls, presumably the murdered Grady children, standing so close
together in their identical dress as to suggest conjoined twins. These images, lasting between one and two
seconds each, are spliced into a close-up of Danny, the horrified spectator of
Tony’s “film.”
This dual function of Tony within Danny (one
who tells / one who shows) can be understood as representing two distinct but
related temporal structures. First of
all, the information we can glean from what Tony says, both to Danny and to
Wendy, indicates that Tony shares Danny’s sensorium. While we never fully understand what Tony’s status as a
consciousness would be if he were to retreat into Danny’s stomach, we can tell
that during most of Danny’s waking hours, Tony is also present as a dual
consciousness. Thus, Danny’s sensorium
is doubled, drawing in information for two separate entities. (This in itself marks a difference from movie-generated
stereotypes of “split personalities,” often shown toggling back and forth but
usually not simultaneous.) However,
when Tony is discoursing, Danny remains quiet, and vice versa. This can be seen as being both practical –
Danny has only one set of vocal cords – and indicative of Tony’s status as a
separate being, since he and Danny engage in conversational turn-taking typical
of civilized spoken discourse. So, at
these moments, Danny and Tony talk to each other and exchange ideas across time.
And, within the context of the film, actor Danny Lloyd speaks for either
character, Danny or Tony, at different times.
In contrast to this diachronic characterization, the visuals Tony
presents to Danny appear like a horrific slide show, jutting into the diegetic
flow and effectively halting the narrative.
Within the contexts of the diegesis and of The Shining itself as
a film viewer experiences it, Tony’s images leap forward in time. That is, they provide views which Danny will
encounter again once he arrives at the Overlook Hotel, and which the spectator
will encounter later in the film as well. But at the same time, these inserts
hark back. The Grady girls are ghosts
from some indistinct past, haunting the Overlook Hotel and Danny’s
consciousness. But also, the bleeding
elevators represent an image from the probable past of The Shining’s
spectators, since this indelible image standing alone served as the theatrical
trailer for Kubrick’s film. So, the
visions which Tony transports from the Overlook to the theatre of Danny’s
consciousness are part of an intertext, both for Danny (these images may
represent events which predate his own birth) and for the spectator
(referencing imagery which preceded the film into theatres, presaging what was
to come).
The visions which Tony provides for Danny
(and of course, Kubrick simultaneously confronts the audience with them as
well) are synchronic slices from multiple points in the non-present, brought
forcefully into the present. The
visions indicate that Tony is a clairvoyant consciousness, possibly omniscient.
As such, Tony has access to visions which occur elsewhere in the film. These visions make Danny’s present into a
compound and multiple timeframe. Within
the context of The Shining’s organization, we are seeing blunt
insertions of future images which will occur in more elaborated form further
along the filmstrip. The plasticity of
film allows for such physical manipulations as the flashback and the
flashforward, and there is nothing so unusual about their appearance in and of
themselves. However, their integration into the diegetic framework of the film
makes this manipulation of cinematic time a doubled effect, since the plastic
rearrangement of the film’s form by Kubrick is also located as the work of an
omniscient agent, Tony, who exists inside the diegesis.
There are numerous precedents for Kubrick’s
temporal intervention in the history of modernist cinema, although most
restrict the organization of temporal plasticity to the textual level,
ascribing this composition fully to the film’s author. Pertinent examples include Godard’s
extradiegetic intertexts, or the radically compressed, almost Webern-like
narration strategies of Straub and Huillet’s earliest films. In these cases, the directors are clearly
marked as the enunciators of these temporal shifts, commenting through montage
on the proceedings from a position outside.
Closer in kind to Kubrick’s use of vertical time relations are modernist
film texts wherein memory, trauma, or subjective dispersal are ascribed to
diegetic characters, and the filmmaker uses the plastic potentials of montage
to create an analog to these states.
This particular formal feature is best exemplified by the cinema of
Alain Resnais – not surprising, given Deleuze’s claims for Resnais -- and a
less well-known Greek-American filmmaker, Gregory Markopoulos. In mid-period Resnais especially (Muriel,
Je t’aime je t’aime), the organization of flashback and flashforward is
so radical as to confound attempts to locate a secure present at most any point
in the film. On the other hand,
Markopoulos’s films, such as Twice a Man, use single frame insertions,
sometimes as near-subliminal signposts of his characters’ consciousness of
other temporalities; other times the single frames repeat and accelerate,
serving as a temporal weave, pivoting between one timeframe and another.
In the cases of both Resnais and Markopoulos,
a particular formal effect is presented as a directorial analogue for a state
of consciousness which is diegetically attributed to a character in the
film. That is, a subjective state on
the part of a character becomes the authorization for formal experimentation,
and we as viewers understand that the filmmakers are creating audio-visual
analogies for the characters’ perception of time and memory, traumatic time,
etc. While Deleuze is certainly correct
to identify affinities between Resnais and Kubrick in terms of organization,
that which Kubrick achieves in The Shining is of a slightly different
order. Danny, a spectator internal to
the text, experiences flashes of imagery, and like we spectators outside
The Shining, Danny experiences these flashes as disturbances in the
perceptual field. More importantly,
Kubrick distinguishes these images from those flashes of clairvoyant vision
common to the “paranormal” film genre, by locating a separate and specific
agent, Tony, who is responsible for their arrangement and presentation. (This split consciousness distinguishes
Danny from Dick Hallorann, who appears to see visions but remain a stable
subject nonetheless.) So, unlike the time traveler in Resnais’s Je t’aime je
t’aime, for example, for whom film form is an analogy to scrambled
consciousness, and unlike the psychic “seer” who appears in many genre films
(Hallorann), a figure who remains a singular subject despite having unplanned
eruptions of psychic perception, Tony appears in The Shining as a
conscious force with the power to manipulate film form. As Danny explains to Hallorann, “It’s like I
go to sleep, and he [Tony] shows me things.”
One need only compare such a statement with
similar statements in the film theory of Christian Metz to begin to detect an
analog between Tony’s power and the power of the cinema. For instance, Metz writes
The
dreamer does not know that he is dreaming; the film spectator knows that he is
at the cinema: this is the first and principal difference between the
situations of film and dream. [. . .] However, the gap between the two states
sometimes tends to diminish. At the cinema affective participation, depending
on the fiction of the film and the spectator’s personality, can become very lively,
and perceptual transference then increases by a degree for brief
instants of fleeting intensity. The
subject’s consciousness of the filmic situation as such starts to become a bit
murky and to waver, although this slippage, the mere beginning of a slippage,
is never carried to its conclusion in ordinary circumstances (Metz 1982, 101).
Of course, Tony quite certainly carries this slippage well past
“ordinary circumstances.” But the
important factor here is that unlike other modes of temporal compression in
film, wherein a disturbance in film form is either a directorial intervention
which approximates a character’s experience, or a representation of a
character’s far-seeing vision, The Shining sets up concrete
relationships between Danny’s vision and that of the audience. Whereas Danny and Tony tend to occupy the
same timeframe on the level of narration, Tony takes over on the level of
visual representation, orchestrating the visual field for Danny while Danny
recedes into a trancelike state.
Likewise, we as spectators are subject to Danny’s visions, orchestrated
as they are by Kubrick. A modernist
organization of temporality in The Shining, to which we are subject as
viewers, is located at the site of a doubled agency. What Tony is within the text, Kubrick is beyond the
text. Therefore, the vertical
temporality represented by Danny’s visions is already doubled, “haunted” by
Kubrick’s overall management of the film’s form. With this doubling, The Shining uses the trope of clairvoyance
to vertically articulate the time of the diegetic narrative’s unfolding with
the time of viewing. Moreover, since these two times are mapped onto one
another, any given vision of Danny’s has the capacity to be temporally coded in
more than one direction – the elevator, for example, which represents Danny’s
future (the trip to the Overlook), The Shining’s past (a period at the
Overlook before Danny was born), and the spectator’s immediate past (the
theatrical trailer). In this way,
Kubrick is able to locate his own directorial authority within the text, as a
parallel but virtually omnipotent consciousness, who shows the spectator things
when he or she is “asleep.” Whereas
filmmakers such as Resnais and Markopoulos use the plasticity of filmic time to
promote intellectual engagement, if not distanciation, with respect to their
modernist organizational patterns, Kubrick’s doubled status seems to encourage
the horror of helplessness on the part of the spectator. Images from multiple timeframes will assault
our sensorium, and an outside force, who has already seen both the beginning
and the ending, is in complete control of what we see. This is nothing unusual – in fact, this is
one of the primary appeals of moviegoing.
What is unusual in The Shining is the rather explicit textual
alignment of directorial control with supernatural force. In this case, modernist manipulation of
filmic time is a cause for severe spectatorial disturbance, not intellectual
contemplation.