The Shining and the Anglosphere

Time, class, empire, corruption

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is very clearly an attack on the American ruling class, and makes no bones about the fact that within that class is a Jewish faction. Given Victor Ziegler’s prominence, confidence, knowledge and influence, Stanley Kubrick was acknowledging that, at the end of the 20th Century, among the American ruling class Jews were at least equal to the legacy WASPs, possibly senior to them. It could easily be interpreted that his attack on “the American ruling class” is actually a veiled attack on elite Jewry.

The Shining (1980), which concerns the American ruling class from 75 years earlier, is different.

In the early 1920s, America had not yet ascended to superpower status. It had helped end the Great War and was heavily industrialised and extremely prosperous, and thus had shown its potential in various spheres, but it was yet to wrest the mantle of supremacy from its British parent. The Great War had already sown the seeds for that transfer, and in the meantime America shocked and delighted old Britain with jazz and the Charleston and the Black Bottom, and tremendous amounts of money continued to be made across America while Britain struggled. But there was still very much a presumption that “civilisation” was “the property” of the British, and Americans had to “live up” to their example by preserving their ways, holding to their standards, emulating their manners and trusting their judgements.

This idea was especially held by America’s upper-class, and the existence and distinctiveness of that class was itself significant; in America in the 1920s, “class” still meant more than how much money you made each year. It was a cultural status as much as a financial one. It expressed differently than in Britain, of course, but was very much a reality.

Kubrick’s film is an adaptation of a 1977 novel by Stephen King. I will assume reader familiarity with the film but not with the novel, and will speak of some differences between them. Deleted scenes and deleted chapters will be referenced. There will also be slight mention of King’s 2013 sequel, Doctor Sleep, and its 2019 film adaptation, but familiarity with them will not be needed.

Of special note, for our purposes, is one particular change that Kubrick made. In both novel and film, the Overlook seems eternally stuck in a moment in its past, a sort of “temporal fulcrum point” around which everything dreamily revolves, constantly referring back to it, facets of the moment being replayed, and people from the present being inserted into it retroactively. In King’s novel, the point in time is a masked ball in 1945. Kubrick changes it to a July 4th ball in 1923. I think this change is very significant.

By 1945, American culture had transformed radically from 1923. It had gone down a far more egalitarian route, lauding the “everyman” who had fought World War II, and celebrating the power of capitalism to make everyone equal and successful. This dethroned the WASP elite, and indeed all overt elitism and cultural hierarchy. Kubrick shows us the chaotic results of this change (in the form of the spiritually-crippled Jack Torrance) but he has the Overlook tied to the era before the change: the 1900s through to the 1930s, when the WASPs were still “on top”.

It is conceivable that this only appears to be the case, and that the Overlook is fashioning itself for Jack Torrance’s psyche. Maybe it is much more versatile, and, when targeting someone else, would emphasise some other period of its history. But I doubt it.

Admittedly, the deleted scrapbook sub-plot (removed only to keep the film a reasonable length) would have shed light on the Overlook’s history after 1923, showing that many deaths and murders have occurred. But these scenes would not negate the Overlook being “fixed” in 1923; they would only show that it had hurt many people since then, before the Torrances.

I think Kubrick was concerned with the end of empire. His Overlook embodies the dangers that face a people at that civilisational juncture.

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We will discuss the various ghosts we see in the Overlook Hotel, as well as some of its staff.

Kubrick’s film has a very minor character called Bill Watson, a quiet and efficient man.

In King’s novel, Watson has far more dialogue and is very different - talkative, uncouth and (quite proudly) uneducated. Furthermore, he is actually the grandson of the man who built and first owned the Overlook, Robert Townley Watson (born 1864). That a wealthy man like “Bob T” could result in such working-class progeny is interesting. It seems to be a milder example of how the Overlook exploits and demeans people.

As explained in the novel’s deleted prologue:

One of the last of the Western giants that arose in the years 1870-1905, Bob T. came from a family that had made a staggering fortune in silver around Placer, Colorado. They lost the fortune, rebuilt it in land speculation to the railroads, and lost most of it again in the depression of ‘93-’94, when Bob T.’s father was gunned down in Denver by a man suspected of organizing.

Bob T. had rebuilt the fortune himself, single-handedly, in the years 1895 to 1905, and had begun searching then for something, some perfect thing, to cap his achievement. After two years of careful thought… he had decided, in modest Watson fashion, to build the grandest resort hotel in America.

From there, Bob T transitioned from a life of speculating to a life of hard manual work. He was devoted to the Overlook from the start, in the same way that later men like Grady, Torrance and (to some extent) Ullman would be. He lost everything in the course of keeping it going. Bankrupt by 1915, he sold it, but with the condition that he be allowed to remain as caretaker, for life, along with his son Richard. (His other son, Boyd, who had a mind for business, died mysteriously on the Overlook’s grounds while it was being built. This seems to be the first example of the Overlook fashioning a family to its needs.)

Born in 1897, Richard was a practical and hard-working boy, “more fitted for this [caretaker] life than one of affluence and college and business things”. He was married in 1922 and his son Bill was born shortly after (being nearly sixty in the novel). Bob T died in the early 1930s. His son remained, and eventually his grandson took over - a caretaking dynasty staying constant while the hotel passed swiftly from one owner to another.

For me as a Brit, it is difficult to understand the character of Bob T. That he could be both a shrewd, successful investor and a hard-working practical labourer seems like a contradiction to me, but perhaps makes more sense to Americans. More oddly, he was born into a “staggering fortune” and would presumably have got the best schooling money can buy, yet his dialogue and thoughts do not seem like those of an educated man. He seems uncouth, cynical, unsophisticated and resentful of rich people, just like his (much less wealthy) grandson would be. He must have had some social grace in order to navigate the world of big business, but this is not illustrated by King. Had the prologue been retained, perhaps these inconsistencies would have been cleared up in redrafting.

As for Kubrick, his film omits all of this history and presents Bill Watson as nondescript in personality and position. With this and the (late) removal of King’s scrapbook sub-plot, it seems that Kubrick wanted the Overlook’s early life to be vague and indistinct, lost in a haze of “WASPness”. Details would only get in the way of that.

I also think he did not care for King’s idea that the hotel had always been a financial drain on its various owners, never turning a profit in its 70-year history. That does not accord with what we see in the film: a successful and prestigious establishment that might be past its heyday (the jet set era, thirty years earlier) but is still doing well on the fumes of that.

This ghost is unnamed in the original novel and credited in Kubrick’s film as “Injured Guest”. In Doctor Sleep, King retcons him to be Horace Derwent, a character from his original novel. This creates problems since the man, as seen in both films, has clearly been killed with a blow to the head, while according to the original novel’s (deleted) epilogue Derwent died of old age.

Another inconsistency is that he is English in Kubrick’s film but American in Doctor Sleep (both novel and film) - but this has to be done, since the original novel stated that Derwent was American.

It explains that he was a sadistic bisexual magnate who was born poor in Minnesota but quickly gained extreme wealth through shrewd business decisions and shady connections. He owned the Overlook in the 1940s and remained linked to it well into the 1960s via money laundering and shell companies. He had connections with the mafia and they found the remote hotel convenient for various purposes, including conducting a “hit” there in 1958. Jack speculates that Derwent might even still own the hotel now, in 1977 (the deleted epilogue states Derwent died in 1976, raising the possibility that, upon death, he has united with the hotel).

Derwent came from the working-class (in a heavily Scandinavian, not Anglo, part of America) and the mafia are Italian/Jewish, all of which is a pronounced departure from the Overlook’s graceful WASP origins. Perhaps this is another reason Kubrick omitted all of this from the film.

In Kubrick’s film, Grady sounds extremely English. Yet, when Ullman is telling Jack about this former caretaker, why does he not mention that he was English? It would surely be unusual. The explanation is presumably that, when Grady was a man, he wasn’t English. He was a working-class American of 1970, but the Overlook has fashioned him in death into a posh interwar Englishman.

In fact, King’s novel might confirm this. Ullman tells Jack that Grady left high school without graduating. Now here are snippets of Jack’s first encounter with him:

He almost fell over the drinks cart that was being wheeled along by a low-browed man in a white mess jacket…

“Sorry,” Jack said thickly.

“Quite all right,” the man in the white mess jacket said. The polite, clipped English coming from that thug’s face was surreal…

“I was told you hadn’t finished high school. But you don’t talk like an uneducated man.”

“It’s true that I left organized education very early, sir. But the manager takes care of his help. He finds that it pays. Education always pays, don’t you agree, sir?”

Of course, the text doesn’t necessarily mean that Grady has an English accent, just that he speaks well, but there is no doubt that the Overlook has changed him. With Kubrick’s film, the same thing perhaps explains the mystery of why an upper-class Englishman took a job as caretaker at a remote hotel in Colorado. It might also explain why Ullman calls him Charles but “he” introduces himself as Delbert; the Overlook has given him a whole new identity, only tangentially based on the discarded one, the one it destroyed in a blitz of murderous insanity.

The same is undoubtedly true of Grady’s daughters. They would have been working-class American girls of 1970 - the kind whose father does janitorial work - but are now upper-class English girls.

The maître d’hôtel who says “good evening, Mr Torrance” when Jack joins the ball is English. Maybe in life he was an Englishman, or maybe, as with Grady, the Overlook has made him into one.

The woman in the bathtub never speaks so we don’t know whether she is American or English. But the film’s casting ironically makes the point: the young version is played by an English actress (Lia Beldam) while the old version is played by an American (Billie Gibson).

As a sidenote… in the novel, this woman died just a few months before Jack’s interview. I don’t like that. For me, part of the “sting” of this scene is the idea that she belongs to some unknowable pocket in the past, and has been drifting in the stale water of that bathtub for decades.

Another aspect of that scene which I find very affecting is the utterly blank look on her face as she rises out of the bath. It is as if the Overlook has drained everything out of her, creating a thoughtless mannequin that can somehow hurt people. I find this much more frightening than when she is cackling at Jack.

The man receiving fellatio from a bear-costumed man has very WASP features but doesn’t speak, so again we don’t know.

Lloyd the bartender is the only ghost whom we know to be American. However, even this isn’t straightforward. The actor Joe Turkel uses the old-fashioned “mid-Atlantic” accent, occasionally sounding pretty much English. The mid-Atlantic accent was associated with actors (which is probably how Turkel, hailing from Brooklyn, learned it) and with upper-class Americans such as would have visited a hotel like the Overlook. The accent is certainly not what one would associate with a bartender. As a result, this character seems to be, again, a hold-over from America’s pre-1945 past, when it was still deeply connected to Britain and still aspired to Old World notions of aristocracy and class. (The only discrepancy with Lloyd is that Turkel was a Polish-Jewish American so didn’t look WASP-ish at all.)

The hotel’s manager Stuart Ullman is American, although he celebrates royalty having visited the hotel who obviously would not be. But he rather vulgarly equates them with modern movie stars (“all the best people”). This seems like a comment on the decline of Western culture; “celebrities” used to be people of refinement, learning and accomplishment, now they are people who merely look good and have a talent for acting (a job which historically was seen as akin to prostitution).

In King’s novel, Ullman is unpleasant, arrogant and snobbish. Kubrick changes the character completely and has him played by the charming Barry Nelson. Friendly, polite, good-natured and coming across as pretty much “a standard man” in modern egalitarian America, the film’s Ullman is very different from the stereotypical WASPs of yore, and (with Nelson’s Norwegian genetics) doesn’t fit their phenotype.

But nonetheless, he is their successor. When the simple Wendy makes amazed, naive and superficial commentary about the Overlook, Ullman deftly handles her inferior cultural awareness. He does it with the subtlety of a true “man of the world”, and there is no sense of contempt.

However, a (famously) deleted scene from the end of the film would have shown that Ullman was involved with the supernatural goings-on at the hotel, fully complicit with evil despite his very affable demeanour. Kubrick kept this scene until the absolute last minute, removing it only due to audience feedback, so clearly it was his intent that Ullman be “involved”. For me this makes far more sense; I can’t believe that Ullman is the manager yet doesn’t “know”.

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Class

Kubrick’s version of Jack Torrance is working-class. This is not just because he is played by Jack Nicholson, that charming ruffian. It is in the very characterisation - his dialogue and behaviour. He is radically different from the man in King’s novel, who is very comfortably middle-class. For example, he says the following about IQ tests:

I don’t believe in them. They strait-jacket the expectations of both parents and teachers.

One cannot imagine the film’s Jack saying something like that.

Like Kubrick, King was interested in social class, but he had very different intentions. Kubrick had the understanding of hierarchy that comes with being a very rigorous and intelligent thinker. He understood there will always be an elite, and that while this is both good and bad, it is always natural, necessary and therefore in a sense “right”. By contrast, King is a standard post-1945 liberal and sees the middle-class as the proper apex of society, with anything “above” that being culturally fraudulent, materially rapacious, and morally indefensible.

His Jack is of the middle-class but has “fallen” due to alcoholism. He was a well-regarded teacher at a private school but got fired after drunkenly punching a student, so is reduced to applying for a caretaker job at a hotel. This only happens because a former drinking buddy from the private school (Al Shockley) is extremely wealthy, has a 35% share in the Overlook, told him about the job and ensures he gets it.

By contrast, Kubrick’s Jack would never be allowed anywhere near a private school. He would never have an extremely wealthy and cultured friend whom he has a lot in common with. That is just not commensurate with the man we see. He is intelligent, but inescapably working-class in his manners and attitudes. He puts on a face for Ullman at the interview and sometimes acts lofty over the (much less intelligent) Wendy, but quickly descends to his brutish default whenever alcohol dissolves his pretensions. We see that there is a hollowness to him; left with infinite time to write a novel, he writes gibberish… because “there is nothing there”.

Jack is the product of what World War II, and the dethroning of the WASP elite, did to America. He is deracinated from all of history - the pre-1939 America, and the deep continuity that would give to “the Old World” of Europe. He values money and respectability - note how he balks at the idea of “working in a car wash” - but does not understand higher culture, does not understand what respectability is actually for.

Conscious of this lack in himself, he mocks higher culture. Stepping into the 1920s high society milieu of the Overlook ball, he does not “rise to the occasion” but instead flaunts his uncouthness. He speaks boorishly to the refined Lloyd and ostentatiously “joke dances” around the upper-class guests. This is a man who has no idea how to behave, who cannot adapt to a higher culture but hasn’t the humility to keep a low profile. He knows about money, power and sex, but not other forms of wealth. He is a predator.

This again seems to speak of Western decline. Ullman mentions “movie stars” because we don’t have aristocrats any more. 1970s America has ignorant bimbos in hot-pants but not elegant young women who went to finishing school and wear beautiful ball-gowns, living and sustaining a higher culture. 1970s America has Jack Torrance, a vulgar everyman who wants to sexually conquer those aristocratic women but resentfully loathes the culture that produces such beauty. He respects it only because it is powerful, because he feels impotent and desires power.

In this sense the film makes it difficult to side with one or the other - the elegant 1920s culture that has turned demonic, or the vulgar 1970s guy who bespoils it.

On the other hand, while only the base aspects of that culture appeal to Torrance, the same might be said of the 1920s ghosts themselves. They do not speak of higher things, do not seem to be interested in anything but power. For this reason, The Shining could be seen as an attack by Kubrick on WASP elites. But I think that would be a superficial reading.

I have long thought that, in Jack Torrance, the film shows a man “up against history”, the sheer force of which crushes him. Scanning the novel recently (I read it once, at the age of 11) I found an oddly similar thing written by King:

[Jack] promised himself he would take care of the place, very good care. It seemed that before today he had never really understood the breadth of his responsibility to the Overlook. It was almost like having a responsibility to history.

The Overlook “employs” him but the weight of the duty is more than a mortal man can bear. Jack is an ordinary man forced to “preserve” (but actually to contend with) the history of the Overlook, of America, of the West.

A related interpretation would say that a man cannot be up against “history”, because history is not inert. It is a space in which events and trends occur and slowly give birth to elements, forces which have their own agendas, and are immanent in the world.

In King’s novel, Jack is a good man corrupted by one of these elements. In Kubrick’s film, he is a bad man - psychotic, selfish and shallow - who is delighted to have finally found something that authorises these traits he has always had to subdue. The alcoholism is incidental, whereas in the novel it is the Overlook’s “predecessor” in corrupting Jack.

I believe this is the real reason King so dislikes Kubrick’s film: it turns his personal avatar (Jack Torrance) from a good, cultured man corrupted by alcohol into a reprehensible boor who would be so even without alcoholism. This deprives King of his comforting excuse and implies that he is by nature an angry, resentful, insecure charlatan. And indeed, his writing hardly represents the pinnacle of culture, however talented he may be. Those old aristocrats might have been pretending too, but if so, at least their pretence wasn’t predicated on jealousy. I think King hates Kubrick’s film because Kubrick’s Jack is the real Stephen King, not the victim he constructed for his novel.

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Empire

That the Overlook was built on an ancient Native American burial ground is a detail absent from King’s novel and added by Kubrick, along with several other allusions (the hanging cloths in the lounge, the tins of food in the pantry, Wendy’s attire and hairstyle). I think Kubrick was a hard realist, and his attitude to empire was like MR James’ attitude to learning: it’s going to happen, and it needs to happen, but it always has a price and the first price is that it makes you complacent. He possibly believed that it also makes you evil, but I don’t think so because the film does not attack WASP culture in general, nor Anglo, nor European. It doesn’t even attack imperialism really, but simply shows that it comes with a cost. We know imperialism was on Kubrick’s mind because the film alludes to it with Jack’s line about the “White man’s burden”, the racism of Grady (“a nigger cook”) and the callous building of a luxury hotel (a plaything for the rich) on ground that is sacred to a conquered people.

The film gives us no understanding of the interplay between the WASPs who built and have died at the Overlook through the years (becoming malevolent ghosts) and the Native American spirits that already inhabited the ground. We cannot know whether the evil stems from one group or the other. Possibilities:

• the WASPs were always evil

• the WASPs were made evil by the Native spirits. (It would seem a strange revenge for the Native spirits to inflict on their oppressors, to make them powerful and immortal.)

• the evil somehow results from the two groups “combining”

I doubt Kubrick saw imperialism as inherently and wholly bad. (Does anyone seriously believe that he saw Congolese primitives as equal - in any way - to the people who built the English mansion he bought? He was far too much of a realist for that.) When you have a fallen view of human nature, as he undoubtedly did, it is much easier to accept that people do bad things without being bad, or wholly bad, and that they do things which are necessary but have bad consequences, that life simply doesn’t rhyme in grand couplets of justice.

But of course, that isn’t enough to say.

Kubrick’s film doesn’t have “a message” as such. It is not “political” or even “moral”. Kubrick is too detached for that. His film is cerebral, contemplating the spiritual. It is a meditation on evil as a force in the world. We first see how the WASPs became vulnerable to that. We see the profound emptiness at the end of empire, when higher purpose has given way to raw mercantile acquisition, vulgar wealth and hollow frivolity. These things seem to be what drove the WASPs of the Overlook. But the hotel itself (and its ghost versions of those people) represents something darker still. It is something perennial and elemental and inhuman, and which I don’t think can be ascribed to any particular human group, certainly not the WASPs. In their late-imperial waywardness, they fell into a foreign trap, not something they created themselves. They were not wholly innocent and good in the first place, but they were naive (as all humans are to the elements) and they got corrupted by something, hollowed out and transformed into husks like Lloyd and Grady, doomed to spend eternity uttering the desires of an unseen, awful thing.

Kubrick laughed off attempts to interpret the film, saying that it was just a horror movie. Certainly it would be a mistake to be too literal about it. But I think it is obvious that, while being vague and imprecise, he was contemplating something, and I think it is this metaphysical relationship between human beings, power, and the sheer overwhelming weight of history, of elemental forces. One group rises only to be cut down by circumstance or by its own hubris, and usurped by some other.

Thus, Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is a quasi-sequel to The Shining. There, we see that, while ordinary Americans are kept busy with material nonsense and the mirage of egalitarianism, there is still an elite in America. It is concerned with perennial things, spiritual matters, and power for its own sake. As before, it owns and controls everything and keeps ordinary Americans in line. It just isn’t their elite any more.