The whole novel of The Shining by Stephen King dripped with contempt for wealth and class from the very first words, “An officially little prick.” Of course it would be popular with the young Boomers who thinks the high class that their parents loved was such a drag, man.
When working in a high art museum while the Joes were still in their 70s and 80s, I was stuck by how classy they were in their attitude as compared to their children. They would wear their Sunday best and behave like they were in a church. The Silents were also classy but with a more chic dress. The Boomers wore sandals, some with white socks, carrying and drinking water bottles and carrying giant cameras. Their kids were worse as years go by.
Considering that the Joes grew up poor and the Boomers blessed with the best economy in the 500 years, it’s still astonishing. The Joes grew up with classy Hollywood movies that still embraced high society and culture and thus gave them a model to aspires to. The Boomers also have clean and classy movies along with a more “hip” music, yet by the time they turned 20, many wanted to buy a pet rock and to perm their hair to better fit their cool pimp getup, because, like, that’s so cool, those jivin’ Shaft men.
I came later but I was described as an old soul, and have a very close relationship with my grandparents. I was very into history and religion and art long before I was exposed to the science fiction, libertarian, and Ayn Rand that seems to influence the Boomers. The thing is, I was already 25, so while these have an impact on me, they weren’t as important as they would be to the Boomers in their teens and college years. I could see the charm and some value but I could compare them to what I already knew. Plus, I was more willing to question even my heroes late into my years. I doubt many can change their minds after 30. And this may be related to my being exposed to the classical thought very early in my childhood. Could this be why the younger generations seem awful? Being cut off from the ancient minds?
This review is definitely a good for thought essay of Kubrick’s movie The Shining, and I loved his 2001. Still disappointed that I didn’t go to the Moon in 2001 like I was hoping as a kid.
Your connection between The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut is sharp. Kubrick was tracing the same disease from one stage to another. In The Shining, the elite is WASP, exhausted, and ashamed of its own inheritance. In Eyes Wide Shut, the elite has mutated, still powerful, but deracinated and decadent, performing rituals of control rather than leadership. Both films describe a ruling class that has lost its metaphysical center.
What makes this reading strong is that it does not mistake Kubrick for a moralist. He does not scold; he dissects. His horror is geological. You sense, as you wrote, the “elemental and inhuman” beneath the Overlook’s floorboards. That is why the films still work. They are not topical; they are ontological.
And yes, Kubrick saw empire as a condition, not a crime. His films accept hierarchy as an inevitability, but they ask what happens when hierarchy forgets the reason it exists. When it ceases to be spiritual, it curdles into cruelty and artifice.
Your reading has that rare quality: it treats Kubrick as the metaphysician he was. Few writers today can trace a line from the collapse of WASP moral authority to the hollow spectacle of late-century American wealth and see the continuity. You did. That is the sort of criticism worth keeping, a sign that someone is still thinking about civilization as a living, dying organism, not a costume party.
I think you're being unfair to King. I know it is fashionable for people on the Right to hate on him nowadays, and he has made many incredibly shallow and stupid public statements. His politics are undeniably awful. But as a writer.... he is something else altogether. In fact, I find it hard to understand how a man can portray such profound moral depth in his novels and short stories, and then display such stupidity and total lack of awareness of truth in his statements on politics and current events. However, I forgive him this. He has affected my life in very positive ways since I was a child. Indeed, I grew up with his work, and was nourished by it. It's part of my mental landscape, and I'm grateful for that. I regularly reread The Stand and Needful Things.
I think it's completely unfair to accuse King of being "an angry, resentful, insecure charlatan". He is no charlatan, but an extremely talented storyteller with a genuinely mythic imagination, and his flaws are largely the result of being a product of the university hippie culture of the late 1960's. We should not be too hard on him for that. How can any of us say what effect coming of age in that environment would have had on us? Can we really say we would be unaffected by it? King is a naive liberal to be sure, who seems incapable of breaking out of the moral and political assumptions he picked up in his early 20's. But I just don't care. His writing more than makes up for it, and in his writing, he transcends those limitations.
I think King had every right to be upset with Kubrick's film. Though an excellent horror film with a superbly eerie atmosphere, it was not faithful to his novel, which would probably upset any writer who takes his work seriously. I don't think King's disliking making Torrance a bad guy shows a flaw in his character- the novel was about the corruption of decent young family man, who had harmed his wife and son in the past through his alcoholism and anger control issues. The film takes away that whole major plot point by just making him a nasty, unlikable creep from the start. The whole point of the novel was about a normal man being corrupted by evil forces and Kubrick's changes just gutted that. Torrance also resisted the evil in the end and triumphed over it by destroying the Overlook, while the film just has a bleak and hopeless ending where Jack dies after thoroughly succumbing to evil. And killing Scatman Crothers was totally unnecessary. That character survived in the novel. In short, the film, while excellent on its own, was not a good adaptation, and King has every right to be irritated by that.
It’s a trope that you see in many of his ghost stories. Some learned Oxford academic will find himself confronted by a supernatural event and, for all his learning, completely unable to make sense of it or deal with it.
" I think King hates Kubrick’s film because Kubrick’s Jack is the real Stephen King, not the victim he constructed for his novel."
Man that is so brutal, possibly the best criticism of Stephen King I have ever seen. King wrote this book as a hate-letter to old America, and it looks like Kubrick saw right through that.
Just curious how kings book was a hate letter? I guess just opulent wealth? Seems like the “Indian burial ground” angle of Kubrick has more “anti colonial” vibes.
I'm beginning to like Kubrick, after years of simply not getting the point. I think he was a genius, so he could make a straightforward horror film and it would end up as a labyrinth of allegories. Not sure how exactly, I guess he focused on minutiae that called to him, and they generated some kind of felt coherence, and he orchestrated these so they harmonise, so the result seems total, dreamlike, unified, rather than just a hodge podge of clever Easter eggs and gimmicks. It's a bit like Kafka's imagination, it invites interpretation while resisting any total definitive analysis. I was just plain baffled by The Shining when I saw it 25 years ago, your (great) essay makes me want to rewatch it.
I don't watch movies, haven't watch tv for years. I guard my emotions (don't watch most sports, ocassioaly a soccer match). 'Truth stranger than fiction'. _Cartoon Reality Nutwork (CRN)- we're livin it!
From what I garnerd from reading the article, I'd say that I love the artistic complexity of Kubrick, leaving things open to interpretation. I just might have to watch the movie! I love reading movie and theatre critics though.
Yes I think that’s how genius happens. And a lot of is done by the subconscious too. Kubrick may not have been totally aware of what he was producing—he probably wasn’t lying when he said it’s ’just a horror film’—but he would have kept working on things that felt right. Keep doing that, and at the very end it takes flight and becomes this living thing that we can still be awed by fifty years later.
I think of it as trying to get as much as possible into a big jar – you or I would start by filling it with rocks, we’d learn a bit about the process and realise we could improve it by adding pebbles. An artist would see us labouring and pour in some sand, and then a craftsman would improve on it again by filling it with water. And that’s it, the thing looks complete.
But the genius sees the full jar and adds a bag of salt, and then we have something else entirely.
You definitely should. What I say about the temporal fulcrum point, and about Charles Grady being transformed by the Overlook into Delbert Grady, explains the photo at the end which seems to baffle a lot of people.
An explanation/bit of fleshing out is in order here:
"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."
Americans to this day, although it is fading fast like everything else, embrace the Horatio Alger mythos whereby through hard work and inherent skill working class boys can achieve material and social success. Alger wrote pulp fiction with this theme for much of the 19th century. Like all national mythos, the Horatio Alger conceit is wildly exaggerated yet also contains large elements of truth, making it useful and effective propaganda. The ideal, again fading, was to obtain wealth while also retaining the ability to work hard once financial success was achieved, a practical egalitarianism of sorts.
In effect, this is the shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves cliche taken to its logical endpoint, with the added element of retaining the ability to labor hard once the bust cycle is entered. I suppose the British mythos of the upper class getting its hands dirty in wartime and rubbing shoulders with the proles in the trenches is somewhat analogous even if not precise because of the extra element of noblesse oblige, real or perceived.
As you touch on near the end, Globohomo is finishing off the Horatio Alger mythos by promoting upper class foreigners who, if they ever worked hard at any point, likely would deny it and would recoil at the thought of having to do so in hard times. Much of today's roiling dissatisfaction with contemporary America results from this transition from a land with possibility to one with a rigid caste system fully in opposition to all prospects of advancement for its Heritage population. If the SHINING were remade, Jack very well might be race-swapped but the demonic apparitions would remain white. That, my friends, is the recipe for revolution.
I like your analysis except for the revolution part. You forgot the sex revolution where (white) women take the side for, and not against, their men. Right now college educated women vote heavily Democrat and want more and more quotas and immigration. Stephen Miller is working hard to decapitate DEI but are women not looking at their potential take-down via loss of sex quotas?
"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."
I think that is about right- in all of King's novels that I have read (I have read them all up through the late 1990s) there is always one character that I think is autobiographical and, in "The Shining", that character is Jack Torrance, and the two versions of Torrance are very different, King's and Kubrick's.
I'm inclined to side with Kubrick on this one i.e. that it was a simple horror story though it does have obvious allusions to the moon landings that are impossible to ignore once they are shown to you.
You may be correct but to me it sounds like that old story of the group of people being shown around an art gallery by an art historian. The group get to a painting of three clearly caucasian naked men that have have all been painted to have black skin except that the man in the middle has a white penis not a black one. The historian said that this painting was clearly expressing the enslavement and emasculation of the black man as the artist had painted these white men black except for the penis of one in the middle which showed that the emasculation of all black men had almost been completely accomplished by the white man. The group murmured amongst themselves and while most moved on to the next room with the historian a few hung back still looking at the painting. An old man sitting there said that what the historian had said was wrong and that he could tell them the real meaning if they wanted him to. The few remnants of the group semi-sniggered and asked why he should know more than the historian and the old man said I should know because I painted it. You see these men are Welsh miners and the man in the middle had been home for his lunch.
Most historical "facts" are just as fake as that art historian's interpretation as one day we shall all be able to see in glorious 3D technicolour and surround sound as we step down into the machine to see for ourselves. Buy one of those infinite Kubricks a beer as a "random" act of kindness before he is famous and long before the Shining and he will probably tell you what his "Rosebud" moment was that led him there just as one of those infinite Welles shall happily tell you his.
That's a funny story and I think it describes the petit bourgeoise middle brow attitude towards art as mere snobbery; and instead demands entertainment or decoration. I think it's a wrong attitude though because you fail to understand how subliminal penetration (advertising/political propaganda/fashion) works; and you can't see how you are being manipulated by images, gestures and sounds in time, i.e., pop culture.
I think the old guy could see how his work was being used to manipulate people which is why he spoke up and I think those who stayed behind for him to speak to saw that as well. Religion is the most obvious way people's minds are manipulated where what a religious leader says is more often than not completely distorted by those that came after who never even met him. Christ's teachings were wholly undermined by Saul for example by the simple method of pretending he had had a conversion on the road to Damascus and he reinforced that by changing his name to Paul in just the way Jesus had given new names to his disciples when he met them. Are those who pushed pop culture manipulating us or are they themselves being manipulated? I remember Paul McCartney stating that "the songs wrote themselves" and me shouting at the TV after he did "then why did you charge us so much to hear them then Paul?" The ancient Greek philosophers used to think that ideas had a life of their own and that they came into the minds of those best able to get them out into the world. This stopped people getting big headed and who knows, given Paul's admission that the songs wrote themselves, and the fact so many ideas seem to arise around the world at the exact same time, ....... maybe it is correct and we are actually "manipulated" by concepts in this conceptual multi-verse that only appears solid because we are conceptual in nature ourselves. What would you call the top concept in this infinitely resourced conceptual reality? The Higgs Boson? Probably not and the top concept would agree with you. McCartney sold his children into slavery, the ideas that came to him freely like a trusting child, he sold. That is why he is not a decent man and that is why there are very few decent people in this world and because when decent people do arise and try to give those children their freedom by releasing them into everyone's mind they are often the victim of a tragic accident or lose their funding as happened to Tesla for example when his backers discovered he was working on ways to free people from their slave system. As he said "These people belittled me and laughed at me but all the while I was working for the future and the future shall vindicate me." ........ and so she shall.
Thanks for your comment. I think the problem with modern culture is that the people who make it despise or have contempt for their audience. Did Saul/Paul hate the people he preached to? I don't know, but I do know that 90% of modern cultural producers despise their audience. Most people don't know this (or if they do they don't care) and are literally eating the equivalent of spiritual fast food. It's pretty much junk.
For instance, what would Kubrick think of Donald Trump and what he represents? Modern cultural producers hate him, from Bruce Springsteen to Robert DeNiro. If you are white guy why would you consume anything made by these people, other than you feel the same way? Stay away from them. They make poison.
Those who push their "culture" on us most definitely hate us and yes Saul detested Christians, he had personally murdered hundreds before his "conversion" but that wasn't killing enough of them for his liking so he took their church over to corrupt it from within. As Lenin replied when he was asked if he was worried about the opposition to his murderous anti-Christian regime in Russia "No for we are going to lead it". He followed Saul's method of infiltration and lies but Saul didn't invent it for it is as old as the hills. I gave Trump a fair shake of the lamb's tail but 2 months of his first term was enough for me to see that he was bought and paid for like the rest unless you believe in him being a 56D chess master which I don't. Clearly Springsteen and DeNiro are simply shills for the other side of the UNIparty. When DeNiro was chosen to advertise the KIA Niro EV I wrote off to KIA telling them that I would never buy any of their products ever again as they had made the idiotic decision to hire a guy who thought that 90% of the planet were evil for daring to want the same standard of living as him and who hated half his own countrymen and I refused to endorse their idiocy. I simply can't watch a DeNiro film after he made those sorts of statements. KIA sent me a reply but I never bothered to read it. What is the point? They will do as vassals always do, follow orders.
Very thought provoking. I need to watch The Shining again; I've never watched it with such literary interest. This essay reminds me of something that I've wanted to write about the old 'patriarchy' in the United States, the Patrician class that has pretty much died off, and which once ruled the publishing industry that was reputedly so exclusive and yet is now utterly trashed by "woke" puritan millennial women with pronouns in their bios. The irony! They wail about how 'exclusive' was the patriarchy, yet they are much more bigoted than the old patrician class was when it came to appreciating great art -- and that certainly would have included the boorish, drunken, talented sort of writer who wasn't of their class, but was inducted into their class by talent.
The 1920s ushered in the NEW MONEY classification, as opposed to OLD MONEY. The celebrities were new money. Old money knew how to behave. New money was brash and ostentatious.
One thing I love about the old money people -- I had an old money WASP boyfriend back in the 80s -- they had a genteel way of looking both rich and poor at the same time. Showing off in any way was forbidden.
In any case, this piece stirs wonder as to what happened to the old world class markers. They seem to have been outmoded for sure. Yet, those classes held civilization together, in a way. Now it seems that the 'upper class' are the new money showoffs who virtue signal love for immigrants and other luxury beliefs to show that their rapacious beliefs actually don't hurt them, while simultaneously destroying the continuity that the upper classes once maintained.
Great comment and spot on. I know of one outrageously rich old money neighborhood that really illustrates the point. Those of multi-generational extreme wealth still shop for groceries in their enclave while dressed very casually, and pay attention to pricing; they aren't "slumming" and are quite sincere. A nearby new money neighborhood, full of the freshly wealthy, has people shop for them and makes a special point to dress to the nines if forced to do the dirty. This is now, but I agree it is disappearing as far as the former.
In case you haven't seen it, the move "Metropolitan," from 1990, portrays the declining WASP upper class in America, and hints at its ties to the Old World. It's poignant and memorable. Very highly recommended. Unlike so many movies, it expresses sympathy for those WASP elites.
Thank you for your thought-provoking reflections on "The Shining."
One case similar to the Overlook situation linked below. There is quite an interesting history of Anglo-American ghost towns, mansions and castles stretching the North American continent. This is a vast topic that seems to always stray into horror and drama. Ghosts of Empire and all that.
Maybe one day our new Chinese overlords will give ghost tours of decrepit Hollywood mansions.
Trump's grandfather was once such old European hotelier, who left a ruin up in the Yukon. My brother-in-law worked on some aspects of the resoration of the heritage site on Lake Bennett, as a contractor.
The whole novel of The Shining by Stephen King dripped with contempt for wealth and class from the very first words, “An officially little prick.” Of course it would be popular with the young Boomers who thinks the high class that their parents loved was such a drag, man.
When working in a high art museum while the Joes were still in their 70s and 80s, I was stuck by how classy they were in their attitude as compared to their children. They would wear their Sunday best and behave like they were in a church. The Silents were also classy but with a more chic dress. The Boomers wore sandals, some with white socks, carrying and drinking water bottles and carrying giant cameras. Their kids were worse as years go by.
Considering that the Joes grew up poor and the Boomers blessed with the best economy in the 500 years, it’s still astonishing. The Joes grew up with classy Hollywood movies that still embraced high society and culture and thus gave them a model to aspires to. The Boomers also have clean and classy movies along with a more “hip” music, yet by the time they turned 20, many wanted to buy a pet rock and to perm their hair to better fit their cool pimp getup, because, like, that’s so cool, those jivin’ Shaft men.
I came later but I was described as an old soul, and have a very close relationship with my grandparents. I was very into history and religion and art long before I was exposed to the science fiction, libertarian, and Ayn Rand that seems to influence the Boomers. The thing is, I was already 25, so while these have an impact on me, they weren’t as important as they would be to the Boomers in their teens and college years. I could see the charm and some value but I could compare them to what I already knew. Plus, I was more willing to question even my heroes late into my years. I doubt many can change their minds after 30. And this may be related to my being exposed to the classical thought very early in my childhood. Could this be why the younger generations seem awful? Being cut off from the ancient minds?
This review is definitely a good for thought essay of Kubrick’s movie The Shining, and I loved his 2001. Still disappointed that I didn’t go to the Moon in 2001 like I was hoping as a kid.
Your connection between The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut is sharp. Kubrick was tracing the same disease from one stage to another. In The Shining, the elite is WASP, exhausted, and ashamed of its own inheritance. In Eyes Wide Shut, the elite has mutated, still powerful, but deracinated and decadent, performing rituals of control rather than leadership. Both films describe a ruling class that has lost its metaphysical center.
What makes this reading strong is that it does not mistake Kubrick for a moralist. He does not scold; he dissects. His horror is geological. You sense, as you wrote, the “elemental and inhuman” beneath the Overlook’s floorboards. That is why the films still work. They are not topical; they are ontological.
And yes, Kubrick saw empire as a condition, not a crime. His films accept hierarchy as an inevitability, but they ask what happens when hierarchy forgets the reason it exists. When it ceases to be spiritual, it curdles into cruelty and artifice.
Your reading has that rare quality: it treats Kubrick as the metaphysician he was. Few writers today can trace a line from the collapse of WASP moral authority to the hollow spectacle of late-century American wealth and see the continuity. You did. That is the sort of criticism worth keeping, a sign that someone is still thinking about civilization as a living, dying organism, not a costume party.
I think you're being unfair to King. I know it is fashionable for people on the Right to hate on him nowadays, and he has made many incredibly shallow and stupid public statements. His politics are undeniably awful. But as a writer.... he is something else altogether. In fact, I find it hard to understand how a man can portray such profound moral depth in his novels and short stories, and then display such stupidity and total lack of awareness of truth in his statements on politics and current events. However, I forgive him this. He has affected my life in very positive ways since I was a child. Indeed, I grew up with his work, and was nourished by it. It's part of my mental landscape, and I'm grateful for that. I regularly reread The Stand and Needful Things.
I think it's completely unfair to accuse King of being "an angry, resentful, insecure charlatan". He is no charlatan, but an extremely talented storyteller with a genuinely mythic imagination, and his flaws are largely the result of being a product of the university hippie culture of the late 1960's. We should not be too hard on him for that. How can any of us say what effect coming of age in that environment would have had on us? Can we really say we would be unaffected by it? King is a naive liberal to be sure, who seems incapable of breaking out of the moral and political assumptions he picked up in his early 20's. But I just don't care. His writing more than makes up for it, and in his writing, he transcends those limitations.
I think King had every right to be upset with Kubrick's film. Though an excellent horror film with a superbly eerie atmosphere, it was not faithful to his novel, which would probably upset any writer who takes his work seriously. I don't think King's disliking making Torrance a bad guy shows a flaw in his character- the novel was about the corruption of decent young family man, who had harmed his wife and son in the past through his alcoholism and anger control issues. The film takes away that whole major plot point by just making him a nasty, unlikable creep from the start. The whole point of the novel was about a normal man being corrupted by evil forces and Kubrick's changes just gutted that. Torrance also resisted the evil in the end and triumphed over it by destroying the Overlook, while the film just has a bleak and hopeless ending where Jack dies after thoroughly succumbing to evil. And killing Scatman Crothers was totally unnecessary. That character survived in the novel. In short, the film, while excellent on its own, was not a good adaptation, and King has every right to be irritated by that.
Yes, fair points.
I am very interested in M.R. James’s idea on learning. I know him most for ghost stories.
It’s a trope that you see in many of his ghost stories. Some learned Oxford academic will find himself confronted by a supernatural event and, for all his learning, completely unable to make sense of it or deal with it.
You’re right (facepalm). Somehow I thought he had some pedagogy stuff.
UNRWA: The Factory of Eternal Conflict
https://open.substack.com/pub/sergemil/p/unrwa-the-factory-of-eternal-conflict
" I think King hates Kubrick’s film because Kubrick’s Jack is the real Stephen King, not the victim he constructed for his novel."
Man that is so brutal, possibly the best criticism of Stephen King I have ever seen. King wrote this book as a hate-letter to old America, and it looks like Kubrick saw right through that.
Just curious how kings book was a hate letter? I guess just opulent wealth? Seems like the “Indian burial ground” angle of Kubrick has more “anti colonial” vibes.
I'm beginning to like Kubrick, after years of simply not getting the point. I think he was a genius, so he could make a straightforward horror film and it would end up as a labyrinth of allegories. Not sure how exactly, I guess he focused on minutiae that called to him, and they generated some kind of felt coherence, and he orchestrated these so they harmonise, so the result seems total, dreamlike, unified, rather than just a hodge podge of clever Easter eggs and gimmicks. It's a bit like Kafka's imagination, it invites interpretation while resisting any total definitive analysis. I was just plain baffled by The Shining when I saw it 25 years ago, your (great) essay makes me want to rewatch it.
I don't watch movies, haven't watch tv for years. I guard my emotions (don't watch most sports, ocassioaly a soccer match). 'Truth stranger than fiction'. _Cartoon Reality Nutwork (CRN)- we're livin it!
From what I garnerd from reading the article, I'd say that I love the artistic complexity of Kubrick, leaving things open to interpretation. I just might have to watch the movie! I love reading movie and theatre critics though.
We're in a SPIRITUAL battle!
Yes I think that’s how genius happens. And a lot of is done by the subconscious too. Kubrick may not have been totally aware of what he was producing—he probably wasn’t lying when he said it’s ’just a horror film’—but he would have kept working on things that felt right. Keep doing that, and at the very end it takes flight and becomes this living thing that we can still be awed by fifty years later.
I think of it as trying to get as much as possible into a big jar – you or I would start by filling it with rocks, we’d learn a bit about the process and realise we could improve it by adding pebbles. An artist would see us labouring and pour in some sand, and then a craftsman would improve on it again by filling it with water. And that’s it, the thing looks complete.
But the genius sees the full jar and adds a bag of salt, and then we have something else entirely.
You definitely should. What I say about the temporal fulcrum point, and about Charles Grady being transformed by the Overlook into Delbert Grady, explains the photo at the end which seems to baffle a lot of people.
Beautiful analysis as always, Colin, thank you.
An explanation/bit of fleshing out is in order here:
"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."
Americans to this day, although it is fading fast like everything else, embrace the Horatio Alger mythos whereby through hard work and inherent skill working class boys can achieve material and social success. Alger wrote pulp fiction with this theme for much of the 19th century. Like all national mythos, the Horatio Alger conceit is wildly exaggerated yet also contains large elements of truth, making it useful and effective propaganda. The ideal, again fading, was to obtain wealth while also retaining the ability to work hard once financial success was achieved, a practical egalitarianism of sorts.
In effect, this is the shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves cliche taken to its logical endpoint, with the added element of retaining the ability to labor hard once the bust cycle is entered. I suppose the British mythos of the upper class getting its hands dirty in wartime and rubbing shoulders with the proles in the trenches is somewhat analogous even if not precise because of the extra element of noblesse oblige, real or perceived.
As you touch on near the end, Globohomo is finishing off the Horatio Alger mythos by promoting upper class foreigners who, if they ever worked hard at any point, likely would deny it and would recoil at the thought of having to do so in hard times. Much of today's roiling dissatisfaction with contemporary America results from this transition from a land with possibility to one with a rigid caste system fully in opposition to all prospects of advancement for its Heritage population. If the SHINING were remade, Jack very well might be race-swapped but the demonic apparitions would remain white. That, my friends, is the recipe for revolution.
I like your analysis except for the revolution part. You forgot the sex revolution where (white) women take the side for, and not against, their men. Right now college educated women vote heavily Democrat and want more and more quotas and immigration. Stephen Miller is working hard to decapitate DEI but are women not looking at their potential take-down via loss of sex quotas?
"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."
I think that is about right- in all of King's novels that I have read (I have read them all up through the late 1990s) there is always one character that I think is autobiographical and, in "The Shining", that character is Jack Torrance, and the two versions of Torrance are very different, King's and Kubrick's.
I'm inclined to side with Kubrick on this one i.e. that it was a simple horror story though it does have obvious allusions to the moon landings that are impossible to ignore once they are shown to you.
You may be correct but to me it sounds like that old story of the group of people being shown around an art gallery by an art historian. The group get to a painting of three clearly caucasian naked men that have have all been painted to have black skin except that the man in the middle has a white penis not a black one. The historian said that this painting was clearly expressing the enslavement and emasculation of the black man as the artist had painted these white men black except for the penis of one in the middle which showed that the emasculation of all black men had almost been completely accomplished by the white man. The group murmured amongst themselves and while most moved on to the next room with the historian a few hung back still looking at the painting. An old man sitting there said that what the historian had said was wrong and that he could tell them the real meaning if they wanted him to. The few remnants of the group semi-sniggered and asked why he should know more than the historian and the old man said I should know because I painted it. You see these men are Welsh miners and the man in the middle had been home for his lunch.
Most historical "facts" are just as fake as that art historian's interpretation as one day we shall all be able to see in glorious 3D technicolour and surround sound as we step down into the machine to see for ourselves. Buy one of those infinite Kubricks a beer as a "random" act of kindness before he is famous and long before the Shining and he will probably tell you what his "Rosebud" moment was that led him there just as one of those infinite Welles shall happily tell you his.
That's a funny story and I think it describes the petit bourgeoise middle brow attitude towards art as mere snobbery; and instead demands entertainment or decoration. I think it's a wrong attitude though because you fail to understand how subliminal penetration (advertising/political propaganda/fashion) works; and you can't see how you are being manipulated by images, gestures and sounds in time, i.e., pop culture.
I think the old guy could see how his work was being used to manipulate people which is why he spoke up and I think those who stayed behind for him to speak to saw that as well. Religion is the most obvious way people's minds are manipulated where what a religious leader says is more often than not completely distorted by those that came after who never even met him. Christ's teachings were wholly undermined by Saul for example by the simple method of pretending he had had a conversion on the road to Damascus and he reinforced that by changing his name to Paul in just the way Jesus had given new names to his disciples when he met them. Are those who pushed pop culture manipulating us or are they themselves being manipulated? I remember Paul McCartney stating that "the songs wrote themselves" and me shouting at the TV after he did "then why did you charge us so much to hear them then Paul?" The ancient Greek philosophers used to think that ideas had a life of their own and that they came into the minds of those best able to get them out into the world. This stopped people getting big headed and who knows, given Paul's admission that the songs wrote themselves, and the fact so many ideas seem to arise around the world at the exact same time, ....... maybe it is correct and we are actually "manipulated" by concepts in this conceptual multi-verse that only appears solid because we are conceptual in nature ourselves. What would you call the top concept in this infinitely resourced conceptual reality? The Higgs Boson? Probably not and the top concept would agree with you. McCartney sold his children into slavery, the ideas that came to him freely like a trusting child, he sold. That is why he is not a decent man and that is why there are very few decent people in this world and because when decent people do arise and try to give those children their freedom by releasing them into everyone's mind they are often the victim of a tragic accident or lose their funding as happened to Tesla for example when his backers discovered he was working on ways to free people from their slave system. As he said "These people belittled me and laughed at me but all the while I was working for the future and the future shall vindicate me." ........ and so she shall.
Thanks for your comment. I think the problem with modern culture is that the people who make it despise or have contempt for their audience. Did Saul/Paul hate the people he preached to? I don't know, but I do know that 90% of modern cultural producers despise their audience. Most people don't know this (or if they do they don't care) and are literally eating the equivalent of spiritual fast food. It's pretty much junk.
For instance, what would Kubrick think of Donald Trump and what he represents? Modern cultural producers hate him, from Bruce Springsteen to Robert DeNiro. If you are white guy why would you consume anything made by these people, other than you feel the same way? Stay away from them. They make poison.
Those who push their "culture" on us most definitely hate us and yes Saul detested Christians, he had personally murdered hundreds before his "conversion" but that wasn't killing enough of them for his liking so he took their church over to corrupt it from within. As Lenin replied when he was asked if he was worried about the opposition to his murderous anti-Christian regime in Russia "No for we are going to lead it". He followed Saul's method of infiltration and lies but Saul didn't invent it for it is as old as the hills. I gave Trump a fair shake of the lamb's tail but 2 months of his first term was enough for me to see that he was bought and paid for like the rest unless you believe in him being a 56D chess master which I don't. Clearly Springsteen and DeNiro are simply shills for the other side of the UNIparty. When DeNiro was chosen to advertise the KIA Niro EV I wrote off to KIA telling them that I would never buy any of their products ever again as they had made the idiotic decision to hire a guy who thought that 90% of the planet were evil for daring to want the same standard of living as him and who hated half his own countrymen and I refused to endorse their idiocy. I simply can't watch a DeNiro film after he made those sorts of statements. KIA sent me a reply but I never bothered to read it. What is the point? They will do as vassals always do, follow orders.
Very thought provoking. I need to watch The Shining again; I've never watched it with such literary interest. This essay reminds me of something that I've wanted to write about the old 'patriarchy' in the United States, the Patrician class that has pretty much died off, and which once ruled the publishing industry that was reputedly so exclusive and yet is now utterly trashed by "woke" puritan millennial women with pronouns in their bios. The irony! They wail about how 'exclusive' was the patriarchy, yet they are much more bigoted than the old patrician class was when it came to appreciating great art -- and that certainly would have included the boorish, drunken, talented sort of writer who wasn't of their class, but was inducted into their class by talent.
The 1920s ushered in the NEW MONEY classification, as opposed to OLD MONEY. The celebrities were new money. Old money knew how to behave. New money was brash and ostentatious.
One thing I love about the old money people -- I had an old money WASP boyfriend back in the 80s -- they had a genteel way of looking both rich and poor at the same time. Showing off in any way was forbidden.
In any case, this piece stirs wonder as to what happened to the old world class markers. They seem to have been outmoded for sure. Yet, those classes held civilization together, in a way. Now it seems that the 'upper class' are the new money showoffs who virtue signal love for immigrants and other luxury beliefs to show that their rapacious beliefs actually don't hurt them, while simultaneously destroying the continuity that the upper classes once maintained.
(😈)
Great comment and spot on. I know of one outrageously rich old money neighborhood that really illustrates the point. Those of multi-generational extreme wealth still shop for groceries in their enclave while dressed very casually, and pay attention to pricing; they aren't "slumming" and are quite sincere. A nearby new money neighborhood, full of the freshly wealthy, has people shop for them and makes a special point to dress to the nines if forced to do the dirty. This is now, but I agree it is disappearing as far as the former.
Narcissists!
In case you haven't seen it, the move "Metropolitan," from 1990, portrays the declining WASP upper class in America, and hints at its ties to the Old World. It's poignant and memorable. Very highly recommended. Unlike so many movies, it expresses sympathy for those WASP elites.
Thank you for your thought-provoking reflections on "The Shining."
I can't help wondering if the 'Indian burial ground' is just a facetious reference to 'Amityville', released the previous year.
Possible, but I doubt it, given the film's other references to Indians.
Beautifully-written as usual. Thank you.
One case similar to the Overlook situation linked below. There is quite an interesting history of Anglo-American ghost towns, mansions and castles stretching the North American continent. This is a vast topic that seems to always stray into horror and drama. Ghosts of Empire and all that.
Maybe one day our new Chinese overlords will give ghost tours of decrepit Hollywood mansions.
Trump's grandfather was once such old European hotelier, who left a ruin up in the Yukon. My brother-in-law worked on some aspects of the resoration of the heritage site on Lake Bennett, as a contractor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_E._Scott
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BpOYp-7d2A0&t=1952s&pp=2AGgD5ACAQ%3D%3D
Brilliant as always.. Fascinating.. Thank you..
And just for the record Eyes wide shut film adapted from the 1927 book 'Dream story' by Arthur Schnitzler.