Even the most adamant LDR hater needs to smoke a j and kill themselves over the quality of this production, especially @2:50.
The Shining seems to be about the quest for immortality — the immortality of evil. Men are psychic murderers: they want to be free and creative, and can only take out their frustrations on their terrified wives and children. The movie appears to be a substitution story: The waiter denies that he was the caretaker, but there has always been a caretaker. And if the waiter is telling the truth, it’s Jack who has always been the caretaker.
Or maybe Jack is so mad that he has hatched this waiter, in which case Jack probably has always been the caretaker. Apparently, he lives forever, only to attack his family endlessly. It’s what Kubrick said in 2001: Mankind began with the weapon and just went on from there. Redrum (“murder” backward).
Kubrick is the man who thought it necessary to introduce a godlike force (the black slab) to account for evolution. It was the slab that told the apelike man to pick up the bone and use it as a weapon. This was a new version of original sin: man the killer acts on God’s command. Somehow, Kubrick ducked out on the implications of his own foolishness when he gave 2001 its utopian, technological ending — man, reborn out of science, as angelic, interplanetary fetus.
Now he seems to have gone back to his view at the beginning of 2001: man is a murderer, throughout eternity. The bone that was high in the air has turned into Jack’s axe, held aloft, and Jack, crouched over, making wild, inarticulate sounds as he staggers in the maze, has become the ape.
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Pauline Kael on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
which (!), dear readers, after days of nagging and phone calls, I got the Del Mar to replay, allowing this fat lesbian a chance to finally see it in theaters! What a dream fulfilled!
