The Shining Obsession
Stanley Kubrick and the Maze-Dwellers
PART ONE:
IN WHICH THE WRITER MAKES FUN OF WHAT HE CALLS MAZE-DWELLERS
In Vladimir Nabokov’s haunting short story “Signs and Symbols”, a young man suffers from a fictional psychological condition called referential mania. He believes that “everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence,” and so “must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away.”
Where Antoine Roquentin, in Sartre’s Nausea, is driven to madness by the sheer randomness and contingency of existence, Nabokov’s character is undone by the opposite: a world where nothing is random, where everything must mean something.
The poor young man in “Signs and Symbols” sprung to mind recently when I rewatched the 2012 documentary Room 237. In this exceptionally strange film, nine people — we don’t see them, only hear their disembodied voices — discuss their pet theories regarding the hidden “meaning” of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, overlaid with relevant clips from the movie. The theories range from the highly plausible (that it’s a meditation on the genocide of Native Americans) to the somewhat iffy (that it’s a cryptic Holocaust film) to the plain silly (that it’s a coded “confession” on Kubrick’s part about having faked the moon landings).
The speakers don’t seem to agree on much, except for two things: (a) that The Shining is secretly “about” something else beyond its shlocky surface horror story and (b) that Stanley Kubrick is an inerrant, almost God-like filmmaker who does “nothing by accident” (variations on this phrase recur throughout): therefore, the real answers, the true meanings, are scattered throughout in the film. In true Nabokovian fashion, the theorists are not especially concerned with the story or the characters, but they are totally fascinated by the “subliminal messages” with which Kubrick has apparently crammed his film. Numbers, colours, rooms, doors, magazines, posters, cans of baking powder, stickers, sweaters, typewriters, patterns in the carpet — all are squeezed for every conceivable drop of meaning, along with architecture of The Overlook Hotel, and of course the famous labyrinth on its grounds.
Clearly, The Shining doesn’t just have a maze; it is a maze. And, in Room 237, we are hearing from the souls who are trapped inside it. These are the maze-dwellers.
At a certain point you realise that Room 237, perhaps like The Shining itself, isn’t what it seems on the surface. It’s not actually “about” Kubrick’s movie. It’s about the maze-dwellers themselves. Or rather, it’s about their obsession, their obsessiveness, and their hopeless, absurd, ultimately rather moving desire to make sense of a senseless world. This became clear to me, on my first viewing, when one of the narrators insisted that you could actually see Stanley Kubrick’s face “airbrushed” onto a cloud during the film’s opening sequence. The cloud in question was duly displayed. It did not contain Stanley Kubrick’s face, or anything resembling Stanley Kubrick’s face. It looked, and still looks, like what it is: a cloud.
Another passage from the Nabokov story:
“Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.”
The cloud is where Room 237’s true meaning emerges. And sure, it’s possible that absolutely everything the filmmakers chose – dialogue, music cues, props, set design, even the marketing materials – was done so to convey a powerful hidden message. But the cloud wasn’t. That cloud wasn’t commissioned by Kubrick. It just happened to drift across the sky one day. In fact, Kubrick probably wasn’t even on set when it was recorded. Footage like that is usually captured by a second-unit crew.
At that point, I stopped being interested in what the maze-dweller was saying. I started wondering who he was. What was his life like? What brought him into the maze in the first place? Did he really see Stanley Kubrick’s face in that cloud? If so, what else did he see? What else did he believe about the world? But maybe he didn’t believe in anything else. He believed in The Shining.
Room 237 helps answer a question I’ve long had about the central object in David Foster Wallace’s mega-novel, Infinite Jest. Known as “the Entertainment,” it’s a cartridge containing a film so engrossing it annihilates the viewer’s desire to do anything else, compelling them to watch it on repeat until they die. Wallace offers only brief, elliptical glimpses of what this film actually looks like. It’s been a while since I read the book, but I recall something about a baby’s point of view, a revolving door, and an unnerving emphasis on the quality of the lens. I remember being disappointed by these descriptions.
Of course, even an author as talented as Wallace is going to struggle to convincingly depict a piece of media so overwhelmingly entertaining that it overrides all human instincts, including the drive to eat and sleep. Perhaps he understood this himself — understood that, like the shark in Jaws, the Entertainment’s content was best mostly left to the reader’s imagination. After all, the plausibility of such a film depends on how fundamental you believe the pleasure principle really is: just how deep does the will-to-amusement go?
I’m not suggesting that The Shining is somehow the real-life analogue to Wallace’s Entertainment. It is, to be sure, a very entertaining film. But it has nothing on the endless gamified brain-rot joy-slop algorithm that is TikTok (a much better contender for an IRL Entertainment). What The Shining does instead is hijack a different instinct: not the will-to-amusement, but the will-to-meaning. Kubrick's film traps the viewer — a certain kind of viewer — not in pleasure, but in a seductive fog of signifiers. The film is saturated with (signs and) symbols, details that may or may not matter, continuity errors that may or may not be intentional, numerological pathways that lead (or don’t lead) to dead-ends, weird distortions of time and space, all encircling a suite of grave and compelling themes: family, violence, civilisation, death, God, dreams, addiction, loneliness, madness. The Shining, if you let it in, goes deep. It gets you reaching for Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, Marx, Derrida, the Bible. Then it gets you reaching for the remote control, to press rewind. For some, it seems to contain the entire history of the world in two hours.
What makes the film even more perplexing as an object of analysis is the fact that it exists in many versions and forms: the original 146-minute North American cut, the 119-minute European release, a slightly altered home video edition. Which one is the real Shining? And what about the source material, Stephen King’s 1977 novel of the same name, which orbits and troubles — we might even say haunts — Kubrick’s film adaptation, validating some readings, utterly contradicting others? Or the deleted scenes, edited out at the last minute and never restored? Even if one version of the film seemed to “add up,” there would always be contradictory evidence lurking elsewhere in the Shining-verse. It can be seen as a kind of cinematic Russian doll or Escher staircase – each layer unfolding into another, never resolving. It is about everything and nothing. It is about whatever the hell you want it to be about.
But you don’t need to watch Room 237 to encounter a maze-dweller. Look closely enough, and you’ll find them everywhere.
There is, for instance, a blogger and YouTuber called Rob Ager who has assembled a huge, twenty-one part blog about The Shining called “Mazes, Mirrors, Deception, and Denial” as well as dozens of videos, many of which invoke the teddy-bear motif to suggest that the film’s true preoccupation is with an unspoken horror – Danny’s possible sexual abuse at the hands of Jack. Another guy – who calls himself The Imperialist – argues that the film is a “post-modern, cliché-deconstructing Black Comedy of the Highest Order” that only exists to make fun of the horror genre and horror fans, rather like how Kubrick made fun of po-faced political thrillers in Dr. Strangelove. There are people who think the film is a story-within-a-story – i.e. that some of what we are seeing is a dramatisation of Jack’s novel. There are people who think the events in the film are Wendy’s hallucinations. There are people who think the Overlook is actually Hell. And there are people who think – as there will always be people who think – that it’s all really about CIA mind control.
Of all the wild theories out there, my favourite – for sheer creativity and craziness – is the one put forward by blogger Joe Girard, aka Eye Scream. According to Girard, The Shining is somehow (in ways I can barely begin to comprehend) linked to Abbey Road and the Beatles’ breakup. He claims the film syncs up with the album — like Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz — but also recommends watching the movie backwards and forwards at the same time. It all starts with a genuinely intriguing detail: the original King novel’s title came from a John Lennon lyric – “We all shine on,” from Instant Karma. But from there, Girard aims straight for outer space.
Unfortunately, verifying any of this would require dedicating the next decade or so of my life to reading Girard’s collected works, which may well outweigh Tolstoy’s. His vast, vast website analyses The Shining frame by frame (as well as frame over frame and frame within frame), while drawing connections to Fibonacci, Noam Chomsky, the Group of Seven painters, Winnie-the-Pooh, Thomas Wolfe, Julius Caesar, Charles Darwin, and possibly everyone else who ever lived. It is also worth checking out his two-and-a-half-hour YouTube video, if only to read the comments.
I only stumbled on this man’s work today, while “researching” this Substack; it made the whole thing worthwhile. This Eye Scream blog might be the most impressive undertaking I’ve ever seen that is also, objectively speaking, a complete and tragic waste of time. I think we’ve found the King of the Maze-Dwellers. His name is Joe Girard. I hope he’s doing well.
But this is what it’s all about, right?
We don’t enter the maze to find the centre – what could we even hope to find there? We enter the maze for the pleasure of getting lost.
PART TWO:
IN WHICH THE WRITER REVEALS THAT HE HIMSELF IS A BIT OF A MAZE-DWELLER
It would be wrong of me – wrong in the sense of incorrect, as well as immoral – to give the impression that my interest in these maze-dwellers is purely sociological in nature. Actually, I’m something of a maze-dweller myself. I have my own Shining theories. They’re not very interesting. I believe the film does in fact have two “hidden” preoccupations, but they have long ago been figured out and better explored by others. I think the film is about the horror of history, of the past – of “pastness” as one of the Room 237 guys puts it – as well as the fear we all have of seeing these horrors repeat (or worse, repeating them ourselves). But this is basic. This is playground stuff. We need to ramp up the schizophrenia here.
So allow me to present my craziest Shining theory: that the film is “actually” about the horror of genetics, and its most iconic prop – the “all work and no play” manuscript that sits in Jack’s typewriter – is a visual metaphor for how genetics operates.
Before I get there, it’s worth pointing out that Kubrick once stated in plain words what he was doing – or trying to do – with The Shining. One of the things he was trying to do, anyway.
In 1980, soon after the film’s release, Japanese journalist Jun'ichi Yaoi conducted a televised phone interview with Kubrick. It was an unusual conversation. For one thing, Kubrick wasn’t calling in from another part of the world but another part of the same building. He was there, alright, in the next room; he just didn’t feel like being on camera. Which feels a bit Shining-y in its own right. Even stranger, when Yaoi asked him what The Shining’s famously mysterious ending was supposed to mean, Kubrick did the unthinkable. He chose against elusion and evasion, and actually tried answering the question.
Here is Kubrick’s response in full: “Well it was supposed to suggest a kind of evil reincarnation cycle, where he [protagonist Jack Torrance] is part of the hotel’s history, just as in the men’s room when he’s talking to the former caretaker – the ghost of the former caretaker – who says to him, you know, “You are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know. I’ve always been here.” One is merely suggesting some kind of, you know, endless cycle of this evil reincarnation. And also, well, that’s it. Again, it’s the sort of thing that I think is better left unexplained but since you asked me, I’m trying to explain...”
Endless cycles of evil reincarnation. If Stephen King himself had said this, I would take him literally. But as far as I know, Kubrick was an atheist who didn’t believe in an afterlife. So this “reincarnation” he’s talking about (assuming he’s being at least somewhat sincere here) should be taken metaphorically. Reincarnation, “to be made flesh again”: the concept refers to a soul surviving death and re-emerging in the body of another. Which could be interpreted, in a secular sense, to mean heredity and the passing on of genes. At that point, though, the word “reincarnation” is becoming a distraction. But if we broaden the idea – and here I’m drawing on Freud as well as Mark Fisher’s essays on The Shining – we get at a simpler and more universal concept: repetition.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud introduced the idea of repetition compulsion: our tendency to unconsciously repeat painful or traumatic experiences, even when doing so brings no clear reward. He observed that children re-enact distressing scenes in play, and that adults often throw themselves into familiar situations of suffering – not because they enjoy them, but because something deeper than pleasure is at work (we’re back at the pleasure principle again).
Freud proposed that this impulse reflects a drive beyond the pleasure principle: a death drive, or Todestrieb, that compels the psyche to return to an earlier, more “inert” state. This idea, speculative in itself, parallels a more empirically grounded concept – that of homeostasis, the body’s tendency to seek balance. Every escape from equilibrium sparks corrective behavior, even if that equilibrium involves or encodes pain and trauma. Repetitive behaviors may therefore be considered primitive attempts to restore a disrupted internal balance, however maladaptive.
Freud’s essay comes dangerously close to defining repetition as a mere psychological glitch. But the repetition compulsion, more loosely imagined, goes beyond that. It is a central motif of life itself. The human being, nature, reality – all repeats itself. God suffers from such a compulsion, maybe. Genes reproduce, the seasons turn, civilisations rise and fall. The birds fly south in autumn, and return in spring. Not the same birds, maybe, though they might as well be the same. This morning I woke up, looked blurredly out the window at the grey sky, and checked my phone. I did the same thing yesterday morning, as I’ll probably do tomorrow morning, and the morning after that.
Repetition is so fundamental that we barely notice it. Instead, our attention fixates on what breaks the cycle, what deviates from the pattern. That’s why traumatic events shock us, screw us up, disrupt our expected loops. It’s why most forms of change feel so uncomfortable and weird.
But change is the exception. Repetition, continuity, sameness is the rule.
Now we can turn to genetic inheritance, a classically spooky phenomenon whose underlying code just happens to be the very language of nature. As I understand it, DNA copies and transmits information across generations with terrible fidelity. We inherit, through our genes, things like eye colour, blood type, susceptibility to disease, but also sleep cycles, stress responses, patterns of thought and behaviour – even our very personalities. And that’s only speaking in biological terms. Once we get to culture, language, religion, social norms, the repetition compulsion deepens further… Maybe everything we are is inherited…
We repeat ourselves. We repeat our own mistakes. Most unsettlingly of all, we repeat the mistakes of our fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers. We are possessed by the ghosts of ancestors we’ve never met, whose names, going back far enough, we don’t even know.
Biology, thus construed, is a kind of horror story. And The Shining is a deeply biological film. It is a body horror film, in a sense, except it’s primarily concerned with what we might call the deep body.
The deep body can be understood as the material organism that carries ancestral phenomena – traits, memories, pathologies – from one generation to another. We all have shallow bodies, which are discrete and constrained within a single lifespan. Yet the body is also a sort of node, linking the past and the future, the dead and the unborn. It carries biological, cultural, and symbolic inheritances from one terrestrial tenure to the next. It’s where genetic inheritance, psychic compulsion, and civilisational patterns converge, making repetition – not autonomy and free will – the governing principle of life. I believe this idea – that we are haunted by our grandparents, and in turn condemned to haunt our grandchildren in ways we can’t imagine – is part of what Kubrick was getting at with The Shining.
I’ve mentioned autonomy and free will, which are central Kubrickian themes. As far as I know, The Shining is his only film that features an artist – or would-be artist – as its protagonist. Yes, Humbert Humbert and Alex de Large exhibit signs of the artist manqué but Jack Torrance is the one Kubrick character who’s explicitly portrayed as a struggling writer/creator. Not that Kubrick encourages us to believe in Jack’s talent or seriousness (he could have shown us reading, say, Middlemarch, but he doesn’t). Sitting at his typewriter, Jack might be brooding about Shklovsky’s distinction between fabula and syuzhet. Or he might be counting the hairs on his fingers. What he really wants to do, though, is assert control over his own story. For him, writing is a form of self-creation. And the film's dark central irony is that this is the only thing he cannot do.
Like many a can-do American before him, Jack wants to be a self-made man, a being of absolute autonomy and control. He wants to be the author. But the horror of his situation is that he is the thing that is being written upon. His cruel fate – and here lies the crux of my schizo-theory – is that he’s forced to type out the same sentence over and over again in a way that eerily resembles the blind, repetitive logic of nature.
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” This is one of the most celebrated images from The Shining. What do you notice about the text? It’s not just the same thing repeated over and over – it’s, as music theorists and Deleuzians would tell you, repetition with a difference. The differences aren’t intentional, though. They’re typos. Little mistakes. But those random flaws end up slightly altering the pattern, which is kind of how genetics work (I think). DNA doesn’t replicate itself perfectly; it makes tiny errors as it goes. Most of them don’t matter. Some are harmful. But they all introduce variation into something that’s fundamentally about repetition. Jack’s “novel” – in my crackpot theory – is actually a representation of his genetic code. He is not an author, but a mere typist, hammering out a glitchy cipher dictated by forces beyond his control, and only changing it through meaningless, involuntary spasms whose ultimate significance is lost on him. So it is on paper, as it is in real life.
Or something. Who cares? I’m done with all this. I’m leaving you now to check back in with Joe Girard. He’s probably already made this observation – he’s probably already written this entire essay, word for word – somewhere in that neverending blog of his.
PART THREE:
IN WHICH THE WRITER ADMITS THAT, ACTUALLY, THINGS ARE A LITTLE WORSE THAN THAT
By which I mean: I wrote a song about The Shining. Wrote it, recorded it, uploaded it to YouTube, along with a “music video” consisting of stock footage that vaguely resembles imagery from Kubrick’s film. It’s “told” from Jack Torrance’s perspective, and I guess you could say it has something to do with some of the things I’ve explored above. But it also has nothing to do with anything. It was just some shit I put together one night.
Jesus, who am I to make fun of the Room 237 people? None of them expressed themselves in song; they had the self-respect to just talk.
There’s no question about it.
I am the maze-dweller.
I have always been the maze-dweller.