✨ Autocomplete

Everybody knows what room Jack goes to to check on the hag. But let's just check the screenplay to double-check something:

— Danny told me. He went up into one of the bedrooms. The door was open, and he saw this crazy woman in the bathtub. She tried to strangle him!
— Which room was it?

Cut to: Miami.

Hmm, that's weird. Everybody who has ever watched this movie thought that she said Room 237. But we actually cut away to Hallorann in Miami before the answer came.

Kubrick exploits what psychology calls an open Gestalt: an incomplete pattern the mind feels compelled to complete. Wendy is asked which room Danny entered, but Kubrick cuts away before she answers. The audience supplies “237” automatically, then remembers its own inference as part of the movie. The missing answer has become an apparent fact.

The film trains us to do this from the start. Jack calls home from the Overlook:

— Hi, hon. How's it going?
— Great. I'm at the hotel and I still have a lot to go through. I don't think I can get home before 9:00 or 10:00.
— Sounds like you got the job.

Jack never said so. Wendy autocompleted him, and we follow her lead. It's a trap, like in chess. We infer that Wendy inferred that Jack got the job by his need to go through "a lot". That's an inference chain, and we fell into the trap. Her line "Sounds like you got the job" isn't an inference at all. It's a performance of inference.

Another example is Hallorann. Everyone knows why Hallorann suddenly returns to the Overlook. He and Danny are psychic and the boy is sending a telepathic distress signal over hundreds of miles, and heroic Hallorann picks it up and immediately drops everything to fly out.

This was another open Gestalt. The film did not say what you think it did. It left an unclosed Gestalt that you manually closed with your own inference, using the patterns you recognized. Hallorann distinctly says that Ullman called him and told him to go out.

— Larry, just between you and me, we got a very serious problem… With the people taking care of the place. They turned out to be completely unreliable assholes. Ullman phoned me last night. And I'm supposed to find out if they have to be replaced.

Here we perform a remarkable inferential jump from what we see and what the characters say to what we believe about the plot. When Hallorann says something that doesn't match what we believe, we reinterpret what he tells Larry as an alibi. Hallorann, we suppose, doesn't want to complicate matters by explaining the whole psychic gift thing to Larry, who might then have second thoughts about renting him the Snow Cat.

We believe Hallorann is psychic only because we accepted his claims when he was talking to Danny. The only "evidence" we possess for Hallorann's extraordinary claims is a simple trick whereby he demonstrated that he knew his name was Doc, which he then fraudulently claimed came by way of his psychic gift. Not only do we compromise our own beliefs to accommodate Danny and Hallorann's psychic gift, but we simply accept Hallorann's claim on face value with an absurdly flimsy standard of proof.

We never considered the simplest explanation: Wendy told Hallorann they call him Doc and then feigned surprise so that Hallorann could scam Danny. It fits all the data with zero contradictions, and is a simple, obvious explanation for what we see. The only thing we have to give up is our credulity with regard to Wendy and Hallorann.

But wait a second, we actually see Hallorann communicating telepathically to Danny in the storyroom! So obviously Thorny is wrong? Again we have filled in the blanks based on what we believe, and let ourselves be duped, this time by a simple voice-throwing stunt. With her back facing us, it is Ventriloquist Wendy who says "How'd you like some EYESCREAM, Doc?" while Hallorann turns to the camera and smiles knowingly. It's a confidence swindle. We ruled out any theory in which Wendy—or even Hallorann, whom we have absolutely no reason to trust beyond his personal charisma—cannot be trusted. So this explanation never merited consideration, even though it is a dramatically simpler explanation for what we see. And keep in mind, Danny is credulous: the standard here is fooling a child in a haunted house. Danny is credulous: you shouldn't be.

Which brings us to the next point. Whatever Wendy and Hallorann say is treated as sacrosanct: they are the "good guys," after all. And even when they are caught lying, we come up with a theory of the plot that protects them, even as our model of reality itself starts to wobble. By the time we get to Hallorann's death, we are way out over our skis with a superstitious and completely unreliable theory of the entire plot of the movie.

Kubrick told Michel Ciment what he liked about King's novel. Not the prose: "The novel is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out." And one moment above all:

It's not until Grady, the ghost of the former caretaker who axed to death his family, slides open the bolt of the larder door, allowing Jack to escape, that you are left with no other explanation but the supernatural.

That's the magician's moment: the locked box opens, and there is no other explanation. Wendy bolted that door. The butler did it.

He also told Ciment how the trick is done:

Stephen Crane wrote a story called "The Blue Hotel." In it you quickly learn that the central character is a paranoid. He gets involved in a poker game, decides someone is cheating him, makes an accusation, starts a fight and gets killed. You think the point of the story is that his death was inevitable because a paranoid poker player would ultimately get involved in a fatal gunfight. But, in the end, you find out that the man he accused was actually cheating him. I think The Shining uses a similar kind of psychological misdirection to forestall the realization that the supernatural events are actually happening.

The cheat in Crane's story is the hotel proprietor's son, Johnnie.

"HEEEEERE'S JOHNNIE". Kubrick scammed us right there. Ciment asked him a question about the film, and Kubrick substituted an answer about a novel of the same name. The tell is his use of the hedge "I think". To a question about the film, he would know, not think—the latter is tentative on whether his interpretation is correct.

But Kubrick also trapped us another way in the same breath. While leading us toward the conventional interpretation by suggesting that the supernatural explanation is inevitable, he had us skim right past the part where he said that the paranoids—the ones who read the deeper plot and view the surface narrative as merely a convenient cover story—turn out to be right after all.

"I like the regions of fantasy where reason is used primarily to undermine incredulity," he said. And of A Clockwork Orange, in the same interview: "it is in the nature of satire to state the opposite of the truth as if it were the truth."

Another thing we do is inoculate ourselves against repeated exposure to informational pathogens like the presence of an enormous Labyrinth adjacent to the Overlook. The change from King's novel is never explained, but we invent a reason: doing the hedge animals convincingly to Stanley Kubrick's standard was not going to be possible using 1980 special effects. We actually hop outside the plot to patch up the discrepancy so that the next time we see the hedge maze it does not astonish us.

McLuhan called this autoamputation. New possible threats are neutralized and categorized so that we don't have to waste calories processing them again, and as a result we go numb to that source of information. When driving a car, we go numb to the danger of moving at high speed. Watching The Shining, we go numb to a gigantic labyrinth beside a hotel called the Overlook. But the first time you watched the movie, you were like, what the fuck? And admit it: you suspected there might be ghosts in there.

Of course the Overlook has an enormous hedge maze, that's for getting lost in, like Ullman explained. You go in there, stumble around, and an hour or two later you find your way back out. We actually neutralize the most conspicuous element of the entire movie so that it can nowise influence our model of the plot, and then backfill a mythological framework about Theseus to explain why the Labyrinth might be so interesting to Kubrick that no expense was spared to put an enormous one in the movie.

There is a shortcut to understanding the most critical fact of the actual plot of The Shining:

1. Imagine yourself looking out one of the windows of the Overlook.
2. Visualize "overlooking" the walls of the hedge maze, in the sense Matthews was meaning here:

From the beautifully turfed level above the maze, or from the parterre terrace above that, one can overlook the hedges and enjoy, if so inclined, occasional glimpses of ensnared and perplexed visitors.

— W. H. Matthews, Mazes and Labyrinths (1922)

3. Make the leap of erudition required to know (or just let me tell you) that historically, the Labyrinth was the bloody precursor to the Gladiator's Arena.

Then it becomes clear that the Overlook is so-named because it is a modern colosseum for bloodsport. Trusting anybody connected with that place is therefore untenable. Which means that by the time Jack kills Hallorann, most people have a hopelessly broken theory of the plot: who Hallorann is and why he's there. We've even gone so far as to patch up two conflicting accounts to make way for our superstitious belief in ESP.

"For the purposes of telling the story," Kubrick told Ciment, "my view is that the paranormal is genuine."

Kubrick freely admits to using tactics of psychological misdirection in The Shining. But like a chess master, his play is thought out several layers deep. In the quote, he subtly leads you to conclude that the correct and final director-approved interpretation of the film is that the paranormal exists and there is no alternative framework. But that's not actually what he said: we autocompleted it. He clearly said "for the purposes of telling the story"... in other words, he hedges. His commentary about The Shining is itself a maze of hedges. If he meant "my view is that the paranormal is genuine" then he would not have qualified it with a clause that brings us back to the topic of narratives and stories—in a film where Hallorann specifically calls out our protagonists as "completely unreliable assholes." It's a pun on the unreliable narrator of The Catcher in the Rye, which we see Wendy reading, and the unreliable witness of "The Blue Hotel." Kubrick works in both modes.

Asked whether he was drawn first by ESP or by King's novel, he said:

I've always been interested in ESP and the paranormal… But The Shining didn't originate from any particular desire to do a film about this.

He didn't come for the ghosts. He came for the well-worked-out plot, which could be used as a Trojan Horse for the much darker True Horror of the bloodsport and humanity's addiction to violence as entertainment.

The interview is yet another application of Kubrick's method of misdirection from the film, one more layer deep. The casual viewer takes the ghosts at face value. The attentive viewer starts noticing the qualifications, the omissions, the contradictions, the books on the shelves. The joke is on credulity itself. Kubrick appears to spend his own intellectual credibility endorsing the paranormal, and that's precisely how he keeps the trick going. And he can't just tell you. A joke you have to be told isn't funny, and a trick explained isn't a trick. It's not a revelation unless you figure it out.

In King's novel, Jack finds a scrapbook in the basement of the Overlook. It holds the hotel's real history. One clipping is headlined "Mafia Free-Zone Colorado?": the Overlook as a "security-jacketed 'key club,'" fed by money skimmed from Las Vegas casinos. The guests include a man acquitted of the gangland murder of one Jack "Dutchy" Morgan, and "Vito the Chopper," who has been "indicted twenty-three times" and was tried for an ax-murder. Jack only skims it.

In Kubrick's film, the scrapbook sits on the table beside Jack's typewriter, in plain sight.

King's furnace is feline. Kubrick places a pair of basement cats—Felix sphinxes—flanking the ladder to 7 Up.

A plot driver in the story becomes a prop in the rebus. Kubrick didn't keep King's story, but he kept King's method: hint at the dark underbelly and let the reader skim past it. Then he ran with it as far as it would go.

You don't need the paranormal to have all the elements of horror. History itself is far more horrifying than anything Stephen King can contrive.