🍞 Burnt Toast: The Shining Decrypted

Everybody knows what The Shining is about. There are two answers, and you were handed both before the opening credits finished rolling.

1. GHOSTS. The Overlook Hotel is haunted. It was built on an Indian burial ground, a man murdered his family there in 1970, and the dead are bored. Ghosts like Grady enjoy haunting the living. They have nothing better to do than give people the heebie-jeebies, and with any luck drag them into Perdition for some quality time.

2. CABIN FEVER. Jack Torrance is a recovering alcoholic, snowed in with his wife and son for the winter, and he cracks. His writing project has stalled, time is running out, and his narcissistic grandiosity is blossoming into murderous ambition. He'll be a pioneer of mass murder as a means of achieving media notoriety. The ghosts are hallucinations of a dry drunk, a broken, delusional mind, aggravated by what the old-timers used to call cabin fever.

Then there are "those guys": Danny is wearing an Apollo 11 sweater, thus the moon landing was a scam. The movie is about the Holocaust and the genocide of the Native Americans. A Playgirl magazine is a bizarre prop, thus Jack must be sexually abusing Danny. The documentary Room 237 revealed a subculture of obsessives who love the movie and are passionate devotees of reading between the lines and finding subtext promoting their own pet theories. Kubrick not only agreed with those theories, but he invested millions encoding them into a beautiful work of art.

I even contributed my own theory to explain the photo at the end, the manuscript, and a few more of the sundries. However, like claiming The Shining is about the Holocaust—a theme that is undeniably present—my theory that The Shining was about Television did nothing to explain the plot of the movie, or solve the deepest mysteries. My theory was a cop-out that declined to take those on, not because it was lazy—I have watched that infernal movie as many times as ANYONE—but because it lacked explanatory power. It was based on one-off observations and my own subsequent interpretation. It bottoms out once we neatly stack up the few bits—the goofy low-hanging clues—in one of the rooms.

GHOSTS | THREAT | CABIN FEVER

The elephant in the room is:

PREMEDITATION

Nothing at the Overlook is an accident, a haunting or a breakdown. Somebody planned it. The surface story is the cover story, and the cover story has two flavours, supernatural and psychiatric, EYES WIDE or EYES SHUT, so that whichever one you pick, you stop looking.

The first thing anyone online will tell you if you bring up The Shining is that King hated the movie and felt it was a complete mutilation of his best work. That's true: Kubrick did take his basic framework and run with it, and the movie bears little resemblance to the book in terms of the plot. In the book we see that the ghosts are real. But for any correct interpretation of the movie, we must be skeptical if we are going to get anywhere.

The tension is just that:

KUBRICK DOUBTS | GHOST STORIES | KING BELIEVES

After cracking Eyes Wide Shut, we wondered if we could apply the rebus method to The Shining. The answer turned out to be YES.

The method is the rebus. Names, signs and props are words to be read, and the dialogue means exactly what it says. There are zero continuity holes in this movie. Eyes Wide Shut took a whole algebra of triptychs to crack, because Kubrick built it for a reader who had already seen through the surface, and booby-trapped it with decoys and false interpretations. The Shining is an older, plainer cipher. Read the props, check the alibis, and ask the question the homicide detective must always establish: was this premeditated?

1. Dies Irae

The film tells you the verdict before the story starts.

Over the opening drive, Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind play the Dies Irae, the medieval chant for the Day of Wrath, as quoted by Berlioz in the Symphonie fantastique. Play it by ear and you get C♯ B♯ C♯ A♯ B♯ G♯ A♯—the chant's opening, note for note, transposed into a key with seven sharps, sharp like the knives pointed directly at Danny's head while Hallorann is stupefying the boy with mentalism and scaring the shit out of him with supernatural ghost stories, before heading out to Florida for the offseason. Dies irae, dies illa. Day of wrath, that day.

The Day of Wrath. Our first clue is looking good for our thesis, so far. The day of judgement is set before Jack reaches the hotel for his job interview. This isn't a man who cracks. That's premeditation, in the score.

Look at the landscape.

The neck of the hourglass is the lone tree on the haunting, isolated island in the first frame. Time is the primary theme of The Shining, and a reckoning that has arrived. The road is the subtle serpent, winding, tortuous, luring the hep cat in the bug, daddio, heading for the sun, into the land known to the natives as the shining mountains for the blinding radiance of their snow white caps. We fly toward a vanishing point that keeps regressing, following the fever, the bug.

HOURGLASS | LEVEL | SNOWFALL

All the film gives you to tell time by is the day of the week on a title card and how deep the snow is. When the snow is at its deepest, time is up.

SUN | CAT | SNOW

2. I'm in the Tree

The serpent doesn't lie. Even God had to admit, after They ateth of the Tree, the goddamn snake was not wrong! Adam and Eve WERE like gods now, with their eyes open, aware of Good and Evil, those two critical elements of any fairy tale or horror show. The serpent deceives by WITHHOLDING information. The slow drip. You have to wait for the next shoe to drop.

Jack flashes his PR smile for Ullman and seduces him. Our Jack is a charmer. Ullman can only briefly demur before revealing what the Denver people withheld. "I'm in the Tree," says Jack slyly. There was a "tragedy" a few years back, and Charles Grady ran amok and killed his family with an axe. "Tragedy," not "crime": the language of a cover-up. Ullman is in the unenviable position of needing to whitewash what happened, to strike a balance between scaring everybody off and attracting copycat artists. He is the cover-up guy: Heywood Floyd again, less handsome, this time with an obvious toupee. We're very far out in the sticks, after all.

But Ullman is outclassed. Jack is a history buff and already knows all about Grady. In fact, he's an admirer of his work. What he's been looking for is not a place to outline his writing project; he has already given up on having any good ideas since his wife forced him to stop drinking. No, he wants solitude for just one reason: to handle the old sperm bank and the little son of a bitch.

LIBERAL | JACK | CONSERVATIVE

King's Jack was a vocal liberal, college pedigreed, against corruption, well spoken, despite his horrible disease, alcoholism. Our Jack is of a different suit: an arch conservative, in the sense Nietzsche meant: "There are parties at the present day whose one aim and dream is to make all things adopt the crab-march." Jack wants to walk backwards, to the summer of 1921, when men ran the house, the help knew its place, and a wife who interfered got corrected. "White man's burden, Lloyd, my man," he would later toast at the bar.

"Our people in Denver recommended Jack very highly," Ullman says, "and for once… I agree with them." Who are the people in Denver? In the novel, Jack gets the job through his drinking buddy, Al Shockley, whose group bought the Overlook in 1970 and put Ullman in charge of it. Al is never seen. In The Shining, the truth is not explained, it is chopped up into little bits and smeared all over the place.

In the novel, wheelman Al and Jack riding shotgun are driving home one night, three sheets to the wind, when they hit a child's bicycle in the road. They stop. Everything points to a child, but they search with flashlights and find nothing, only a bike, placed in the middle of the road for some reason. In a movie where we see his wife reading The Catcher in the Rye, we are gently nudged in the direction of questioning what we are merely told. But Jack and Al are spooked. They both swear off drinking.

The two shameless revelers hit something that went thud in the dark, found a bicycle, and never drank again. Thereafter, Jack is drained of his creative spark, entombed in career-ending writer's block. Jack would like to forget. Al would like to forget. But Jack is the one man who won't let Al forget. He's a liability to the man Danny calls Uncle Al. Al has a family empire's reputation to protect. And that brings us to the corrupt arrangement by which Al recommended Jack for the caretaker job.

The stacks of books positively everywhere in the Boulder apartment tell us that the Torrances are avid readers. And we should be too. Despite King's adamant objections, his text is 100% in scope for interpreting this movie. Kubrick fundamentally did honor King's novel, his method of storytelling, his ubiquitous word games and puzzles, his unreliable narrator, and anything in the novel that was not deliberately altered by Kubrick should be considered canon when interpreting the film. Kubrick doesn't make movies where the hotel explodes in an inferno at the end.

The text and movie dialogue are consistent with premeditation: Al likely told Jack about Grady, knew Jack was suicidal, all but promised him the job, and sent him someplace far away hoping for the worst. He knew, right? Meanwhile, Jack had been plotting to murder his family for a while, and all he needed were the means and opportunity.

3. Means, motive, opportunity

The famous bathroom scene:

— You a married man, are you, Mr. Grady? says Jack.
— Yes, sir. I have a wife and two daughters, sir.
— And where are they now?
— They're somewhere around. I'm not quite sure at the moment.
— You were the caretaker here, Jack says, malevolent Cheshire smile widening. I recognize you. I saw your picture in the newspapers. You chopped your wife and daughter up into little bits. And then you blew your brains out.
— That's strange, sir. I don't have any recollection of that at all, deadpans Grady.
— Mr. Grady, you were the caretaker here.

The Apprentice meets the master, who perfected the dark art of brutal family slayings—the one who even exhibited the immaculate professionalism to neatly stack their remains in the West Wing, as the macabre ghoul Ullman cheerfully points out.

When Jack calls his wife to let her know the wonderful news that he got the job, he is standing in the middle of a multifarious puzzle. The elaborate scene has guests and bellhops churning through the lobby while Jack uses the guest phone to call out. But there on the counter is a rack of brochures for AVIS. This is one of Kubrick's favorite tricks. He reprises it in Eyes Wide Shut with the seemingly innocuous phrase SONATA JAZZ.

Rental car brochures are not found at hotels, and certainly not at hotels way the hell out at the end of the road. They are paraphernalia of airports, where you land without a vehicle and need to rent one. Not hotels. This is obvious the first time you watch The Shining. Those AVIS brochures really do stick out like a sore thumb. But you are only developing a cursory theory of the plot at that point, and by the time you are scrutinizing the movie to decipher clues, you will have autoamputated your initial sense of disharmony and become numb.

To analyze The Shining, your job is to sniff out the clues, wherever they lead. The Shining is a detective story. The Overlook is a crime scene. That is often overlooked.

So what could AVIS mean?

• Avis is Latin for bird.
• Avi is Hebrew for my father.
• A VIS: Latin vis is force, violence.
• Vis-à-vis: face to face.
• VIS|ION: vision, the thing Danny has.
• VS: versus.

FORCE OR VIOLENCE | VIS | VISION
DANNY | VIS | JACK

Hmm, this is starting to look pretty incriminating for Jack. Even the brochures are getting suspicious of him.

But another one of Kubrick's moves is sowing confusion by planting decoys. AVIS opens up all kinds of red herrings to pursue when there is something VASTLY more interesting going on in this scene!

This scene sets up a diabolical triptych:

CLERK | ULLMAN AND WATSON | JACK

But wait a moment, it's a DOUBLE triptych, Ullman and Watson themselves bracketing another figure, matryoshkawise:

ULLMAN | CAM | WATSON

The CAM is, I am sorry, there is no other way to say this, the fucking CREEPY ASS MOTHERFUCKER who is frozen, peering down into the model of the Labyrinth in the corner of the lobby.

CLERK | ULLMAN | CAM | WATSON | JACK

A telescoping triptych. That is Stanley Kubrick literally ushering you by the nose toward the paydirt. So who is the CAM? He appears to be a man so utterly obsessed with the Labyrinth that he is frozen in total stillness. But the way he is fixating on it exhibits a malice that is unsettling once you see it. In fact, the presence of this man in the scene would itself be cause for nightmares if noticed. And it is probably even worse having him there and perceiving him only subconsciously.

The new caretaker Jack is just reading the pro-incest article in Playgirl when you walk up. You catch a glimpse of something you like over his shoulder. Your eyes light up appreciatively. But then he closes the magazine and flops it on the chair nonchalantly. He stands to talk to Ullman.

ULLMAN | WATSON | JACK

— Good morning, Jack. I hope you haven't been waiting too long.
— No problem. We had time to grab a bite to eat.
— Good. Glad you made it before they shut down the kitchen, says Ullman, tongue in cheek. Is your family having a look around?
— No, my son's discovered the games room.
— Has your luggage been brought in?
— Right there.
— In view of all we have to cover today, I suggest we have a quick look at your apartment and get started. To you: Have the Torrances' things brought to their apartment.
— I'd better collect my family first, Jack deadpans.
— Oh! winces Ullman appreciatively, and Jack flashes his satyr's grin.

The Labyrinth shines in the background. There's a new CAM in Townley.

The tales of Jack's violent tendencies are horrifying. And he can't fall back on the job every failed writer falls back on, because while he tells people that teaching was only a way of making ends meet, the truth is he was fired for assaulting a student and will never be trusted around other people's children again, notwithstanding Al's claims that he'll sweet-talk the other board members and get him his old teaching job back by spring. "I did hurt him once, okay? It was an accident," says he about his son. Jack shows zero remorse, only the desire for everyone to forget what happened. Jack is an entitled narcissist who calls himself a writer and has never shown a flicker of talent at it. Lots of ideas, he tells Wendy. No good ones.

JACK | WILL NEVER FORGET | WENDY

Plenty of evil ideas, though. He has already decided on WHAT he's planning to do, and WHEN he's planning to do it. But Wile E. Coyote is still contemplating precisely HOW.

4. But that's not what happened

What we didn't tell you is that the Caretaker is a role, not a person. It's like a snake that sheds its skin. New skin, same snake.

PAUL MCCARTNEY | BEATLE | WILLIAM SHEARS

Back in Boulder, a dwarfish doctor is examining Danny in his bedroom. He blacked out in the bathroom, talking to Tony in the magic mirror. She shines a light in his eyes and asks whether, while he was brushing his teeth, he smelled anything funny, or saw any bright, flashing lights.

— Is Tony one of your animals?
— No. He's a little boy that lives in my mouth.
— Tony's his imaginary friend, Wendy explains.
— If you were to open your mouth now, could I see Tony?
— No.
— Why not?
— Because he hides.
— Where does he go?
— To my stomach.
— Does Tony ever tell you to do things?
— I don't want to talk about Tony anymore.

The tableau is surreal. The light switch is so high on the wall that Danny could never reach it. That cannot be up to code. But more importantly, there is an intense gravity in this room. Wendy slumps. Danny lies pinned to the bed. Even the doctor must lower herself onto it, overcome by exhaustion. The wall hanging has been dragged to the floor. Only the paper balloon seems buoyant enough to resist, floating off toward Oz. Or perhaps returning from there.

Wendy, ever mindful of the time, has her watch on outside her sleeve. Perhaps the theme is not merely Time but The Persistence of Memory. And her attire perfectly matches the Goofy toy that is inexplicably hanging by a noose under a conspicuous stack of papers—an attempt at gallows humor, I gather?—on the obnoxiously high windowsill that sits right about at eye level for the dwarfish doctor.

On the wall, a triptych: a red and blue dog, a lion whose head is the sun, and a purple elephant. Literally, the elephant in the room. The dog is half nose, and it's also wearing Wendy's colors. On the bookshelf, among the books, stands a pair of Adidas far too big for Danny—somebody's rugby slippers—striped like a zebra so the eye takes them for a toy. There are two rubber ducks: one Donald, one plain.

The doctor and Wendy step out. Danny is told to lie in bed silently for the next several hours and not move. On her way through the door, Wendy glances back suspiciously at the shoes on the shelf—her size—and smirks. The Dopey sticker is gone. But that triptych should not be overlooked!

SNIFFING DOG | SUN HEADED CAT | CONSPICUOUS ELEPHANT

In the living room, the doctor asks about Tony, and about the injury.

— He dislocated his shoulder.
— How did he manage to do that?
— It was just one of those things, you know. Purely an accident.

Wendy is smiling as she tells it. It's an uncomfortably wide, borderline sadistic grin. But we excuse her: Shelley Duvall is not acting this well. Jack had been drinking and came home three hours late, so he wasn't in the greatest mood. Danny had scattered some of his school papers all over the room, and Jack grabbed his arm. The sort of thing you do in a park or in the street. Anyway, she says, something good did come out of it all: Jack swore off drinking. The appalled doctor sits in silence searching for a response. She will call protective services.

We see that Wendy is an enabler and codependent. She knows that Jack is violently deranged, yet she stands by her man. She's the propagandist who will carefully wordsmith refutations to any narrative in which the Torrances might not be exemplary parents. Might even be incredibly irresponsible ones. She walks on eggshells. She equates abuse with grumpiness. She protects Jack.

5. Dead Presidents

The Overlook has had an illustrious past. Movie stars, jet-setters, even four Presidents. And it has had a chain of owners, including an in-universe sosie of Howard Hughes, going all the way back to old-timer Robert Townley Watson, who built it on an Indian burial ground and even had to repel a few Indian attacks on the way. But despite its uncanny allure, attracting such notorious people down such a long, winding road, up this crooked mountainside, above the timberline where even the spindly Grinch-like trees the area is known for stop, with only one way in or out, where there is really nothing to do but get lost in a creepy Labyrinth and watch your rationality atrophy, the place has been a money pit, only breaking even for the first time last year: one year out of 70.

The sleep of reason breeds monsters. — Goya

But the torrent of red ink flooding the premises has not stopped one owner after another from incinerating their fortunes in its old feline boiler, dozing downstairs. They redid the enormous Pink and Gold Ballroom, or should I say Baalroom, just last year. Peter Pan blew in from Oz with his uniquely up-to-date taste, and Wendy is impressed, to say the least. "I'll say!" she declares dopily, mouth agape.

Ullman's office has on its desk an ugly, looming, abstract statue, like something tossed up out of the gastric acids of his Id. It defies categorization: not animal, nor architecture, nor discernibly plant. It hulks on the corner, CONSPICUOUS ELEPHANT occupying a good amount of surface area, like some rotten bridge or tumbledown windmill, now makeshift gallows. It is an Eagle's Rest. A cactus, denizen of the desert and by extension, hell. And why is it there? For the two weird eagles to perch on, presumably. Why else would it be there?

There are famously Four Beatles, and of course they correspond to the Four Mountains, or should I say the Four Seasons: a single mountain spread out in time. Winter is Ringo, the dead ringer, and Winter is NOW, the only picture that looks real, the season of the snow. Spring, that would be John the shining, was a different geological era entirely. Summer is Paul, the Somerton man, in a yet more ancient era. And by autumn, by George, we are back in the Mesozoic, with a huge lake nearly covering Hood. A lake is the first thing we see in this movie.

You might expect a Grand Cycle, but these Seasons run once through, left to right, top to bottom, one b'one m'boy, and it's done. Ringo, John, Paul and George. The Fifth Beatle is Nevermore.

Ringo is sustained only by human sacrifice. The Aztecs counted the ages of the world as Suns, and believed the world had already been made and destroyed four times: the First Sun ended when Tezcatlipoca's jaguars SUN HEADED CAT devoured humanity, the Second in a hurricane, the Third in a rain of fire, and the Fourth when the water goddess Chalchiuhtlicue "wept blood for fifty-two years, flooding the earth." The present age, the Fifth Sun, is Huitzilopochtli's, the eagle's, and it survives on one condition: the blood of sacrifice. "Should these tributes cease, the fifth sun will go dark, the world will crumble in a great earthquake." Winter is NOW, and NOW has to be fed.

The Ahwahnee in Yosemite Valley opened in 1927, twenty years after the Overlook broke ground. It was built as the "Yosemite All-Year-Round Hotel," and renamed just before opening "to reflect the site's native name." Awani was the village of the Ahwahnechee. In 1851 the Mariposa Battalion "burned Ahwahnechee villages and took their food stores," and marched the survivors off to a reservation. Seventy-six years later, the hotel took their name, and their designs for its walls.

PEOPLE | AHWAHNEE | BUILDING

And it is from the Ahwahnee that Kubrick copied the Overlook's Colorado Lounge and Lobby.

The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, broke ground in 1907 and opened on the Fourth of July, 1909: a resort for wealthy Easterners at the top of a mountain road, on land bought from the 4th Earl of Dunraven. Its builder, F. O. Stanley, born in Kingfield, Maine, was one of the twins behind the Stanley Steamer, and before the steam cars the twins made their money on photographic dry plates, a business they sold to Eastman Kodak. In 1911 a gas explosion in Room 217 injured a maid. In 1974 Stephen King spent a night there, and the Overlook was born.

HOTEL | STANLEY | KUBRICK
KING | FIELD | HAT

Around the time she was gathering her timbers here, she was ascending other mountains in other lands. Timberline Lodge, the real-life sosie of the Overlook, went up on Mount Hood between 1936 and 1938, and Franklin Roosevelt dedicated it in 1937. In 1938, on a crag above Berchtesgaden, the Nazi Party completed the Kehlsteinhaus, the Eagle's Nest, a mountain lodge "for official and social functions," up the road from Hitler's Berghof. Dark peers, perched at the ends of similarly winding roads through the snowy Alps: Baal temples both—orbiting an Ancient Evil common to them both.

Who keeps pouring gold into a ballroom at the end of a road nobody plows? Exodus 32: "Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me… and he… made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel."

BALLROOM | GOLD | IDOL

Back in the lobby, the CAM is enthroned, flanked by his deranged sphinges, Ullman and Watson: the god and his sycophantic guardians.

ULLMAN | CAM | WATSON

Posed exactly like Baal-Hammon:

SPHINX | BAAL-HAMMON | SPHINX

In Ullman's office the same altarpiece sits on the windowsill: two carved eagles and, between them, the cactus.

EAGLE | CACTUS | EAGLE
PAST | PRESENT | FUTURE
DESTROYED | SHAMAN | RESTORED
DESTROYER | GOD | CREATOR

An eagle on a cactus is the sign of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of the sun, whose emblem shows the eagle perched on the cactus devouring a serpent. In some shots Ullman's head blocks one of the eagles out, taking its place. We see Ullman, proud Eagle, fluttering, perching on his Cactus, stately bird now at Rest.

And back in Boulder, before the Torrances have ever seen the place, the emblem is already set up in Wendy's kitchen: a row of cereal boxes, Froot Loops, a snakey cucumber, long, green, sinewy. The Serpent, crutched by the Toucan.

All this to say: what the FUCK is the Overlook good for? Why its illustrious past, with Rockefellers and Astors and du Ponts going so far out of their way to achieve what, exactly? What to DO with all this Solitude?

Two old houses came up out of the ground while Kubrick was making this film. In November 1976, King Tut set out on a tour of America: Washington, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Seattle, and finally New York, where the lines ran around the block until April 1979. His tomb had been opened in November 1922, the year after the Overlook's Fourth of July ball, and when Lord Carnarvon, who paid for the dig, died the following spring, the papers gave the world the Curse of King Tut.

STEPHEN | KING | TUT

Meanwhile, on 21 February 1978, electricity workers digging in Mexico City at a spot then known as "the island of the dogs" struck a stone disk ten feet across. Huitzilopochtli's great temple, the Templo Mayor, which he shared with the rain god Tláloc—razed by the conquistadors in 1521 and paved over for four and a half centuries—was coming back up. The excavation ran from 1978 to 1982. Kubrick started shooting that spring, with the Pharaoh still on tour.

Every horror fan knows this one. The dig, the ruin, the ancient evil coming up out of the ground: Father Merrin turns up his winged demon in the ruins of Hatra in The Exorcist, and The Omen sends its father to the ruins of Megiddo for seven daggers. Seven sharps, seven sacrificial blades. Kubrick didn't have to stage the dig. It was happening.

Ancient evils are far more terrifying and persistent than men with axes. When The Shining crossed the Atlantic, it was billed as "The tide of terror that swept America." Jack's latest violent outburst can hardly be characterized as sweeping America. The ancient evil is systematically building new temples in various places around the earth, and industrializing what it was only doing at city-state scale before.

The four pictures outside Ullman's office have a name. The Aztecs held that the four corners of the universe are marked by "the four Tlálocs," which "both hold up the sky and function as the frame for the passing of time." One mountain, four frames of time: Ringo, John, Paul and George.

RAIN | STORM GOD | DROUGHT

Tláloc is the storm god of the mountain, lord of rain, hail and thunder, who lives on a sacred peak. On its summit there are five stones, for Tláloc and his four Tlaloque. One of their festivals, Atemoztli, falls in the dead of winter, in December. And what did his worshippers do up there, with all that solitude? The sacrifice of children on sacred mountaintops. The children were carried up the mountain, and "if, on the way to the shrine, these children cried, their tears were viewed as positive signs of imminent and abundant rains." In other words, they were total sadists. At the festival of Atlcahualo, seven children were sacrificed every year: the Seven Dwarves on the Snow White Peak.

The shrine held four pitchers of water, and each pitcher was a fate for the crops: the first would "bring forth a good harvest, the second would cause the harvest to fail and rot, the third would dry the harvest out, and the final one would freeze it." Spring, autumn, summer, winter. John reaps, George rots, Paul dries out, Ringo freezes. Jack is five months dry. And who is Winter?

John the shining preacher; Ringo the witchy undertaker; Paul the Somerton Man, the stiff; George the ghoulish gravedigger.

Come Together

The sign on the door reads GAMES ROOM, which is one of those Sonata Jazz things. It's not a natural phrase. It's like a weird combination of billiards room and game room. But you can unscramble the letters and find OMEGA MORS. The end, death.

The Colorado flag hangs on the wall: white for the snow, gold for the sun, red for the "ruddy" earth, blue for the sky.

In England, the Board of Green Cloth, named for the green baize on the table it sat at, ran the royal household's accounts and sat as a court on offenses committed within the verge of the palace, with emblems of its power to reward or punish on the cloth. By the end, their powers of inquisition and judgment had been watered down and all the Board did was license drinking, betting and gaming. Here in OMEGA MORS we have cafeteria tables that cannot help but evoke casinos, and then we have billiards tables throughout the hotel that swap out the green or red we've been trained to expect for brown felt.

The walls of OMEGA MORS are papered with ski posters, in a hotel that closes for the winter because skiing would cost too much. Look closer. Giants squat on a mountaintop performing burnt offerings. The poster says MONARCH; that's a ski resort. Had to resort to cannibalism. The Overlook is NOT a ski resort.

"They built the high places of Baal… to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Molech."

TWIN | MOLOCH | TWIN

There is a cigarette machine in the corner, an ashtray on literally every table, and beside the cigarette machine, a child's crucifix, reminding one of Gallows Goofy and the sniffing dog.

CRUCIFIX | CIGARETTE MACHINE | GATE | TWIN | MOLOCH | TWIN | GATE | WATER COOLER | PHONE BOOTH

This is our wildest triptych yet, with 4 layers, all regressing towards Moloch, a vaguely owl or bull poster with a cactus or coral and a pyramid shaped diamond on its head. We hardly notice the demon because of the girls, who evoke in us something WE CANNOT QUITE PLACE. Dorothy. Oz. But instead of ruby slippers their slippers are black. Instead of a Hollywood smile, they are like reanimated corpses. We immediately conclude that these are the Grady Girls who were axed to pieces. But ghosts are NOT what is most frightening here! That goddamn crucifix is far worse! And it blends into the scene and no one on the Internet appears to have even commented on it.

— Hi, Lloyd. A little slow tonight, isn't it?
— Yes it is, Mr. Torrance. What will it be?
— I'm awfully glad you asked me that, Lloyd, because I just happen to have two twenties and two tens right here in my wallet.

He opens the wallet.

— Say, Lloyd, it seems I'm temporarily light. How's my credit in this joint, anyway?
— Your credit's fine, Mr. Torrance.

HAMILTON | DEAD PRESIDENTS | JACKSON

Jackson and Hamilton. The genocidal maniac and the imposter who managed to get on the money anyway.

SHRINE | BURIAL GROUND | FOUNDATION

Ahab, the king who "reared up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal," had a builder:

In his days did Hiel the Bethelite build Jericho: he laid the foundation thereof in Abiram his firstborn, and set up the gates thereof in his youngest son Segub.

6. The numbers

Kubrick renamed the room. In the novel it's 217. In the film it's 237. 217 means nothing. 237 is the carpet: two rows, three columns, seven diamonds. The impossible relation.

TWO | THREE | SEVEN

Two: everything at the Overlook comes in pairs. King and Kubrick: Jack and Jack. The Grady girls: the Burns twins. The lake and its reflection, in the first frame. Charles Grady and Delbert Grady. Howard Hughes and Horace Derwent, the latter still around here somewhere. The Overlook: the Timberline. The Overlook: the Ahwahnee. Two Snowcats: one scalped by Jack, one the escape. Two ducks: one Donald, one plain. Two sycophants: one loud, one soft. Two walls of fifteen photographs. Two timelines, ours and the hotel's. And two premeditations.

Three: the triangles in the Labyrinth. The three is Kubrick's innovation. He was not satisfied with having 1 there. It wasn't punny enough. The sosie method itself, or how to do puns at scale: the ubiquitous triptychs we are using in this article. Three who shine: Hallorann, his grandmother, Danny. Three years: 1907, 1921, 1977. Three versions of Danny's arm: five months, fourteen months, three goddamn years. Baal and the boys. The Little Pigs. Three darts. The three goddesses: Coatlicue, the skirt of snakes, the sweeping mother a ball fell on; Cihuacōātl, the snake woman, who weeps at the crossroads for the son she abandoned and finds a sacrificial knife; and Tlazolteotl, who eats the filth, absolves the sinner, and keeps the steam baths.

Seven: the grid. The hotel opens in 1907. Two sevens later, July 4th, 1921, the photograph. Nine sevens on, the winter of 1970, Grady corrects his family. Ten sevens on, the Torrances arrive. Now look at the gaps. 1907 to 1921: 7 × 2 = 14. 1921 to 1977: 14 × 4 = 56. Each multiplier is the square of the one before: 2, then 4. Seven notes of the Dies Irae, seven sharps in the key. Seven dwarves. Seven children on the mountain. Seven days in a week. Seven cigarettes on the Somerton Man. The Group of Seven on the walls. Seven cereals in the storeroom. Seven boxes of Frosted Flakes. Seven youths and seven maidens for the Minotaur. Seven walls around Troy. Seven kinds of what have you.

Multiply it out: 2 × 3 × 7 = 42. Danny wears it on his shirt.

Subtract the book from the film: 237 − 217 = 20. "20 feet of snow." "Two twenties and two tens."

2 × 3 = 7, the impossible relation.

So what is in room 237?

Nothin'! Ain't nothin' in Room 237, but you ain't got no business going in there anyways!

ROOM 237 | AIN'T NOTHIN' STAY OUT | AREA 51

Head chef

How'd ya like to have some EYESCREAM, Doc?

He has just met the boy. The Head Chef is bribing Danny with chocolate "ice cream" from a ceremonial chalice, under a rack of sacrificial knives that appear to be pointed straight down at his soft skull, while giving him the Spanish Inquisition. Do you know how I knew your name was Doc? How long have you been able to do it? Do your mom and dad know about Tony? Has Tony ever told you anything about this place? Think real hard, Doc. And the interrogation is working: SNIFFING DOG Danny has already told him about Tony, admitted that Tony tells him things, and betrayed the fact that he knows at least Something about Room 237. Now, we might be tempted to get bogged down in number games, and the temptation is certainly there, with all the numerical decoys Kubrick planted everywhere to keep us from noticing that one thing, but rather than ratholing ever deeper into the maze, losing sight of the people and what they're actually doing, perhaps we ought to step back and ask the question that really deserves to be asked, after all. Why the fuck does everybody think Hallorann is benevolent?

You mean they ate each other up??

In a movie where we are already dealing with the spectre of cannibalism in the first 20 minutes, it is HARDLY safe to trust the HEAD CHEF, the guy who keeps bowie knives and meat cleavers within arm's length of his office, which is WEIRDLY right next to the teleporting meat closet.

ANATOMY | HEAD | ORG CHART

And his office doesn't have normal office equipment besides some file cabinets, but there are these hulking file cabinet-ish things disguised as office furniture containing WHAT, exactly? What DOES a head chef keep in his office in such gigantic cabinets?

— I think a lot of things happened RIGHT HERE in this particular hotel OVER THE YEARS, and not ALL of 'em was GOOD, says Hallorann, with a stripe of sadism.
— What about room 237?
— Room 237?
— You're scared a Room 237, ain'tcha?
— No, I ain't.

In most theories of the Shining, CLOSING DAY is intensely ominous, but the true horror hasn't started yet. But for one who is truly parsing this film and taking in what is onscreen in the tableaux Kubrick has painstakingly arranged, this is already one of the most disturbing movies ever made. There is not a single character so far who is sympathetic besides Danny, and the next closest is arguably Jack.

Hallorann is a demonic imposter of a Hollywood trope we have been trained on. We want to like him partly because Scatman Crothers is likeable, and we give him far too much undeserved benefit of the doubt. From everything we can tell, the Overlook is a resort for modern cannibals, who torture and murder children for their own amusement and/or to appease ancient "gods" that definitely do not exist.

Ullman's thin veil of charm hardly conceals his Count Dracula mannerisms and affect, his macabre sense of humor, his chipper delivery of grisly facts. His Dantesque tour through this infernal maze routes from enigma to puzzle to paradox and back again and every frame along the way is loaded with subliminal satanic imagery evoking a meatpacking facility, heads on pikes, the Holocaust, and ancient child sacrifice rituals across various cultures and as described in the Bible. But keep in mind, it is Kubrick's job to erect the most effective haunted house cinematically possible.

Wendy is already shown to be strange and morbid, bringing up the Donner Party in the car. Smiling when covering up for her husband's despicable abuse. Agreeing to take Danny far from civilization for five months with nobody but his insane parents to look after him, parents who are shown to be all too eager to hand their son over to Hallorann, someone they don't know and have no reason to trust—literally a Stephen King character who is enticing the child with dubious offerings...

And about that chocolate ice cream. On the eve of his sacrifice, a slave chosen to represent Quetzalcoatl had to dance, and if he did not dance joyously, the temple elders prepared him a potion: chocolate, mixed with human blood washed off the sacrificial knives, to take his mind off the Macabre so he'll get back to the Dance.

CENTER OF PARKING LOT | AIN'T NOTHIN' STAY OUT | ROOM 237

7. What didn't Tony want to tell Danny about the Overlook?

THE SHINING (BOOK) | THE SHINING (FILM) | MAZES AND LABYRINTHS

By the way, The Shining has a second source text! It's named on the sign outside the so-called Hedge Maze: Mazes and Labyrinths by W. H. Matthews, 1922, the year after the Fourth of July ball. And it's long, and it would take a long time to read, and it would take a long time to understand how it relates to THIS story (other than the obvious fact of the Labyrinth existing). There are two critical clues here that make this straightforward.

1. HATFIELD — that's the name of the boy Jack assaulted at Stovington, and it's the name of the Maze on the frontispiece of the book. What a strange coincidence, eh?
2. SOMERTON — that's the name of the Man who was found on the beach in Australia with all the tags cut out of his clothes, in a suit and tie, seven cigarettes in his pocket. Paul is dressed as the Somerton Man on the cover of Abbey Road, so he was already in our rebus, and we simply struck paydirt when we found an estate called Somerton with a labyrinth in the book.

So we find Troy-town in the same book: a turf maze in the garden of a farmhouse named Troy, one path four hundred yards long, coiled into a lawn fifty-seven feet across. And we find a maze like the one in the movie, beside the labyrinth laid out for a CAM named Charles V, erstwhile monarch of the Holy Roman Empire. We'll come back to him later.

To overlook something is to keep an eye on it. To overlook something is also to miss it entirely.

Then we get to Hatfield House, and a delightful third sense:

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.

This is the sense of the name of the hotel in the movie, to Overlook the hedge maze. And why do they want to overlook the hedge maze, and name their entire creepy hotel that? The hotel at the end of the road with only 1 way in and 1 way out? With nothing really to do BUT overlook a hedge maze?

Listen: the hotel is a resort for modern cannibals. They had to RESORT to CANNIBALISM. Get it?? They OVERLOOK the maze, because the Overlook is a modern colosseum for bloodsport. Get it??

That's why the rooms face onto the labyrinth. Pay more, get a better view. This is the meaning of the shots where we have CAMs "overlooking" the labyrinth in the lobby. And that also brings us back to the other clue from the lobby, AVIS, the one we thought might be about Jack, our "premeditator" from the strawman theory at the beginning of the piece. We can clearly see that AVIS was a polyglot pun on BIRDS' EYE VIEW. Rollicking fun!

— This site was chosen for its seclusion and scenic beauty, says Ullman, tongue in cheek.
— It's certainly got plenty of that.

The jet-setters who come to this place watch from above as the Minotaur devours the children trapped in the labyrinth. That is just what Minotaurs do. And what is a Minotaur? A brutal murderer in a costume: a gladiator, before anybody knew what a gladiator was. This kind of deranged bloodlust and child sacrifice is an old fact of history, and Kubrick is reminding us of it. It is the ancient evil of our ancestors, and this movie, a HORROR film and a work of fiction, suggests that it continues to this day. THAT is the plot of the movie we are watching, and all of the evidence points that way.

Now we understand the meaning of the green tables of OMEGA MORS. This room is for gambling on the children in the "games," a step up from the sadistic practice of dog fighting. The event these sick fucks have all congregated for.

— We can accommodate up to 300 people very comfortably, says Ullman dryly.
— Boy, we could really have a good party in this room, deadpans Wendy.

After the main event, they go downstairs to the Baalroom, where Hallorann has cooked up some of the heads, the ones that don't go on the enormous pikes outside the walk-in incinerator behind the stairs. That is what the gentleman means when he says "Great party!"

Now, is it INCREDIBLY DISGUSTING AND MUCH BLEAKER than you expected? Yes. But it's also darkly comic. It's satire, encoded in satanic imagery in a horror film that is genuinely pretty scary even on the surface, and the satire layer is MUCH scarier than the surface narrative, even if Kubrick loves gallows humor. What's missing is only the laugh-track. Consider all the characters you met along the way, and once you discover the TRUE purpose of this place, they get ENTIRELY recast into their proper roles. You no longer believe the surface narrative, the propaganda that made you think Hallorann was a GOOD guy, like that novel what's his face wrote about this. Hallorann is one of the WORST ONES—he's a DICK!—but saying that is likely to get me tarred and feathered and driven out of Townley, because EVERYBODY loves Hallorann. But they shouldn't. Because HALLORANN is the MINOTAUR!!!

8. The Tannis Baal

In Crete, King Minos built a Labyrinth, and Athens sent him seven youths and seven maidens to feed into it. An Athenian historian, Philochorus, said the Labyrinth was just a dungeon. The children were kept there until they were handed out as prizes in the games held in honor of Minos's murdered son. And the monster was an officer named Tauros, a brute. A coin from Knossos shows the Minotaur as he really was: a man in a bull's mask.

In Rome came the gladiators. Captives killed each other in the arena for Caesar, and fans in the stands celebrated the grim spectacle while enjoying food and drink. The Games were a totally normal part of Roman culture, celebrated by the great Latin poet Ovid as an ideal place to meet women. Watching slaves be brutally murdered was a source of entertainment, physical comedy everyone enjoyed, all ages, merchant, centurion, emperor. The Retriever tosses gore onto his slab to drag it off the Arena: an arm here, a knee there, he loads his palette full. The slabs can be seen leaning various places in the industrial "meat processing" zone of the hotel that Hallorann ironically claims "ain't nothin' but a kitchen", along with the conspicuous piles of plates we see America-cleaners moving uselessly on Closing Day, just to make sure we are left NO DOUBT that everyone there is a cannibal who is well aware of the grisly nature of the "games". You can see the Plaid Bags carried off by completely normal-looking guests. Those are their carrion-bags! Gory souvenirs taken home as keepsakes to remind them of the somber spectacle that thrilled and amused them when they came up to the Overlook with their famblys last year. What a hilarious gag!

In Mexico, the ballgame. A solid rubber ball, nine pounds, struck with the hips down a long narrow alley between two walls. The bouncing ball was emblematic of the sun. The losers lost their heads. Sometimes, the heads were even used instead of balls! What fun! And no expense was spared: more than 1,300 ballcourts have been found from Mexico to Central America, alleys walled in cut stone, built to last. One city, Cantona, had twenty-four. The stone hoops themselves were hundreds of pounds, raised 20 feet, and required ingenious engineering to construct. The spectators bet everything they had: they sold their children to bet, and when there was nothing left, they staked themselves and became slaves.

In 1528, Cortés shipped a troupe of ballplayers across the ocean to perform for Dracula doppelganger Charles V, bloody satanic monarch of the Holy Roman Empire, mass murderer, and Savior of Christendom, a hero of the American religious right. They praise him for, among other atrocities, the gruesome sacking of the Templo Mayor, where the Aztecs formerly practiced appalling ceremonial human sacrifice for many centuries—the site of the Ancient Evil which came up out of the ground during the production of The Shining. The conquered players played their sacred ballgame for the monarch, who sat amused, sloshing back wine and crunching on rich imperialist tidbits.

And on May 25, 1921, six weeks before the Overlook's Fourth of July ball, W. H. Matthews built a little maze of wire and elm leaves for a church fête at Eastcote, and hung a sign at the entrance:

Beware the dreadful Minotaur
That dwells within the Maze.
The monster feasts on human gore
And bones of those he slays.

TANNIS ROOT | FUN | TENNIS BAAL

9. Merrie Melodies

The dialog of this movie always works as a comedy routine, and every line lands. If you think you spotted a continuity gap, chances are you missed a gag. Grady is a vaudeville straight man in a waiter's jacket, telling us he "corrected" his children with hilarious deadpan delivery and absurd overpronunciation, exaggeratedly rolling all his Rs with the King's English of a Jeeves, saying it over and over and never giving us the slightest hint that he is pulling our leg. It's a speech impediment joke built on the common sound of "corrected" and "collected"—the gruesome pun Kubrick reprises throughout the film. That's comedy GOLD!

— I should know, sir. I've always BEAN here, says Grady.

JACK is at the GOOSE soiree in the GOLD ballroom and has had an EGG drink spilled on him by an ENGLISHMAN.

— Has Tony ever told you anything about this place? About the Overlook Hotel? asks Hallorann.
— I don't know.
— Think real hard, Doc! he prods. Try to remember what it was!
— Maybe he showed me something! (laugh-track)

Wendy is the witch. Hallorann is the Minotaur. And Jack, the misunderstood one, spends the last act buffoonishly plodding after the Road Runner, and pathetically lurching up and down like an accordion somebody threw out the window, the way Wile E. Coyote does after a big fall. His wife knocked him on the head with a baseball bat, completely destroying his mental faculties, and he tumbled down the staircase backwards nearly breaking his neck: hysterical slapstick!

And admit it: while he was falling you were hoping it was gonna kill him. Our desire to see Jack suffer exactly mirrors the malice and sadism of every man, woman, and child at the Gladiator's Arena. What is needed is just the soundtrack from Danny's cartoons. Jack struts and frets his last hour on the stage chasing his wife and boy around the hotel with an axe—a callback to Phineas Gage!—but even in his delirium manages to perform one last selfless feat by finally putting an end to the diabolical monster Hallorann once and for all—the final act of violence of a catastrophically injured hero. Then he wanders out into the labyrinth and freezes stiff, fulfilling his destiny as Paul, the Summer-ton man, making way for the new Season. Beep beep.

And who is Winter? Witchy Wendy, of course: the grim reaper, the propagandist, the undertaker, the hag in the steam baths of Room 237. When Hallorann swings open the door to C4, revealing the contents so utterly horrific Kubrick had to splice the scene out of the movie, Wendy loves it! She is the coolest cucumber, the most macabre, the quickest-witted straight man of all, ever in command of impeccable comic timing. She peeks into the freezer, sees whatever is in there, and doesn't bat an eye. Hallorann reminds her that "you got to keep regular if you want to be happy." A hilarious reference to the necessity of performing child sacrifice rituals during the Age of Ringo.

That's all, folks!

We abandoned our task of film analysis in earnest after Closing Day. Kubrick's long shots of Jack slowly deteriorating and getting nothing accomplished for the rest of the winter are a clue that the back half of the movie is just a Trojan Horse for smuggling Closing Day past the censors. Other writers have already handled most of the nuance of the long cold winter well. The part they missed was the actual plot of the movie, which we have finally brought to light. Sorry to ruin the movie for everybody, but it really held up well, with not a single person in 46 years getting the joke in only the most heavily scrutinized movie ever made. Well played, Mr. Kubrick!