SHINING Examples: The Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror

Caught THE SHINING (1980) for the 18th time Monday night, realized never before had I noticed huge, druggy disconnect between the members of the Torrence family, how badly each is trapped in their own nightmare head space; how the Overlook's trans-dimensional gravity which makes even normal job interview blather cryptic and enriched with mantra-like repetitions that vainly try to form a buffer of spiritual calm against the madness of irrational experience. Of the entire cast, only Shelly Duvall's perky mom uses words in a direct, emotional manner. I also gleaned new insight into cabin fever and the archetypal meaning of the bathroom.

'Cabin fever' is a term everyone understands as 'real' but scientifically we know little about it since serious scientific inquiries into its nature are seldom made, and understandably so since any inquiry into cabin fever diffuses it by definition. If you knock on the door of the person living in isolation to study his cabin fever, right there you dispel a goodly portion of it, or are maybe killed with an axe. We're talking about a complete collapse of the social sphere into the inner psyche --the subject can't tell the real from the vividly imagined. With no direct link to the social order present to keep the Torrence family anchored--whether to each other, the social order or linear time/space--they dissolve into the archetypal time warp created by their own unconscious minds which interconnect to the ghosts and dark energy of the hotel, like an ipod connecting with a Kubrick obelisk hard drive (Their last name isn't pronounced 'torrents' for nothing!). Danny 'leaves' his body altogether, to be replaced by his talking finger, Tony. Jack goes off the deep end in his writerly determination to not be 'a dull boy,' and Shelly's inability to get a 'normal' response from either of the Torrence males drives her into hysterics. Now that's cabin fever.

Consider their example in light of the bedraggled survivors of the Donner party (mentioned in the car ride). The Donners spent months starving and shivering in clumsy brush sheds, buried under mountains of snow, weakened by frostbite and starvation, with only some human remains for snacking. They would have quickly lost any semblance of 'sanity' simply because the situation itself would be without any 'anchor' of space/time and social strata. In such a situation, sanity is a burden, an anachronism. We can read the accounts of the survivors, but it was not a time wherein settlers waxed on about their mental states.

In a way the relationship between Bowman and Hal in 2001 is reflected in THE SHINING with its random markers "Tuesday" and "8:00 AM" indicating the complete breakdown and meaninglessness of time. There are no weekends in space, or at the Overlook; no intruding signifiers of social order for your madness to worry about. No alarm clocks. No recourse in a battle of wits except to kill any person whose reality might contradict your own.

The second thing that stuck out this nth viewing of THE SHINING was the constant repetition of 'tour guide' language: Jack and hotel staff (and later law enforcement via short wave radio) hide behind repetitive phrases ("over") and Jack especially clings to this repetition in his avoidance of any real commitment to writing - his mantra of All Work and No Play make jack a dull boy functions as the endgame of a long string of repetitions heard throughout the script. Jack uses mantras to keep his smirky bad boy egotism intact while interviewing for the job, taking the tour, or interacting with either his family or the ghosts of the Gold Room.

There are never points of genuine emotional connection between Jack and anyone in the hotel, alive or dead, or his family. He 'hides' in language, depending on its obscurantist 'wit' for melting away the terror of any unsignified remainder that may come roaring up from his repressed unconscious. We see his eyes widen and bug out as he talks with the ghosts, but he never dares ask anything like "are you real?" for that would risk sounding as square as his wife.

Note that the ghost bartender Lloyd (right) appears at Jack's big moment of crisis - when Shelly Duvall accuses him of hurting his son and he goes a little mad in outrage. Here he's wasted five months not having a single drink, out of some dorky fatherly guilt, and all for nothing as he's accused of hurting Danny anyway. His language finally breaks up a bit from the mantras and he mutters he'd sell his soul for a drink. Bingo. Salvation and destruction all tied up in a single bargain.

The Bathroom

Ground zero when it comes to realizing the drugs are kicking in, the bathroom is you can check your dilated pupils in the mirror, freak out when you close the medicine cabinet (checking for mom's Librium, no big deal) and see a figure standing behind you or a different background in the mirror; the toilet looms serpentine and alien --the gaping maw of porcelain where we are mystified in childhood by the sudden presence and absence of feces as an extension of our body that vanishes in a swirling vortex never to be seen again. It is the place of hair combing and judgment and bereavement, of porcelain gods and vows to never drink tequila after wine ever again. It is the place where coke moves from the tip of some dude's car key into your nose, or you sneak cigarettes, or find the gun taped to the back of the old-fashioned toilet. We all surely know the 'boost' we may get when navigating precarious social situations by looking into the mirror of the bathroom. Here we are able to reconstitute our ego, a little mini-resurrection. It is where we go to delude, and denude. We are allowed 'privacy' there. And as the hotel itself is so immensely private, the bathrooms in the film (there are two) are double private - a bathroom within a giant bathroom if you will (and in the bath nook in room 237, even a room within a room within a room, so triple private, and the tub is even in a nook at the infinite point, for yet another layer). Time and language drift away in the solace of the gleaming fixtures and tiles; it all corresponds perfectly with our visualizations of the the portal that lurks at the bottom of our souls, between our own unconscious and that of the universal collective. 

Top: 2001, The Holy Mountain / B: Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

Which came first, after all, the way bathroom tiles glisten in the light when you're tripping balls at 3:30 AM, or your mind's eye temple, adorned with countless sparking lights, as large as the eye can wish to make out through the constantly rearranging serpentine points of definition?  Small wonder then, that the bathroom is where the scary business goes down in THE SHINING. For most Kubrick films, it is always, as it were, the same bathroom; the bathroom behind your eyes, or its eyes.  The black of your pupils in the mirror are the black of the 2001 obelisk and the blackness of the very bottom of the toilet bowl, or the sink. It's the room at the end of 2001 where Bowman hides from his older self. It's where Pyle shoots the sarge and his own mouth; it's where we see Nicole Kidman on the toilet while Tom adores his Adonis looks; the colors in the Kubrick bathroom are always melting, the tiles always glistening like the skin of a giant slumbering serpent from the warped perspective of a fish-eye lens.

I've always felt if therapy wants to be truly effective it should take place in the bathroom. The room wherein the dancing dwarf speaks backwards in David Lynch's Twin Peaks is 'kind' of like this bathroom, a little less functional--like the outer lounge antechamber in swanky hotel ballroom bathrooms. The beginning of Jodorowsky's THE HOLY MOUNTAIN takes place in a similar kind of bathroom/ tiled space, as the shaman shaves the heads of two women acolytes. This latter example evinces a superb understanding of the fantasmatic - with the hair shaving representing a complete identity melt down (see also Kubrick's credit sequence in FULL METAL JACKET) an essential rite of passage when undertaking the trek to total self actualization and surrender.

In a Jungian analysis Jack's room 237 bathroom scene is something straight out of Hansel and Gretel - with the bathroom as the gingerbread house. Jack is a nervous but horny Hansel, the initial stern leggy sexiness of the apparition is the 'candy', the lure. The breadcrumb trail in this case is the maze-like paths of the carpet and hallways that seem to pull him like a magnet in slow dream time motion towards the 'end' where the woman in the bath waits --the witch and the candy rolled into one. In Jung's lexicon, this old witch is the undernourished and most cranky shadow/anima; the 'wrathful deity' aspect in the Tibetan bardo sense --the flip side of the peaceful diety / sexy young woman. Jack should have read the Tibetan Book of the Dead! What kind of 'writer' is he?

Anyone who's been 'experienced' will surely have some chills of recognition in 237, for the room itself has cabin fever-- everything is slowed like clockwork and without a 'majority' rule of normality that would exist if there were more people who are less attuned to such things and therefore less apt to notice when the actual mechanics of perception bog down. It's as if the Overlook holds, in the bathroom of 237, a black hole --through the drain into the pipes of Aboriginal 'dream-time' --you move through it and come out of Marian Crane's open dilated pupil in PSYCHO, or out of the pistol barrel fired into the camera of Mick Jagger's brain at the end of PERFORMANCE. This small black hole slows down the world around it; the world around it revolves as it approaches; the world around it slows and spins in an inescapable clockwork pentameter; the rotation is hypnotic in its steady unwavering mechanical rhythm; it is the earth, the sun, and the wheels within wheels revolving in 2001's spaceships or Ezekiel's wheels in the sky. The drones on the soundtrack work to achieve this revolving sense of hypnosis, as does the slow, dreamlike movement of the camera and actors, the repetition of certain words over and over as a tool of hypnosis - "gimme the bat!" for example, becomes a mantra, as does 'redrum' and 'my responsibilities' and "Danny! Danny boy!"

In my past viewings I've found her unbearable, but I came to respect and like Shelly Duvall's character this time around. After all, she does knock her husband out with a bat and then lock him in the pantry. She defends herself with a knife and eventually triumphs over him in every respect. She kicks his ass! Her kid may be a nutcase and her husband a self-absorbed bully but she manages to keep some kind of grip on things even as she herself begins to see the apparitions. I was particularly aware of the wincing of the men over her gushing naivete at the hotel's size during their initial tour, and it's that which clued me into the language aspect: "This may be the biggest, most beautiful place I've ever been in!" she beams.  Jack would never admit the Overlook was the biggest place he'd ever seen, or otherwise betray a possibly provincial past, and in part that's why he got the job. Still, it's her kind of uncomplicated normality that survives cabin fever, not Jack's cynical structuralism.


Jack instead plays the game wherein all language is double filtered, repeated and used as a distancing tool, a way of negotiating one's way through matters too vast and complex to adequately sum up. For those who operate in this 'adult code' any gushing or exclamatory phrase that interrupts concentration or an unspoken understanding is evidence of immaturity --the domain of the squares, i.e. the wives who don't get invited out to drinks. For speech to be 'successful' as indicative of one's adult insider status -- too cool to care, as it were-- it must circumvent and sidestep and double-time its actual meaning, and protect the sublime in fields of repetition and banality.  The words Ullman speaks to Jack, for example, are all words he's clearly spoken before - it's all 'the tour' and the interview; the touchy matter of the caretaker who went a little funny in the head is brought up with a great deal of cushy tact, an approach Ullman's clearly perfected over years of responding to investigations and queries.  Jack rolls with this and reacts in just the way one would ideally react, without real thought or emotional surplus. Compare his reactions to someone who attempts to be 'earnest' when faced with a similar situation, and you know I'm thinking here of the meetings between Barton Fink and Lipnick (read my thing on that thing here)

This strategy is also what enables him to talk with the ghosts of Lloyd and later Grady. Jack confronts these specters with, if anything, a greater connection than he has with his own family or Ullman, but basically the connection is the same in that it is deliberately clouded by 'hip' language. Ghost bartenders are much more sympathetic than hysterical wives or disturbed sons, at least in Jack's eyes. Effortlessly moving into a racist, classicist mode of thinking, Jack becomes the gentleman who is served, i.e. the upper class -- which until now he's obviously regarded (as do we and Kubrick) with anxiety, since (unless we're part of this 'old money' class) we never 'see' this reality in our normal life. Now he's ready to move into this higher class and clearly views his wife and son as the disposable dregs of his present - they're like pregnant Shelly Winters in A PLACE IN THE SUN, the sort who can't let a minute go by at Disneyland without having to say "Isn't this fun?" or "Did you have a good time, honey?," laboring under the idea that language will somehow encompass and exceed the event, will adequately mirror the vastness of direct experience. But Jack knows that by saying it she in effect robs it of what she's saying it has. Moms do this all the time, don't they? Honey? Don't they? Honey?

The only way saying something is great without making it less great is if the great thing has moved safely into the past - which is part of why the bourgeoisie prefers its artists long dead before they honor them. The artist was great but can never be great in that moment. (Jack is finally happy when he is 'already dead' from the photo in the 1920s).

The only time greatness can exist in the moment and still be cool then is with repetition, ala Warhol. In repetition only can language work as an equal to experience, and can actually 'enhance' direct experience by hypnotizing the conscious mind into a state of strictly observational stasis.  Approached via mantra, by removing one's focus from the realm of the symbolic, by repeating a single word over and over until it loses all meaning, the obscene dimensions of the real are suddenly exposed. Say it enough times in a row and even the word 'beauty' becomes a hideous, trumpet-like mass of snouts and tentacles. Better to just hide in the bathroom until these sounds have passed into rusty memory and greatness has attached to them like barnacles and all tomorrows parties are like a thousand yesterdays.