Measured Madness

The filmmaker’s voracious appetite had him constantly pouring through bookstores (Kubrick would later buy every available copy of Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, which became Eyes Wide Shut (1999), to keep it out of the hands of others). He’d so brilliantly leavened apocalyptic horror with satire in Dr. Strangelove that he, in effect, created a new genre, combining the two so deftly that it’s almost impossible to discern where one starts and the other leaves off. The satisfaction of making a filmic meal out of scraps that other directors couldn’t measure up to seems to give the movies themselves a malicious grin—a countenance seen in almost every film that Kubrick made. When he came across Stephen King’s mammoth The Shining, with its meticulous weave of the quotidian and the gothic, we can imagine the firing of enraptured synapses in his head.

Public awareness of Kubrick’s adaptation of King’s opus started with the deliriously slow grind of the teaser, which consists of a static shot of the end of a corridor in what seems to be an elegant but slightly rundown hotel lobby—but immediately the appetite is whetted. Especially for fans of the novel, who undoubtedly must have thought: “Is this how Kubrick imagines the Overlook to be?!”

As that brief scene played out—the teaser ran less than two minutes—it had the feel of something that hadn’t quite made its way into the center of pop culture, but very much resonated in neighborhoods like mine in inner city Detroit, as it had the swagger of the O.G. director stepping up to the mic, ready to blast away at the youngbloods such as John Carpenter (whose Halloween had reset the table two years earlier), Brian DePalma (who’d led the stars of his 1976 Stephen King adaptation Carrie—the actors Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie—to the Oscars, a rarity for performers in a genre still treated with disdain), and the upstart Ridley Scott, whose 1979 Alien was built on an industrial working-class atmosphere, complete with rats running around. Or the older hands, such as William Friedkin, who took center stage with The Exorcist (1973) and dragged Al Pacino to grindhouse seediness with Cruising in 1980.

And as the credits rolled slowly past, and the tension mounts, and the words “Based on Stephen King’s Best Selling Masterpiece Of Modern Horror” are followed by “Directed by Stanley Kubrick,” that same stately but unsettling image of the Outlook’s corridor begins to be disturbed by splashes of blood leaking from the side of the elevator doors. Within seconds, a tidal wave of dark, velvety scarlet (none of that Halloween red for Kubrick) languorously floods the entire space, finally overtaking the camera in luscious, decadent slow motion.

This, kids, is how a master does it.

Not with terrified faces on camera, not with a knife exposed and glinting to indicate its overdeliberate position before the audience. Not even with the voices of the cast. Instead, Kubrick began his assault on the mass consciousness with a scene that transforms from dream into nightmare without giving anything away—a ruminative and deliberate decision by a man recognized for controlling and monitoring every cubic centimeter of the marketing and advertising for his movies. (Kubrick was known to have called Warner Brothers to complain that the ad in a Midwest Sunday newspaper was half an inch smaller than the ad in a major Eastern newspaper, leaving studio staff confused, even unnerved, as to how he got such information. And this would be minutes after the papers were published.)

Because what Kubrick did better than anyone is supply his oeuvre with a claustrophobic series of sets that pinned his casts—and the viewer—so that by the end, they’d all undergone the same experiences. His noir films, with ceilings that seemed to bear down directly upon the beleaguered participants, were early examples of this. But even the sleek narrative contours of his comedies bring that third dimension of constant anxiety to the scenarios. When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art unveiled its landmark Stanley Kubrick exhibition in 2012, that aspect was carefully maintained. (Even an earlier exhibit of his photographs, Stanley Kubrick, Photographer 1945-1950, held at Venice’s Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti in 2010, was staged in a space that communicated a vivid similarity.)

And so, the success of The Shining is deeply ironic, in that it’s a film about a man unraveling seam by seam, delivered by a filmmaker with an exacting sense of control.  This silent and powerful contrast between story and storyteller undergirds almost all of Kubrick’s work, from the noir washes of Fear and Desire (1952) and Killer’s Kiss (1955) to the intimacy of Lolita (1962), and finally to the refined bravura of The Shining. 

The loose ends that remain in the film are precise and purposeful, dangled so expertly that, even 40 years later, we can still find ourselves tangled in its dark tapestry. Echoes can be heard in the low thrum of 21 Savage’s deadpan dropping of the word “redrum” in his hit of the same name, evoking the same chill that Kubrick used to heighten the isolation and fear in his film, proving that the final effect of the film is in fact timeless.

Traces of Kubrick’s vision aren’t just limited to the work of arrivistes such as Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar). Of course, we’d expect to detect glimpses of his control in the command of talents such as Brian de Palma. But that particular Kubrick POV that was both masterly and ominous was also absorbed into films such as Wes Craven’s 1972 hardscrabble horror The Last House on the Left, or even the work of Albert Brooks, whose 1979 comedy Real Life had a sweaty-palmed allure that showed Kubrick’s influence. (Brooks once told me in an interview that Kubrick let him know he admired his stuff, which both delighted and puzzled him.) 

In a moment of utility that feels like an acolyte’s gesture of genuflection to his master, Ridley Scott actually used footage from the overhead shots of the Torrance family’s car trip to the Overlook Hotel in the end credits of Blade Runner (1982). While Kubrick intended these shots to depict the Torrance family’s journey at the beginning of the film to a solitary, inconsolable outpost outside of the modern world, Scott used these clips to depict his protagonist’s ride to freedom—another irony we can only imagine may have delighted or irked Kubrick to no end.

Kubrick could not have predicted how deeply the DNA of The Shining would embed itself into the collective unconscious, so constantly quoted in venues either self-important or playful. An episode of the Disney animated series Kiff features the characters desperately paddling for safety as elevators unleash a freshet of crimson towards the camera; in Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018), a key scene features a virtual recreation of the Overlook Hotel as part of a virtual reality challenge within the film's OASIS world; and the entire career of Guillermo del Toro uses Kubrick with a Gothic chill and suavity. But this is also indicative of the hall of mirrors in which Kubrick lived—he himself had no problem with quoting other films, such as Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, the Ugly (1966), or the forgotten Mike Hodges-directed sci-fi creepshow, The Terminal Man (1974), with a single frame reference that gets one of the biggest laughs in The Shining.

What he saw—in a way that no other filmmaker of his era did—is that the medium was meant to be a kind of conversation that artists could pick up and keep alive. The final result is that the idiosyncratic boldness of his vision left its mark, absorbed in the bloodstream of not only film, but all of pop culture.