"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness." (Samuel Beckett)
In Labyrinth, Sarah was just a young girl--she created Jareth to be her animus figure; to be her Demiurge. But this was really a case of arrested development--in order to truly grow up and take charge of her Child, she had to overthrow him.
"Leader of the Pack": Mary Weiss is Shangri-La, the Garden of Paradise. As Ain-Soph (the Candy Store) she creates Jimmy, the Demiurge; he's a bad dad but he writes ("rides") for her.
Kabbalah shows us how to see beneath the surface and discover deeper meaning — in the Torah and in our lives. Kabbalah jolts us out of our religious habits and makes us confront new possibilities. For example, the Zohar (the masterpiece of Kabbalah) reads the opening verse of the Torah not as “In the beginning God created”… but rather: “With beginning, [the Unnamable One] created God.” This sounds shocking or heretical. But the point is that our usual understanding of God is pretty childish. What we think of as God is only one limited aspect of the infinite divine reality, which transcends and explodes all names.
Something may have gone wrong.
“Remember what Mr. Hallorann said. It's just like pictures in a book, Danny. It isn't real.” You might want to think about this from that last quote; at what point did “pictures in a book” and visions that aren’t “real” change and become something that can supernaturally unlocked a pantry door or strangle Danny? In the novel Dick Hallorann’s important line to Danny is, “I don't think there's anything here that can hurt you. So just be cool, okay?" (page 60) and he never says, “It isn't real.” In the novel he isn't sure about whether Danny can be hurt by anything inside the hotel, and this is important. He simply doesn't know. Stanley Kubrick came up with the line, “It isn't real.” on his own. He's telling us that the visions in the film are different and he makes Dick Hallorann's statement quite definite, they aren’t “real”. A pure evil psycho possesses a very powerful supernatural ability, and he’s also going completely mad. The “ghosts” everyone thinks are haunting the Overlook are not real - it's Jack and his supernatural ability to “Shine” that's creating these visions for himself and the others. (Jonny53)
The Shine
In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the astronaut Dave Bowman made a journey through the so-called “stargate” which took him out of the two dimensional cinematic universe and into the 3-D universe of his own audience. At several points in the story we were offered subliminal indicators that we were watching a film within a film . . . The same technique is used in The Shining, but this time several scenes are presented as a film within a book … and the book in question is Jack’s manuscript. (Rob Ager)
Cobb: You got the basic layout. Bookstore, cafe, almost everything else is here too. Ariadne: Who are the people? Cobb: Projections of my subconscious. Ariadne: Yours? Cobb: Yes. Remember, you are the dreamer, you build this world. I am the subject, my mind populates it. You can literally talk to my subconscious. That's one of the ways we extract information from the subject.
The producers are almost always male: Max Martin, Dr. Luke, David Guetta, Tricky Stewart, the Matrix, Timbaland, the Neptunes, Stargate. The top-liners are often, although not always, women: Makeba Riddick, Bonnie McKee, and Skylar Grey are among Dean’s peers. The producer runs the session and serves as creative director of the song, but the top-liner supplies the crucial spark that will determine whether the song is a smash. (When I asked Tricky Stewart to define “smash,” he said, “A hit is just a hit; a smash is a life changer.”) As Eric Beall, an A. & R. executive with Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., a music publisher, puts it, “The top-line writer is the one who has to face a blank page.” (The New Yorker)
Seduced by the Nazi: "Your life, little girl, is an empty Page, that men will want to write on . . ."
"FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper is called in to investigate. Cooper's initial examination of Laura's body reveals a tiny typed letter "R" inserted under her fingernail."
Truth
"It came from the heart of the earth. A Stone so rare, men will do anything to possess it."
"She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster."
The read, white, and blue
A puppet of the projectionist
"The duck’s position on the window ledge, backed by false light, also suggests that it is Jack, the domineering husband, 'pulling Wendy’s strings' so to speak."
Kubrick was renowned for not allowing visitors during a shoot, but in the documentary we see James Mason and his family visiting the Torrance apartment set. . . . Why did Kubrick break his code of on-set secrecy and why did he show this meeting in the documentary? It’s actually quite simple. He was creating a parallel between Jack Torrance and the main character of Kubrick’s earlier film Lolita. In Lolita, Mason played Humbert Humbert, a man who has a sexual relationship with his underage stepdaughter. . . . Both Jack and Humbert are writers. Both of them keep their personal writings hidden from their wives. Both of them secretly despise their wives. And both of them have sexual relations with a minor within their own family unit. [?!?] (Rob Ager)
(Leaders of the Pack)
"Well, they got this here - see - uh - scissor-happy 'Beautify America' thing goin' on around here."
"Polanski, then aged 43, became embroiled in a scandal involving 13-year-old Samantha Gailey . . . This took place on 10 March 1977, at the home of actor Jack Nicholson in the Mulholland area of Los Angeles."
Kubrick's Lolita is not Nabokov's Lolita. Kubrick's girl is a blonde and Nabokov's is brown-haired. Nabokov's Humbert tries to remake Lolita into his lost ideal (Annabel Leigh); Kubrick's Lolita is the ideal; there is no reference to any other forebears. The date of its release, 1962, inextricably links it to the world's most famous dead blonde starlet, Marilyn Monroe.
It has been said that Stanley Kubrick's Shining is an inverted reflection of Stephen King's: Wendy in the book is a strong-willed blonde, while in the movie she is a weak-willed brunette. But where have we seen a blonde Kubrick starlet? It is Lolita, and The Shining likewise acts as its mirror opposite--the Veronica to Lolita's Betty. Here, Humbert and his doppelgaenger switch places: Jack is Clare Quilty (the writer), and Wendy is Vivian Darkbloom. Peter Sellers in Lolita copied his speech after Stanley Kubrick (compare this to this)--being trapped in Quilty's Play becomes being trapped in Kubrick's Movie, which in turn becomes being trapped in Jack's Book.
Jack's labyrinth of words
Twin daughters: Lolita and The Shining?
We’ve already discussed the symbology of Jack Nicholson being introduced to James Mason on set in that they both played sexually abusive father figures in Kubrick films. But also in the same scene Nicholson is introduced to a variety of other people who seem to be friends and relatives of James Mason. Among them are “two little girls about eight and ten” who are introduced as Katie and Liza. Katie, the older of the two, is almost a dead ringer for the twin girls of the film. She has her hair done in the same way with a white head band and she is facially very similar to them as well. We get a very good look at her because she glances straight into the camera for a moment. Her younger sister, Liza, doesn’t look anything like the twins, however her sky blue dress is almost identical to those worn by the twins. . . . Kubrick may have observed these “two little girls about eight and ten” and then based the twin girls’ costumes and appearance upon Katie’s face and hair and Liza’s dress. If this was the case then it’s likely that James Mason was unknowingly being used by Kubrick to play Delbert Grady. (Rob Ager)
In Diana
Lolita is Old Europe debauching Young America. The Shining is her decadent progeny dancing on her grave.
"Bicycle rider, just see what you've done / To the church of the American Indian"
Jack as Osiris is 'chopped into pieces'--Kubrick explains the mystery-myth: the King's Initiation is the full remembrance of the original murder (Susie Salmon et al.) in the Rabbit Hole. These are the ghosts that haunt the Overlook. Jack's death will be an atonement for the original death (a spring clean for the May Queen).
For the famous soliloquy that Peter Fonda does in the cemetery while tripped on acid, Director Dennis Hopper asked Peter to talk to the statue as if he were talking to his mother, who died a suicide when Peter was 10 years old. Peter didn't want to do it, as he had never confronted his feelings about his mother. But Hopper insisted, which is why you hear Peter call the statue "Mother", and he states that he both loves her and hates her, which expresses his conflicted emotions. (IM DB)
"Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together"
"She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy"
Ego encountering Self: "Down in the Underground, you'll find someone True"
While July 4th may be known in America as Independence Day, it is also celebrated across the Atlantic as Alice In Wonderland Day. According to C. M. Rubin, in an article from the Huffington Post (What Do July 4th and Alice in Wonderland Have in Common?), July 4th is celebrated as “the day that commemorates Lewis Carroll’s first telling of the famous children’s story to his young inspiration, Alice Liddell. It is the day on which Carroll sent his child friend Alice down a rabbit hole in his far-fetched tale, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. During the course of her journey, Alice finds the courage to overcome the strange, often intimidating characters she meets in the kingdom of Wonderland, realizing they are just ridiculous obstacles in her path.” (Uncommon Nonsense)
Jareth: Everything that you wanted I have done. You asked that the child be taken. I took him. You cowered before me, I was frightening. I have reordered time. I have turned the world upside down, and I have done it all for you! I am exhausted from living up to your expectations. Isn't that generous?
Wendy's illumination occurs when she sees the skeletons in the Overlook, a visual symbol that she (having attained the "driver's seat") now walks living among the dead of unenlightened humanity.
The ash heap of history: "The gods were impressed by the devotion of Isis and resurrected Osiris as the god of the underworld."
"Loser has to keep America clean"--having slain both himself and his doppelgaenger Halloran, Jack becomes the new King of the Wood, the maker of illusions, the Lord of the Underworld--even though he was also the old one. (Stanley Kubrick became a film director.)
Horus triumphant
(Epilogue)
An empty page
[T]here's Wendy in a white room, in a white bed, in a white gown. . . . Ullman says something along the lines of 'you'll be fine,' and Wendy asks what was found in the hotel. Ullman makes patronizing, and again inappropriate remarks about Wendy imagining the things she saw in the hotel. . . . It had an odd resonance with the scene in 'Lolita' (in the hospital) where Lo tries to convince Humbert he's imagining things . . .
