1. “…it makes the reader wonder if the central character is mentally disturbed or truly in danger…” 2. “he concluded that Kubrick had ‘looked for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only a few supernatural overtones’” 3. “ I’ve never been able to decide whether the plot [in any film] is just a way of keeping people’s attention while you do everything else, or whether the plot id really more important than anything else, perhaps communicating with us on an unconscious level which affects the way that myths once did.” 4. “ they both eschew off-screen narration in favour of intertitles ( in The Shining the titles announce events or mark the passage of time in increasingly short intervals); they both use a mixture of modernist and romantic … they both take place inside large man-made structures controlled by non-human entities … they both tell stories of characters who are trapped between a hostile outside world and a murderous figure on the inside who destroys their technical equipment; and most significantly, ‘In either film, the spectator is incapable of supplying a rational explanation for what [she or he] has witnessed.’” 5. “ In this regard, we should also recall that some gothic fiction tends to express a latent, romanticized nostalgia for a lost aristocratic world, symbolized by ruined castles and old dark houses.” 6. “One almost expects clichéd horror music to accompany this sort of information, but it turns out that the hotel is haunted not by the Indians but by descendants of the white barbarians who destroyed the Indian culture…” 7. “ Kubrick takes a more realistic approach, strongly emphasizing the ways in which the building’s luxury feeds Jack’s resentment of his family and his fantasies of becoming a playboy author in the mould of Scott Fitzgerald. “ 8. “ Like the Star Child at the end of the earlier film, Jack experiences Eternal Return, but with a vengeance; frozen inside the hotel maze, he becomes an emblem of ‘repetition, with all its overtones of traumatic fixation and the death wish’…” 9. “From the latter view-point, the plot seems flagrantly Oedipal with a male child’ struggle against a castrating father who, even though he is absent much of the time, inhibits full access to the mother. At one point Danny and his mother watch Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42 (1971) on TV, becoming absorbed in the scenes of a beautiful older woman inviting a handsome boy into her kitchen, and at the end of the movie, when Danny escapes the hedge maze where Jack is trapped, he runs straight into Wendy’s arms and kisses her on the lips.” 10. “One of the distinctive features of Steven King’s fiction is that it contains several monstrous fathers or father figures. Kubrick’s film seizes on this quality and, to a greater degree than King, locates the propensity towards evil in a father’s psychology. Jack Torrance appears to be guided and assisted by ghost but, at the ideological level, it hardly matters whether the ghosts are real or figments of his imagination… nearly all the ghost who have speaking roles or significant scenes, including sexual revelers we see near the end are white males.” 11.
1. “…it makes the reader wonder if the central character is mentally disturbed or truly in danger…”
ReplyDelete2. “he concluded that Kubrick had ‘looked for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only a few supernatural overtones’”
3. “ I’ve never been able to decide whether the plot [in any film] is just a way of keeping people’s attention while you do everything else, or whether the plot id really more important than anything else, perhaps communicating with us on an unconscious level which affects the way that myths once did.”
4. “ they both eschew off-screen narration in favour of intertitles ( in The Shining the titles announce events or mark the passage of time in increasingly short intervals); they both use a mixture of modernist and romantic … they both take place inside large man-made structures controlled by non-human entities … they both tell stories of characters who are trapped between a hostile outside world and a murderous figure on the inside who destroys their technical equipment; and most significantly, ‘In either film, the spectator is incapable of supplying a rational explanation for what [she or he] has witnessed.’”
5. “ In this regard, we should also recall that some gothic fiction tends to express a latent, romanticized nostalgia for a lost aristocratic world, symbolized by ruined castles and old dark houses.”
6. “One almost expects clichéd horror music to accompany this sort of information, but it turns out that the hotel is haunted not by the Indians but by descendants of the white barbarians who destroyed the Indian culture…”
7. “ Kubrick takes a more realistic approach, strongly emphasizing the ways in which the building’s luxury feeds Jack’s resentment of his family and his fantasies of becoming a playboy author in the mould of Scott Fitzgerald. “
8. “ Like the Star Child at the end of the earlier film, Jack experiences Eternal Return, but with a vengeance; frozen inside the hotel maze, he becomes an emblem of ‘repetition, with all its overtones of traumatic fixation and the death wish’…”
9. “From the latter view-point, the plot seems flagrantly Oedipal with a male child’ struggle against a castrating father who, even though he is absent much of the time, inhibits full access to the mother. At one point Danny and his mother watch Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42 (1971) on TV, becoming absorbed in the scenes of a beautiful older woman inviting a handsome boy into her kitchen, and at the end of the movie, when Danny escapes the hedge maze where Jack is trapped, he runs straight into Wendy’s arms and kisses her on the lips.”
10. “One of the distinctive features of Steven King’s fiction is that it contains several monstrous fathers or father figures. Kubrick’s film seizes on this quality and, to a greater degree than King, locates the propensity towards evil in a father’s psychology. Jack Torrance appears to be guided and assisted by ghost but, at the ideological level, it hardly matters whether the ghosts are real or figments of his imagination… nearly all the ghost who have speaking roles or significant scenes, including sexual revelers we see near the end are white males.”
11.