Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy: Fantasy, Reality, Passion, and Horror All Collide in 'The Shining'

In our weekly seriesAnatomy of a Scene's Anatomy, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around them, and their legacy. This October, we'll be looking at some famous horror movie nude scenes and this week we return to Kubrick town for his nightmarish vision of what lies inside Room 237 in The Shining!

The unconventional documentary Room 237gave us four wildly varying opinions on the true meaning behind Kubrick's film, nearly all of which are well thought out but nonetheless full of hole themselves. Geoffrey Cocks proposes the film is laden with imagery related to WWII and more specifically, The Holocaust. Bill Blakemore, on the other hand, thinks the film is about another genocide, that of the native population of this country who was more or less eradicated over the centuries.Jay Weidner,meanwhile, thinks that the film is Kubrick's confession to the filmmaker's part in faking the moon landings.

And finally, Juli Kearns, who has written extensively about Kubrick's filmography, thinks that the film is rife with intentional logical inconsistencies as they relate to the layout of The Overlook Hotel. She also speaks a lot about the hedge maze—not in King's book—and how the entire film has a labyrinthine, dream-like structure in which Kubrick constantly obfuscates any attempts to grasp at logic. I want to focus on some of Kearns' extensive, extensive writing on the film to navigate our way through one of the film's most haunting and endearing sequences. All of the quotes below come from her writings on The Shining, which can be found here.

To present the slightest bit of context possible, young Danny Torrance has re-appeared, bruised, after entering the unlocked Room 237. His mother Wendy (Shelley Duvall) first accuses her husband Jack (Jack Nicholson), but later asks him to check the room out because Danny claimed there was a woman in the room. Jack goes to the room and after walking through an empty entryway and main living area, he makes his way to the bathroom.

Bathrooms have an air of the sacred to them with Kubrick. They are places of revelation where one is finally unable to escape some aspect of truth and must be confronted with it.

Indeed Jack himself had just been confronted by former caretaker Delbert Grady in the ballroom bathroom about Danny's "interfering" mother. Grady's counsel is questionable since he murdered his own wife and daughters—the "come and play with us Danny" girls made pop culture legends—so it's more than a little telling of where Jack's journey will end.

The shower curtain is closedbut soon is opened to reveal a beautiful young woman (Lia Beldam) naked, a sight Jack is understandable all too happy to take in, considering he thought he was going to have to battle a murderous psychopath...

She then approaches him and his look turns even more sinister...

Things, of course, escalate from there...

Pumping the brakes quickly before the next revelation in the scene, we return to Kearns' writing in which she indicates that things do not play out this way in the book...

In King's The Shining, Jack only senses but doesn't directly encounter anything in the bathroom where an older woman, abandoned by her young lover, committed suicide. In the book, a chapter was devoted to Danny finding the corpse of the old woman in the tub, which became animated but didn't strangle him. And Jack, upon going to the room, didn't observe anything directly, seeing neither an old woman nor a young one. Instead, after having looked in the tub and finding nothing, he discovered the shower curtain had been drawn shut again and thought perhaps there may be an amorphous shape behind--or perhaps it was just a trick of light.

Whereas King's phantasm had closed the curtain, Kubrick's Jack will open it.

Of course, Kubrick's not about to let this fantasy get in the way of his nightmarish vision, and the gorgeous Beldam is replaced in Jack's embrace by the rotting corpse of an older woman, played by Billie Gibson, who taunts Jack...

We then cut quickly between this, Jack's horrified retreat, and also a shaking Danny, who is presumably experiencing all of this as well, envisioning the old woman dead in the tub as she was in King's book...

Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy: Fantasy, Reality, Passion, and Horror All Collide in 'The Shining'

Kearns proposes that death is constantly pursuing Jack, even as he attempts to evade it, and this entire scene is emblematic of that...

The Shining has incorporated the film Summer of 42 in which a teen boy is abused by an older woman, which screws him up. Jack's encounter is then with a young woman who turns into an old one, and pursues him as death.

Neither woman in this scene has any other credits, so it's tough to know their own personal history, relation to the film, or perhaps what they were told by Kubrick about their part in this crazy film. We'll likely never know any of the answers to these questions as the film approaches its 40th anniversary next year. Either way, this is a scene that takes you from boner town to instantly flaccid, and Kubrick's the kind of director who really liked pulling that trick.

Kearns' entire writing on The Shining is dauntingly extensive, but I encourage you to check it and the rest of her similarly thorough writings on Kubrick's other films by clicking here.

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