The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Stanley Kubrick · a film · 1980 · the US cut, about 146 minutes at its premiere and about 144 as circulated · written with Diane Johnson, from Stephen King’s novel
Mode
Horror film made in full light; a haunted-house story, a family drama of a father’s violence and a fable of American hospitality in one structure
Mythos
The labyrinth and the Minotaur, the son escaping by his own tracks; the ogre father as the wolf at the door; a soul offered for a drink at an empty bar; the caretaker who returns for ever
Phase
One winter, from an interview and closing day through a month, then single days, then hours, under title cards that narrow as the snow closes the house, ending on a night in the maze and a photograph of 1921
Presentation
Feature film in colour, the US cut, about 144 minutes as circulated; John Alcott’s photography, Garrett Brown’s Steadicam, Roy Walker’s hotel built at Elstree, Ray Lovejoy’s cutting; music by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind beside Penderecki, Ligeti and Bartók, and dance-band records of the early 1930s
Register
From the small talk of a job interview and the irritations of a marriage to murder; dread kept in even light, crossed by Nicholson’s comic turns and a dance band playing to the dead
Scale
One family, one hotel and its dead, and a national past glimpsed at its edge
Governing Proposition
A writer takes the winter job of caretaker at a mountain hotel, after he is told that a caretaker before him murdered his family there, and brings his wife and his young son, who has the second sight. Snowed in, he is welcomed by the hotel’s dead, who pour him a drink and teach him to correct his family, and he goes after his wife and son with an axe until he is lost in the hedge maze and freezes there. The wager of the film is that horror can be made in full light, by symmetry and duration, without ever saying whether the ghosts are real or the father mad, so that the hotel’s courtesy and the man’s resentment are seen to be one thing, and the man who comes to serve the house is found to have always been in its service.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in the air. The camera flies low over a mountain lake, then finds one small car on a road climbing through forest and follows it from high behind while the main title plays the Dies Irae on a synthesiser. The car is Jack Torrance’s, and Jack Nicholson plays him: a writer who has come to a hotel in the mountains to be interviewed for the job of caretaker through the winter, when the snow closes the road and the hotel shuts. Title cards divide the film, and the interval each one marks will narrow from here to the end.
In a sunny office the manager, Stuart Ullman, played by Barry Nelson, is courteous and corporate, and as a matter of policy he tells Jack that a caretaker before him, Charles Grady, murdered his family in the hotel. Jack takes the job. In an apartment in Boulder are his wife, Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall, and their son, Danny, played by Danny Lloyd. Danny has the second sight, and speaks with another self he calls Tony. When a doctor comes to see the boy, Wendy explains that Jack once hurt Danny’s arm “by accident”, and smiles as she says it. The family has been damaged before the hotel touches it, and the excuse is already fluent. On the drive up, the talk turns to the Donner Party.
Stanley Kubrick produced and directed the film for Warner Bros. from a screenplay he wrote with Diane Johnson after Stephen King’s novel of 1977. John Alcott photographed it, Garrett Brown operated the Steadicam, Ray Lovejoy cut it and Roy Walker designed it; the interiors were built at Elstree, outside London, and the hotel’s exterior is Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood, in Oregon. The electronic main title and some cues are by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind; beside them stand recorded concert works by Krzysztof Penderecki, György Ligeti and Béla Bartók, and dance-band records of the early 1930s. It opened in the United States on 23 May 1980 at about 146 minutes. Within days Kubrick withdrew a short closing scene, Ullman visiting Wendy in hospital, and the US cut has circulated since at about 144 minutes; later that year he cut an international version of about 119 minutes for Europe. The film judged here is the US cut as it has circulated.
Movement II
On the last day of the season Ullman shows the family the hotel. The tour is a planting. Here is the Gold Room, the great ballroom with its bar; here is the hedge maze in the grounds; there is Room 237. Ullman mentions that the hotel stands on a burial ground. Everything is bright and wide and symmetrical, the halls lit from their own fixtures, and nothing in the light is frightening. The dread of the film will come in exactly this light, and the courtesy of the tour is the first form of it.
The cook, Dick Hallorann, played by Scatman Crothers, takes Danny aside in the kitchen. He shares the boy’s gift, and gives it a name: the shining. He warns Danny about Room 237. It is the warning the plot needs, and it is also the film’s only explanation, given by a kind old man to a child before he leaves for Florida. Hallorann is the one adult in the film who shares what Danny has, and the film will bring him back across the country only to end him in a moment.
The cards move on a month, and then count single days. The family is alone. Jack sits at his typewriter and does not write; Wendy keeps the house; Danny rides. In one image the film shows its design: Jack stands over a model of the hedge maze and looks down into it, and the camera descends into the model to find Wendy and Danny walking there, small, among its walls. The father looks down on his family as the house looks down on him, and the maze he will die in is already a toy on a table.
Movement III
Danny rides his tricycle through the corridors, and the camera follows at his height, gliding, never tiring: the wheels loud on wood, silent on carpet, loud on wood again. At the end of a hall stand two girls, twins, side by side, and the film cuts for a few frames to their bodies. Blood floods from the lift doors toward the lens, an image seen three times in the film. Jack goes into Room 237, and a woman rises from the bath and comes to him, and in his arms she rots. The hotel offers itself to each of them in a different form, and the film never says which forms are in the hotel and which in the mind.
Jack goes to the empty bar in the Gold Room and says he would sell his soul for a drink, and the barman, Lloyd, played by Joe Turkel, is there, already polishing a glass. Jack tells Lloyd that he would never lay a hand on his son, and the film has already shown the arm. Later the ballroom is full: a party of the 1920s, dancers, the dance music of the early 1930s, and Jack among them as a guest. The patience of the barman and the sweetness of the music are the house’s manners, and they serve whatever its guest wants.
In a bathroom painted red, a waiter in red talks with Jack. He gives his name as Delbert Grady, though Ullman named the murderer Charles Grady, and he teaches Jack to “correct” his family. He names Hallorann with a racial slur, and he tells Jack that he has “always been the caretaker”. The scene is the centre of the film’s argument. Courtesy and murder speak in one voice; the history of the house passes from one servant to the next as instruction; and the man who came to look after the hotel learns that he was always its property.
Movement IV
Wendy backs away from her husband up the stairs, a baseball bat in her hands, while he follows. She strikes him with it, and he is locked in the storeroom. Then the bolt is drawn from outside, and the door opens. It is the one moment in the film where the ghost must be real, because no one living is there to free him, and the film places it exactly where Jack must be free to finish what the house has taught him.
From his bedroom in Florida, Hallorann sets out for the hotel. He telephones; he flies; he rents a car; he takes a snowcat and drives it up through the storm, while a forest ranger’s radio and a television report stand for the world outside. The film cuts between his journey and the hotel in the grammar of any rescue, and then refuses the rescue. Jack takes an axe to the bathroom door, splitting the wood, calling “Little pigs, little pigs” as the wolf of the nursery tale, and putting his face through the gap with a comic line. Hallorann arrives, and is killed within seconds.
In the last stretch the hotel shows its dead openly: a man in a bear costume, skeletons in cobwebs in the lobby, a guest with a bleeding head who says “Great party”. The film’s cold manner loosens here into a funfair of apparitions, and the strain shows. Even so the law holds in the greeting: the dead are still polite, and the house is still the host. Outside, Danny runs into the snow and the maze, and his father follows him with the axe.
Movement V
The maze at night is blue with light and snow. Jack goes after his son with the axe, and the camera glides behind him as it glided behind the tricycle. Danny walks backward in his own footprints, and the trail his father follows leads nowhere. The labyrinth that was a model on a table has become the place of the hunt, and the boy finds his way out without a thread, by going back the way he came. He escapes, and the father is left in the maze. When the film looks at him again he is frozen in the snow.
The last shot moves slowly into a photograph on a wall of the hotel. It shows a crowd at the hotel’s July 4th Ball of 1921, and Jack is among them. The music is Ray Noble’s orchestra with Al Bowlly singing “Midnight, the Stars and You”. The picture is fifty-nine years older than the film, and it closes the law the interview opened: the caretaker who came for a winter was always the caretaker, taken into the house’s past as the house’s courtesy takes every servant. Whether that means return or absorption the film does not say.
The first reviews were divided. Kubrick, whose previous film, Barry Lyndon, had failed commercially, drew a nomination for his direction at the first Razzie awards, and King objected publicly to the film, and kept objecting. The standing rose across the decades that followed. In its own decade horror went to the slasher and not to this model; the model came later, in the slow, formal art-horror of the 2010s, in Doctor Sleep (2019), built on this film’s hotel rather than the novel’s, and in the hotel rebuilt in Ready Player One (2018). Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237 (2012) is given entirely to rival accounts of what the film means. What lasts is a shape: a house of perfect manners in perfect light, a father who becomes its instrument, and a boy who walks backward out of the maze.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure. The spine resists the subtractive test: the interview sets the past and the hotel’s courtesy; the tour plants Room 237, the maze and the Gold Room; Hallorann names the shining and gives his warning; the narrowing title cards are the trap closing. The three central encounters, at the bar, in the red bathroom and at the storeroom door, are each required, and the last is the hinge where the hotel acts. But the film holds more than it needs, and Kubrick showed it by cutting it himself by about twenty-five minutes for Europe. The paediatrician explains what Wendy’s evasions already show; Hallorann’s journey back is long for a man killed in seconds; the lobby skeletons are a turn the film can lose. Necessary at the spine, permitted at the edges.
Score: 8.2 / 10
What the film brings into the open can be stated, and it holds: a father’s resentment of his wife and child, licensed by an institution and its history, makes him the instrument of that history against them, and the polite house of American hospitality rests on a violence it has made routine. Most of it comes by image and sound. Wendy tells the doctor that Danny’s arm was hurt “by accident”, and smiles; Jack tells Lloyd he would never touch his son, and the film lets the lie be seen; the waiter teaches Jack to “correct” his family. It is a true, hard account of how domestic violence is excused and inherited. What holds it at the figure is that much of the power is dread rather than meaning: ghost or madness is kept open as atmosphere, and the descent is asserted more than shown, since Jack is estranged from the first scene.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation is frequent, and it is of the dreadful and the grand kind. The camera flies low over a mountain lake and follows one small car up a road under the Dies Irae. Danny’s tricycle runs the corridors, loud on wood and silent on carpet, to the twins at the end of a hall and the cut to their bodies. Blood floods from the lift doors toward the lens. The woman in Room 237 rises from the bath and rots in Jack’s arms. Jack stands over the model maze with his wife and son tiny inside it; the axe comes through the bathroom door; the maze is blue with night and snow; the camera moves slowly into the photograph of 1921 under Al Bowlly. Held below the top because some peaks tip into the comic, Nicholson’s line at the split door among them, and the lobby skeletons lift nothing.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The myth is built, and the maze makes it structural rather than allusive. The labyrinth runs through the whole film: corridors that loop and do not join, the hexagons of the carpet Danny plays on, the model Jack looks down into, and the hedge maze where the father becomes the Minotaur hunting the son, and the son escapes, a Theseus without a thread, by walking backward in his own tracks. Over it stands the ogre father, named by the film itself when Jack plays the wolf at the bathroom door. The Faustian bargain is spoken at an empty bar, a soul for a drink, and the eternal return closes it: the caretaker who has always been the caretaker. Held a step from the top because the archetypes are partly laid side by side rather than fused, and the burial ground under the hotel is named, not built.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the haunted-house film, The Innocents (1961) and The Haunting (1963), the art-horror of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Don’t Look Now (1973), the horror boom of the 1970s, and a bestseller with its own rules. The departures are large: horror in even, bright light, with wide lenses and symmetrical frames and ghosts standing in full view; dread by duration rather than shock; a score of modernist concert music; the novel’s explained supernatural stripped to an ambiguity never resolved; the cook who comes to the rescue killed. The stake was paid in divided first reviews, a nomination for its director at the first Razzie awards, and the lasting public objection of the novel’s author. Held below the top because the cold manner was Kubrick’s proven path since 2001, and a King bestseller was a commercial wager, not a blind one.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that the man and the house are one thing. The Steadicam is the house’s gaze, gliding behind the boy at his height and behind the father in the maze, never tiring, so that the viewer moves as the hotel moves. The symmetry is the trap: halls, rooms and the twins framed dead centre, with nowhere to go but forward. The title cards narrow from a month to days to hours as the family’s world closes. Every apparition can be the shining or madness, except the storeroom bolt drawn from outside, placed where the ghost must be real for Jack to be free, and the hotel’s space does not add up. Told with the novel’s explained hotel, the film would be a ghost story. Held from the top because Hallorann’s cross-cut journey uses the suspense grammar of any thriller.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence over forty-six years, and it is unusually large. A whole documentary, Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 (2012), is given to incompatible readings: the film as an account of the destruction of the Native Americans, of the Holocaust, of a confession that the Moon landing was faked, of the Minotaur. The questions the film itself keeps open are real ones: whether the ghosts exist or the father is mad, or both; whether the photograph means return or absorption; why the waiter is Delbert Grady when Ullman named a Charles Grady; whether the hotel’s impossible windows and turning corridors are design or error. Doors, mirrors, carpets and doubles rhyme on every return. Held below the top because much of the return is puzzle-solving rather than meaning, and the famous readings neither converge nor rest on the film’s evidence.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1980s, and force and reach are scored together. The force is real: the film made horror a form for a director’s full command, showed that dread could be built in light, symmetry and duration, and made the Steadicam a horror instrument. It perfected and enlarged a line that Rosemary’s Baby and Don’t Look Now had opened rather than founding one, and that holds the force a step down. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own decade horror went to the slasher, not to this model, and the reach came later and is very large, in the slow, formal art-horror of the 2010s, in Doctor Sleep (2019), built on the film’s hotel rather than the novel’s, in the hotel rebuilt in Ready Player One (2018), and in a corridor grammar and a score of concert modernism borrowed constantly. The delay is discounted.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric across forty-six years. Form: the film survives whole in both of Kubrick’s cuts, the US cut in wide circulation and the international cut intact. The hospital scene withdrawn in the first days of release was the director’s own removal, not a loss, and takes nothing that makes the work. Presence: continuous and as wide as any film of its year, in revival, on television, in every home format and in restoration, and a standing that has risen from divided first reviews to a central place. The surface is little fixed to 1980: the ballroom of the 1920s and the family’s plain clothes date lightly. The span sets the figure. Forty-six years is a short demonstration beside centuries, and the widest presence earns the most such a span allows, and no more.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in every department. Alcott lights the hotel from its own fixtures and ceilings, so the dread sits in full light. Brown’s Steadicam holds the tricycle at a child’s height through long, unbroken takes. Walker’s interiors were built at Elstree as one continuous hotel, the Gold Room, the red bathroom and the maze among them. Lovejoy’s cutting lands the title cards and holds the twins’ bodies to a few frames. The sound is exact: wheels on wood and carpet, the typewriter, the dance band through the ballroom. Danny Lloyd is natural, and Crothers is warm and exact in little time. The costs are real and hold the figure: Nicholson plays the end before the beginning and tips into burlesque, Duvall’s long hysteria strains, and the lobby skeletons are a lapse of taste in an exact film. Chinatown and The Third Man stand at the same figure.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Ullman’s interview, a sunny office and a corporate courtesy, and Jack frozen in the maze. One law governs both: the institution’s hospitality conceals a violence it will hire, and the man who serves it becomes it. Ullman tells of Grady’s murders as a point of policy; the waiter Grady is the same courtesy turned to instruction; the photograph closes the law on Jack. The dance band over the ballroom of the dead, the twins’ sweetness and Lloyd’s patience at the bar obey it too. The strain is real. Nicholson’s register runs comic against the film’s cold, and late in the film the man in the bear costume, the skeletons in cobwebs and the bleeding head that says “Great party” loosen the law toward a funfair of apparitions: ghost and madness are one law in principle and two in practice.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a chamber horror film of about 144 minutes holds. Consciousness, in Jack’s breakdown, Danny’s second sight and his other self, Tony, and Wendy’s fear and denial; the family, a marriage and a child already hurt; labour, a caretaking job, a writer’s block and the hotel’s order of service; history, a burial ground, the Donner Party talked of on the drive, a ball of 1921, the slur the waiter uses for Hallorann; the natural order, mountains and a storm that seal the house; the sacred, inverted as a haunting. All are integrated through the house. What holds the axis lowest is depth: history, race and the Native ground are signs at the edge, glimpsed rather than entered; the world outside is a ranger’s radio and a television report; Wendy is seen from outside. Many orders, held at the depth of suggestion.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.0, then The Sublime and The Living Form at 8.9, then The Archetypal Deep, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8. A making in which light, the Steadicam, the built hotel, the cutting and the sound each bear weight; elevation of the dreadful and the grand, from the flight over the lake to the move into the photograph; a form in which the house’s gaze, its symmetry and the narrowing title cards are the knowledge that the man and the house are one; the labyrinth built into corridors, carpet, model and maze; forty-six years of readings and questions the film itself keeps open; and a reach that came late and is very large.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: consciousness, the family, labour, history, the natural order and an inverted sacred are integrated through the house, but history and race are signs at the edge, the world outside is a ranger’s radio and a news report, and Wendy is seen from outside. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.2, where the paediatrician, Hallorann’s long journey back and the lobby skeletons are permitted rather than required, and Kubrick’s own shorter cut stands; then The Unconcealment at 8.4, a true account of inherited violence whose power is as much dread as meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis alone: The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, The Swerve at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls short by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by the Epochal Gate, unmet on The Unconcealment, and by its aggregate, 8.6 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Shining in its US cut, the version that opened in the United States on 23 May 1980 at about 146 minutes, less the short hospital scene Kubrick withdrew within days of release, and that has circulated since at about 144 minutes, in colour, from the flight over the lake to the photograph of 1921: produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick for Warner Bros. from a screenplay by Kubrick and Diane Johnson after Stephen King’s novel The Shining (1977), photographed by John Alcott, with Steadicam by Garrett Brown, designed by Roy Walker and edited by Ray Lovejoy. Kubrick’s international cut of about 119 minutes survives intact and is not judged separately; it is named only where it bears on what the film can lose. The withdrawn scene is weighed as the director’s own removal, not as a loss. The novel is a source, not part of the work, and enters only where the film departs from it. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where the words are certain, in short fragments, and songs and concert works are named by title alone. Particulars that could not be verified are not given: among them the full order of the title cards, the scenes the international cut drops or shortens, the content of the withdrawn scene beyond its setting, how the low tricycle shots were rigged, the film’s later honours, the book-length studies of it, and the shot counts, average shot length and share of Steadicam footage.