Tessa Lewes Dissertation by PDF Uploads

[Cover Page] Student Name

Tessa Lewes

Student Number

180271890

Dissertation Title

An Exploration of the Psyche through the use of Architectural and Labyrinthine Space in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

Dissertation Tutor

Edward Wainwright

Dissertation Word Count

This dissertation reads as over the word limit, 9974 due to the number of relevant footnotes. Main body: 8789 words Footnotes: 1185 words

[Foreword]

Coronavirus and a UK national lockdown has taken a toll on the widespread practice of academic research and composing this dissertation has been no exception to the effects. In deciding upon a topic for this dissertation, the elective of ‘Marginal Spaces’ encouraged my interest in researching the space of the corridor. I initially wanted to study the experience within a specific architectural corridor space, where primary research would draw upon a firsthand experience in a corridor space within reality. However, the inability to visit unessential sites of architecture made it unjustifiable to find a real corridor to be the topic of rich analytic research. With a new national focus on virtual modes of communication, I was inspired to analyse spatial experience in virtual world which could be accessed from the safety and comfort of my own home, such as through film. This was the site of the inspiration for this dissertation. In terms of sourcing research materials, the film was the primary research source, accessible online and unaffected by the pandemic. Secondary materials have been slightly limited to online resources however the expanse available means I have not found myself illequipped. Limited access in a field where there is so much knowledge available may have even been a blessing. It has been thoroughly enjoyable writing a dissertation about the virtual spaces of Kubrick’s The Shining in an era where the virtual world has never been more important to us.

ARC3060 DISSERTATION

A Exploration of the Psyche through the use of Architectural and Labyrinthine Space in Stanley Kubrick’s

THE SHINING Tessa Lewes 180271890 Newcastle University Architecture & Planning

[Acknowledgments] I would like to express my gratitude to my tutor Edward Wainwright for his insightful comments and assistance at every stage of this research project.

CONTENTS

Figure 1.1

Backlighting [Introduction]

An Aerial Shot [Chapter 1]

9 25 38

45 47

0 Figure 1.2: Narrative Diagram of The Shining

4p m

Tu es Sa day tu rd ay W ed ne sd ay

in gD

Start End

146 minutes

vi ew

8a m

M on th La Th te r ur M s da on y da y

Th eI nt er

Backlighting [Introduction]

“Here’s Johnny!”

tanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining is a masterpiece of unconventional horror. A complex narrative of conflicting thresholds and paradoxes, it is destined to elicit a sense of impending doom, compounded by

the ambiguous, intangible atmosphere of the Overlook Hotel. The story is (rather typically) about a man, Jack Torrance, aiming to harm his family in a state of violent insanity, however the focus here is witnessing the monstrous evolution of the human psyche. The emotional unrest that Kubrick triggers is instrumental in his ability to chill, rather than shock the audience, yielding a new brand of psychological horror that would remain iconic for decades to come despite the technological advancements of the film industry.

Key to Kubrick’s legend is his ability to immerse us in the spatial presentation of his film set. The power of space often depends on its tensions, for example cave and sky, dark and light, closed and open, stimulating and soothing, suffering and repose. The spatial experience on offer of either extreme can produce an emotional response of exhilaration, awe, wonder, elation, or perhaps apprehension or anxiety. Stanley Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel denotes the symbolic contrast of tight confinement and freedom yet infused within he plants a repetitive, deeper tension through spaces of the open, closed, long and narrow. These characteristics are representative of the Labyrinth; a spatial device that I think Kubrick uses to manipulate his characters and audience.

This dissertation aims to explore the questions of how and why the labyrinth as a space might be a tool used in The Shining for the emotional unrest that is manifested in both the audience and detrimentally, Jack Torrance. I will be exploring the psychic experience induced by the labyrinth as a space in both Jack and the audience, and draw upon studies of psychoanalysis to guide this research. I will draw my insight from my own as well as others’ reading of the film, studies of Greek Mythology, the famous work of Sigmund Freud and finally the work of modern architectural psychoanalyst Anthony Vidler.

Whilst psychoanalysis has long existed, it has not long been a subject of architectural discourse, as the 1980’s brought a decade of largely deconstructivist theories in spatial analysis. By the 1990s, a shift in these theories towards psychoanalysis allowed architectural

historians and theorists to relocate the significance of the human subject within the architectural realm as a producer and by-product of architecture. The infiltration of this new understanding led to an altered perception of the relation between human subject and the corresponding realm of space, environment and matter. The pathologies of the self are now analysed in relation to space, beyond simply the practical inquiries of our collective relationship with architecture. I will apply the understandings of such psychoanalysis to explore Jack’s spatial experience and decline within the labyrinth of the Overlook and the consequences for Kubrick’s audience as we experience his fictional space second hand.

AN AERIAL SHOT [CHAPTER 1]

Exploring the effects of Kubrick’s Labyrinthine spaces

his chapter aims to outline how Stanley Kubrick uses the concept of the labyrinth and to what effect. I will explore Kubrick’s many spatial tools of labyrinthine

representation; for example the Steadicam, the hedge maze and the corridic system of the Overlook Hotel, which in itself emerges as a manipulative building, body and mind. The corridor is one of the most seemingly regimented, formal, grid-like and crucially, controlled architectural structures to exist, yet Roger Luckhurst explains the rise of modernity has damaged our relationship with this now ironically, anxiety-inducing space, and formed (his expression) ‘corridor dread’. I will draw upon his text Corridors to unpack the theory behind corridors and their vision, manifestation and decline in the world of both real and fictional architecture. I aim to explore how Kubrick’s adaptation of the labyrinth echoes the ancient myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, as well as the spatial significance of room 237 and where this space fits within the labyrinth of the hotel. To scrutinise Kubrick’s hidden meanings and intentions within the film I will look towards analytical texts on The Shining such as Stanley Kubrick. Seven Films Analyzed by Randy Rasmussen, and Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime by Eliza Pezzotta.

The Overlook

The ‘hotel’ is a familiar world to the audience, and perhaps the existing connotations of this architectural destination is a cause for initial trepidation. Hotels promise the fantasy escape from routine lives and selves as innumerable doors to innumerable rooms foreground a sense of transience and easy substitution. An orthogonal grid of corridor circulation slices the structure into isolated rooms, where cleaners slave away to erase every trace of the last guest passing through. The corridors present a view of many individual lives standardized by the identical distribution of cellular private spaces along a semi-public passageway. In an attempt to decipher the building, movement only greets you with a vast vanishing perspective of identical doors and hesitation as turning right or left seems to offer identical prospects. The emotional tone of this experience mixes disorientation with a kind of existential angst, aptly described by Roger Luckhurst, as ‘corridor dread’ in Corridors, Passages of Modernity. I will draw upon Luckhurst’s history of the corridor and subsequent exploration of how this architectural space went from a utopian ideal to a place of unease and archetypal figure of nightmares. Luckhurst explains that the hotel experience is both anxiety ridden and cause for the disorderly, as a hotel stay constitutes a pathological ‘moral holiday’ from social obligations

with alarming social consequences when adopted by many people; “The detachment, freedom, loneliness and release from social restraints mark the hotel population”. 1

Aside from Jack, The Overlook hotel is arguably the antagonist of The Shining. Overwhelming grandeur and vast interior spaces reveal the Overlook is powerfully complex, and Wendy quickly compares the kitchen to a maze requiring a trail of breadcrumbs to navigate.2 This unwittingly predicts the physical and emotional disorientation she and her family will experience within The Overlook through its later uncovered power as an emotional crucible which relentlessly haunts and erodes at the sanity of the Torrance’s. Kubrick isolates the family completely, even from each other across The Overlook’s size and distance, with intent to portray that we are never more vulnerable than when we are alone. Visual diagrams fig.1.5 and 1.6 both illustrate the powerful vastness of The Overlook to force the family into isolated spatial experience. In volume 7 of the University of Minnesota Cultural Critique journal, Amy Nolan writes a narrative of digestion: Labyrinths of Historical Ruin in Kubrick’s the Shining, exploring the revelation of hidden depths seen by the mind and not necessarily the eye alone3. Nolan suggests that The Overlook seductively demands Jack’s descent into madness by constructing his hallucinations; a personified force of evil that according to critic Robert Kilker, is coded feminine, destined by the winding umbilical cord-like road connecting eventually to the hotel4.

The red interiors in the service corridor and blood red-bathroom (fig.1.3) highlight this womb-like spatial quality of the hotel, the latter a scene that seduces Jack to his state of insanity and resultant death. Nolan highlights that the power of the hotel is perhaps exaggerated by comparing it to the other female body of the narrative, Wendy (fig.1.4). Kubrick puts Wendy in a position of passive subservience, which is significant in an era of

Luckhurst, Roger, Corridors: Passages of Modernity. 1 ed. (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), pg 147. In chapter 5; The Ecstasy of Communication: The Hotel Corridor, Luckhurst refers to an American social study published in 1936 called Hotel Life, containing the work of sociologist Norman Hayner who considered the transience of hotel living in America to be corrupting the moral self and contributing to the decline of civic society as an exemplary space of modern alienation. 2

The Shining. 1980. Film Directed by Stanley Kubrick. (United States: The Producer Circle Company)

Nolan, Amy, Seeing is Digesting: Labyrinths of Historical Ruin in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, (JSTOR, Volume 77, pp. 180-204, 2011) 4 Nolan, Amy, Seeing is Digesting: Labyrinths of Historical Ruin in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, (JSTOR, Volume 77, pp. 180-204, 2011) pg 185. Nolan refers to the work of Kilker, Robert, All Roads Lead to the Abject: The Monstrous Feminine and Gender boundaries in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. (Literature/Film Quarterly, vol 34, 2006)

feminist awakening, as she fails to protect Danny from Jack’s abuse5. Contrarily, the Hotel is a powerful female figure that enables and protects Danny; here, the architecture is the dominant personified female. It is exhausting to watch Wendy struggle as she maintains a pathetically upbeat, often banal attitude. Weak and pathetic, Kubrick’s characterisation exaggerates the personified power of the hotel; a body, with a mind that exudes its paths and its visions.

Figure 1.3: The Red Interiors of The Overlook

Figure 1.4: Wendy Torrance

Kubrick’s method of filming is imperative in building the powerful spatial characterisation of the Overlook and depth of the narrative, guaranteeing a reaction of fear and angst. Usually in horror cinema, the use of tight angled close-up filming limits the audience’s view of the scene; we wonder what might be lying beyond the frame, and quick cuts keep it feeling frantic for when the scares do happen. However Kubrick’s filming was done mainly with an extremely wide angled 18mm lens, making the spaces of The Overlook appear gigantic and overpowering. Often the backdrop completely engulfs the characters, reinforcing the fact that they are utterly alone. Wide angled lenses are usually used in environmental shots for the effect of expansive and numinous landscapes; this is what Kubrick hopes will exemplify the power of The Overlook. Even close ups were shot with the same lens, elongating and distorting the face in focus, ensuring an uncanny, disturbing look to the actors. Attacking the sanity of its occupants, there is a malevolent consciousness to the fate-ridden Overlook hotel. Unlike a haunted house, it seeks to send its inhabitants mad; instead of murdering them, it encourages them to murder each other. We follow the Torrance’s initial tour of the Overlook as a subjective camera travels behind through the hotel’s rooms and corridors, observing them, exposed from a discreet distance and the camera omnisciently witnesses the unfolding subsequent disasters from afar, resembling the corridic perspectives often in play. The Overlook is a vessel for a labyrinthine system of narrow corridors; an instant weapon for entrapment as it seeps seduction through its walls. 5

Nolan, Amy, Seeing is Digesting: Labyrinths of Historical Ruin in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, (JSTOR, Volume 77, pp. 180-204, 2011) P188

The Gold Room

Entrance Hall Colorado Lounge

Timberline Lodge

Figure 1.5: Diagrammatic floor plans of key spaces in the Overlook. Their vastness is exaggerated by the fact that they are logically too big to match up with the geometry of the Timberline Lodge used as the exterior facade for the hotel. The Lodge organises tight spaces and a room as large as the Gold Room would need surrounding windows to fit within the structure, which Kubrick does not include in his set.

Jack

Danny

Wendy

Jack: the interview Torrance’s car movement through the mountains

Tour: the apartment

Tour: the grounds and maze

Tour: the kitchen

Wendy serves breakfast Danny’s tricycle ride 1: Colorado Lounge

Figure 1.6: Mapped Key movements throughout the film. Jack, Danny and Wendy are quickly separated and forced to experience the spaces and explore the horrors of the Overlook independently. I used this map as a premis to draw the more focussed Overlook floor-plan diagrams, however it is also a useful tool to illustrate the Overlook’s ability to explode the family dynamic as they traverse the labyrinth isolated from each other.

Wend Dann the M

dy and ny explore Maze

Danny’s tricycle ride 2: room 237

Danny’s tricycle ride 3: service hall, jumps to corridor, he meets the twins.

Wendy checks the intercom, entrance hall.

Jack visits the Gold Room Jack visits room 237

Jack re-visits the Gold Room and the red bathroom

Jack kills Halloran in the entrance hall, past the elevator of blood.

Danny’s movements escaping the maze.

Corridors

The claustrophobic corridors provide respite from the agoraphobic hotel as this asymmetrical and seemingly impossible system of circulation defines movement within The Overlook and symbolises an evil brain that organises its inhabitants lives. As Danny rides his trike in loops throughout the various corridors of the hotel, he explores every inch of the building and discerns its hiding places as well as its bitter memories and hauntings. Only Danny appears to understand the loops of this interior maze; the audience are left perplexed, only understanding that it is a dangerous space to abide after witnessing the repetitive vision of an ocean of blood spilling out of the elevator to engulf the spectator down the corridor.

Perhaps it is within the system of interior corridors that Kubrick’s atypical filming style is first realised. Here, the value of the pioneering Steadicam comes to life as the film lulls you to sleep with its hypnotic glide, the camera moving at the pace of a disorienting anxiety dream.6 The pace of the Steadicam seems to lose Danny as he turns down a corridor before reaching him again, and this continuous sense of lost and found is unnerving and disorientating for the audience as the follower.

Figure 1.7: Kubrick recorded in a 1980 interview with French film critic Michel Ciment

“The Steadicam allows one man to move the camera any place he can walk… I used Garrett Brown as the Steadicam operator. He probably has more experience than anyone with Steadicam because he also happened to invent it. The camera is mounted on to a springloaded arm, which is attached to a frame, which is in turn strapped to the operator’s shoulders, chest and hips. This, in effect, makes the camera weightless” 7

The continuous filming through the Steadicam is significant as it means that the audience are exposed to a particular field of view throughout which typically exhibits one point perspective. Physically strapped in a position below eye level, we become especially accustomed to viewing a moving expanse of the floor that Danny drifts across. Kubrick recognises the position of our gaze and introduces carpets of psychedelic geometry to further build a sense of unease in scenes of the hallway outside room 237. Danny surfs arrow-like protrusions pointing in both directions, reiterating his movements as he loops back on himself

Luckhurst, Roger, Corridors: Passages of Modernity. 1 ed. (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), pg 152 7 Ciment, Michel, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. (London: Faber & Faber, 2001)

in this scene, and the odd carpet pattern inside room 237 graphically points towards the bathroom, directing Jack towards a scene of danger. Optical illusions generally create a feeling of anxiety as the brain struggles to make sense of such images. Kubrick designs these carpets to resemble an optical illusion but not explicitly, to ensure the psychedelic trickery only penetrates the unconscious layer of the mind. The pareidolia response that Kubrick embeds in his audience adds to the unsettling yet arcane ambience of The Overlook.

Colorado Lounge: Danny’s tricycle ride 1

237 Hallway, above: Danny’s tricycle ride 2

Figure 1.7: Photographic snapshots of Danny’s Tricycle Rides

Apartment hallway: Danny’s tricycle ride 3

Colorado Lounge: Danny’s tricycle ride 1

237 Hallway, above: Danny’s tricycle ride 3

Figure 1.8: Diagrammatic maps of Danny’s circular tricycle rides

Apartment Hallway: Danny’s tricycle ride 2

(Hill of snow that Danny slides down)

Figure 1.9: Diagrammatic maps of Danny’s circular tricycle rides.

Psychedelic geometry can also be recognised in the more literal hedge maze, where unrest towards the long and narrow escalates. Kubrick increases our angst as he reveals a contemporary configuration of the Labyrinth, the epitome of entanglement and dangerous uncertainty, amplified by an underlying nod to ancient myth and legend which I will extrapolate further in due course. The garden maze is witnessed as itself, as well as two other reproductions of it: the map outside and the model that Jack looks down at (fig.1.10). Looking closely, the map is different from the model, and alarmingly, there is no other scene that enables the spectators to understand what the real design of the maze is. As Elisa Pezzotta recognises in her book Kubrick: Adapting the sublime, the maze appears in four sequences: when Wendy and Danny run inside to play in it, when Jack looks down at the model, when Wendy and Danny are again seen running through it and finally when Jack follows his son in with an axe to kill him. During each of these scenes, like inside the corridors, the audience disconcertingly cannot comprehend the character’s positions inside the maze thanks to the filmic angles of the Steadicam.8 Just as horror films generally tease viewers by taking them close to an experience of terror without fully committing them to it, the hedge maze allows its visitors to feel lost but not necessarily trapped.

In Seven Films Analysed: Stanley Kubrick, author Randy Rasmussen explores scene by scene analysis of The Shining, and brings to light the significance of an eerie scene of conflicting spatial perspective when we first explore the hedge maze. Kubrick transports the viewer from watching Wendy and Danny rushing joyfully towards the maze, to an image of Jack, inside the hotel, glowering menacingly over the table-top model, in which his wife and child can be seen as curious miniature figures. and Jack’s creative imagination combines physical reality with abstract representation, giving him, and us, a brief impression of godlike power over his wife and son, who are reduced to the equivalent of mice in a laboratory maze 9. Alongside the disorientation of experiencing the labyrinth in itself, the audience suffers the destabilising feeling of being simultaneously above and within the maze structure. Furthermore, in the final scenes of Jack hunting Danny with an axe, the camera disconcertingly alternates its point of view, stalking Danny, and then being pursued by Jack. The expression on Jack’s face fluctuates between malice and pained exertion. Staggered and ill 8

Pezzotta, Eliza, Stanley Kubrick : Adapting the Sublime. (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2013) pg 80. Chapter 3, Plot Construction, A Chaotic Geometry. Elisa Pezzotta explores how, unlike his predecessors, Kubrick creates a cinema not only centered on the ontology of the medium, but on the staging of sublime, new experiences. 9

Rasmussen, Randy, Stanley Kubrick. Seven Films Analyzed, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc, 2001) pg 252

clad, he is a predator with large teeth (the axe) but no insulating fur10. Jack has transformed from a man to a grunting, murderous beast, personifying the Minotaur inside the Labyrinth.

Figure 1.10: Three visions of the maze

Figure 1.11: Jack’s transformation into the aggressive Minotaur. His bull-like expression of a downward tilt, eyes looking up, mouth slightly open; a soulless, animalistic glare.

Rasmussen, Randy, Stanley Kubrick. Seven Films Analyzed, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc, 2001) pg 281

The Ancient Myth of Theseus & The Minotaur

n ancient Crete, King Minus tried to outwit Poseidon by sacrificing a lesser bull from his herd. In fury, Poseidon made Minus’s wife fall in love with the bull,

exposing an animalistic lust at the core of human nature driven by desire. A consequential act of Bestiality created a monster with the head of a bull and body of a man, to be called the Minotaur; a victim of his fate from birth. Horrified, King Minus imprisoned the Minotaur away from the world, in a labyrinth designed by architect and engineer Daedalus. This was a prison without barred cells, but a massive winding maze with series of passageways and stairways, disorientating and deadly. King Minus sought revenge after the Athenian murder of his son, and decided to use the maze as a weapon against anyone who tried to challenge his power. Every nine years, 14 of the purest young Athenians were to be sacrificed to the labyrinthine prison, with a man eating beast as the warden. On the third year of sacrifice, Theseus volunteered to enter the Labyrinth. After years of being tortured and trapped, the Minotaur is slain in his lair at the centre of the labyrinth by Theseus, who makes it out alive by following the trail of a ball of twine given to him by the beautiful Ariadne. Ancient Greeks believed that the Minotaur was the enemy of all human reason, a symbol of the animalistic instincts trapped inside all men. The monster is the untameable part of human nature that the Greeks were trying to understand: the one thing they could not control.11

Cassel , Christopher. & Conway, Jessica, Legend of the Minotaur. (United States: The History Channel, 2009)

Reference to Theseus and the Minotaur can be recognised in The Shining in aspects more than just Jack’s characterisation. The tale is said to have been inspired by Knossos Palace on a Cretan Island, relentlessly complex in its structure with thousands of rooms all connected by small passageways across five storeys. Greek understanding considered it a dark dungeon series of corridors that violated the Greek sense of symmetry. The Overlook appears similar to Knossos Palace, rethought with its long corridors and grand halls, geometric decorations, pillars and deep red chambers. Similarly to the centre of the labyrinth, room 237 marks a paradoxical scene of life and death, the centre and turning point of the film wherein history, dream, reality and memory are joined in irregular departure from the overall narrative. The analysis of Amy Nolan describes 237 as a scene of sex and crime, where the unidentified woman is a living corpse: a paradox. This scene of death pre-empts what lies ahead of Jack as he is seduced to the centre of the hotel labyrinth. Tension, unease and violence hide at the centre of the eerie and twisting corridors of the hotel that constitute Kubrick’s labyrinth. Here, Kubrick suggests that our unconscious minds still perceive the animistic universe; a labyrinth with death at its centre in the form of room 237.12

Before getting lost in a physical spiral of oblivion, Jack first becomes lost in the labyrinth of his own head as his broken mind becomes the greatest threat of the film; the predator that you dread to meet where there is no clear escape. The progressively disturbing corridors can be compared to the progressive narrative of Jack’s decline as he leaves the natural landscape that surrounds him by turning inward and upward into his mind, yet this transformation takes the form of an unconscious, descending, labyrinthine spiral into his assimilation with the dead. For psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who’s work I will draw upon in more detail in Chapter 2, the unconscious resembles the dark corridors and hidden places of a labyrinth. Navigating the chaos of that maze, achieving mastery over it, mapping it, understanding it and finding one’s way out of it is the work of psychoanalysis. “Psychoanalysis simplifies life… it reasserts the maze of stray impulses… it supplies the thread that leads a man out of the labyrinth of his own unconscious.”13 When Danny retraces his steps and escapes the garden maze, this symbolically suggests his ability to navigate his own mind and the depths of his unconscious, unlike Jack who has become lost inside his own mind, in the boundless 12

Nolan, Amy, Seeing is Digesting: Labyrinths of Historical Ruin in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, (JSTOR, Volume 77, pp. 180-204, 2011) 13

Freud, Sigmund, The Value of Life, (Interview with Sigmund Freud by George Sylvester Viereck, 1926) This interview can be found at the following link: http://www.psychanalyse.lu/articles/ FreudInterview.pdf (available online).

labyrinth of his anarchic and dangerous unconscious. I wonder if perhaps when Daedalus designed the Labyrinth, he re-created the ridges and intricate folds of his own brain in the form of a structure, as if it were a self-portrait. If Daedalus’ labyrinth is a diagram of the brain, it is therefore also a symbol of the imagination. In the 1962 English translation of The Library of Babel14, amongst the collection of stories in the book Labyrinths, Argentine Author Jorge Luis Borges wrote that the Library is a labyrinth; each one containing a possibility of infinite places and infinite existences. Books and literature are labyrinths that express the winding shapes of their writers imaginations, that leads the readers through the numerous possibilities of their tale with a thread like that of Ariadne.15 Kubrick’s recreation of The Shining itself is a labyrinth with numerous twists and turns, that enters so deep into the mind that it attracts interpreters to decipher its arcane and secret meanings, like psychoanalysts. Kubrick succeeds in directing a coherent plot yet a scattering of minor unexplained loose ends leaves the audience satisfied, but speculative. Perhaps this provocative finale is what entices many to repeatedly engage in this labyrinthine narrative.

Figure 1.12: Room 237

Figure 1.13: The red pillars of Knossos Palace and it’s tight, orthogonal, grid-like plan of corridors.

Borges, Jorge Luis, Labyrinths: The Library of Babel (United States, Penguin Classics, 1962) edited by James E. Irby and Donald A. Yates

A PULL BACK SHOT [CHAPTER 2]

Exploring the reason behind our emotional response to Kubrick’s Labyrinth

his chapter aims to investigate why Kubrick’s exploration of labyrinthine space has the emotional effect that I have discovered in chapter 1. I will firstly explore

how fiction has the power to induce spatial phobia, and identify where such spatial anxieties reside in the mind. To unpick how the labyrinth as a space connects to our psychological inner fears I will draw upon studies of psychoanalysis, most significantly those of the Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his personality theory and studies of the unconscious. This will help explore the capability of space, most specifically the labyrinth underpinning the Overlook Hotel, to arouse unease in the audience and a state of psychosis within Jack Torrance. Analysing Kubrick’s filming techniques and architectural formations, I will also draw upon Freud’s discussion of the Unheimlich and how this defamiliarized, strange and unknown condition might culminate in the labyrinth.

Why does Kubrick’s fictional labyrinthine space affect us?

Before analysing why we fear the space of the labyrinth, it is important to highlight the potential origins of spatial phobia, and specifically why experiencing Kubrick’s fictional space is no exception to our emotional response. This is theorised by British philosopher and academic Gregory Currie in his book Image and Mind 16, which presents semiotic and psychoanalytic theories of film. The central thesis is that film is essentially a pictoral medium and that we register the movement of film images as real rather than illusory. Drawing upon his works will help to explain the potential for anxiety towards fictional space. Currie explains that upon immersion in fiction, our mental processes are engaged ‘off-line’, and what we acquire instead of beliefs is imaginings. When we imagine being in a situation we could be in, but actually are not, this simulates the process of acquiring what we perceive as beliefs. Imaginings function like ‘internal surrogates of beliefs’ as they retain belief-like connections to our own cognitive interior world, even though they lack the connections of belief to the external world. For example, imagining yourself in danger causes you to feel disturbed, it does not merely cause a state of imaginary disturbance. This is because feelings of the interior world are states identified in terms of how they feel. A state which feels like a bodily sensation really is one. When we imagine ourselves lost in the labyrinth of corridors on our screens, this

Currie, Gregory, Image and Mind: Film, Philospohy and Cognitive Science. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1995)

causes a real state of anxiety. Imaginings, like beliefs, can lead to decisions, as fictions also provoke imaginary desires. How we can desire something for an entity that we and don’t believe in, but only imagine? How can we desire for Danny to succeed in escaping Jack, when there is no real object of our desire? Currie explains that our desires are also being run off-line, subconsciously and simultaneously with our subconscious beliefs.17 We have a pretend desire that Danny will succeed and Jack will fall short, backed up by a pretend belief in his existence.

If fictions encourage simulations, and simulated beliefs and desires retain their internal connections to our bodily states, one would expect us to experience body states as we are emotionally moved by events, be that elation, angst or fear. The anxiety induced by watching a horror film such as The Shining does not cause me to hide and call the police, but it does cause me to feel afraid. Fictions function to ignite our imagination, usually when the subject is unaware and rarely exerts conscious control. 18 The work of Currie suggests that the unconscious is where we experience the imaginings and anxieties of Kubrick’s spaces in The Shining. The labyrinths of the Overlook provoke an uncontrollable emotional response of uncertainty and disorder in the depths of the mind that I propose resembles that of spatial phobia. Immersing oneself in film emotionally removes you from the boundaries of the room you are in as inside and outside, past and present combine in temporal as well as spatial fusion. Due to this, experiencing film encourages disorientation of the imagination. Kubrick’s labyrinths add another layer of spatial disorientation by exploring the tension between inside and outside space, with limitless spatial possibilities of doors along the corridors and the turns in the maze. Informing a reaction in the unconscious, spatial experience manipulates our emotions, and the labyrinth is certainly a central persuader of emotional unrest in The Shining.

Currie, Gregory, Image and Mind: Film, Philospohy and Cognitive Science. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1995) Chapter 5 Imagination, the General theory, pg 148 18 Currie, Gregory, Chapter 5 Imagination, the General theory, pg 161

How does the labyrinth as a space trigger our unconscious spatial phobias?

In likening the labyrinths of The Shining to that of the ancient myth, Kubrick manages to unsurface the peaks of our darkest inner fears, suppressed and hidden in the depths of our unconscious. The beating heart of the labyrinth is dominated by the Minotaur, humanised by Jack who also lurks resembling something else that makes the labyrinth feel more dangerous than ever: the id. Naturally supressed and dreaded to emerge, Sigmund Freud’s personality theory sees the id as a third of the tripartite psychic structure. Our reality is presented as work of the ‘ego’, the balancing body between the ‘id’ and ‘superego’. The id is the primitive and instinctive component of the personality, acting through the biological instincts of Eros (desire and libido) and Thanatos (aggression and death). 19 Impulsive, the id is the unconscious part of our minds that engages in primary process thinking, which is primitive, illogical, irrational, and fantasy oriented. Kubrick embodies the beast of the id in Jack; a psychology of drives that the audience can disturbingly comprehend. Stephen King recognised that Jack represented the darkness we all have within us; he himself admits he often felt a force encouraging him to hurt his own children. 20

Kubrick likewise recognises the darkness at the core of human nature and describes the potential of horror film to “show us the archetypes of the unconscious: we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly” 21. Jack is an illustration to disturbingly remind us that although we suppress the id, Kubrick believes his deathly aggression lurks within all of us. Kubrick’s materialises this idea in The Shining through his relentless filming approach. He is known to have shot most films in numerous takes, sometimes in the hundreds. With each retake, the actors became slightly more unhinged, exhausted and unconventional, and by take 30 or 40 22, they acted in bizarre, unbalanced ways which made for their genuinely unsettling acting. As the site of an Indian burial ground, the historic context of The Overlook is largely ‘overlooked’, suggestive that civilisation seduces humankind into believing we have transcended our dark history and true primitive, id-dominated identities, yet Kubrick implies that the evils that inhabit our collective memories still lurk like the Minotaur trapped within.

Freud, Sigmund, The Ego and the ID. (Internationaler Psycho- analytischer Verlag, Vienna, 1923). Munday, Rod & Fulmer, Tim, The Shining and Transcendence, (Interview with Kubrick and discussion, 2006) Available at: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0091.html 21 Munday, Rod & Fulmer, Tim, The Shining and Transcendence, 22 Ciment, Michel, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. (London: Faber & Faber, 2001) 20

Figure 2.1: Kubrick hints we are Jack’s mirror image by frequently showing Jack as a reflection of a mirror we are looking into.

It could be said that in discovering the labyrinth in the spaces of the hotel corridor, Kubrick dramatizes and emphasises a pre-existing spatial angst associated with the hotel as form of architecture. As a hotel guest, a mark of identification as only a number and a key. Expanding upon this concept in Corridors, Roger Luckhurst explores how through the corridor of the monster hotel, the 1920 utopian promise of social levelling has turned into a space dramatized by the annihilation of authenticity and the rise of soft despotism, now resembling a dystopian space of existential dread. Luckhurst refers to German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s 1951 post-war essay Building, Dwelling, Thinking, where he equates the functional and infrastructural with the inauthentic and soulless. The transient, generic, featureless space of the Hotel is an exemplary instance of ‘the real plight of dwelling’. Only ever a temporary shelter, it reveals the fundamental human condition of homelessness.23

Whilst the rather typical Overlook hotel characterises an architectural icon of lost identity and institutionalised order, it’s labyrinths represent symbols of asymmetric chaos which exemplify the essence of the disorderly. My thoughts are that the aim of the built environment is to provide the illusion of order, where creating order out of disorder is relieved. In other words, since architecture is closely linked to emotional response, (an idea to be explored further in Chapter 3) it provides the order that we cannot discover in the internal disorder of the mind. Through the stability of the architectural world we can experience some conscious clarity that helps us consider and understand our identity in the world and flourish as a result. Looking to the work of Freud, I speculate that without such order, we cannot find the mental clarity needed to establish our identity so we retreat to the core of human nature and discover the supposedly inhuman characteristics suppressed in the depths of our unconscious. The distinctly unordered space of the labyrinth lacks the stabilising effect of ordered architecture, and in the extreme case of Jack Torrance’s decline, it seems he succumbs 23

Luckhurst, Roger, Corridors: Passages of Modernity. 1 ed. (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), Chapter 5, The Ecstasy of Communication, The Hotel Corridor pg 148. Martin Heidegger suggested modern buildings such as power stations, railway stations, dams and social housing being constructed in Germany post war merely provided shelter rather than authentic dwellings.

to the unconscious, instinctual, destructive urges that constitute Freud’s primordial death drive.

Kubrick leads us to intimate encounters with the death drive in the labyrinths of The Shining which is fundamental in underpinning our fears towards experiencing this space. Such drives are uncontrollably beyond our conscious desires and according to Freud, the objective of lethal satisfaction that constitutes the death drive lies at the core of human nature. In her text FreudSpace, Juliet Flower MacCannell translates Freud’s death drive to be ‘the transubstantiation of time into space into a compulsive circling that has all the trappings of temporal movement, but which is usually stuck, cycling around a traumatic point of fixed, almost mineral immobility.’24 MacCannell also looks to Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic who explains that the death drive alone lies beyond the screen of projected desires: “once we move beyond desire, we enter the domain of ‘drive’; the closed circular palpitation which finds satisfaction in endlessly repeating the same failed gesture.”25 Zizek moves on to reference Friedrich Nietzsche’s provision, and perhaps the most explicit definition of the word ‘drive’ as ‘the unbearable aspect of the eternal return of the same’ 26, which can now instinctively be compared to the doom of the spatial experience inside the labyrinth. With the potential to be an eternal struggle, one that we unbearably cannot leave, the labyrinth has the potential to represent the ‘circular palpitation and endless repetition of the same failed gesture’. The similarly endless overriding time loop that Jack is vulnerable to also threatens the unescapable, claustrophobic death-grip, which Jack eventually succumbs to after experiencing the architectural manifestation of the death-drive amidst the endless labyrinth of the Overlook and finally the maze.

Understanding the death drive is a cause for fearing the labyrinth as it lies to be directly confronted at the centre of this space. The struggle that takes place in room 237 could be translated as a confrontation between Jack’s Eros and Thanatos. Eros is epitomised by the sex act, however when Jack looks in the mirror and sees the decaying form of the old woman, the fortress of his Eros is breached and overrun by his Thanatos. According to Freud, 24

MacCannell, Juliet Flower, Freudspace, p7. [Within] J. A. Winer, J. W. Anderson & E. A. Danze, Psychoanalysis and Architecture. (Chicago: Mental Health Resources, 2006) pp. 93-109. An exploration of space as being as crucial to Freud's psychoanalytic approach as time is thought to be. Zizek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies. (London: Verso Books, 1997) Zizek’s book demonstrates how the modern condition blinds us to the ideological basis of our lives.p30 25

Zizek,Slavoj, p31

aggression can save a person from the innate self-destructive tendency of the death instinct, extroverting it as a desire to kill. 27 Perhaps an aim to avoid self-destruction is what justifies Jack’s aim to then murder his family. It is the manipulation of room 237 that offers Jack the damaging opportunity to face his death drive, and subsequently it is this space that inspires his murderous behaviour which results in chaotic misery and death.

Figure 2.2: As jack walks down the corridor towards the gold room after being accused of child abuse, at each point that he passes a mirror lining the walls, he has a spasm of anger. Exposing truth and desire, Jack’s aggressive nature explodes in front of the mirrors, his Thanatos arises, the infinite space of the mirror, like the labyrinth, exposes the true self.

Munday, Rod & Fulmer, Tim, The Shining and Transcendence, (Interview with Kubrick and discussion, 2006) Available at: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0091.html

The Uncanny

Amy Nolan identifies the paradoxical, in-between state of the architecture of The Shining, as the hotel’s seemingly infinite depths contrast with its warm, spacious sanctuary feel, all the while isolated in hostile freezing mountains; the hotel per se is both threatening and strangely familiar 28. Here, Nolan implies a feeling of the uncanny, a concept most remarkably explored in Sigmund Freud’s highly influential text of 1919, Unheimlich where he describes the uncanny as “in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”29 It awakens a sense of inaccessible memory and a state of discomfort that isolates from all that is homelike; something that “ought to have remained hidden but has come to light”. It requires a situation of unlikely realism to arouse an unexplainable familiarity and disturbing sense of déjà vu which stirs the repressed beliefs of our childish selves. With a feeling of “dread and horror”, it seems that we experience a fear that the irrational beliefs of our childish self was right all along.

Freud highlights that “A particularly favourable condition for awakening the uncanny sensations is created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one.”31 In The Shining, Kubrick successfully builds the uncanny as he directs a pretence to realism with an unclear discrepancy between reality and fantastic events and objects. The unexplained characters that appear throughout the film and excessively towards the end are not distinguishable as real as paranormal, and the tricks of moving furniture, impossible doors and disappearing spaces throughout the Overlook makes the physical architecture appear impossibly controlling and alive, illustrated in fig.2.4. The use of one point perspective filming illustrated in fig.2.5.is also cause for composing an uncanny vantage. The audience is forced to focus in one place, all else in the frame is secondary, and the vanishing point conflates an illusion between space and time, all the while in the midst of the familiar setting of the typical grand hotel. As seen in fig.2.6, Kubrick uses this filming technique throughout the entire film and causes a tension between the familiarity of the current setting, and the elongated, almost futuristic temporal projection of the shot. 28

Nolan, Amy, Seeing is Digesting: Labyrinths of Historical Ruin in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, (JSTOR, Volume 77, pp. 180-204, 2011) pg 187. 29

Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny (London: Hogarth Press, 17 ed. 1955)

Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny

Freud, Sigmund, The Uncanny pg 16

Figure 2.4: Exemplar scenes generating the uncanny A chair shifts behind Jack between a single cut.

Ghosts of the Overlook are indistinguished from their environment and appear real. Evidence of their violent attacks and death induce an irrational belief in their resurrection, and feeling of the uncanny.

In a bid to induce themes of repetition, deja vu and the uncanny, Kubrick lines the corridors of the Overlook with endless doors. When assessed, many of these are impossible, showing a set design intent to despatialise the audience in a state of confusing repetition.

Repetitive doors seen on Danny’s tricycle ride can be mapped and understood to lead to impossible spaces.

Impossible windows are revealed understanding the enclosed position of the apartment. 32

Figure 2.5: Kubrick’s iconic use of One Point Perspective to build the Uncanny.

Figure 2.6: Kubrick’s continuous use of One Point Perspective

When Danny sees the twins in the corridor, although a return from the dead seems irrational and goes against our faith in reality, its place amongst a scene of reality makes it believable. When Jack speaks to the camera as he sits behind the bar, it seems he is realistically talking to himself, yet a bar-man is then revealed out of nowhere. In the repeating scene of the bloody elevator, not crucial to the plot, Kubrick makes no attempt to define this supernatural element as delusion or reality. In each of these examples, Kubrick conflates the barrier between real and fantastic spaces, and it is the incorporation of the viewer in his cinematography that establishes the presence of the uncanny, which thus becomes the films true source of horror.

Kubrick’s stylistic filming presents the uncanny, but as does the spatial arrangement of the labyrinths in The Shining as Kubrick sends the audience down winding, endlessly repeating and unnervingly familiar spaces. Amongst The Overlook and the particularly the garden maze, as illustrated in fig.2.7, we are sent on a twisting, repetitive and indistinguishable journey of déjà vu in a state of the uncanny. In this circumstance, the mind reads this accumulation of spatial experience as familiar, as all that is homely, and Freud explains we succumb to a new, strangely inescapable drive; a compulsion to repeat. Our terribly feared fate of being lost within an infinite cycle of repetition amidst the labyrinth is made all the more apparent when expressing fondness for Overlook, Jack says “I wish we could stay here forever and ever and ever” 32, echoing the ghoulish twins who similarly invite Danny to play with them “forever and ever”. Their invitation is juxtaposed repeatedly with the sight of their butchered, bloody corpses lying in the same corridor, and an offer of companionship made in a state of the uncanny thus becomes an invitation to death.33 It appears we experience the uncanny in these long and narrow spaces because we have unwittingly released the instinctual drives of the mind; the supposedly inaccessible and feared death drive. In order to decipher the sensation of the uncanny we must assess our unconscious drives, and navigating this unfamiliar and disturbing territory uncovers the human nature that we have been forced to repress under social contract.

Figure 2.3: Stanley Kubrick

“if you submit (The Shining) to a completely logical and detailed analysis it will eventually appear absurd. In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than life.”34

King, Stephen, The Shining. (United States, 1997)

Rasmussen, Randy, Stanley Kubrick. Seven Films Analyzed, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc, 2001) pg 256 34

Ciment, Michel, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. (London: Faber & Faber, 2001)

Figure 2.7: 3 different versions of the maze, neither of which correspond to each other and build despatialisation. When mapped, Danny’s movements as he escapes the maze can be vouched for, but only in Kubrick’s private set map which the audience are not made aware of.

The Map outside the Hedge Maze

Kubrick’s cinematography of an endlessly repeating map of the maze

Kubrick’s map of the set maze. Only Danny’s final movements can be tracked here.

Figure 2.7.1: Images taken from Documentary “The Making of The Shining’

DEEP FOCUS [CHAPTER 3]

Modern Understandings of Spatial Phobia towards the Labyrinth

his chapter aims to consider modern understandings and explanations of psychoanalysis, where Sigmund Freud’s work may have been superseded. It also

aims to uncover the root underpinning the psychological fear of the labyrinth and how this is revealed in Kubrick’s fictional space through Jack. I will draw upon two models of psychoanalysis that specifically indicate a shift in application towards architecture: the first provided by Anthony Vidler, the second, Sylvia Lavin. Vidler introduces the ‘architectural uncanny’, studying how spaces such as the void of the labyrinth are felt as fundamentally unhomely. Vidler further explores how architecture could be a reflection of the unconscious, an opinion which Lavin seconds as she identifies the desire to build and construct architecture as a libidinal drive central to human nature. Vidler describes how the uncanny provoked through fragmented architecture such as Kubrick’s disjointed Overlook Hotel creates a reflective feeling of fragmentation within us. Such despatialisation threatens our position in the world and the existential anxieties that arguably underpin human nature are brought to light.

The zeitgeist of architectural theorists to use psychoanalytical concepts in his 1990 writing was Anthony Vidler. His initial encounters with space were collected in his first 1992 book The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely35, which presented ideas he later further explored in Warped Space: Art, Architecture and the Anxiety of Modern Culture in 2000 36. Vidler’s philosophy was that architecture crafts a realm in which a range of human psychological conditions may develop. Such architecture he refers to is manmade, hence he builds a proposition that architecture can be both the product and producer of the human psychic condition. In studies of the Uncanny, Vidler expands upon Freud’s 1987 essay Das Unheimlich where he claims that the uncanny is more and more found architecturally, in the interstices “between psyche and dwelling”, between “body and space”, between “the unconscious and its habitat”.

Enter, Vidler’s ‘architectural uncanny’; an exploration of “approaches that seem relevant for the interpretation of contemporary buildings and projects provoked by the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally unliveable modern 35

Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992) Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the resurgent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally "unhomely" modern condition. 36 Vidler, Anthony, Warped Space. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000) Vidler identifies the concept of claustrophobia and agoraphobia in theories of spatial alienation and estrangement, and explores current conditions of displacement and placelessness. Vidler examines ways in which contemporary architects have produced new forms of spatial warping.

condition.”37 As per the myth, the labyrinth is a space of lost position and impending death, and the hotel corridor is a vessel to travel to liveable spaces. These spaces are fundamentally unliveable and ensue the feeling of the uncanny; the feeling of an old memory that we are unable to reclaim, a symbol without content, a “void”. Voids are empty but also “full”: they contain, “in absentia” all that is missing and all that has been destroyed. 38 Whilst the Overlook corridors appear empty, they attend to the emotion in the stone as they are ridden with the unfamiliarity of ghosts, imaginings and death; voids presenting all that has been lost and is no longer there.

Voids can lead to the distress of the uncanny when we expect these spaces to be filled with something familiar yet they are empty. Having one’s expectations frustrated, finding nothing when one expects something, resembles defamiliarization 39. Such an open narrative does not provide the familiar sense of continuity of experience as one walks from one space to another. In the spaces of the Overlook, neither the characters nor the audience feel a sense of continuity. Whilst the characters contend with the unexplained horrors found amongst the corridors, the audience often has no idea where they are in context of the hotel- despite closely watching the narrative unfold, Kubrick ensures the audience are repeatedly spatially defamiliarized and left in an uncanny state of mind (fig.3.2)

The Overlook’s unheimlich condition of voids and despatialisation generates unconscious notions in the psyche, but at the same time, both conscious and unconscious layers of the psyche are manifested within architecture. Vidler suggests that architecture is partly a reflection of the creator’s unexpressed desires and perverse tendencies, only accessible on the unconscious level. If The Overlook resembles the unconscious mind, spatial experience may lead to a vague kind of self-recognition, familiar to our unconscious. This potentially leads to a further, complex layer of uncanny experience in the audience. Whilst our experience of the architectural uncanny is certainly thought provoking, it lacks the dangerous

Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992) pg introduction 38

Homans, Peter. & Diane Jonte-Pace, Tracking the Emotion in the Stone, An esasy on Psychoanalysis and Architecture. [Within] Psychoanalysis and Architecture (Chicago: Chicago Institute and Society, 2006) pg. 261283. This text questions whether there are “emotions in the stone,” or, whether buildings, structures, and interior physical spaces affect us emotionally. Homans and Jonte-Pace draw upon psychoanalytic studies, including both Sigmund Freud’s and Anthony Vidler’s essays on The Uncanny.

consequences seen in Jack’s spatial experience. The violence that The Overlook was built upon seeps through its walls and into the unconscious of Jack’s mind. With prolonged exposure to these spaces he gradually recognises his own inner desire for violence, succumbs to his unconscious desires and initiates his own self destruction. The theories of Vidler certainly suggest an explanation for Jack’s demise in relation to his architectural context, and the role of the uncanny as a source of our deep-rooted spatial phobias.

Figure 3.1: Diagram of the effect of architecture on the mind and vice versa.

Sylvia Lavin is the second architectural theorist and historian whose writings on psychoanalysis and architecture culminated in an insightful 2004 book Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in Psychoanalytic Culture40. Here, Lavin outlines the work of Architect Richard Neutra, born in Vienna and residing in LA, part of a psychoanalytical circle influenced by Freud’s work and ideas. The logic of Lavin’s work outlines a theory of interrelation between psychoanalysis and architecture as it prevailed in early modernist California. At the centre of her writings is the argument that libido is the drive that directs human subjects, responsible for certain behaviour. Lavin offers specific new analysis of the libido, which Freud understood as the pleasure principle and element of the id. The libido is allegedly responsible for far more than just the sexual drive for which it is known, for example, it is the same satisfied pleasure that I would feel drinking water after being thirsty. Libido has long been understood as the energy that comes from the instinctual primordial drives for pleasure. Lavin adapts Freud’s theory by identifying the relevance of architecture here and

Lavin, Sylvia, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006)

places libido at the centre of human psychology as opposed to an element of a tripartite structure.

According to Lavin, the human desire and drive to build, construct and expand is libidinal, and architecture is a product of that tendency. “Psychoanalysis is inconceivable without its language of drives, instincts and above all, libido” 41. Architecture is a reflection of the libido at the centre of our existence and much like Vidler, Lavin suggests that architecture is a visual reflection of our deep-rooted psychology. I have presented ways in which Kubrick ensures that the architecture of The Overlook hotel is perceived as disorderly, and it is this reflection of the disjointed, dislocated, fragmented and darker side of the mind that comes to light. Similar to the conclusions drawn from Vidler’s work explaining the uncanny, Lavin also suggests that Kubrick’s architecture would be a reflection of our unconscious, libidinal desires; this is why the chaos of the labyrinth feels vaguely familiar, but unreachable in conscious explanation.

A further argument of Lavin is that architecture as an outcome of libido cannot be treated as an object but as an energy that manifests itself in reality 42. Lavin sees the concept of architecture as intangible, in a constant state of change, and once complete, a form of solidified energy marking a moment in time but also a moment in energy. Spatially, Kubrick’s labyrinthine Overlook resembles a form of malleable energy, unpredictable and akin to the fluctuating libido of human nature. Kubrick draws a direct connection between architecture as a reflection of the malleable human nature by bending the reality of his physical set. The Overlook is in constant flux, a live form of energy and direct product of libido.

By continuously warping his set, Kubrick fragments his constructed environment in The Shining and the perceiver is removed from the familiar. Extending Freud’s writing, Vidler suggests that feeling the unheimlich, we perceive our bodies as a fragmented entity, and the fragmentation of architecture in the late 1980s is drawn in parallel to this 43. Such

Lavin, Sylvia, Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) 42 Lavin, Sylvia, Form Follows Libido 43 Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992) Vidler interprets the unsettling qualities of today's architecture—its fragmented neo-constructivist forms reminiscent of dismembered bodies, its "seeing walls" replicating the passive gaze of domestic cyborgs, its historical monuments indistinguishable from glossy reproductions - in the light of modern reflection on questions of social and individual estrangement, alienation, exile, and homelessness.

fragmentation of the human subject is a result of modernisation and an age of challenged authenticity which has led to the estrangement of humanity from its being-in-the-world. Kubrick explores physical fragmentation of The Overlook on both the macro and micro scale. For instance we don’t see the interconnection of the labyrinthine rooms and spaces of the Overlook, (fig.3.2) and looking closer the spaces we do experience as a whole feel distorted and dislocated in their structure and envelope (fig.2.4). As Kubrick directs this in conjunction with Jack’s mental fragmentation, this confirms Vidler’s proposition of a combined, vice versa effect.

Figure 3.2: Only the individual spaces of the Overlook can be mapped. Kubrick isolates them, disconnected in our understanding, ensuring wide despatialisation.

Experiencing despatialisation, fragmentation and the uncanny threatens our knowledge of our position in a space, and more widely, our place in the world. A position of existential unrest could not better be discovered than in the labyrinths of the Overlook, as one doesn’t know when the paths of this maze will end, nor an accurate spatial position. We may construct a vague map of the Overlook in the unconscious which tells us that the Torrance’s apartment is unlikely to be next-door to the Gold Ball room, and that the Colorado Lounge seems to be the floor above the entrance lounge, however any safety in knowing this is disturbed by the torment of Jack and various ghosts haunting the spaces. Kubrick only provides a very slight understanding of spatial orientation and it is this vague spatial familiarity that is cause for the uncanny. The close possibility of becoming lost within the maze is primitive, and one can quickly imagine the threatening loss of identity to be suffered within a never ending maze such as The Overlook. Its offerings of ongoing paradoxical conflicts of past and present, dream and reality, inner and outer resemble the complex threshold of the enclosed, yet exposed space of the labyrinth that it comprises. Existing within such a paradox reminds us to reconnect with our instinctual existential crisis state of mind and the anxiety that it promotes.

Jean Paul Sartre is perhaps one of the most influential writers on the philosophy of existentialism. In his highly influential 1943 essay L'Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness) 44 he uses the architectural form of the hotel corridor to convey the human condition in an example called ‘The Look’:

“Let us imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity or vice I have just glued by ear to the door and looked through the key-hole, where behind that door a spectacle is presented as “to be seen””. This models the ‘other’ as an object reduced to the mastery of the unchallenged gaze.

“but all of a sudden, I hear footsteps in the hall, someone is looking at me. I now exist as myself… I see myself because somebody sees me… The Other’s look makes me be beyond my being in this world and puts me in the midst of the world”. 45

Sartre, Jean Paul, Being and nothingness; an essay on phenomenological ontology. (New York, Washington Square Press, 1957). An essay on his radical conceptions of consciousness and freedom, Sartre believed human consciousness to be far from being a passive container, instead constantly projecting itself into the outside world and imbuing it with meaning. He argues that we alone create our values and paints a stark and controversial picture of our moral universe that resonates strongly today. 45 Sartre, Jean Paul, pg 283.

This scene suggests that it is in the transitional, enclosed, yet exposed corridor space that we come into our ‘being-in-the-midst-of-the-world-for-others’. The deracinating experience reminds us that to exist depends upon acknowledgment of another set of eyes. When alone, our existence is anonymous and undetermined. It is in the distant space of the long and narrow that we are encouraged to question our position in the world and consider our existence as meaningless. 46

The identity crisis is perhaps what underpins all of our fears, including those that are spatial: if we don’t know where we are, our existence and place in the world is superfluous and we cannot lead a meaningful life. In the world of architecture, the registration of the exchange of inside and outside was of paramount importance because it was the analogue of our own psychic exchanges of introjection and projection; it objectified subjectivity at the same time that it allowed us to experience it visually and sensually 47. The labyrinth, and corridor, presents the new dichotomy of being inside and outside. This manifests in psychoanalysis as such architecture represents simultaneously experiencing the potential of both our conscious and unconscious. Such tension and conflict goes against objectivity of being either inside or outside which further arouses our existential fears as again, we cannot define our position in the world. In The Shining, it is once again this despatialisation that Kubrick uses to evoke existential unrest. The spaces of the Overlook’s labyrinth exist in isolation; they appear from nowhere and without spatial context. There is little evidence for where the corridors may end or begin and the maze feels simultaneously enclosed yet exposed; it is not liberating as an outside space should be, yet it isn’t totally confined like an interior space should be. The inability to decipher these spaces and our position within their environment stimulates our existential fears of a lost being-in-the-world.

We perceive ourselves being perceived and come to objectify ourselves in the same way we are being objectified. Thus, the gaze of the other robs us of our inherent freedom and causes us to deprive ourselves of our existence as a being-for-itself and instead learn to falsely self-identify as a being-in-itself. 47 Stokes, Adrian, The Quattro Cento. In: The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes, (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd, 1978) [As cited by] Deamer, Peggy, The Architecture of Phantasy and the Phantasy of Architecture [Within] Psychoanalysis and Architecture (Chicago: Chicago Institute and Society, 2006) pg.

Closing Credits [A Final Word]

Throughout this dissertation I have explored the representation of the psyche through the use of architectural and labyrinthine space in Kubrick’s The Shining. The synthesis of my research suggests that Kubrick’s spatial depiction of implicit and explicit labyrinths awakens fears of despatialisation, fragmentation and existential unrest.

At the time of his filming, Kubrick was likely aware of Freud’s theories of the unescapable darkness within human nature, and Kubrick explores how spatial organisation of the labyrinth exposes this, which in turn promotes Jack’s self-destruction, and strikes an emotional chord close to the audience. In my opinion this philosophy is rather dogmatic and I don’t think there is necessarily a demonic Minotaur waiting to rip its way out of us when unveiled. I think these primitive parts of human nature lie dormant and easy to conceal following social contract, so that for most, these supposed core drives have become detached. It is only in the small, unhinged population of the human race in which the Minotaur seems to make an appearance, such as an axe murderer like Jack Torrance. Instead, I think that fragmentation of space as Vidler describes is more of a reason to feel angst towards the labyrinth; fearing the loss of the self, as opposed to fear of the self and its true ability.

I can now acknowledge the labyrinth as a powerful spatial tool with the capacity to tell us about who we are and I will forever see Jack as a predatory Minotaur in Kubrick’s constructed labyrinth of The Shining. This dissertation has opened my eyes to the complexity of the psyche, leaving me to consider that perhaps the minotaur is somewhere within us, but the labyrinth of the self is so infinitely complex that whilst running into it feels imminently close, the probability is almost impossible. Only very rarely would someone meet it and suffer as Jack did.

In scrutinising Kubrick’s work, this research has brought to light the importance of psychoanalysis in creating and understanding an influential spatial experience. As analysed in the case of the labyrinth, an emotional response to space can penetrate the unconscious layer of the mind and arouse huge questions about the authenticity of our identity and place in the world. Whilst this research explores how and why space can uncover anxieties and fears, further research might explore how and why space might arouse feelings of elation, euphoria and our hidden deepest desires. Furthermore, as this research is focussed on one film in a

huge genre of psychological horror, it signals the question of whether Kubrick’s spatial decisions of, for example, the labyrinth are still used as spatial devices in the 21 st Century. If it is still prevalent in horror film, does this mean that architects shouldn’t design spaces reminiscent of the labyrinth? And can such an avoidance be recognised within architectural discourse?

Whilst many further questions exude from this piece of research, I believe this contribution to the spatial and psychoanalytic field is unique. The rich existing research on The Shining includes exploring hidden depths of characterisation, hidden conspiracy theories and hidden meanings in the spatial organisation in the film. The synthesis of my research digs deeper into why Jack’s spatial experience causes our unrest by applying the depth of psychoanalytic theory, in order to understand the emotional effects of watching this film. I have explored how the work of Freud and modern psychoanalysts of architecture might be relevant in explaining our response to space and via Vidler’s work on fragmentation, I have culminated in an argument of existentialism to be at the root of our fears towards Kubrick’s labyrinth.

finis.

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Nolan, A., Winter 2011. Seeing is Digesting: Labyrinths of Historical Ruin in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. JSTOR, Volume 77, pp. 180-204.

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Pezzotta, E., 2013. Stanley Kubrick : Adapting the Sublime. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi.

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Rasmussen, R., 2001. Stanley Kubrick. Seven Films Analyzed.. North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc.

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Sartre, J. P., 1957. Being and Nothingness : An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. New York: Methuen & Co. Ltd.

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Stokes, A., 1978. The Quattro Cento. In: The Critical Writings of Adrian Stokes. 1 ed. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd.

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The Shining. 1980. [Film] Directed by Stanley Kubrick. United States: The Producer Circle Company.

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Vidler, A., 1992. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Vidler, A., 2000. Warped Space. Cambridge(Massachusetts): MIT Press.

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Zizek, S., 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso Books.

List of figures •

Figure 1.1

Authors Own

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Figure 1.2

Authors Own

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Figure 1.3

Snapshot taken from the film: The Shining

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Figure 1.4

Snapshot taken from the film: The Shining

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Figure 1.5

Authors Own

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Figure 1.6

Authors Own

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Figure 1.7

Snapshots taken from the film: The Shining

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Figure 1.8

Authors Own

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Figure 1.9

Authors Own

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Figure 1.10

Snapshots taken from the film: The Shining

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Figure 1.11

Snapshots taken from the film: The Shining

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Figure 1.12

Snapshot taken from the film: The Shining

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Figure 1.13

Knossos Palace floor plan: (Evans, 1921) Knossos Palace photograph: accessible via https://www.world-archaeology.com/travel/knossos-journey-tothe-centre-of-the-labyrinth/

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Figure 2.1

Snapshots taken from the film: The Shining

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Figure 2.2

Snapshot taken from the film: The Shining

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Figure 2.3

Quote from Stanley Kubrick (Ciment, 2001)

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Figure 2.4

Snapshots taken from the film, overlaid with authors own sketches

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Figure 2.5

Snapshots taken from the film, overlaid with authors own sketches

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Figure 2.6

Snapshots taken from the film: The Shining

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Figure 2.7

Snapshots taken from the film & Authors Own sketches

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Figure 2.7.1

(Making The Shining, 1980) Overlaid with authors own sketches

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Figure 3.1

Authors Own

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Figure 3.2

Authors Own