9 minute read
THE SHINING PARTY
from The Chap Issue 108
by thechap
Film
The Overlook Party at 100
Darcy Sullivan revisits the fabled July 4th 1921 Ball at the Overlook Hotel, featured in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, to find out why people are still talking about it
uly 4th marks the centennial of one of
Jthe world’s wildest parties. This was a grand affair to rival Gatsby’s shindigs or Truman Capote’s 1966 black and white ball. The party took place at the Overlook Hotel in Colorado, and in a famous photo you can see the well-heeled partygoers pausing for just a moment in their revelling. They look as if they don’t know what awful things are about to happen – but perhaps they do. Possibly the chaos had already begun when the photo was taken.
Dead centre in the photo is someone you know. He is smiling, but the smile looks feral. We know him as Jack Torrance. Jack is a murderer who tried to kill his wife and son. That, however, was in the 1970s. So how could he be in a photo from 1921? And why is he smiling?
These are just two of the questions raised by the final scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining. The film divided critics and audiences at the time – was it dull or terrifying? Stephen King hated it, and it was based on his bestselling novel. “Kubrick just couldn’t grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel,” King wrote. “So he
looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones.”
Now hailed as a masterpiece, The Shining took on an even more iconic status last year, due to the pandemic. People posted memes and jokes about how much they related to Jack Torrance, driven insane by being locked up for months with the people he loves. So it seems more than simple coincidence that, as the world stumbles toward recovery, the Fourth of July 1921 party at the Overlook reaches 100. What does that party signify? And can we solve the puzzle of that maddening photo – one of the most talked-about final shots in film history?
THE PAST
The Shining is really two stories — the one told by King and the one told by Kubrick. King’s 1977 novel is about a failed writer who signs on as the winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. He and his wife and son anticipate a dull few months of snowbound isolation while Jack writes his novel. But the Overlook is haunted – more than that, it’s evil. It preys on Jack’s weaknesses, including his alcoholism, and he abandons his writing to obsess over the hotel’s history, gradually becoming more and more unhinged. To make matters worse, the hotel amplifies his son Danny’s psychic powers, and the boy sees sinister ghosts and visions. Jack becomes homicidal and sets out to murder his wife Wendy and Danny.
Kubrick’s basic story is the same, but he tones down the idea that the hotel possesses Jack. Viewers, critics and King himself say that actor Jack Nicholson, who plays Torrance, seems unhinged right from the start. For instance, he takes a perverse delight in telling Danny about how the Donner party resorted to cannibalism. While there are ghosts and visions in Kubrick’s Overlook, the focus is on Jack Torrance having the world’s worst midlife crisis. It’s possible he would have had the same meltdown during a longish stay at a Premier Inn.
All ghost stories are about the past, and the Overlook has a strange one. In the book, Jack uncovers a history of unsavoury events. In the film, we’re only told of one: a previous caretaker, Grady, went insane and killed his wife and daughters. But Grady and his daughters aren’t the only ghosts here; Jack stumbles on (or summons forth) a malevolent female spirit, a conspiring bartender and an entire party’s worth of spooks. In book and film, Jack keeps getting drawn into the past, both his own past (he starts drinking again, his anger
towards his wife and son resurfaces) and the past of the hotel.
THE PARTY
As his madness escalates in the film, Jack finds a full party going in The Gold Room. The costumes tell us this is the 1920s, and we might conclude that this is the 1921 July 4th celebration pictured at the end of the film. There are mixed signals, though. All three of the songs that play in the party scene were recorded in the 1930s: Midnight, the Stars and You and It’s All Forgotten Now by Ray Noble and His Orchestra, and Home by Henry Hall and the Gleneagles Hotel Band. This anachronism may seem confusing, given that Kubrick was a stickler for details. But then, the waiter who spills a drink over Jack turns out to be Grady, the murderous former caretaker from a different time period. The Overlook is a place where bad pasts merge.
The party looks innocent enough to Jack, but Wendy later sees bizarre images from it. These range from the humorous – a man in a dog costume fellating a man in formal wear – to the startling sight of a blood-covered man telling Wendy, “Great party, isn’t it?”
This last image suggests that this party may be one of the times chef Halloran is alluding to when he tells Danny, “I think a lot of things happened in this particular hotel, and not all of ’em was good.” If, as Halloran says, bad things leave traces behind, the party must have been monstrous to have manifested again in the 1970s, full of guests and decor, and to have swept up both Grady and Jack. We can only imagine what happened on that night 100 years ago.
What’s clear is that Jack fits right in. “When Jack walks into the crowded ballroom, for example,
Stanley Kubrick stands in for Lloyd the bartender
literally crossing over into a party atmosphere directly distilled from the Jazz Age, redolent of smoke, free-flowing booze, flapper fashion, and music, he is not only unfazed by the historical simulacrum that absorbs him, he immediately feels right at home,” notes Tony Magistrale in Sutured Time: History and Kubrick’s The Shining.
Why is the party set in the 1920s? It may just be a clear visual signpost for ‘a long time ago’. Show people a few flapper dresses and they know it’s the 1920s. The 1920s also represent hedonism in a way the 30s or 40s don’t, and we can imagine hedonism degenerating into murder. But as the documentary film Room 237 illustrates, there are theories that the film is ‘about’ World War II, or the genocide of Native Americans, or how Kubrick faked the Apollo 11 moon landing. In some of these theories, the Overlook and its bad past represent America itself.
“In contrast to the unstable Seventies (exacerbated by the advent of American feminism) of Jack’s own time,” Magistrale writes, “Kubrick depicts the Twenties as an era where blacks, children, and especially wives ‘knew their place’. It may not be a coincidence that Kubrick configures Torrance’s Overlook photograph during a July Fourth fete, seeking to capitalize on the ironic significance of that date in American history.”
“It’s good to be back, Lloyd!”
THE PHOTO
The final shots of the film, after Jack dies, move slowly in on a wall of photos in the hotel. Our party photo is in the centre, showing Jack Torrance in the middle of the July 4, 1921 celebration. (The photo was a historical photo that Nicholson was airbrushed into.) The eerie photo works on many levels – Jack has been drawn into the past throughout the film, and is told he has “always been the caretaker here” by the ghostly Grady. He tells Lloyd in the party scene, “I’ve been away, but now I’m back!” With his homicidal rage, he belongs here. And since he died at the hotel, he’s now been absorbed by it into its supernatural force. He was always here and he’ll always be here.
Of course, it also doesn’t work on any literal level. Was the photo always there? Why didn’t Wendy or Danny see it before and say, “Hey, this looks like you.” We know Jack is a real person with a past – how could he have ‘always’ been here? Did he magically appear in the photo when he died? Kubrick seemed fond of obscure endings, having closed 2001: A Space Odyssey with one of the most baffling WTF sequences in film.
Kubrick himself told an interviewer, “The ballroom photograph at the very end suggests the reincarnation of Jack.” Co-screenwriter Diane Johnson backed that up: “There is an explanation for the photo, though it’s a bit strange and paradoxical because it’s both real and unreal – the idea that Jack was always at the hotel in some earlier incarnation. Jack had somehow been the creature of the hotel through reincarnation. At the same time, we’re meant to experience it ‘in the now.’ There’s no way of resolving that, it’s meant to be magical.”
Fair enough – but what about this? On her website (idyllopuspress.com), Julie Kearns notes that the photo subtly changes as we move towards it. “In shots 660 and 661, Jack’s shoulder is dropped down to reveal the woman to his left (our right) holding something. This is covered by his raised shoulder in shot 659.” Presumably two versions of the airbrushed photo were used – but why? What is she holding? Does it relate to the small slip of paper in Jack’s waving hand? 100 years on, that photo reminds us that the past is a mystery – and almost certainly darker than we think. n
Luxury capmakers and handweavers
Distinctive tweed and linen caps for discerning Chaps and Chapesses. Now stocking triple-layer linen face masks.
SARTORIAL
Photo Shoot: Overlook Revisited (p44) • Grenson (p60) • Vetra (p66) • Get The Look: Riviera Style (p70) • Wishmoor Watches (p74) • Grey Fox Column (p78)
