THINKING FOR A SINGLE SOLITARY MOMENT ABOUT THE SHINING AND MOVIE POSTERS

I have literally five posts sitting in my drafts folder that I need to finish and put up. For now, though, here's a quick one on my favourite movie, The Shining (which is playing in the background as I write this. Jack and Wendy are having a talk right now...).

Via twitter, I was directed to Buzzfeed's collection of 39 movie posters made by fans of The Shining. There are several striking posters in there (particularly #s 3, 9, 12, 14, 24, and 37), but by and large I am not a fan of them. What I dislike about many of the posters (aside from the ones that just look like covers for a Dover Thrift Edition of the novel) is that they mistakenly load their weight onto (admittedly iconic) elements of the film that have nothing to do with what makes it such a masterpiece. The twins, the axe, the blood, the tricycle, even the typewriter and the manuscript, all of these are contributing aspects to the film's horror, but they're not the central cause. That resides in the relationship between Jack, Wendy, Danny, and the Overlook Hotel.


The Shining is not scary because it's a violent film (really, the amount of violence is fairly small, though its impact is sizable); The Shining is terrifying because nothing in the film really explains why it is violent. The ghosts from the hotel don't really explain it (unless accepting the drink from Lloyd really does involve Jack selling his soul to the devil), the story Ullman tells about cabin fever doesn't really explain it, and the already present strain between the family doesn't really explain it. King famously complained that it was a mistake to cast Jack Nicholson because what is to come is too obvious from the opening scene. King makes a good point in that there's a certain narrative satisfaction that a less overtly "on edge" actor might have provided by emphasising the transformation of Jack from the start of the film to the end, but again knowing that violence will break out by the end of the movie, that Jack will become something monstrous, doesn't explain why. No, the very ambiguity of the movie, the "undecidability" that it foregrounds--is the Overlook a malevolent force that corrupts an otherwise decent man? Is this simply an encounter with absolute evil and its effects? Are ghosts responsible for all of this? Any of this? Would this have happened regardless of the family visiting the Overlook?--is the key to the horror that it instills in the viewer. This is what prevents a glib dismissal of the movie as "just a story;" it is fantastical in some respects, but in that is the seed of "fantasy" in the sense of a wise or desire: is The Shining showing us something we long for? Some quotidian violence that can erupt when given the right impetus? What is that impetus? Of course, these are once again the very questions that the movie refuses to answer. For now, I'll point in the direction of one of the most cogent explanations of the film's power (and horror), and leave it at that.

When it comes to a poster for the film, then, something of that undecidability, that quotidian element that trends into horror, that erupts into violence, should be captured in a way that blood and axes can't. For me, were I to make a poster of the film, I would focus not on the memorable "Here's Johnny!" scene that the DVD uses, but on a smaller scene that I find the most chilling in the film. After arguing with Wendy just before he goes down to the ballroom and runs into Grady, Jack storms out of the apartment, leaving the door wide open. That scene, with Jack walking away, the family now open and exposed to evil, to violence, to something that no longer feels like a possibility, but an inevitability (and, even worse, an inevitability that has never really seemed like anything else in hindsight, though there's still no reason why--cruelly underscored by Grady's insistence that Jack has always been the caretaker). Of course, one of the deepest ironies of the film that Fisher mentions in the analysis I've linked to above is that all of the horrifying elements, once they've assembled themselves into an (il)logical chain by the end of the movie, cannot be overlooked in any subsequent viewing. The telos of the movie is its violence, but nothing will ever really explain how we get there.

To that end, my movie poster for The Shining (clearly, I'm not a graphic designer, and I'd like to do something nicer with most of the text). One obvious caveat to all of this: more than almost any other movie I've seen, The Shining relies on all of its constituent parts to work; without its music/sound effects, any movie poster for The Shining is doomed to woefully underrepresent the movie's power.