9 - The Political Uncanny, or the Return of Domination: The Shining
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
My concluding interpretation of Kubrick’s The Shining is once again a synthetic reading of the whole work using the tools of film analysis. In a Lacanian/Žižekian extension of Jameson’s reading of the film, I will demonstrate how Kubrick, in the guise of a popular genre film, creates a spectral analysis of the postmodern, late capitalist totality. In a second step I seek to go beyond Jameson in order to prove that The Shining, in its natural-history totalization of capitalism, is even more total than Jameson ascribes to the film in his class-history reading. Like perhaps no other film, The Shining opens itself up to the wounds of the social totality, but at the same time, in its hermetic formal perfection, the film creates the counter-measure of a purely aesthetic totality, which may itself be utopian.
Keywords: Form, Genre, Horror, Natural History
The Dance of Death
The Shining is a cinematic dance of death. The vitalistic and naturally beautiful associations of the sunny title are already thwarted in the opening credits by a sense of looming catastrophe. Accompanied by the alien, electronic sounds of the famous Dies Irae motif, the camera swoops in a helicopter shot over an alpine lake. The surrounding mountains are reflected in the crystal clear water with almost perfect axial symmetry. Initially, the camera moves towards the geometrical vanishing point of the landscape, until it tilts slightly to the right and turns in the same direction. Thus, the first shot already contains all the aesthetic parameters that structure the film: a spatial slipstream movement, motifs of mirroring and doubling, the dominance of symmetry and central perspective and anamorphic distortions. These are all condensed in an image of nature denuded of any human presence, which, despite (or because of) its immense beauty, congeals into a monument of inhuman creation. It is for this reason that the first shot of The Shining is not so much an establishing shot as it is an emblematic image that sets the film’s allegorical process in motion.
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- Information
- Towards a Political Aesthetics of CinemaThe Outside of Film, pp. 265 - 314Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020