Oriphiel

I didn't even notice those impossible windows until you mentioned them just now . Anyway, can you elaborate more on the presence of these themes, because I don't really remember them coming up in the movie, so I think I might have missed a few details:

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Frownland

I highly recommend watching the film Room 237, it discusses several theories involving The Shining.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

Chula Vista

Jack was sexually abusing Danny. This is hinted at in a number of ways. Did ya notice what magazine Jack was reading right before he was summoned for his interview?



Note the innuendo in these lines:

Danny: "Tony is a little boy that lives in my mouth."
Doctor: "If you were to open your mouth could I see Tony?"
Danny: "No."
Doctor: "Why not?"
Danny: "Because he hides."
Doctor: "Where does he go?"
Danny: "To my stomach."
Doctor: "Does Tony ever ask you to do things?"
Danny: "I don’t wanna talk about Tony any more."

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Oriphiel

Eh, I don't know... I can see where you're coming from, but I think that's a bit of a stretch. I think the last thumbnail title on the magazine is pretty clever, though: "How To Avoid A Dead-End Affair" .

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Chula Vista

Kubrick put those in there on purpose. There's not a single aspect of any of his movies that he didn't meticulously plan out.

Note the number on Danny's shirt early in the movie. 42. Wendy swings the bat at Jack exactly 42 times. The movie that Danny and Wendy are watching (on a TV that has no plug or wire BTW) is the summer of 42.

1942 was the year of the Nazi "Final Solution".

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Oriphiel

Yeah, there's obviously a connection to the year, but is there anything in the movie that actively provides a commentary of the events that happened during it? I guess what i'm asking is, what do you think Kubrick was trying to say by including the year in multiple places?

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Chula Vista

He's just f*cking with people. The 42 connection wasn't made until many years after the film was released. The same with the Playgirl magazine.

Here's a doozy. You know the two hacked up dead girls lying in the hallway? They weren't dead. The were not only breathing but breathing very heavily. If Kubrick had wanted them dead he would have asked them to hold their breath for those few seconds. Instead he had them breath real heavy.

He also knew that this wouldn't be discovered for decades later until the advent of digital technology that allowed for viewing the frames one at a time.

Download these 4 pics and then view them quickly as a slideshow to see the girls breathing.

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Oriphiel

I didn't notice that. It's pretty freaky.

Anyway, do you think that the movie is partly a commentary on perspective? I mean, every character sees things that couldn't possibly have happened (like the unplugged television playing a show, the impossible windows, etc.), and yet you also get the feeling that none of the characters are outright lying (or meaning to, anyway), kind of like the movie Rashomon.

So, maybe the reason Kubrick keeps alluding to real life tragedies (like the holocaust) is that he's trying to explain why humans end up doing such things? I mean, nobody wakes up and thinks "I'm the bad guy. Today, i'm going to kill people", and yet groups (divided by fear, different perspectives, and the social/tribal nature of humanity) keep committing atrocities to other groups as history goes on. You also said that there are references to the moon landing, and that fits in with this theme as well, because it was the culmination of a race between two nations both that thought the other was evil. Also, it goes back to the theme of perspective in another way; though everyone saw the same footage of the moon landing, there were (and still are) people who believed it to be fake (kind of like how all the characters in the movie technically lived through the same events, but they all saw different things happening).

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Chula Vista

Nah.

Another thing he did all throughout the shoot was move things around and/or remove/add them to scenes. In some scenes of the Colorado room there's a huge bearskin rug on the floor. In others it's gone. When Jack is being interviewed, Unger has a cigarette in his ashtray. Cut to Jack and then back to Under and the cigarette is gone. When Danny sees the two girls in the rec room holding hands there's a couple of tables with chairs in the frame. Cut to Danny then back to the girls and the chairs have all been moved very slightly.

In an early scene there's a glass display case on one side of a hallway. In a later scene it's been moved to the opposite wall. In another Wendy is talking to Jack while he sits at his typewriter and there's a chair in the background against the wall. Cut to Wendy then back to Jack and the chair is gone.

There's dozens and dozens of instances like this all throughout the movie. Kubrick knew that no-one was going to catch all of this when they first watched the flick. They'd be too busy paying attention to the foreground and dialogue. But he put it all in anyway knowing that eventually people would analyze the movie knowing that Kubrick simply wasn't going to tell a straight ahead ghost story and that there had to be more there.

The Shining was Kubrick's magnus opus of using the cinematic experience to totally mess with people's heads.

Check this one out.

Danny is playing with his trucks and a tennis balls rolls up out of nowhere.



Camera angle changes to Danny looking down the hall where the ball came from. Do you see what Kubrick did here?

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

Oriphiel

Anyway, the ball came from one direction, but the next shot showed him (and the direction) reversed (which you can tell by looking at the carpet; the orange ring in the pattern is only broken on one side, not both, so he should have had a black line in front of him and not a closed off orange ring).

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