What if you watch The Shining backwards? It becomes a romance, a positive epic, a heroic psychodrama. Let Mstrmnd explain:
The Shining is a film meant to be watched both forwards and backwards.
The human mind may find ways of playing it backwards subconsciously. ...
Shown backwards it is a heroic film about human experience: A man trapped in the logic of ghosts, trapped in a grayscale 2-D flat world, a photograph inside history, frozen in spectral finity: is unfrozen, and is lured outside of a maze where both his wife and son proceed to ‘undouble’ him and assist him in his war with his self and is finally able to drive away from the Overlook, from the lunarscape of this unreal summit and into a perfect mirror, earthmade.
Shown backwards it is a heroic film about human experience: A man trapped in the logic of ghosts, trapped in a grayscale 2-D flat world, a photograph inside history, frozen in spectral finity: is unfrozen, and is lured outside of a maze where both his wife and son proceed to ‘undouble’ him and assist him in his war with his self and is finally able to drive away from the Overlook, from the lunarscape of this unreal summit and into a perfect mirror, earthmade.
The argument goes on deliriously, obsessively on this score:
Tricks are used to play with your memory of standard cinema convention.
There are several reasons why backwards is a viable viewing order. The front credits are end credits, blue-turquoise filled helveticas rise as if the film is coming to an end (and Kubrick does not use rising end credits, ever). Like many other subtle combinations of camera movement and storytelling/activities in the film, seen backwards, the first shot of the film can become the end of the film: the final image the horizontal/horizon, mountain and reflection, a state of hybrid native American nirvana. Another example: Wendy reads Jack’s typed book ‘backwards’ in the film’s forward, ie: she reads the page in the typewriter then the top page and continues down. The film itself is a reflection, each scene possesses a mirror scene of the other (ie: Danny and Wendy’s campfire/roadrunner meal is doubled beginning and end.)
It's like the old joke about playing a blues or country song backwards, and getting a utopia. The singer regains woman, money, drink, dog, happiness, guns, etc.
I disagree with this argument, though:
the film is actually scarier backwards since Kubrick has reversed
the order of storytelling horror conventions in the forward. People
have always commented on the film’s inability to shock, the scariest
imagery comes at the tail of each ‘scary’ scene, diffusing any effect.
Backwards the effects rise in their shock value.
The film has scared a lot of people since its launch. But it's extra effective as a silent film - watch it with the sound off. The heightened facial expressions, the tempo all work like some lost 1915 movie, colorized.
(via MetaFilter)
Kubrick can be very mischievous, as we know. This whole film makes rogueishness terrifying, neatly puncturing every male's hope that savoir faire can substitute for both brawn and brains. Oh, and the family romance....
For true chills, juxtapose the star child shot at the end of 2001 with the close-up of Alex at the beginning of Clockwork Orange.
I got yer starchild, RIGHT HERE.
Posted by: Gardner | April 09, 2009 at 09:04
Classic Gothic family romance, Gardner.
I do like this image you've given me, of the Starchild in a bowler hat.
Did I tell you about the nice fellow I worked with, years ago, who would recite scenes from The Shining when customers were around?
Posted by: Bryan Alexander | April 10, 2009 at 09:01