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February 15, 2014, 01:10:23 AM |
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There's some truth to this.
I think that after 2001 Space Odyssey and Clockwork Orange, Kubrick got stuck in a rut creatively. He tried that terrible period drama movie, which was all about the oil painting style visuals and not much else. The Shining was an attempt to do something different again, to tell the history of post-colonial North America, using a horror movie as a bed in which to implant the hidden narrative subliminally. It was so subliminal that no-one noticed at the time the movie came out, or for years after (I always thought it was the most boring, unscary horror movie I'd seen). So it's arguably getting into the territory that modern art has, because you can get over-interpretive when it comes to metaphorical storytelling (like the "proof that Kubrick faked the Apollo 11 footage in a London film studio" stuff, maybe he did, but there is no such proof).
So he does make all these references to the history of the USA in The Shining, you can't pretend it's all a coincidence. But I don't know whether he's making political or revelatory statements by doing that, although I'm going to have to watch it again one day to see for myself. I'd like to try to figure what part the picture of Jack with Woodrow Wilson is supposed to play, as I not sure this is just being deliberately cryptic like I did when I saw the movie before.
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