The Shining (1980): How Philosophical Theory of Deconstruction Influences Props
Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece, The Shining, is an exciting and immersive cinematic reimagining and adaptation of the popular book written by Stephen King in 1977. The story takes place in Colorado at the Overlook Hotel, a popular summer vacation spot that completely closes down in the wintertime. Because of the hotel’s complete seasonal shutdown, the property needs a caretaker during this time of guest vacancy, which leads us to meet Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a school teacher turned writer who takes on the job as the winter caretaker in hopes of curing his writer’s block. He, his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and his son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), move into the hotel for the winter with him. Jack has struggled with alcoholism and domestic violence in the past, and Danny has psychic premonitions that make him extremely nervous about going to the hotel for the winter and about his father as a whole. As the winter goes on, Jack’s writer’s block has not been solved, and Danny’s visions become increasingly more disturbing. The two of them begin to uncover the dark secret’s behind the hotel and Jack turns into a murderous maniac determined to kill his family.
As most Kubrick films are, the movie is both abstract and concrete; this is seen in the first and second half of the film. The film starts out quite blunt, from the dialogue to the camera angles and lighting, but as it progresses, it gets harder to tell reality from fantasy, certainty from delusion. Part of what makes this film stand apart from other horror films that were being made around this time like The Thing (1982) and Little Shop of Horrors (1986), is that Kubrick uses deconstructionist components that highlights and exemplifies the development of how the characters deal with the alienation that comes with staying at the Overlook. Through this use of the philosophical technique popularized by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the significant props used in the movie take on different roles based on the state of psychosis that occupy the characters.
Deconstruction is a philosophy that questions the rudimentary abstract distinctions in Western philosophy through a detailed recount of reason and rhetoric in literature, philosophical texts, and art mediums, like film. The opposition litigated in Western philosophy has been in place since philosophers of Ancient Greece began uncovering what aspects of philosophy and daily life are “hierarchical” versus “binary.” Deconstruction banks of pairs of representations, which part of the pair is derivative and what is fundamental. In philosophy, examples of this are nature and culture, mind and body. Deconstruction is exploring the variability and discrepancies within hierarchical sequences that are either socially accepted or explicitly claimed in the medium one is exploring. This aspect of deconstruction is crucial when parts of the medium are implicit or subordinate, depending on the allegorial or declarative expression. Through deconstruction, the challenges found within the medium being analyzed become a product/construction of itself.
While deconstruction is mostly used as a way to explore literary and philosophical texts, this theory was heavily prevalent in my mind when thinking about the significance of the props used in The Shining. In film, props are important in story-telling and for aesthetic purposes. They accompany and activate characters, they tie scenes together, help actors feel more like the character, and can identify a certain place, and in this case, mindset.
One of the most iconic props used in the film is Jack’s typewriter. In the first half of the film, the typewriter is seen and used as Jack’s passion. It’s his line of work, his motivation for wanting to stay at the hotel. But halfway through the film, it begins to take on a role of the ruthless, insane bureaucracy that Jack has over his wife and son at the hotel as Jack slips deeper into a maniatic state. It is a force of mechanical frigidness, where it was once a creative and emotional outlet. In one of the most terrifying scenes of the film, Wendy discovers the pages that Jack has been working on all this time, only for it to say the same idiom over and over, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” The typewriter even changes midway throughout the movie, becoming darker. Not only can this change of typewriters been seen in a deconstructionst light, it can also be understood as symbolism of the Holocaust. The cold, hard, efficiency and repetition of the way that Jack has used the typewriter at his time at the Overlook is similar to how the Nazis operated when invading different areas of Europe, not to mention that both typewriters used in the film are German-made.
Another important prop used that can be viewed in a deconstructionist light is that of the axe that Jack attempts to slaughter his wife and child with. We are actually introduced to the axe prop in a metaphorical sense in the opening scene, when Stuart Ullman tells Jack that a former winter caretaker of the Overlook was driven insane from isolation at the hotel and killed his entire family with an axe. "He ran amok and he... killed his family with an axe." Kubrick introduces us to this prop without even seeing it in this opening scene, and again when Jack runs into the ghost of Delbert Grady in the bathroom where he brings up the axe murder to him. While Jack hasn’t used an aze on anyone yet, it’s on his mind, and as he descends further into insanity from solitude, he strays down the exact path as Grady. The prop goes from metaphysical to physical as Jack’s demeanor alters.
