Liliea
Jedi Council Member
The first time I saw The Shining I didn't understand much, I read it as a man who had gone to a hotel with his family and suddenly wanted to kill them and they were running away and defending themselves, I even laughed... When you don't have the knowledge to understand the whole package of information sometimes the link is activated and it is in many cases when suddenly one is told: "it reminds me of the film such as ....".
Stanley Kubric (which sounds in Spanish like “encubrir” whitewashing) is one of the few directors who, to my understanding, creates his universe in the most objective way possible, where his objectual world is connected with the psychic, conceptual and biological world which implies an almost architectural interrelation between dialogues, colors, mental spaces and different layers that conform and fit reality.
This film has several iconic scenes: Dani on the tricycle-twins, apollo11, room 237, the blood, the labyrinth, Jack, Wendy and the axe.
The axe scene is a key moment that marks the programmed schizophrenic reality of the family. A family that in my opinion suffers from transgenerational ritual abuse that would make up the MK program society and that Kubric exposes throughout the film with threads to pull.
Everything takes place inside the bedroom and bathroom of the Torrens couple (the De la Torre's) and the spaces are divided by the access of the door -Redrum-morder-, (door, tur, fuerta, red-pink room, killer) an architectural metaphor of their dissociations that divide one reality from the other: politically correct frontal alters and traumatic, perverted, hidden alters, 237=732 code.
Jack is looking for Wendy and Dany to kill them and for this he carries an axe, Wendy ,the one from Neverland, has a programming failure -which is revealed in the bear scene- and rebels against Jack, so fleeing she ends up in the bathroom of her room with Dani (Dani boy), they try to escape through a small window from which Dany can get out, here we perceive a kind of rebirth of Dany (exit-Twins) to the cold zone of the labyrinth.
After breaking down the first door of the entrance to her bedroom, Jack knocks on the bathroom door-Redrum- and suggests with cynical malevolence the children's story of the wolf and the piglets is a way of connoting that he abuses Dany and that the diminutives Johnny-Dani (Jack Daniels) have suffered the same treatment and are one in programming, reminiscent of the scene of the twins as a symbol of dissociation. Then he enters with the violence of the axe on the door to gain access, in the same way that the controller enters the mind of the controlled.
Wendy, unable to escape, resigns herself to remain in the cold zone and takes the knife she has taken from Dani. After a masterful histrionic performance by Wendy between pleas and screams, the blows of the axe make a kind of opening through which the iconic image of a Jack completely possessed by his alter comes out, revealing: "Here is Johnny", who we already know who he is.
For Johnny, Wendy is a mother who, deprogrammed and in rebellion, is no longer welcome. So his programmatic command orders him to use his "patriarchy" - which at the same time is the negation of it - to sacrifice her (maternity). A command given by those who care about misunderstanding, loyalty and obedience (the ladder, the eagle, the hierarchy).
Wendy takes the knife and cuts off the hand with which she tries to access the door, thus completing a failed rebirth.
Kubric makes it very difficult for us, because we are in a vicious circle of how the executioner becomes the victim and the abuser becomes the abused, but as from the difficulty we can only understand the deep truth, in reality it is the victim who becomes the executioner, the abused becomes the abuser, this is the real programming, the executioner makes the victim another executioner. The programmed becomes the programmer.
All told with architecture, design, much insight and subtlety.
