The Shining Analysis

An analysis of Mise-en-scene and Editing in an extract from The Shining Superficially, The Shining (1980) directed by Stanley Kubrick and written by horror novelist Stephan King, is about Jack Torrance; a writer suffering from writer’s block and his family who move into the Overlook Hotel after Jack takes an off season job as caretaker. As stories unfold about the hotels previous inhabitants, Wendy and Jack’s son, Danny’s frequent psychic premonitions become vivid, paralleling Jacks deteriorating psychotic state of mind, as their stay at the hotel grows longer. Under the surface however Kubrick uses mise en scene and editing in The Shining to display hypocrisy and inability of Americans to admit the mass Native American Indian genocide, and
For example, the colours Danny is wearing match the pastel blue dresses the girls wear, connoting purity and innocence. However, in a shot shortly after the audience is exposed to the girls brutally murdered in the hallway, their dresses covered with blood that also stains the blue walls creating a shocking resemblance to Danny’s costume. Perhaps Kubrick is trying to create broad symbolism of the mass murder of the Native Indians, implying to the audience that it still lies in the hands of the Americans, indicating that they will be forever guilty of genocide, which will haunt them. Then again, Danny’s costume could have been used by Kubrick to enhance the theme of repetition, implying that westerners have never stopped killing since the first major extermination of a race, exaggerating that the past is doomed to repeat itself. His costume bares a similarity to his fathers which may have been used to suggest that Danny will grow up to become comparable to his psychotic father; this could infer that throughout generations the American mindset hasn’t changed. The younger generation will duplicate the generation before them like an ongoing cycle; unable and unwilling to accept the disturbing truth of the people that they have murdered. In addition, the two girls have a strange similarity to Wendy who Danny has a close relationship with. During the start of the film Wendy wears a blue dress
A brown wooden chair turned over drastically on the floor is used on the first vertical third of the shot implying a sense of struggle before the murder took place. This makes the audience feel sympathetic towards them but also horribly disturbed at the same time. Also the chair seems abnormal in the visually pleasing shot of the lifeless girls placed mirroring each other, lying perfectly horizontally across the hallway, their heads on either side of each wall. The chair doesn’t fit at all in the shot creating a sharp contrast in the surrounding