32/ What does the ending mean?
"I hope the audience has a good fright, has believed the film while they were watching it and retains some sense of it. The ballroom photograph at the end suggests the reincarnation of Jack"
Stanley Kubrick
Here's a section of Jonathan Romnay's essay on The Shining from the August '99 edition of Sight and Sound.
Amid the quiet - broken only by the ghostly strains of a 20's dance tune - the camera tracks slowly towards a wall of photographs from the Overlook's illustrious history. It closes in on a central picture showing a group of revellers smiling at the camera and the in two dissolves, reveals first the person at the centre of the group - Jack himself, smiling and youthful in evening dress - and then the inscription, "Overlook Hotel, July 4th Ball, 1921" Cue credits, cue shudder from the audience.
Just what makes this chilly pay off so uncanny? It appears to reveal something, the final narrative turn of the screw, or perhaps an explanation of the stories ambiguities - but really it reveals nothing for certain. What's more the last thing we see is not an image but and inscription hardy the chilling coup de theatre we expect from a horror film. But The Shining is a film that, while it uses written language sparingly is most concerned with words: not just words of the literary chef d'oevre Jack attempts to write, but also the film's frequent intertitles, and the fetish word REDRUM (murder in mirror writing that preoccupies Danny,
The closing inscription appears to explain what has happened to Jack. Until watching the film again recently I'd always assumed that, after his ordeal in the haunted palace, Jack has been absorbed into the hotel, another sacrificial victim earning his place at the Overlook's eternal the dansant of the damned. At the Overlook , it's always 4 July 1921 - although God knows exactly what happened that night [..]
Or you can look at it another way. Perhaps Jack hasn't been absorbed - perhaps he has really been in the Overlook all along. As the ghostly butler Grady tells him during their chilling confrontation in the man's toilet. "You are the caretaker, you have always been the caretaker Perhaps in some early incantation Jack really was around in 1921, and it's his present day self that is in the shadow of the phantom photographic copy. But if his picture has been there all along, why has no one noticed it. After all its right at the centre of the central picture on the wall. and the Torrances have had a painfully drawn our winter of mind numbing leisure in which to inspect every corner of the place. It is just that, like Poe's purloined letter, the thing in plain sight is the last thing you see. When you do see it, the effect is so unsettling because you realise the unthinkable was there under your nose - overlooked - the whole time.
However you interpret the photographic evidence with which the film singularly fails to settle its uncertainties, this strikes us as an uncanny ending to an uncanny film. One of the texts Kubrick and his co writer Diane Johnson referred to when adapting Steven King's novel was Freud's 1919 essay "The Uncanny." The essay defines uncanny as the class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. Or as Freud put it, quoting Schelling, the uncanny is "something which out to have remained missed but which is brought to light. [...]
The Overlook doesn't want a neat caretaker, let alone a resident writer. It likes to reduce clever people to menials: look at Grady the butler, clearly a cultivated man through and through. the Overlook wants Jack as a clown, an entertainer for the bored spooks wintering up there alone, The privilege Jack is accorded (Tolerance from Lloyd the sepulchral barman, limitless credit from the management) are the sort of deals given to the in-house cabaret act. The ghouls are assembled to watch Jack wrestle with his demons and lose: this is effectively Kubrick's second gladiator movie, after Spartacus (1960).
Hence Jack's reward after his defeat: a central place among, who knows how many other doomed variety acts on the Overlook's wall of fame. He's added to the bill on the Overlook's everlasting big night back in 1921. And having done his stuff, he deserves an acknowledgement from us too as we get our coats and leave. And that's exactly what he gets. The last thing we hear in the film after the echoing strains of midnight with the stars and you is a round of polite applause over the end credits, which then dies down as the ghouls leave the theatre.
I just recently watched the Shining and I think it replaces 2001 as my favorite Kubrick film.
