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Most critics of Stanley Kubrick's latest film, The Shining, seem to feel that he has provided so much psychological motivation for the events in the movie that he has rendered unnecessary the presence of the supernatural and extrasensory perception, thereby draining the horror from what was heralded as "the ultimate horror film." Jack Kroll says that "The sight of Torrance's endlessly repeated sentence chills you with its revelation of a man so clogged and aching with frustrated creativity that his desire to kill doesn't need to be explained by his seizure by sinister and suppurating creatures from a time warp of pure evil."l Pauline Kael asks, "Do the tensions between father, mother, and son create the ghosts, or do the ghosts serve as catalysts to make those tensions erupt? It appears to. be an intertwined process. Kubrick seems to be saying that rage, uncontrollable violence, and ghosts spawn each other-that they are really the same thing." She concludes that while the film's theme is "the timelessness of murder," "the picture seems not to make any sense."2
Both these critics go wrong in focussing on Torrance's transformation from troubled father to axe-murderer. Both Torrance's son and wife who are not characterized by rage or uncontrollable violence also see ghosts- ghosts he never sees. Like Torrance's wife, Wendy, we are torn between two people possessed, a father and a son. Kubrick places us at the very fulcrum of their opposing but related perspectives.
The source of this balance can be traced to the two books Kubrick and Diane Johnson reportedly read while writing the script- Freud's essay "The 'Uncanny' " (1919) and Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment (1976). 3 Pauline Kael recognizes that Kubrick may have structured his film in terms of Freud's essay (i.e., the use of doubles, déjà vu, a maze),4 but she completely ignores not only Bettelheim's book as an influence but elements in Freud's essay directly related to Bettelheim's topic. If Kubrick's intention was to focus solely on the father, it is understandable why he might read an essay about the nature of an adult's feeling of horror. But why read a book concerning the importance fairy tales have for children if the son's view of the events is not equally important?...