The Shining Room
Live from Sens
In 1980 everything changed and Gen X wasn’t even Gen X yet but somehow you just knew this was all gonna wind up being an algebraic variable, and scary movies were released for the huddled masses to deal with cold war paranoia. We were aware that just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t after you and there was a great deal of research, without an internet, into who they were, in the days when we could conjure a conspiracy without the acceleration of the internet.
Two of the movies were Alien (1979) and The Shining (1980). Alien is a movie about a monster terrorizing a resilient woman who ultimately survives, and so is The Shining.
Last night (whenever you are, last night remains fixed in time) in the proudly loyal municipality of Kingston, Ontario, I lost myself in the comforts of the Screening Room, a repertory cinema in the grand tradition of independent movie houses which still proliferate, if not prolifically. Upon one of three screens was screening, on the forty-fifth anniversary of its release, The Shining. I was the only representative of My Generation and surely (not Shirley) the oldest patron. The rest of the three-quarters filled theatre was kids. A kid, for this veteran of a thousand psychic wars, is anyone who doesn’t remember when The Shining was released.
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I started visiting Kingston from Montréal in the 1980s when mom started teaching at Queen’s university. Kingston is a university, a military, and a prison town, so if DOGE was here the whole place would be unemployed. The economic fallout would precipitate the collapse of a remarkable number of bougie bakeries, beloved equally by professors, professional criminals and professional soldiers. If you want cake, you should have it and eat it too, here.
Most of Kingston is not bougie. I only know the part that is still wearing its bougie shoes.
I stayed with mom and her mad professor. I came for the family dinners and stayed for the erudition. I brought Babelfish to play The Toucan here, a pub that will be overflowing for St. Patty’s Day. The Irish. If they aren’t writing, they’re drinking.
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The Shining is about writing and particularly the associated isolation. It is also about what its director Stanley (Cup) Kubrick said was the plight of the indigenous peoples of America. And ultimately it is about the thing it is (a spontaneous act of creation into an indifferent universe) which all brilliant things are. The director of the movie being the eye of God and the will for control. The novel is by Stephen King, for whom Kingston is probably not named but last night this was Stephen Kingston.
Writing is hard and we know this because every single fucking writer says writing is hard and for anyone who can’t write and tries, the truth becomes clear, fast. So the only people we have to rely upon for this whole writing is hard thing are writers and you just have to take our word(s) for it.
Jack Nicholson plays Jack Torrance. He brings his small family to oversee the Overlook Hotel -or the Overlooked Hotel because Jack has been overlooked his whole goddamn life- for the winter, when the sprawling estate is snowed in and, like a derelict spacecraft, all alone. Jack is faithfully accompanied by wife Wendy and son Danny. Wendy is a high-strung Mother with eyes as big as Shelley Duvall, because she is in fact played by Shelley Duvall, and Danny has a boy who lives in his mouth named Tony, who showed up around the time Dad dislocated Danny’s shoulder, in an incident of parenting while drunk. The political times are hinted at from a copy of the New York Review of Books lying on the Torrance’s coffee table with the headline The Carter Collapse. America has embraced a new President, a B movie actor who thinks America is a TV show, and, in his words: a Shining city on a hill.
A million words before these have been miswritten about The Shining. Jack wants to write, get famous, be the fuckin man. Finally alone with his thoughts, he sits at his typewriter on the long desk situated in a magnificent parlour (study, conservatory, lounge, anything from Clue, really), an expansive metaphor for the vastness of human consciousness, Barton Fink’s life of the mind manifest in eternal capacious surroundings. Barton’s hotel is decrepit, Jack’s is eternal.
Jack’s barely concealed condescension towards Wendy turns fully hostile when she interrupts his important work in this elegant mind chamber. And yes, yes, Nicholson and Duvall are extraordinary, you know, this isn’t a fucking film review. This moment, Jack’s turning, is the actual scary part. Wendy alone with a guy who can’t see beyond his failures, a big dumb writer who is realizing he might suck at this. He sees his incompetence and blames his family, the only thing he has any power over. The governing political class.
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Today’s laughable missive is live at Sens café in Kingston, the third Next Play to be written here. The owner is a lovely woman from France who brings coffee and a local bagel to my table with a side of smile, and this big dumb writer is not used to being served petit déjeuner when working (working! as if). Sens (not a hockey team) paid nothing for this wildly influential shoutout.
Stephen King wrote a book on writing called On Writing and I keep trying to read On Writing before I write the next Next Play and I never do and boy can you tell.
Meanwhile (if you start a sentence with meanwhile you are failing upward) Jack is writing. You can hear the clackety clack of the typewriter. AI don’t use no typewriter. This is real human stuff, a soul pouring itself onto the page like syrup from a tree onto new fallen snow, also known as sugaring off.
Once events in The Shining have gotten as bad as they reasonably can without an alien showing up, Wendy goes down with a baseball bat to Jack’s writing, um, palace, and finds the desk absent the writer. Famously, she discovers a novel’s worth of typewritten pages with just one sentence, repeated thousands of times in different formatting: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. (We see the actual pages. Someone had to type this. It’s not a special effect or AI. This was someone’s job. I wish it had been mine).
It’s a writer’s joke about masturbation. Sugaring off.
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I was a kid (way under forty) and going to Montréal repertory cinemas that were dives compared to the bougie charms of the Screening Room. It was Monty Python at Cinema V, Led Zeppelin at Cinéma Lumière (in the original 4-track, which was um, kinda dumb), and David Lynch at Cinéma du Parc.
Sean Baker, the Director of Anora who won all the Oscars this year and took the occasion (after Adrien Brody’s convincing performance of a man making the worst speech of all time) to deliver a good speech (a King’s Speech, if you will) about the cultural desirability for movie theatres. Ok, it’s how he makes his living, so yeah, but he’s right.
At the last pandemic -and if you are reading this next year, that historical reference might be different- benefactors rescued the Screening Room from the coronavirus and kept one last movie theatre operating in downtown Kingston. And it isn’t a Cineplex.
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In 2025, The Shining centers Wendy, Danny and Scatman Crothers’ Dick Hallorann, who is also Jesus (he really shines), dealing with flailing, failing, murdering Jack. Jack inflicts unnecessary cruelty to hide from his insecurity and shame and it is up to the other characters, with their big eyes and crazy sweaters, to survive him.
I don’t know what the kids thought of The Shining. They had a place to be and it wasn’t a phone. After the movie, when the lights went up, I noted a recognizable giddiness. Kids talking over each other. It’s a good thing. All work and no play makes Jack fucking dangerous.
RED RUM
· Radiohead made an LLP. Some might be giddy.
· The Bends is 30. Just.
· Hugh Grant on Creep iterations.
· Twin funk guitars. Live from New York on Saturday night. Some might go gaga. Woulda been on the 90s house band set list immediately.