When Stanley Kubrick tried to explain the end of ‘The Shining’: “Since you asked me”
Would the ending of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining have generated so much debate, discussion, and dissection if the director hadn’t realised he’d made a grave error in sending the finished film out to cinemas with a coda he immediately tried to erase from existence? It’s definitely worth thinking about.
The 1980 classic originally ended with Shelley Duvall’s Wendy Torrance recuperating from her ordeal in the hospital when Barry Nelson’s Stuart Ullman shows up, tells her they never found her husband’s body, throws young Danny the same tennis ball his old man was tossing around the Overlook Hotel and then fucks off.
Getting rid of it a week into The Shining‘s theatrical run was the right call, with the image of Jack Nicholson grinning ominously from a photograph dated July 4th, 1921 ending the film on an ambiguous, sinister, and iconic note that viewers have been picking apart for over 40 years.
To this day, theories continue to run wild as to why The Shining waited until its closing shot to hint at a malevolent hotel having the ability to bend the laws of time and space to its will to trap Jack Torrance in a never-ending cycle of misery and misdeeds. Much like David Lynch, Kubrick was never one for spoon-feeding the meaning of his work to audiences, but he did try once.
“It’s supposed to suggest a kind of evil reincarnation cycle,” he hinted to Jun’ichi Yao. “Where he is part of the hotel’s history, just as in the men’s room, he’s talking to the former caretaker, ghost of the former caretaker, who says to him, ‘You are the caretaker; you’ve always been the caretaker, I should know, I’ve always been here.'”
That matches up with the most consistent interpretation of The Shining‘s ending: that Jack is destined to rinse and repeat his descent into madness for eternity and there was never anything he could do to resist the foreboding charms of the Overlook because, according to Kubrick and Philip Stone’s Delbert Grady, he’s always been part of its grand design whether he knew it or not.
“One is merely suggesting some kind of endless cycle of this evil reincarnation,” Kubrick continued before stopping himself from diving any deeper into the nitty-gritty. “Also… well, that’s it, and it’s the sort of thing that I think is better left unexplained, but since you asked me, I tried to explain.”
It’s not quite the definitive answer to the questions posed by The Shining‘s last moment, which is precisely how the director wanted it to be. He’d rather let people make up their own minds, but it turned out the easiest way to find out what he thought it meant was by asking him. For someone as infamously guarded as Kubrick, it’s so obvious that it’s a wonder more folks didn’t think of doing it.
