‘The Shining’: Stephen King’s reimagining of the Eagles hit ‘Hotel California’
It’s easy to revisit the opening chapter of Stephen King‘s The Shining and pinpoint his techniques to build the story’s broader themes into Jack Torrance’s job interview at the Overlook Hotel. “Officious little prick,” our antagonist might think on several occasions as Ullman wastes no time sugarcoating the building’s colourful history, but efforts to forbode Torrance are fruitless. The hotel’s deceptive grandeur is too appealing, forming the strange juxtaposition of a place designed to be welcoming and quickly succumbing to scandal and terror.
These themes of horror rising from isolation and entrapment in an almost sinister hotel setting were explored a year prior in the Eagles’ immense hit ‘Hotel California’. By the mid-1970s, bands like the Eagles were becoming increasingly aware of the dangers of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, even if they had yet to address the necessity of making the appropriate changes—sometimes it felt impossible, especially if you were to prioritise your success.
‘Hotel California’ drew in monumental sales at a significant juncture for the band, capturing a level of popularity and success that warranted widespread interpretation. The thing about this song, however, was that its exact meaning wasn’t easy to deduce, partially due to the band’s atmosphere of mystery but mainly because of the lyrics, which drew on both real and metaphorical tropes to create a sense of entrapment.
This feeling was something the band knew well at this point, especially with their experiences rising to such monumental heights of fame, so something that pinpointed a general air of malaise as openly as ‘Hotel California’ wasn’t exactly a surprise. However, suspicions continued to pour in about the song’s true meaning and whether it broadly criticised the dangers of the world of rock under the guise of physical entrapment or whether it tapped into something even more sinister.
“The concept had to do with taking a look at all the band had gone through, personally and professionally, while it was still happening to them,” Don Henley explained to author Marc Eliot. “We were getting an extensive education in life, in love, in business. Beverly Hills was still a mythical place to us. In that sense, it became something of a symbol, and the ‘Hotel’ was the locus of all that LA had come to mean for us. In a sentence, I’d sum it up as the end of the innocence, round one.”
In the beginning, the song seems to point towards the hotel as a sort of symbol of relief and idyllic freedom, but on the inside, it signifies the impossibility of escapism, something that the song reflects most starkly in the final line: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” In The Shining, the Overlook Hotel resembles the same psychological shackles as Hotel California, implying no escape, even if it seems that there is an obvious way out.
The psychological facet also permeates both fictions in the almost supernaturally ethereal edge given to both, particularly in the beginning, with Torrance shrugging off the Overlook’s more disturbing historical events in a similar manner to Eagles’ unawareness of their hotel’s spellbinding quality. All they know as they approach is that this feels like a much-needed sanctuary, one with luxury and an overwhelming sense of welcome before its more sinister underbelly reveals itself.
Being released a year apart, The Shining and ‘Hotel California’ appear deeply entrenched in the emerging sense of capitalist entrapment that threatened to define the 1970s and the disillusionment that followed the peace-laden call for greater freedom and creativity in the 1960s. The line between reality and psychosis becomes blurred amid the confusion of such societal upheaval, with both subjects lamenting the real possibility of disappearing in a haze of despair and defeat. As Eagles put it, “We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969.”
The hotels might be inviting in the first instance, even necessary for survival, but the more they take over as an intrinsic entity, the more they reveal the basic aspects of loss of identity and self, alongside self-destructiveness and the pitfalls of a generation who were not only promised meritocracy in the form of the American dream but who felt entitled to it, too. In The Shining, dreams of escape and success appear in the form of aspirations that never occur, while in ‘Hotel California’, there is a persistent longing for the way things were, resulting in a sinister loop of nostalgia-driven longing.
The death of the American dream manifests in Torrance’s psychological break following his inability to pursue his dreams of being a successful man of intellect and a perfect father and husband. It’s a toll he cannot escape, set against the backdrop of the Overlook Hotel as a stand-in for the broader entertainment industry and Hollywood’s knack for selling it all as a pretence for keeping hamsters on its wheel indefinitely.
‘Hotel California’, though a more succinct variation, reveals the music industry’s corruption and obsession with materialism, negating the system and the pressure it puts on those in the rat race. The whole thing likely stemmed from the band members’ personal experiences with stability and status, but with illusion hardwired into such American business and culture monopolies, ignoring the obvious capitalist thread seems entirely dismissive.
As Henley reflected in the 2014 documentary History of the Eagles, “There was some kind of commentary on the music business and on American culture in general.” He added: “The hotel itself could be taken as a metaphor not only for the myth-making of Southern California but for the myth-making that is the American Dream because it is a fine line between the American Dream and the American nightmare.”
Interestingly, the cinematic disposition of ‘Hotel California’ and its broader themes caught the attention of several film industry figures, including the producer who worked on Taxi Driver and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The general premise had already been done a number of times—someone stalking up a highway and stumbling upon a mysterious hotel is what sets the scene for many earlier movies, like Psycho—but people became endeared to the nuances Eagles applied to the concept, with “one-shots all sort of strung together, and you sort of draw your own conclusions from it,” as Glenn Frey later said.
Therefore, its cultural resonance and enigmatic quality clearly pinpointed something both the music and film industries were becoming increasingly keyed into. Moreover, the entertainment industries might forever be perpetrators of the disillusionment that defines the American dream, but their fixation with it ultimately reflects society’s ongoing struggle to reconcile idealism with reality.
