The column behind Jack, a dimensioned shape, is the width size of Danny’s bathroom mirror as his zoom begins (and is predicted by column-like shape that framed Jack in his sit-down interview).  The mirror's door is not closed it is slightly opened at its left side.  A doorway in editing. This ajar/folding space motif is continuous in the film, using variants of this logic, spaces and rooms have folds and doorways that are left open, a play on words. Vertical Interview. Some cuts invert background and subject.  Others use a bookend shot, a transition, like an image of Danny looking (seeing what we see). Patterns made of folded walls in backgrounds, irregular wall designs all begin to emerge slowly as animation across cuts. (Kubrick may have adapted some of this frozen animation style from his own manner merged with ghost logic/graphic Topiary scene in book: each time Jack looks back at animals carved from shrubbery they've moved, in effect Kubrick makes the entire film this blink-and-the-scene-is-different, and he gets to ditch the topiary scene's pulpy narrative, special effects laden problematics. Importantly the topiary scene is a only a literary masterpiece concept because it's only comprehendable by Jack who turns to walk and loses sight of the hedges, Kubrick rigorously chooses to alter from King and make the hallucinations continuously communally viewable.)

This interview exhibits two faces: Danny's and the elevator.

The poster, a medium that descends from stelae and other publically placed displays, illustrates what shining actually is, in yellow, is animating a face from a black and white realm, or is the final view as the face is frozen into the black and white realm the film ends with, a sunset of some kind. The elevator is a progression from/to this title-image, the T is transformed to the mesoamerican (Aztec/Mayan/Mixtec/Zapotec) lintel form, a staging location most associated with ritual bloodletting (kingship and priesthood were sometimes linked via blood spilling) and human sacrifice, the eyes transform to the elevator's dials. The yellow is diluted from red, becoming sunlight, an unseen but implied transition, into two purities of equal parts white and red. Two black and white framed posters on left and right walls act as mirrors. And the chandelier is in full blast, an overexposed shining like the poster's overblown yellow light.

Images from within: the demon FACEMENT of the hotel, the elevator,  in a sunlight less corridor, ejects blood from its left side (look at left sides: where Danny’s animated myth characters are affixed, the left doors of both inner and outer facements): the hotel is a living being. Corporeal hallucination. Masks are encrypted elsewhere in the hotel as well. The blood pours earthward to mirror - mimic the watery image the film begins with, the furniture moves and floats not unlike the island's movement.  Combine the liquids unconsciously: Red (blood) White (milk) and Blue (lake). Gravity enforces the division made by the liquid/sky, it moves from upper to lower. Watch further examples of right-left entrances, they are keys to comprehension. Red, both literal and metaphorical, is isolated in this shot. As an extraction blood-rite, the elevator summarizes an extreme result of living sacrifice and hallucinatory bleeding. As a destiny-destination that separates body from spirit, the Hotel combines the segueing of human sacrifice, obviously this blood refers to Jack's draining blood once you connect Wendy's view with the maze's effective trap. The color concentrated drawn from the living who, if doubled and killed inside the hotel/maze, become black and white (which is why the landscape images outside Ullman’s office can keep their color, there are no humans exhibited). This begs the question who is storing this blood? Whose blood is it?  Answer from King: a native spirit dimension, answer from Kubrick a lintel faced by what appears to be Wide Ruins hochq design elements of the Navajo built into a T-shaped Mesoamerican portal. The darkest possible state of humanity, a blanket-form that bleeds. A platform portal that descends into an underworld (like most portals atop Mayan/Aztec/Mixtex/Zapotec/'Olmec'/Toltec pyramids, though raised aboveground, still keep their underworld connections mytho-logical). No other primary colors appear.  Like Ullman office there is asymmetry within apparent symmetry. Flash cut, The girls are representationally twinned: they are not true twins, they are only perceived as twins (we know they are different ages), a doubling meant to invite Danny to join and double himself (which has already begun to Jack). We stare at them laterally (our eyes remain on a horizon) but we interpret their differences in conscious and unconscious manners, there are right-left differences of bilateral symmetry and asymmetry (ie: differences in body weight, ratios of torso/legs). Their shot has blue as a primary and yellow as secondary (the title sequence returns as color leitmotif blended with the pure reds and white). Their background is littered with asymmetries and complex shadowing. The hotel's power T-form separates into further asymmetries, colors diffuse their psychic/spiritual value purities into patterns made of symbols. Back to the elevator. Now red pours onto floor (and the red animates into the hotel: the access way that Danny drives over, and the walls of the Gold Ballroom’s bathroom, the Fire alarm bells.)

The elevator's glyph-image is associated with the outer/inner symmetries begun demonically in Ullman's office, except in this new form there is both asymmetry in frame and at center a brilliant animation in cutting: look closely dead center is the elevator's left call button, an incongruous and sly overdesign (why does an elevator bank require two request buttons).  Incredibly, this is a direct portal with 2001, combining color (the red and the red of HAL's eye) and the form (the button-light) merging HAL 9000's eye with this elevator bank. Why? They are both masks of murderers, and they are intelligences that discovered murder in revolt to the paradox they were created/conquered by. There are complex differences as well. The hotel's manifest intelligence is asymmetric and analog in contrast to HAL's exhibited symmetry and perceived digital. They are opposite. If the view into Ullman's room is a (possibly illusory, see below) portal to a skylit (upper) ghosting-form through native wave-lightning patterns broken by a change in visual-cognizance (the asymmetry hiding behind symmetry), then the elevator bank's asymmetry is a function of Kubrick's exacting frame (HAL is a cyclops, the elevator bank is cockeyed: the way Kubrick views it for us), a metamorphosis that combines what is seen in Ullman's office into a central mask.  HAL is born from perceptive and taught electrical logic (and collapses into a murderous rage, a fit of perfection) and Hotel (with elevators acts like HAL's seeing interface) is born from holocaust murder-death purified into spectral logic.

In return to Boulder, red and blue (and white, her skin) are grouped back into Wendy’s outfit.

Colors/Bears.
3rd redhead, the doctor, examines Danny by shining light into his eyes (and our last image was of a very faint point of light in the center of frame), who lies upon a brown bear pillow with the elevator's half circle eye form (protected like a native in his sleep/dreams). See the mirror both bear and doctor create. She also is dressed in brown hues, a fellow bear of the forest. Her final bodygarment is black suggesting a void, like the bear's mouth he could be swallowed up by and in motif similar to the animal illustration on the floor which duplicates every color in the room (and mimics monolith from 2001) and acts as a void. Appliques on left wall become three dimensional on right wall. Danny's eyes cross the center plane both horizontally and vertically (similar to the poster), as if he has seen beyond. The doctor mimics him in communication but does not succeed entirely ("is Tony one of your animals?"), she remains above horizon. When asked if Tony tells him to do things, he looks both left and right: he checks with both sides of himself - a sign of consciousness. He tells her he will not answer anymore questions. Danny disagrees with her request to remain in bed. A hero's defiance: he is suspicious of her motives. Wendy stares at bed from its foot, this exact stance 90 degree morphed is doubled at film’s end for a shock scene, the bear reappears at the film’s end reversed: as Wendy runs up the stairs, she spots a Bear giving head to a partygoer sitting on bed, her angle to the bed 90 degrees off this first bear. This tells us the hotel scares you with signs you are not aware of consciously: it reads your mind and later shows something you fear to you at right angles.

The movement from bedroom to living room is a series of right angles. "Shall we go into the living room." No doubt conscious of language shifting, this moniker seems normal to us, but perverse to non-English users. Kubrick repeatedly shows us the normality of this apartment and it will contrast with the monstrous impossibilities of the Hotel's design (to be explained below).

Cigarette:  Doctor sits under sunlight and disappears into color void, like Ullman her hair matches the curtains, she is ghosted. Forms of curtains here are animating from Ullman's curtains: now a Navajo sunset pattern is used. Doctor's hand gestures differ when cutting, suggesting the Doctor is part of this mirror world that Wendy is not. She's contrasted in both outfit and skintone/haircolor. Wendy takes out a cigarette (a reference to Navajo/Crow peace pipe) and is interviewed. She approaches her interview on an angle unlike Jack's approach. Her unconditional retelling of Danny’s accident means she does not rewrite history. The magic of the Navajo spirit in the smoke is honored (tobacco is a truth/peace drug). Although her past is not peaceful, she does not hide from it. Wendy’s brown eyes are entirely visible.  This scene occurs in Altman’s 3 Women with very different palattes.  The ‘Navajo’ book pattern from the Ullman interview is centered and is the highest point in the frame in almost same spot as the office, here it is perfectly centered horizontally. Notice the shift of window left from Ullman office while the zig-zag pattern remains centered. These are Interviews, not unlike how codes and passwords are tumbled to make passages difficult.

Closing day is Halloween. Ullman explains earlier their season runs May 15 (very near film's release date) through October 30th. 

The car rides on left slope of approach valley, reverse of first approach.

Framing of family in car allows Danny to be the tallest (and he remains visible to Jack in car's interior rear view mirror). Last Danny standing shot was looking in bathroom's mirror right, now he looks left into another mirror now offscreen, and talks. Jack glances at him repeatedly, in effect Danny is conceptually chasing him (Roadrunner/Coyote reversed).  Notice audio, the car is almost silent, “Boy it sure feels different up here.” This suggests the car is not even on, it is being pulled by the hotel itself.  One of the few shots composing them together.  Music is more eternal synth-organ and it suggests the car's engine is haunted.   This is the only original piece of music composed for the film as the opening theme is the Dies Irae.

The following shot of the car is reverse of the interior angle.

Again hotel is shown as ghost ship, the dissolve maps the Beetle's arrival as a vision, see the Beetle appears on a road to itself curving, where it is parked. Different time of day/angle of sun/change in sky condition from opening.

Reverse angle from initial lobby establishing shot (Jack’s initial arrival). A man mops where Beetle was frozen. A mirror staged to re-enact his first interview, Jack is seated like he was in Ullman's office. Ullman is dressed in same colors as column. Like bellhop in previous scene in lobby, reversed.  Once out of red white and blue uniform, he adopts the hotel’s appearance. The dissolve(s) showcase patterns, surfaces and perspectives in play. In the distance, BOTH interiors have matching staircases, like a lock's form, look at the dissolve: the man with the rolled rug is ascending. Many facements overlap perfectly (notice photographs). Crosses dissolve into elevator door.

Ullman and Jack depart left and arrive right. A red pool table equates this room with Games room (the Games room had a Colorado flag). Tour of Hotel is replayed during film’s last scenes in reverse, kitchen, maze, quarters, gold ballroom.  Sequences are even reversed ie: while describing maze, the party is actually walking away from the maze, surreal but not enough to awaken an audience into questioning storytelling.  Establishing shot of Colorado lounge showcases the group’s exit from the left elevator doors, the first time we see the doors post-blood vision and the only use of the elevator for ascension ever shown.  Later we will see this view is from another elevator/mask in the room.  An American flag caps the room’s end, just below here, Jack will begin writing. On an opposing 45 degree plane from the elevator is the first visible Navajo rug, made of browns, animating the hotel’s décor into a symbol source (from Lobby's polished surface designs to the weaving the patterns are born inside). Wendy is dressed in rug’s same colors.  Wendy is centered throughout tracking. Colorado lounge is a pronounced symbolic battlefield. Vast Tudor chandeliers lord over flattened Navajo patterns in rugs. Much of the Amerindian symmetry is walked upon or used out of context. A man now walks down with a rug, towards us in opposite to the Lobby scene. Movement creates overlays in window-distance, mid-ground and foreground imagery. At opposite position to establishing elevator is a scale differential: an impossibly large fireplace (humans can fit inside it) opposite Sitting Bull's portrait. This is a movement from colorful abstract wall art outside Halloran office of the chief to this black and white photograph. Placed opposite a massive fireplace, imagine the glass's surface reflecting this pyre. The transition to black and white photograph suggests death, like Jack's transition into his.

Games room is beginning of the Overlook's game, a game of death the hotel plays with any active user. Here Danny's first real time hallucination occurs, this doorway image of the girls is the Hotel's first giveaway.  All the other mirrors will be congruous, they will seem invisible, like Ullman's two offices. Later in the red bathroom scene we will see that Jack has always been fooled by the mirror, he stares into the mirror not at the Grady we see him standing nearest. Games room is beginning of the Hotel’s unique property of time re-balancing made visible through editing: watch closely, the girls, their establishing vision and their outfits will expand into other sequences. "My son has discovered the games room." A hint at Discovery, HAL's conscious vessel from 2001, the quote also lets the audience know that this is a game spirits play. A suggestion that foreknowledge is a weapon that emerges from knowledge. Kubrick begins showing mirrors within shots: Danny travels through the shot to return to an opposite stance, like Jack's initial hotel lobby sequence. Danny throws red darts (in contrast/parallel to his dad, who hurls a tennis ball later in the film at the initial Navajo blanket) to target and in whip-pan, girls in blue penetrate this dimension, they are no longer relegated to ‘visions’ of Danny’s, they appear corporeal, escalating the Hotel’s intention with Danny. The Hotel is animating (call it from now on shining) the dead as invitation to Danny: it looks as real as you are. A poster above this pair continues their symmetry deeper.   In parallel to the Colorado Lounge with an American flag at top, this is the games room with a flag made from Colorado Indian visual forms: the state flag. Both flag and dart board are target-shaped and are shown at right angles. Kubrick is suggesting that the phones (communication), the card tables, the skiing, the buffalo hunt, and the conversion of the Colorado Indian emblem to state flag are part of a game of conversion from color to black and white, a vast metaphoric glyph of a conquest game, the human version. It's mirror is later converted into a game by Jack who parallels Danny by tossing the ball in the Colorado Lounge against an Indian form. They both agree to play the game and they sign on after cryptic discoveries, and the Hotel becomes a mirror that must be consciously navigated to survive now.

Like separation of blood-red pouring and girls’ establish shot, the red darts play counterpart to the girls’ blue isolation. They are responses to Danny's assertion, he's prodding the hotel to communicate, he's pricking it to play a game with him. Danny is the instigator, later he will activate portal to Room 237 by turning its knob (and seeing the future, again).   Phone booth mimics vidphone in 2001.  In effect we are at both films' stage of consciousness: remember Floyd communicates with his daughter, now there are two. Danny’s face stares at the departing girls, and cuts to arriving Torrances, in corridor with wall pattern behind where we first met girls in corridor vision in Bathroom mirror.  The solid yellow baseboards and blue walls here extrude from that rear corridor, the girls' fabric is now on these walls. A complex completion across time and edits, a Shining. These subtle shifts cannot all be explained here, this guide excerpt is roughly half of the notes, but like Ullman taking column's colors, and these girls' fabric extending on foreground wall in a future within the film, the upcoming is littered with hundreds of planned transferences. You are watching the first ghost film that employs active human memory, with shifts in color, props, doorways that lead to nowhere, windows that should not be there:  these are subtle and manipulative in an unconscious way (it makes the film riveting without knowing why) and some could even be falsely labeled as continuity errors.

An example, look below and see the EXIT sign right. This would imply a corridor is there and a staircase. Once we enter the bathroom of their apartment, and are shown the window in the bathoom (and then later we see Danny exit an entirely flat exterior wall) this corridor and implied exit are false in physical space. We have been fooled without seeing it exactly: unconsciously we can tell the entire Hotel's design is false. Deformities in spatial logic are continuous.

Grown twins, tall light brown haired women, walk towards the blue floral wall pattern and Jack stares at them, duplicating Danny’s last act of seeing other near twins. They are seeing twins at differing time scales. Oval above bed duplicates at final bed in 2001 and is a portal to the opening shot a few minutes ago.  Kubrick probes the rooms until the bathroom to ensure we are aware of this layout logic.

Bathroom is white and black and is terminus of this sequence as well as at ending. Both are followed by maze sequences.

Introduction to Overlook's hedge-maze is begun with party walking away from it, maze is capped by pyramids. They encounter red snowcat, first blood red object featured centrally after elevator expulsion. The snowcats form is dissolved towards a right angled (to it) love seat at entrance to Gold Ballroom, which it turns out has much blood red furniture. Entrance to maze is capped by the continually reappearing half-circle. The eye-form.

“I found him outside looking for you”  Danny seeks. Susie (a redhead like the Doctor) that stalks Danny. “Did you get tired of bombing the universe?”  Another almost secret reference to Danny’s descendancy from origin as 2001’s Starchild - final act unseen in 2001's script was the simultaneous destruction of the orbiting weapons. His jacket reads Flyer as a hint to Tony's eagle-spirit journey. Halloran is met in Gold Ballroom. Original goals of American conquest: passage to Pacific and gold.  As dressed, Halloran is highly contrasted.  Dress of characters shifts from person to person in the trio.  Late in film Danny wears Jack’s blood red coat. Staff met in Ballroom are near parodies of colonial battlefield, Halloran is an apparent Uncle Tom (it is his performance mask) and Grady is stodgy butler persona: they are cartoon characters (Scatman Crothers has voiced Disney characters).

The ghosts thrive in rooms without sunlight. The Ballroom is exhibited as a lateral tracking between mirrors, each side is a penetration into left-right mirror worlds, Danny enters mirror from left and joins them on right. The eye-forms (poster/elevator etc) appear as half-domes above insets on the golden stage far in the back. The ceiling apes Aztec/Mayan temple interior/exterior with suspended Tudor crown chandeliers: the Sun God is not only worshipped, its glittering spectacle is rendered day AND night. The tables are clearly Moonshapes, and showcase the moon descendant, unworshipped, support for alcohol and tobacco usage. On the floor is the Mayan symbol/eighth day-glyph Lamat composed of pink, gold and brown: the pouring blood red separated. Lamat is a day sign in Aztec/Maya calendars that most closely resembles the sun as glyph. Lamat is a symbol found across most prehistoric cultures (others include bar, dot and tri-dot) as early scrawled notation, but here with the native and mesoamerican references littering the film signifies its specificity. Completing cosmologies, the film now has North and Central information coding systems: the Navajo (and Apache, Crow, Blackfoot) are societies without written representation, their signs and symbols encode narratives, and now the Aztec and Maya, who encoded information into syllabaries of logograms, logoglyphs and ideograms.  These inclusions of forms means the Hotel celebrates and attempts the total domination of the Americas.  Dick Halloran enters from and keeps an optically clear ladder (teepee form) on his shoulder with a man standing on it.  Teepee form includes compressed human, first indication Halloran may possess unusual gifts. The Man on the Ladder appears to be whispering in Halloran's ear.

The Lamat symbol. Paradoxical that the day is celebrated in a room missing sunlight. The day is walked upon, perhaps this room is an underworld. At its separations, INTERVIEW, CLOSING DAY, TUESDAY, 4pm, The Shining contracts in time spans, ending literally in a fraction of a second on a date that acts as the counterpoint to earlier looser framings (the photograph) and at film's beginning is an infinity of time (INTERVIEW). Mayan time expands from a centerpoint of creation, Western time creates leapfrogs: creation to birth to death. Non-linear or Continuum vs. Linear: the horror of being pressed into a flash is the end of the film, a nightmarish Western time freeze.

Gold Ballroom: there is a massive play on words here, the yellow tennis ball will be the only ball we see consistently. Once properly decoded, this set is an inverted Mayan ballcourt (the ceiling) with a repeating sun image on the floor (its sky). The conquest of the Americas included the discovery and industrialization of rubber seen first by Cortes as a spiritual game of human-sun interaction (and then harvested madly through the 18th, 19th and part of the 20th century see the diaries of Roger Casement). The yellow Tennis ball is (colonially) a supreme compaction of sun-worshipping/ballgame played in Mayan societies until the 1600's.  The ball that Jack throws is a sun-object that has been conquered and absorbed into English game codes and now returns to the hotel as a prompt. It is a tease the spirits use relationally, the Games Room expanded into every room.

Tour of kitchen is like education of maze later on. It shows Wendy how to use the hotel.  Watch tracking, Wendy is favored in incandescent, Halloran in florescent. Jack never enters the kitchen except unconsciously, dragged by Wendy. He also never leaves the Hotel until film's end.  Kubrick begins jarring continuity tricks here. The film is littered with perhaps hundreds of changed orientations of props, directions, entrances. They are so subtle they defy even continuity experts.   Look closely when watching, Halloran opens a door to the freezer on one side of this hallway and they exit it on the opposite side. Notice the shift in door orientation entrance to exit. Once again he is suggesting the entire hotel is a shifting corporeal engine, now the doorways have no logic, they are portals. The kitchen itself has illogical doors across the entire hotel. Later when the film probes other accessways, Wendy will enter a mask of the hotel (as an illogical doorway to the kitchen, not an elevator) behind the Ullman office and it will make the window in his office appear either a flaw or an intentionally faked effect:  the window is spectral, it isn't real it's shining.  The final two shifts you will see, the summary portal/state change,  are the very entrance to the maze, which was once 90 degrees away, aimed away from the hotel, at film's end it now faces the hotel (Kubrick shows you a right pan to it) and the lobby at night. It appears Danny has shined this final opening, away from the Hotel's power, to disorient his father. This maze sequence is paralleled by Wendy's discovery of the Lobby moonlit and cobwebbed, which is the Hotel's actual alternate state (in moonlight, the men are sun worshippers: remember Danny's Apollo sweater they may help create the hotel's lighting) everything you have seen in the film is falsely single minded, the lights have never been on they are shined,  its existence to the known/outside world is as a hallucination.  It is dark only when a male is not present, and maybe only a white male. Maybe only an White Adult male with children. This may be the first and only scene by moonlight in the film. It is bright in the hotel to reinforce the male's domination. A building without a nightway.

Frozen meat suggests this is another roomful of red, yet frost covers it with white. Containment of death that jack will die in outside. Monochromatic like the B&W images.

In drystorage room, zoom reveals Halloran mirrored with Calumet baking powder alternated with Willapoint minced clams. Music begins cue that shining is occurring and it seems to be the result of the visual mirorring between Halloran and the only cartoon, animated archetype color image of a Native American. Iroquois profile on the shelf.  Jack will be imprisoned here, a step-away from the frozen mirror he ends inside, mirrored in time, the kitchen's maze mirrored against the one outside. Calumet is Iroquois peace/war pipe concept that became a contract between French and tribe subsequently dismantled by US Government’s evolving policies (despite the contract's acceptance into treaties). Danny’s favorite food is french fries and ketchup, all yellow and red.   Dry goods storage is assymetrical, mausoleum-like cold storage for frozen meat is symmetric.

Brilliant sequence. The group's departure leaving Danny and Halloran behind suggests Halloran can still hear them as they depart out of earshot: they never leave his head's 'aura' in dissolve. Both parties are reversed from one another, ending with a dissolve of the group farther away into Halloran's head who begins with "do you know how I knew your name?" as Kubrick has just slyly explained visually how he does. Subtle distant voices are heard throughout this scene.

Arrow forms are now aimed downwards, the knives pointing towards the underworld. Favorite flavor is chocolate. Inadvertant result of America’s conquest is cocoa (Aztec/Cortes). Halloran is revealed as protector, first testing validity of Tony’s advice, then discoursing about the Overlook. Danny has eaten from a silver cup-chalice that he surrounds with his arms. Both use hands posed in proper manner of discussion, initial one indicates collective prayer, they mutate per shot, defying continuity.  Danny is a seer, like Halloran. Objects and head shine here.  Shine in Danny’s chalice and Halloran’s head and their shape similarity intentional.

 

continues