A photographically obsessive Kubrick cuts between disparate states of clarity. A grayed and fugal backlit Grady is contrasted with a sharply contrasted backlit Danny and Wendy. Notice the framing reconfigures the elevator's T-shaped mask on the mirror behind him/them. Wendy attempts to communicate with Danny, who is travelling by shining to bring Halloran to a rescue.  Tony responds to her questioning as in beginning. Their scene is filmed in the darkest state the film allows and the starkest fill of bright light shined.  Danny looks at us in audience while he shines, contracting an unconsciously time-split series of eye focal points: the Jack-from-bed-view into mirror-at bathroom-door eye contacts. While Jack loops through the hotel, he hears the Forest Service attempt contact and intent on severing ties to the world below, he pulls the radio’s hardware apart: he takes over the role of HAL 9000 who exploited potential radio failure as a ruse to kill, he preyed on his shipmates fear of isolation and now Jack begins converting choice to murder. Incredibly he recreates Bowman's action of shutting HAL down while behaving like HAL. Positioning in direct conflict to Wendy’s radio use scene. Kubrick begins showing us some key facements previously unseen, Ullman's outer office door. Soon we will see what the Kitchen's doors look like.

Halloran finds no response to the Ranger’s call so he takes a Continental (a reference to the continent's Divide) flight, his outfit a duplication of the plane's brown and umber hues (these are native colors). The plane is heading for distant snow capped peaks (the snow of the Overlook).  It descends into the pure white of a blizzard. A sly alternate version of the film’s opening flyovers which began with metaphysical flying and are now experienced as physical flying.  Halloran is seen strictly in profile at times (a simplified mimic of the Calumet chief), he is avoiding the mirror of the film, in effect the least enslaved to this power that eventually traps Jack face-forward. He glances back at stewardess to ask her what time they will arrive (forward). His forward, right side, is knowable since Kubrick shows you all directional elements. As the plane lands we see the desk has dissolved into the runway light structures, the stairs and the two side staircases that lead up into the plane itself.

His call to Durkin’s duplicates Jack’s first call to Wendy, Larry crosses into speaking area and is shot reversed of Wendy’s framing.  Halloran on other end is reversed of Jack’s angle in Hotel lobby. Halloran's phone carousel's outer edge is curved like his airplane's windows and the angle of his car's window duplicates plane's tail.  Larry turns his body and immediately becomes warmer, inclusive (he reveals in a single scene a full reversal of view). In airport as with most scenes with communication, a dividing vertical line is present and Halloran’s face is centered. Larry may even be turning in direction of Halloran (like Wendy is framed in her sequence with the Forest Ranger).

As Halloran’s journey continues westward in car, he sees a traffic accident. This view alternates from the side-view of Halloran, notice angles of car window edge. A red VW Beetle is crushed in a jackknifed tractor trailer. A curved object crushed in a right angle.

Wendy and Danny duplicate their picnic/campfire that opens the film. Their clothes suggest absorption (she wears Jack’s interview shirt, Danny wears Halloran's outfit). She wears Jack's clothes on her way out, a transfer. Cartoon music accompanies her bat withdrawal perfectly. A Louisville Slugger, an American iconic ball game/tool now weapon. The Disney-Warner Bros. animation references now inhabit the adults, blending archetypes and time distortion for a genre bending futurism. Key Disney invention: paradoxical timings  that waver between nightmare and comedy, later adapted by Warner Bros; these are subtly suffused throughout entire film, another rationale for the animated origins of the genre. Kubrick is suggesting the ghosts are merely animations of archetypes (like the stickers on Danny's walls in Boulder coming to life) and acquiring movements that are mechanical, lifeless yet seem real. These spectral beings are animations of the hotel and behave, strangely, eeirily, within the Disney rulebook.  Chocolate. Tobacco. Baseball: connecting to the ball behind Danny's head in his opening shot.

That coyote is really a crazy clown,
When will he learn he can never mow him down?
Poor little Road Runner never bothers anyone,
Just runnin' down the road's his idea of having fun

Wendy ventures to the Colorado Lounge, centered in every shot until Jack arrives, where she finally gets a good look at his arduous typing. Once we see this novel-sized rant, we now know what Kubrick is showing us: The Shining is a language disconnector, the ultimate horror is using a language that no longer has any meaning, but if pushed to completion would make storytelling impossible. Instead Kubrick carefully alters meanings; the disconnection ramps and ebbs until the end when Jack's sentences are just futile explosions, the murders he's trying to commit adds meaning or proves that there is meaning. Both evidence of his madness (Jack has become as dull, monotonous and robotically controlled as Grady) and his confusion about his identity (now permenant).  She reads the book backwards, though it does not matter what direction she reads it in. The page in the typewriter is even faked, it's been placed there mid-page although there is typing both below and above the typing line: Jack wants her to see it. He knows it might provide enough of a shock that she is easily murdered. He even shows it as a yellow head-chopping blade to make less subliminal its page placement. The second shot of Wendy reminds us the lights are on ONLY upstairs, both a lure to Wendy made by the Hotel (which she follows) and a reminder that Jack is going downwards, his level is dead.  The book is inherently a parody of english (the novel written in the film is a continuous sentence in repeat): isn't the book essentially shined? He has trance-typed an introductory sentence taught to boys as an initial structural device while he shines like Danny entering other time-scales, maybe it is his first learned phrase: the same as HAL who was taught Daisy as first sentence structure. He regurgitates it the entire film without speaking it once. A mirror to 2001 and it subordinates Jack as near death. On yellow paper it contrasts the two Sand Painting narratives, her jacket and the centerpiece of the Colorado Lounge. As a pliant reversed bookend look at the Road Runner theme: Jack's writing is below Danny's comprehension level.

Jack arrives from shadows as if he is made of the photos, and when he moves to the table he is bathed in shining light that ghosts him wildly. He has a new manner, light, cheerful, drugged by single-minded madness, he is reverting, like HAL in his death throes. His consciousness is ebbing. We are now looking at a Jack minus his soul that is trapped in the alternate. Danny's reverse shows us the apartment's false doors that are shining. Danny's end-act is beginning, he is dressed in brown and red, his eyes alit with shined glow that emits from the hotel, and a glass of chocolate in a pre-killing ritual drink. The REDRUM door is seen from the lowest point up, a mimicry that precedes Jack's view from the lower part of the dry storage doorway. Notice false door behind Danny and it is a reverse of the bathroom door (knob is left).

She offers him suggestions about Danny and the discussion escalates into a prelude rant to violence. Do you have the slightest idea what a moral and ethical principle is, do you?  ‘Have you ever had a single moment's thought about my responsibilities?  Jack's discourse is now no longer about shared information, earlier at least his lies have meaning as shared data (in pure contrast), now he purely controls the very definitions of the words and is asserting God-like control. The language no longer has any shared meaning, the role of the alphabet has merged with the role of the container the hotel provides. It is false facing, a theme taken directly from the book now made subtler, unconscious. Jack is psyching himself up to kill her.  Danny hears the conversation and sees the tail end of the blood flooding (the elevator bleeding is overlapped in time release each time it is shown).  The liquid has colored the lens and causes everything to seem red.  Wendy moves backwards quickly to a powerful stance once above him on the stairs. As she is crowned by lighting fixture, Jack makes his move ("gimme the bat" is achieved) and is met by two glancing blows of a Louisville Slugger (a mirror to the Jack Daniels, another form of Louisville slugging) and falls to the landing below. Wendy dulls him, then slices his hand, in effect she preps him for Danny's confusing maze lure.

Jack is dragged into the dry storage locker, drooling like Danny. She places him inside and locks him within. Wendy pulls out of horizon-level a stabbing weapon. An arrow-form, first spotted in the opening shot. She is told there are some big suprises for her. Jack faces the doorway upside down (a negative, monolithic-space) in interview from the REDRUM door framing and upper-staircase of Colorado Lounge framing.  She inspects the radio and Snocat and discovers them tampered and incapacitated.

An exterior establishing shot displays a white foreground and background with towering trees that seem to bend toward the hotel.

In reverse of early sleeping scene we find Jack asleep on flour bags. Grady calls from the outside of the door, his person never appears, only a voice on the other side of the door. The door’s opening is loud, one of the loudest things we hear in the film. Grady is there to ensure Jack completes their "business."

Halloran’s sno-cat moves through the forest that resembles a magnified hedge maze. Third establishing shot of Halloran facing right, centered, piloting his way to Overlook. The sno-cat is the mirror of the pods in 2001, they are the rescue vehicles from these oppressive outlands and provide final escape from spiritually decaying structures Overlook and Discovery.

Danny appears to walk out of the apartment’s mirror and he begins an incantation, blessing the blade with his own blood (a blood-rite since it will be used to snare his father) and using his mother’s lipstick as blood-writing.  His chant (he is in another dimension, he is inside the mirror world, while Tony inhabits this one in his place), an act of telepathism: he’s flying. Unlike Jack it is easy to tell when Danny is inside the mirror world, he allows Tony to speak for him, he maintains a rigorous identity. Danny is now in banded orange and brown colors. He chants until Danny returns and his arrival coincides with his father’s. The Hotel gives you two names once it kills you, Danny takes one intentionally while alive, he blocks the Hotel's menace.  Jack begins to use pop references-fairy tales and television monologue to narrate his slaughter.  Wendy, I’m home. Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in…  Wendy clearly hurls her knife into the sink aimed window-ward, sending Danny outside who slides down a slide made of snow. When she spins from window to confront Jack's blows, the knife is now aimed at the door.

Danny escapes by snow-slide. Here’s Johnny, is a subtle progression of the TV’s role as window to the outside world.  Jack with face framing is as crucial as the TV, he’s acting like furniture in the Hotel. He is animating.  It predicts he will soon be seen purely as a wall hanging and mirrors the poster image's subtle message: Danny's success means Jack will become a part of the walls. Incorporeally trapped. Redrum doorway is same as initial POV into mirror at breakfast-in-bed, Jack has been looking at us from his bed through the redrum surface and into bathroom. This is a memory animation of POV. Wendy slices Jack's blood into the bathroom's surface, like other bathroom's roles as red absorber, this is the first bathroom we see actual blood in. This is the ritual Wendy seems to comprehend, of converting Jack into the house by pulling red from him she hits him, slices him and then witnesses his ritual blood spilling from him with the elevator gushing. Outside the incongruous noise of a second Snocat, more red on white, suspends Jack’s axing.

His track to Ullman’s office covers yet another angle, the staircase viewed is used only in the film's first scene.

Wendy moves above, where she encounters the bed's bear from the first scenes (The doctor’s mirror when examining Danny) and the bear is administering a sexual act in reverse of Danny's resting upon it. Her fear of this image is like the audience's:  unconscious.  She no more remembers the bed scene with her son than they do. The hotel is making mirrors for her with her unconscious. The colors have continued a separation, blues in the Wendy/Bear vision, red in Jack’s corridor move to the outdoors, blue again in the pan view outside, where Danny waits for his father’s gaze.

Jack tracks Danny to an exit, passing in front of a mimic of the Lobby corridor's ending. Outside, perched by Halloran's Snocat, Danny awaits his pursuer, challenging the notion of who is actually pursuing who. Jack illuminates the exterior and maze and Danny runs mazeward. Here is the key to the film, he runs towards an entrance that never existed before but whose orientation has been disoriented so often that the audience is completely unaware that Danny is physically shining through nature: he finds an alternate entrance and guarantees he will trap his father who has no experiential data about this maze's flow. His father only knows the right-angled version of this maze.  Once inside the maze, Danny plots his entrance and escape, choosing an optimal location to retrace his tracks.  He walks backwards mirroring Wendy, mirroring Jack escaping the hag. Wendy is treated to numerous apparitions, and chases herself into a red ‘Elevator face’ that cuts with the maze's pronounced blue.  She encounters two different Lobbies (or states of the Lobby) through the kitchen. The color of the nighttime maze is contrasted with our initial experience of it as a green hued experience. The separation and dominance of each color reaches their apex.

After she runs through the scattered circular objects Jack dispersed, she encounters an imperfect, bloodied man who scares her into running the opposite direction, through the double doors to the kitchen: this is our first view of the Kitchen's doors and they are of course: the same as the elevator's. This entrance solidifies the kitchen's character as a portal inside the hotel. Like the boardgame Clue, entrances to the kitchen improbably lead everywhere (she departs the kitchen at film's beginning to the left of the Gold Ballroom doors and now enters it across the lobby and to the right of that first entrance: there is no true logic to the kitchen it is a portal), but must be learned to know its structure. The man has an injury that mimics Jack's by his wife and he wears a tuxedo that Jack is about to wear inside the photo, this is an apparition made of several forms inside the film as well as a photo come to life.

As a film that was sold to Europe with the double-entendre "The Wave of Terror that Swept America", The Shining is about a total hemispheric conquest of idealized forms of Continental cosmology by Europeans. Situated in Northern Colorado, the Overlook is a hotel layered (at right angles) with Navajo and Apache art, tribes far south, not near its location at a timberline (there are many tribes within distance that create equally riveting and extensive art forms, Colorado is itself named for a great tribal group), illustrated in its introduction by Blackfoot image-cosmology forms (St. Mary Lake/Mountain Gods/Going-To-The-Sun-Road) located a great deal away in Wyoming, nowhere is the tribe mentioned whose sacred burial the Hotel desecrates by existing in place. Kubrick even ends the film with a sublime reference to the Curse of Chief Cornstalk, a Shawnee, an eastern tribe. 

She returns to the hotel Lobby (our next-to-final Lobby view) and it is now unlit from the inside and a pallor of moonlight now drifts in at the same angle as the sunlight that made the  angles of the maze. Cobwebs ghostly suggest how it really looks to its inhabitants. What it looks like when it is not shining, the dead still in place, cobwebs connect the skeletons. Even Grady is there with his hairstyle.  The mirror visible without a mirror: the withdrawal of its lit power. She is shown all four directions and death (as skeletons or photo) is in each view. The photo wall her husband ends on is behind her. These frames are colorful photos of death, frozen, an animation towards the photos and their conjugated sense of time.

Danny is shown walking backwards, tracing each step, he walks away from where Jack will be trapped. He retraces like Wendy did before her blows against Jack occurred.  He disappears from view; Jack is easily fooled by his son’s unfinished footprints. The act of fooling Jack engages the hotel, since it already possesses his soul, it now has his life fluid trapped in the maze which bleeds in full view of Wendy. We now see Jack's death/absorbtion as a portal in blood, the hotel knows it has him since it knows he cannot figure a way out (it has his mind) it bleeds before Jack is physically dead.  Danny has correctly understood the purpose of the prescient vision: and he has seen through his mother from a location in the future.  Kubrick subtly moves the orientation of the elevator's face to show us the single red shape of the elevator door: it is the Monolith in red, dead-center. Jack stumbles and slips to a seated position, directly in front of a rectangular light which mimics/predicts the framed photo he is about to be pulled inside (overlay below, look at the curtains parting like the maze walls), it's been combining into this photo all of the souls viewed now it adds Jack (and it's also a mirror to the projection bulb through a rectangle in the film's projected ratio 1:1.85) an animation to the flashed light of day. He sits like the skeletons Wendy just ran from in the lobby (Kubrick is flowing all scales and states into this final shot).

Jack is frozen into light of day and into flash of bulb a continuum between now and then. White's of his eyes now form the elevator's floor indicators' radials upside down, a fusion of his stare from Colorado Lounge with the black sweater and the underside view at the storage door. Is it his final mask? Crucially we see the ghost he is to become in the outer (the frozen dead) and the youthful continuum ghost (in the photo) not as the hotel's animation yet, but as frozen evidence.   A long tracking shot (linked to Jack's initial path crossing into hotel) to ballroom music reveals his stare at us, dead, ancient. He didn't show it to us, of course (the way Back to the Future animates its proof of existence photo), but the Hotel has added Jack to the image once his soul was trapped, the problem/paradox is when did this happen? Kubrick is even suggesting slyly that Jack as always been a ghost and has now wandered home. The gauge of the photos are 35mm, the same as the film we are watching. It is the complete opposite of the ending of 2001, which shows a living, conscious being equal in size to the earth, staring at us, engaging us.  Now a miniature Torrance is frozen into photographic grain, the flash of the bulb's capture, a fragment of a second.  We must dissolve in each macro to finally spot him. Time compresses from the limitless INTERVIEW to MONTH to DAY to HOUR to this flash.

The ending date, July 4, 1921 has obvious connotations (The U.S.'s 'birthday,' the road's construction, the Wilsonian dialogue) and some not so obvious. In Point Pleasant, West Virginia on this date, lightning struck and destroyed, a mirror to the flash of the photo's photographer,  for the second time a monument built to honor Chief Cornstalk of the Shawnee, who was cruelly murdered in false revenge by our Continental Army, despite having offered himself peacefully to the US Government which held him to prevent the Shawnee from joining the Royalist cause and attack the newly rebellious colonies. The year was 1777. His mythic dying words were: “I was the border man’s friend. Many times I have saved him and his people from harm. I never warred with you, but only to protect our wigwams and lands. I refused to join your paleface enemies with the red coats. I came to the fort as your friend and you murdered me. You have murdered by my side, my young son.... For this, may the curse of the Great Spirit rest upon this land. May it be blighted by nature. May it even be blighted in its hopes. May the strength of its peoples be paralyzed by the stain of our blood.” Kubrick find's a lightning connection to a date, and animates it as a shine (he forms the death scene portal-bathroom with a ceiling annoited with a lightning-mirror). The Cornstalk curse is a facet of U.S. History that Kubrick extends into the filmic-glyphic realm.

The end credits: Musical ending “Midnight and the stars and you” a reference to the witching hour and the Nightway in a film that never shows us the moon or the stars.  The audio ends with actual clapping from 1920’s and is the audio within the picture:  audience murmurings mirror us leaving the theater.

THE END

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[sing to the Dies Irae, The Shining’s opening theme]

The day of wrath, that day
which will reduce the world to ashes,
as foretold by David and the Sybil.

What terror there will be,
when the Lord will come
to judge all rigorously!

The trumpet, scattering a wondrous sound
among the graves of all the lands,
will assemble all before the Throne.

Death and Nature will be astounded
when they see a creature rise again
to answer to the Judge.

The book will be brought forth
in which all deeds are noted,
for which humanity will answer.

When the judge will be seated,
all that is hidden will appear,
and nothing will go unpunished.

Alas, what will I then say?
To what advocate shall I appeal,
when even the just tremble?

O king of redoutable majesty,
who freely saves the elect,
save me, o fount of piety!

Remember, merciful Jesus,
that I am the cause of your journey,
do not lose me on that day.

You wearied yourself in finding me.
You have redeemed me through the cross.
Let not such great efforts be in vain.

O judge of vengeance, justly
make a gift of your forgiveness
before the day of reckoning.

I lament like a guilty one.
My faults cause me to blush,
I beg you, spare me.

You who have absolved Mary,
and have heard the thief's prayer,
have also given me hope.

My prayers are not worthy,
but you, o Good One, please grant freely
that I do not burn in the eternal fire.

Give me a place among the sheep,
separate me from the goats
by placing me at your right.

Having destroyed the accursed,
condemned them to the fierce flames,
Count me among the blessed.

I prostrate myself, supplicating,
my heart in ashes, repentant;
take good care of my last moment!

That tearful day,
when from the ashes shall rise again

sinful man to be judged.
Therefore pardon him, o God.

Merciful Lord Jesus,
give them rest.

Amen.