The Shining As Space, Not Story

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s first novel, Satan in Goray (published in English in 1955), tells the true story of a 17th century Jewish mystic, Sabbatai Zevi, who sweeps into a Polish village and convinces the people living there that the end is nigh. He tells them to stop honoring their rituals and traditions, based as they are on the assumption that life will go on, and instead to indulge whatever dark urges they’ve repressed. Both frightened and exhilarated, the villagers comply, quickly reducing Goray to ruin. When the apocalypse doesn’t come, Zevi sneaks away, leaving the villagers to sort through the wreckage, having learned, as Singer puts it, that “you can’t force the end.”

Four hundred years later, human feelings about the end remain both hopeful and fearful: every generation wants to believe it’s the last, and yet doesn’t really want to believe this. So we toy with the possibility in books and movies and video games, indulging in its romance without facing the consequences.

The Overlook Hotel, as conjured by Stephen King in his 1977 novel The Shining and brought to the screen by Stanley Kubrick in 1980, is a microcosm for a world that’s always ending. The same people are reincarnated, only to kill each other again and again. They exist in a perennial state of crisis that, following the warped logic of a nightmare, becomes perfectly sustainable.

The plot of The Shining is simple: a struggling writer named Jack Torrance brings his family to the abandoned Overlook Hotel in Colorado, planning to spend the winter there, working as a caretaker while finishing (or perhaps starting) his overdue novel. As soon as the property gets snowed in and the roads become impassable, he begins a descent into madness that ends in his attempting to murder his wife and son. But plot has little to do with The Shining’s lasting power. Like the Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the Overlook transcends the events that occur in it to become something larger: a space that haunts an entire culture. It lingers in our popular imagination, now more than ever, because its predicament mirrors our own.

The Hauntological Hotel

A hotel isn’t anyone’s home; it’s a cold public space that sells strangers a simulation of home for a night or two. Hotel rooms thus perfectly model how Freud describes the uncanny, as a home that’s not a home, a place where the resident ought to feel comfortable but can’t help feeling alienated instead.

In The Shining, the Overlook is even more alienating in that it’s an off-season hotel, devoid of guests. Despite...