Joe Girard · Transcript · · Updated
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining Analysis: EYE SCREAM – Transcript
Video by Joe Girard · Watch the original on YouTube
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- The speaker analyzes Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining by examining its complex patterns, structures, and synchronicities when played backwards and forwards simultaneously.
- The analysis reveals extensive references to literature, history, mythology including Hercules, and various cultural works woven throughout the film.
- The investigation explores the application of musical compositions, compositional grids, and hidden numeric patterns like 237 across the film's architecture.
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you have this tremendous advantage of reading something for the first time which is an experience you never have again with the story i mean the first time is something which you cannot ever guess about you know so um that's the first thing then you have a reaction to it and um the subsequent readings you know are more analytical
but you know you have to start with uh you know kind of you know like falling in love reaction with with the material so then it just becomes you know a matter of uh almost like a code breaking of breaking the thing down into a structure that seems to be
you know still truthful not losing the you know the ideas or the content of a feeling of the book and uh trying to get it into uh the much more limited uh time frame of a movie and the criteria really always is you know is it is it truthful and is it interesting
how'd you like some ice cream dark how long do you guess it would take to deconstruct the most complicated film ever constructed a minute a hundred minutes for me the magic number seems to be 23 months
that's how long ago i first noticed what you're watching right now that you can play the shining backwards and forwards simultaneously with the last album ever recorded by the beatles and get hundreds of thematic subtextual and structural synchronicities big and small and i thought the breadcrumb trail would end there but i've since discovered 11 other major pillars that support kubrick's grand vision everything you're about to learn can be verified on my website where i've
gone to pretty extensive lengths to source each point and you know i've debated endlessly whether it's right to release this information so i'm offering it to you and the world for two reasons one i think it's time people understood the awesome depth of kubrick's genius and two i'm a movie lover and i want there to be better movies which there might not be if people forget how to think like a
in stanley end the love you take is equal to the love
speaking of things i have endlessly debated where to begin perhaps the best place to start with any maze is the entrance a thing that likes to change in the shining the overlook hotel which only jack ever enters by its main entrance was heavily modeled after california's awani hotel and awani is based on a miwok word
meaning mouth does that mean that symbolically as jack drives up through what indigenous people call the shining mountains he's riding straight into the open mouth of some unfathomable predator when the torrances serve themselves up as a family mouths are on everybody's mind
dad yes i'm hungry hey wasn't it around here that the donner party got snowbound mean they ate each other huh they had to in order to survive the torrances do survive in these jaws for some time though so maybe they're a bit like the egyptian plovers that pick clean the teeth in the open
mouths of alligators a bit like these plovers these plovers are only seen in one other instant in the film peaking out at the other side of the lobby for a split second moments before the overlook's jaws snapped shut on old dick halloran and what's the doctor asking danny on the exact opposite side of the movie she's asking about teeth can you remember what you were doing
just before you started brushing your teeth talking to tony who's tell me tony's a little boy that loves my mouth if you were to open your mouth now could i see tony
no why not because he hides where does he go to my stomach before we go any further down the gullet of what i have to share with you let me just say that if you're looking for a detailed brick by brick analysis of each of my theories you should probably skip over to my 27 part series decoding the shining or to my website
ice cream this video was designed and can only serve as an introduction what's more it might be a bewildering one since half of what i'm about to impart involves ways of looking at film that you might never have considered before in an earlier version of this doc i explained how the love of my life who i call the scully to my molder was quite bewildered herself and insisted that a scientific methodology would have to be devised
if the theories were to be taken seriously what i neglected to mention is that the methods i came up with didn't do much to shake her arch skepticism however accurate and interesting she's found the more concrete analyses to be our debates have been rigorous and passionate and for my money have made the work a hundred times better but over time i noticed that the most recurring element in her critiques was
we don't have a written confession from kubrick so how can we ever know the reply i eventually devised is one that has stumped her ever since so if you are one such skeptical mind see what you think imagine that i made a cartoon version of the shining so that every shot has the same framing every sequence is the same length and we get all the same art objects on
all the walls and tables throughout the film and then i confess to everything you're about to learn about my findings what would be the difference between that and my findings as they are wouldn't the only question that remains then be how good a job i'd done at burying all these patterns in fact there is one thing to be said about that which is that i said that
over a year ago before i had unearthed four more giant patterns i hadn't noticed before and there remain around 30 art pieces throughout the film that haven't been properly identified so insofar as all the ones that have been id'd have a big story to tell no one could claim to understand every one of the shining's mysteries yet
but even if you're not as dubious as perhaps you want to be you've probably never watched a film forwards and backwards before this came from the infamous 2012 documentary room 237 and was the part of that film that captured my imagination the most like many who saw the documentary presenting the culture of shining theorists and their proofs i was intrigued but increasingly skeptical there was a pervasive suggestion that
more evidence existed than we were being presented a with paper tray on the desk and as soon as they touch hands the paper tray turns into a very large straight on hard on coming out of barry nelson yeah it's hilarious it's a joke a very serious joke but a joke by stanley and there's many
of these in the film and very disturbing some of them and this will all be in my film kubrick the magician kubrick the magician never came and while i understand others in that film have kept up their own online analyses these past eight years what further revelations i found through them only seemed to expand on what room 237 had already presented
eventually i thought if i'm going to get to the bottom of this maybe i just need to do my own shining study sit down live tweet any curiosities at friends and family and try not to make a fool of myself then not half an hour into my second run i notice this and this and this
and finally this and i thought now hold on what does the abbey road album cover have to do with the shining turns out the name the shining comes from a john lennon song we all shine on did kubrick know that it might be faster to ask what kubrick
didn't know but at the time i wondered why he would bother with the reference then i noticed this at 24 minutes 37 seconds 15 seconds before abby rhodes side 1 would end side 2 is largely about why the band broke up halloran arrives and breaks up the band this is called a fee grid and it's a way of composing film images
we'll get into it more later but for now just note how cleanly divided each figure in this moment really is so is abbey road to the backwards forward shining what some think dark side of the moon is to the wizard of oz long story short
the abbey road shining or what i call red rum road became the catalyst the breadcrumb trail that led to every other of my discoveries in a sense ice cream became inevitable after that
well it was inevitable because i'm sort of a completist once i notice a pattern i'll follow it to any length which is a tendency that the shining only rewards let me give you my favorite example early on it occurred to me that a few of the film's visual motifs seem to be describing the tenth labor of hercules basically to make up for murdering his wife and children after the revelation of his godliness
from harrah's messenger iris sends him into a familicidal rage herc must perform 10 great feats for the ruler of the day in his final feat herc steals some red cattle from garion a beast of many forms but always with a human face
he then voyages into the atlantic ocean clubs girion's two-headed guard dog to death shoots girion through the head with a poisoned arrow and walks the cattle back to the king for sacrificing on his way back a giant named caccus steals some of the cattle while hercules
sleeps making them walk backwards so that they leave no trail but before all that on herc's way to first get the cattle he smashes through a mountain called atlas thereby creating what became known as the pillars of hercules greeks and romans of the day understood that this was a real place which we now call the strait of