4. Mirroring and Duality in The Shining: Gender, Identity, and Stanley Kubrick’s Subtle Symbology
Adventures in "The Shining."
Mirroring and Duality in The Shining: Gender, Identity, and Stanley Kubrick’s Subtle Symbology
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a film layered with themes of duality, mirroring, and the clash of opposites. This intricate tapestry extends beyond the narrative and visuals to include the film’s music and the choices Kubrick made during production. The decision to hire Walter Carlos, a transgender composer who later became Wendy Carlos, and her collaborator Rachel Elkind, adds an additional layer to these recurring motifs. While most of Carlos and Elkind’s score was ultimately unused, their involvement subtly reflects the film’s themes of transformation, duality, and the blending of opposites, which are reinforced throughout the film in its mirroring motifs, characters, and settings.
The Music of The Shining: A Study in Juxtaposition
Kubrick’s soundtrack choices for The Shining exemplify his meticulous attention to detail and his ability to use music to deepen his films’ thematic complexity. While the iconic Dies Irae theme opens the film and sets the tone for its apocalyptic themes, much of the soundtrack relies on avant-garde compositions by György Ligeti, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Béla Bartók. These works, characterized by dissonance, tension, and abstraction, complement the film’s exploration of madness and the uncanny.
The contributions of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, however, add a unique dimension to the narrative, even if much of their work was excluded from the final cut. The unused score underscores the tension between Kubrick’s vision and their innovative compositions. That Kubrick engaged a transgender composer resonates with the film’s exploration of mirroring and duality, suggesting an interest in challenging conventional boundaries and embracing themes of transformation and ambiguity.
Mirrors and Duality in The Shining
Mirrors are omnipresent in The Shining, both literally and metaphorically. Kubrick uses reflections, doubles, and contrasts to reinforce the theme of duality, a concept that extends to the film’s exploration of identity and morality. Jack Torrance, for example, embodies conflicting roles as father and provider but also as murderer and madman. Similarly, the Overlook Hotel is both a symbol of high civilization and a site of brutality and savagery. This interplay between opposites is a central motif that permeates the film’s structure, characters, and visuals.
The Grady Twins: The Grady twins, often referred to as "the shining twins," epitomize duality and mirroring. Their eerie symmetry and synchronized speech suggest not only a haunting presence but also a reflection of the Torrance family’s internal fragmentation, particularly Jack’s fractured psyche.
Room 237: Room 237 presents another stark example of duality. The beautiful woman who seduces Jack transforms into a decayed, horrifying hag, representing the illusory nature of appearances and the inherent corruption beneath surface beauty. This moment also underscores Jack’s moral decay, as his willingness to engage in infidelity is swiftly punished by the revelation of its grotesque reality.
Navajo Motifs and Two-Spirit Symbolism: The Overlook Hotel’s décor prominently features Navajo-inspired patterns, which not only signal the appropriation of Native American culture but also introduce themes of identity and duality. Among the Navajo, the concept of the “Two-Spirit” refers to individuals who embody both masculine and feminine qualities, blurring traditional gender binaries. This symbolism aligns with the film’s broader exploration of transformation and contradiction. The juxtaposition of Navajo motifs with the Comanche imagery in the hotel’s designs further underscores the theme of duality, as the Navajo and Comanche represent contrasting cultural and historical narratives.
Wendy Carlos and the "Two-Spirit" Connection
The involvement of Wendy Carlos, a transgender composer, aligns intriguingly with the film’s thematic concerns. Carlos’s transition from Walter to Wendy reflects a personal transformation that resonates with the Navajo Two-Spirit concept and the film’s broader mirroring motifs. While Kubrick did not overtly engage with Carlos’s gender identity in his work on the soundtrack, her presence in the production nevertheless reinforces the film’s preoccupation with blurred boundaries and hybrid identities.
Carlos’s groundbreaking work in electronic music, which often blends organic and synthetic sounds, can also be seen as a sonic parallel to the film’s visual and narrative dualities. Her pioneering approach mirrors the blending of opposites found in The Shining—a world where beauty becomes grotesque, civilization masks savagery, and familial love devolves into violence.
The Overlook Hotel: Civilization and Savagery
The Overlook Hotel itself serves as the ultimate symbol of duality. On one hand, it is a masterpiece of architecture and luxury, a testament to human ingenuity and achievement. On the other hand, it is a site of profound brutality, built on the graves of Native Americans and haunted by a legacy of violence. This juxtaposition mirrors America’s own historical duality, where the ideals of progress and democracy coexist with the realities of genocide and oppression.
The hotel’s labyrinthine design, with its shifting corridors and impossible geometry, reflects the fragmented nature of Jack’s mind and the inescapable cycles of history. The ballroom, a space of grandeur and revelry, is populated by ghosts, suggesting that the past is never truly gone but always present, haunting the present.
Jack Torrance as a Reflection of Duality
Jack Torrance’s character embodies the film’s themes of transformation and mirroring. As a writer and aspiring provider, Jack seeks to construct a legacy of creativity and stability for his family. However, his descent into madness reveals his darker impulses, aligning him with the hotel’s legacy of violence. Jack’s duality is visually reinforced through the film’s repeated use of mirrors, which often frame his image as he succumbs to the Overlook’s malevolent influence.
The final image of Jack in the 1921 photograph further underscores his duality, suggesting that he has been absorbed into the Overlook’s eternal cycle of violence. His identity as a modern man collapses into his role as a timeless figure of brutality, reinforcing the cyclical nature of history and the inevitability of humanity’s darker tendencies.
Conclusion
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a masterful exploration of duality, mirroring, and the fluidity of identity. From the involvement of Wendy Carlos, whose own life reflects themes of transformation and boundary-crossing, to the film’s pervasive use of reflections, opposites, and contradictions, The Shining delves into the complexities of human nature and history. The Overlook Hotel stands as a monument to these dualities, a space where high civilization and savage brutality coexist, and where the Torrance family enacts a haunting allegory of humanity’s capacity for both creation and destruction. Kubrick’s genius lies in his ability to weave these themes into every aspect of the film, creating a work that continues to resonate with its profound and unsettling insights into the human condition.