The first Alien features a theme of birth trauma which origintes from Freud. Rob Ager has done an excellent analysis of this theme for his Collative Learning site, but unfortunately it’s not posted on the site itself and you have to buy one of his DVDs to get it. I recommend it though to anyone who’s interested – his analyses are amazing (you can read many of them on the site). I’ve bought most of his DVDs and have not been disappointed.
Not sure if I can post a link but here goes: http://www.collativelearning.com/FILMS%20reviews%20BY%20ROB%20AGER.html
Here’s a quote from Freud: “The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.”
And I wouldn’t say it’s just a male anxiety – everyone experiences the trauma of being born.
I do see where you were coming from Lisa, the chestburster does offer a way for a male to experience life growing inside and then giving birth… but that seems to be only one in a myriad of birth related fears explored in the film. As Rob suggests in his analysis, that whole angle may have come from Giger’s obsessive sexual imagery more than from Scott. Personally I’m not aware of any other films that explore birth trauma themes in such an imaginative way (I haven’t seen Prometheus).
And speking of 2001, Ager has recently posted a new and fascinating installment in his ongoing explorations of that film. I only discovered it last night when I grabbed the link to his site for posting here, and my mind is still being blown in slow motion!
As for what the theme of birth trauma may represent in Alien – I can’t add anything to what Ager has already said about it. But it sure is a fun subject to explore, isn’t it?
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Not a great film of course, but it’s Bradbury and Harryhausen – 2 of my all-time favorite geek-out people. Put the 2 Rays together and for me it’s magic!
@ Scampi, the issue is with restoring the film itself. Old film suffers from all kinds of damage, and must be cleaned and restored before being transferred to DVD Blu-Ray or before a streaming copy can be made. That sometimes also involves finding prints from other sources (other countries in some cases) that have undamaged portions correlating to portions that are heavily damaged or have been removed from the original source print or negative.
This is a very labor-intensive and expensive process. A studio will only undertake it if they expect good revenue from DVD or Blu-Ray sales.
Wait – before anybody points it out – yes, I know – Wendy looked at ‘the manuscript’ and all it said over and over is “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.
But stop and think about this – Steven King wrote a story about a writer…
Wait. Back up a bit. Steven King discovered a news item (supposedly based on the same incident from the Eagles song Hotel California) and wrote a story based on it – a story about a writer who takes his family to a closed-for-winter hotel for solitude so he can write a story and subsequently is overtaken by the evil forces in the hotel and attempts to murder his family.
I haven’t read King’s novel, so I don’t know if that’s exactly what it’s about, but I know it’s close to that.
The fact that he was writing about a writer writing makes me believe that, to some extent anyway, Jack Torrance can be seen as King’s alter ego. I don’t know if the novel includes the scene where Wendy finds his manuscript consisting only of repetitions of "All work and no play.. " or if that was entirely of Kubrick’s devising, but there is one simple clue even in that repeated sentence that the author Jack Torrance was writing about himself… the name Jack. At the very least we can infer that Jack Torrance was writing about someone named Jack. Could he in fact have been writing about his family?
The movie begins with Jack meeting with the hotel manager (or whatever he was), who after explaining the nature of the job, tells him about the horrific incident involving another caretaker some time in the past, at which Jack’s face lights up (could he have become inspired to write about that event just then?) and he actually says “Well, that’s quite a story!”.
King frequently wrote about Maine and surrounding areas, where he lived. I believe he also frequently included lots of details from his own life in his work – ‘write about what you know’. So did Kubrick make a movie about Steven King writing The Shining? It fits – the main character is an author who discovers a juicy real-life event about a grisly murder that supposedly involved supernatural forces, and then proceeds to write such a story based on himself and his family. This is exactly what King did when he wrote The Shining, and it’s exactly what Jack Torrance did (at least in Kubrick’s The Shining).
Most people (myself included until recently) assume that what we see onscreen – namely Wendy finding the manuscript consisting of only one repeated sentence – is literally what Jack Torrance the author was writing – from which it follows that the rest of the movie actually happens. But consider for a moment – IF we’re actually seeing the story that Jack was writing at that point, the story-within-a-story (meaning “All work and no play..” is not what Torrance was writing, but what his CHARATER was writing), then it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that the entire second half of The Shining in fact represents that manuscript, craftily told in story-within-a-story form.
What bothered me about this idea was “Well, then what REALLY happened to Jack and his family?”
Then it occurred to me – if Kubrick was giving us a clever story-within-a-story, and didn’t want to advertise that fact, then he couldn’t really pull back from it at the end and show that everything was alright and the Torrances were all alive and well and sane – that would ruin the effect! It would give away the fact that all the ghosts – all the Shining visions – all the murder and attempted murder and craziness and the evil of the hotel itself – were all simply elements in that manuscript. And where would be the fun in giving it away like that?
When I realized that, that’s when I began to think it’s not just the second half, but the entirety of the film, that represents the manuscript.
There are a couple of clues that this might indeed be what Kubrick intended. For one, many people have pointed out that several sequences are jarring due to weird visual qualities or what seems like oddly bad writing. For instance, the sudden jarring closeup on Jack’s frozen corpse just before the end, and the similarly odd shot of him with that crazy intense look on his face. There’s weird lapses of logic in some of the dialogue – for example when Halloran (Scatman) calls for a snow cat to drive up to the snow bound Overlook and tells the guy on the phone that the Torrances “turned out to be unreliable assholes and they need to be replaced”. Huh?! This just doesn’t fit at all with what happened – according to what we’ve seen Halloran had shared a Shining vision with Danny and apparently understood that there was some kind of trouble, and was going to HELP the Torrances. Remember, before leaving his house he called the Forest Service and asked them to check on the Torrances and make sure they’re ok.
However, all of this would make sense IF the movie was meant to represent a first draft of a manuscript by a perhaps untalented writer that’s in need of some polishing up and editing.
Also, the movie is broken up into ‘chapters’ by black title screens saying which day it is.
Another clue is right after Danny sees the twin girls and they say “Come play with us Danny – forever and ever and ever!”. He covers his face with his hands (it’s a kind of weird gesture – maybe like one invented by a writer who relies on melodramatic cliches?) and then he goes into his Tony talk and says “Remember what Mister Halloran said Danny – it’s just like pictures in a book”.
But wait – there was never a scene in the movie where Halloran said that! Of course it could refer to something in a conversation they had that we weren’t privy to. But if you think about it – what does that even mean, and why would Halloran say it? Most likely he was referring to Shining visions – but in what way are they like ‘pictures in a book’? The visions Danny has are totally immersive – there’s movement and sound and he is inside of them, more like a dream or an actual event than flat silent pictures in a book. And why say “in a book” at all? Why not just pictures?
It could be a clue that the Shining visions themselves are actually something happening in a book – the book Jack is writing.
There are other clues to this effect – remember the scene where Danny walks in with his collar torn and Wendy runs and kneels by his side to comfort him? There’s a shot of it from over Jack’s shoulder in which Wendy and Danny are visually placed directly over the typewriter – in fact exactly where the paper would be. It’s a weird looking shot and seems almost designed to say “this is happening in the manuscript!”
Ok, well, I’ve gone on long enough. And yes – before anybody tries to hurl accusations that I stole all this from Rob Ager, I AM familiar with his analyses of The Shining and other Kubrick films, and my thinking is largely based on his writings. I don’t think he’s ever suggested directly that the entire film is the manuscript though, or that it’s the story of King writing The Shining. I believe that part is original to me (though I could well be wrong). These ideas are spurred by the intriguing title of his planned-but-as-yet-unwritten next chapter in his Shining Analysis, called “Pictures in a Book”. That made me start to think a lot about why Halloran would have said that, and that’s what led to this theory. I strongly suspect it parallels Ager’s theories too, and in fact I believe it’s what his next chapter is going to present.
Yes, both of those things, plus partly based on King himself writing The Shining.
Since King did write about himself, and Jack was writing about someone named Jack, did Kubrick take several steps back and write about a writer (King) writing about a writer (Torrance) writing about himself murdering his family exactly the way he had heard a former caretaker of the same hotel had done?
It’s also been said that Nicholson was a sort of alter ego for Kubrick – the crazy hair and intense eyes, the scraggly little beard he was starting… so there may well be another level of complexity in which Torrance also represents Kubrick making a movie about King etc…
But at that my mind is beginning to boggle. I won’t even begin to think about that just now – I’m still trying to absorb the implications of the ideas I presented above, and that may take some time.
Oops! Hellshocked, your post wasn’t there when I replied!! So this is intended for Scottie:
That’s very encouraging. I do apologize for my long and somewhat rambling initial post above – I was still working out my ideas and probably shouldn’t have posted yet.
Let me try to refine the basic premise a bit -
I do not think Kubrick’s film is necessarily about Steven King himself – but if you accept that the entire film represents the manuscript Jack was writing, then by default it’s a movie about a writer writing about the events depicted in The Shining.
I don’t really see any parallels with King himself, other than the fact that Torrance is the author of the story (The Shining). But that fact in itself does begin to suggest a sort of infinite regress – or at least a several-layers-deep regress.
Yeah, it’s definitely time to watch it again!
@ Hellshocked:
Thanks for the info about King as a writer and about the sequence of events from the book. I can certainly understand your viewpoint as well, and I suspect most people will agree with it. But I’m having a blast with this and I’m pretty well convinced, though I have no real proof as yet. It would be very hard for me to believe that Kubrick actually made a film (after Strangelove anyway) that had little or no more going on in it than the surface narrative. The most interesting things in a Kubick movie happen beneath the surface and need to be teased out through careful analysis.
“.. or are you saying these were also products of the manuscript?”
Well, if my theory is right, then everything that happens in the movie IS the manuscript, and that manuscript is The Shining, but sort of a first draft that isn’t fully developed yet, so that could account for the differences. I began by thinking only the second half represented the manuscript, but then realized it actually makes more sense if the entire movie is the manuscript. And the fact that King writes about himself plays into this idea very well, since it would be about a writer writing about himself and his family – undoubtedly ‘versions’ of themselves, or characters based on them rather than being exactly like themselves.
Have you looked at Rob Ager’s Kubrick analyses? http://www.collativelearning.com/2001%20chapter%201.html
Here’s his analysis of 2001 (the first video segment is missing for some reason) – if you’re not interested in digging in to all the reading (it could take days or even weeks) maybe at least watch one of the videos, just to get an idea of how in-depth and convincing his investigations into a movie are.
Did you realize that never once is alien life or alien intelligence mentioned in 2001, and that there’s a mountain of carefully hidden evidence (planted by Kubrick the chess master who had a special interest in code and code breaking) which suggests quite plainly that the monolith itself is a fake planted by the government and used to manipulate the public?
Yes, there’s a fairly coherent surface narrative that’s simple enough a child can grasp it easily, and even that has different interpretations. The monolith could be planted by aliens or could be god or something planted by god. But for a director known to be exacting and to demand countless takes in order to get everything perfect, he sure did include a lot of incredibly noticeable continuity errors, such as for instance the fact that as the camera tracks upward to follow the spinning bone, there is a cut and suddenly the bone is spinning the wrong way! Could ANY director have let that slip through? Or could he be using carefully planned ‘continuity errors’ to draw attention – to say “here… look closer at this part – there’s something going on beneath the surface”?
But I won’t go on – people who refuse to believe this won’t be swayed. I’m not accusing you of being a strict denier – a lot of people simply refuse to believe that any movie has anything beneath the surface simply because that’s the way 99.99% of movies are, and some deny these ideas about Kubrick’s films because it goes against some belief of theirs. I have no idea if you fall in to one of these camps or if you’re open minded but haven’t seen convincing evidence yet. As far as I’m concerned, even if you refuse to believe in some of Ager’s ideas about what Kubrick has hidden in his films, it quickly becomes obvious that Kubrick was definitely putting SOMETHING there.
Sorry if I sounded a little vehement there Hellshocked – I didn’t mean to be insulting to you. And I do appreciate your not retorting angrily. And now I understand better where you’re coming from – you don’t deny deeper meanings in Kubrick.
I don’t think my interpretation of The Shining necessarily renders a surface reading incompatible so much as simply reframes it. When you watch The Shining (if my theory is right) you certainly are seeing exactly the story you first think you’re seeing… but that story is a ‘story within a story’. It’s just a matter of stepping back and realizing it’s framed within another – hinted – story, not something that utterly changes everything. I don’t think that changes the basic character of the original story – just adds a level of complexity that gives it ‘legs’ – it stands up to years’ worth of rewatching and still rewards you with new interpretations that don’t destroy the original experience but only enhance it IMO.
And thank you Bijoux – was the character of Torrance an alcoholic (and implied child abuser) in the novel?
Ah, well that last bit actually lends credence to Ager’s theory that at different times Nicholson is playing Jack’s father or even grandfather rather than Jack (when he’s at the bar drinking for example) and that at times the boy is actually supposed to represent a young Jack rather than Danny, and that the ‘Party Guest’ with the bleeding head wound is meant to represent Jack’s father (or was it his grandfather?). That fits in with the idea that Charles Grady and Delbert Grady are two generations of their family.
To me it makes sense – Kubrick saw that King had essentially written a story about himself writing a story, and that King was in fact envisioning the possibility of himself going mad – and then he made a movie about THAT, which IMO is more interesting than a direct rendition of the surface story itself. And by not making that very obvious, he was giving us something to ponder deeply and discuss on Mubi decades after the film’s release.
Sorry to double-post, but I’ve thought of something to add that actually develops this quite a bit, referring back to a rather offhand statement I made earlier.
I had mentioned a certain apparently deliberate similarity between Kubrick and Nicholson (which is stressed strongly by the fact that, in the documentary shot by Kubrick’s daughter, he is seen typing on the set, just as Jack does in the movie). My earlier tentative idea was that Nicholson represented an alter ego for Kubrick, but I think it’s actually the other way around. Kubrick is deliberately inserting himself as Jack into yet another framing story (the documentary, which is a film about a film about a story about a story… in which incidentally a man named Jack {Nicholson} plays a man named Jack and a boy named Danny plays a boy named Danny… can you stand any more parallels??!!). This is similar to the documentary about Apocalypse Now in which Coppola’s situation echoed that of the main character and the actor who played him (Essentially they all had breakdowns).
I think Kubrick is doing some things very deliberately – such as making sure that in the doco we see him mistreating Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers a lot but always being nice to Nicholson. This parallels the way Jack Torrance acted in the second half of the film. I know, it would be a stronger case if he also mistreated Danny, but that would have been going too far – there would have been a public outcry if he was seen mistreating a child.
SO… if I have this right – the documentary is a movie about a movie (shot by a Kubrick, unless his daughter was married?) in which the director is a tyrannical dictator mistreating the women children and ethnic minorities involved. Exactly like Jack does in the story.
And if I know my Kubrick, his themes tend to run across several films rather than just appearing in one isolated project… so it’s not much of a stretch to assume that it’s meant to say “the power brokers behind the movies you watch (represented by Kubrick in the documentary) are using those movies as propaganda for the benefit of white adult males against everyone else”. I don’t think he means the actual directors themselves (of Hollywood entertainment) are deliberately making such propaganda – unless it’s at the service of those power brokers (against whom it seems most of the hidden messages in his films are aimed).
The end of the documentary showed how Kubrick played games with the hedge maze – moving sections of it each day so the crew would get lost while his voice was heard laughing cruelly from somewhere. This backs up the idea that at that point he represents “the power behind the surface” ie the financers and government/military institutions who have ultimate say-so over what films get made and how because they supply much of the money and/or have the power to shut productions down if they don’t like what’s being filmed.
Wow – ok my brain is twisted like a pretzel now!! But I feel like I’ve seen pretty successfully through the maze of this intricate and confounding film. Now I’m beat. Been up all night wrestling with this and should have slept hours and hours ago, but it overtook me and wouldn’’t let me. Now I fear I look a bit like a deranged Kubrick/Nicholson (I do have the scruffy little beard for the part)..
edit **
Wait – I just gagged!
So – if Kubrick is essentially ‘playing jack’ in the doco, then is he a stand-in for Steven King? Gah!! Too many levels of impersonation and identity/crossover!!! Losing my mind now!!
So sorry for triple post! But nobody has interpersed anything, and this is too closely related to start a new thread..
I just watched the documentary again and had another thought..
There DEFINITELY is an infinite regress going on here. I believe Kubrick’s film IS about King writing The Shining, and that what he’s implying is that King must have had some level of madness and abusiveness in himself to fuel that project. The events in the story were based on his own fears about things he might be capable of. This is hardly groundbreaking I know, but it gets better.
Buried INSIDE that story is the story most people believe the movie really is about – ghosts and evil entities haunting a hotel and possessing a man named Jack Torrance.
Pull back a level to the documentary and you have essentially the same story repeating, only this time Stanley Kubrick (who happens to share initials with Steven King) is the madman who’s doing the writing and making the descisions and mistreating everyone except the white males (all the crew seemed to be white males). He and Nicholson are seen pandering with stars in the doco, and Shelley Duvall talks about how much people seem to love Nicholson and she demonstrates jealousy over it. This is related to little Danny’s 2 interview scenes where he seems really excited about all the money he’s making from this project, and he talks about how his friends give him a hard time about ‘thinking he’s really smart’, to which he says that he really does think he’s smart. He’s a little entitled upper class white male in the making, soon to be hobnobbing with stars and world leaders like Nicholson and Kubrick and King et al.
Then, pull back yet another level – from the personal to the collective. The buried symbolism implies that what’s been suggested about King, Nicholson, Kubrick and even Danny aplies to an entire group – namely the white upper ‘ruling’ class. The entitlement we see developing in Danny, the madness growing in the hearts of all the adult white men who are in positions of power…
An infinite regress. Like nested Russian dolls, all infected with the same madness. This is also why we see multiple generations of the Torrance males… infinite regress. Kubrick is saying the same story has happened, is happening, and will happen again and again, on multiple levels socially, politically, and interpersonally.
A very interesting thing I noticed that I don’t remember if Rob commented on yet or not – we see Kubrick and his crew emerge from ‘behind the scenes’ of the hedge maze into the hedge maze set itself with a cameraman and he begins to direct Danny. Danny turns and runs away through the maze (during the shot) – followed by the cameraman and Kubrick. Kubrick is CHASING Danny through the hedge maze – which immediately brings to mind the ‘entity’ represented by the camera which chases the car at the beginning, chases Danny’s tricycle, and of course Jack chasing Danny in the maze and through the house etc. I think it’s very deliberate that the camera is between Kubrick and Danny – this is after all the Steadicam Movie – first real use of the steadicam after its development (and doubtless its best use so far) – the swooping movements of that camera are tied intimately to the evil entity.
DFFOO: My reading of this was that Halloran doesn’t want to let everybody know that he’s pretty much psychic. So them being unreliable was a cover story so he wouldn’t have to say “a boy in danger beamed me some telepathic brainwaves asking for help.”
lol yeah, well of course that makes sense. I guess that scene doesn’t support my theory after all.
“It’s been a while since I read it, but I’m 99.999% sure that Halloran said that in the book. I’m pretty sure there was some kind of thing about Danny having a scary illustrated book of Bluebeard, and Halloran was saying that the ghosts are just like the pictures in that book. I guess this takes a little bit away from the “first draft inconsistencies” part of your theory…”
Maybe it doesn’t. Kubrick didn’t film the scene where Halloran said that, or else removed it during editing. So having Danny refer to it is a continuity error that Kubrick or someone else probably should have caught. In a sense it actually strengthens the first draft theory I think, because it’s as if the author (Torrance/King) hadn’t thought of that scene yet but only came up woth it now and still needs to go back in and add the earlier conversation. Oh, but he did include a strange statement by Halloran about burning toast being liek the Shining. Was that in the novel? Did it make more sense there? It’s as if the story isn’t properly edited yet. He needs to go back and take out the weird burnt toast lines and instead inser the Bluebeard illustration thing.
I honestly believe that Kubrick frequently plays with the fact that we’re used to seeing movies with bad plot holes and errors that we need to ignore in order for the story to make sense, and he takes advantage of that fact by deliberately putting such mistakes in, but in such a way that if you investigate further it leads to some other meaning. Of course he’s not superhuman, and is certainly capable of making errors himself. It’s just that when he does it it seems profound, whereas when another director does it it’s just a mistake.
I have gotten more sleep now, thank you! I’m left feeling really strange and zoned-out.
Bijoux, I agree that the cycle issue is key. One very interesting thing I noticed when re-watching most of it in a sleep-deprived daze earlier is that immediately after Danny first sees the twin girls for the first time we cut directly to the scene where Ullman is ushering Jack and Wendy in to their room to show them around, and right at the beginning of the shot 2 girls walk past them (young women actually) and Jack swivels his head almost comically to watch them walk by. Hmm…
Personally now I’m pretty well convinced Kubrick deliberately inserted the nested framing devices idea… the documentary (doubtless directed by him) is a movie shot by a Kubrick (Vanessa) about a movie shot by a Kubrick (Stanley) about a book written by an author (King) about a book written by Torrance.
I really wasn’t able to find any more evidence to support the idea that the movie is the manuscript, aside from what I presented already (which isn’t strong I know), but to me it seems likely that once Kubrick had hit on the idea of the infinite regress, both through the nested framing devices I just mentioned and through the multiple generations of Torrance men passing on the cycle of abuse down the line, that it would occur to him to present the movie itself as the manuscript. One piece of supporting evidence – why is Jack’s typewriter small and white at first, and then large and battleship gray later? Is one the ‘real’ typewriter? Also, note that as he’s writing, Jack has a huge scrapbook open on the table next to him that seems to contail pictures and newspaper articles about the Overlook (Rob Ager presented evidence for this in one of his analyses). This scrapbook is apparently where he saw the article about Grady – remember he tells Delbert Grady that he saw his picture. So it really does seem like he was writing a story about the Overlook, and at the very least with himself in it (the repetitions of Jack in the manuscript Wendy finds). Since there’s already an infinite regress theme going on, why would he pass up an opportunity to add this rather interesting layer, which to me takes it all to a new level?
The main reason as I understand it that King hated the movie was because Kubrick had changed so much, and he even said that Kubrick ’didn’t get it’ and placed the evil mostly in people rather than in the hotel. This makes sense if he was making a movie about the author who [i]wrote[/i] that story, rather than the simple horror story itself. Also, if he presented himself as Jack Torrance in the documentary, and had Nicholson sometimes playing Jack and sometimes playing Jack’s father and/or grandfather, and was probably playing on the idea that the actor’s name is the same as the character (and his initials are the same as King’s) – he’s definitely drawing the ides out into the real world. In fact that’s what the documentary does really – it says “Look – not only are we filming a movie about a guy who bullies and mistreats everybody under him, but that’s exactly what happened during production too!”. So if he’s presenting himself as ‘the director gone mad’, then he’s at least strongly inplying King was ‘the writer gone mad’.
I feel that, even if I haven’t found any definite evidence inthe movie itself, Kubrick most definitely had that interpretation in mind. And if he did, then it’s almost certain that the manuscript Wendy found is not meant to be what her husband was writing, but what his character was writing. I firmy believe parts of the movie represent the Torrances and parts represent them as he described them in his story.
Heh heh – yeah, I’m definitely getting the book now.
VERY interesting that Torrance was researching the Overlook hotel, and apparently Grady. That means the book he was writing was meant to be about that event and about the Overlook. And since we’ve already established that King has a tendency to insert himself as an alter ego into his stories (and since even in the disputed manuscript we see in the movie he’s writing the name Jack over and over – an infininte repetition of himself) then it’s not much of a leap to assume that indeed Torrance was writing about himself and his family going to the Overlook hotel, learning about Grady, and repeating the murderous rampage himself.
AND, if that’s the case, since he was writing about HIMSELF going to the Overlook to write – what would THAT writing have been about (his character in the book would also be a writer)? Infinte regress right there. Personally I suspect “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is what Torrance’s CHARACTER was writing. This would help explain the mysteriously changing typewriter and the weird shot of Wendy and Danny kneeling right over the typewriter where the paper would be, which couldn’t be a more clear metaphor for “this is what’s happening IN THE MANUSCRIPT”.
I need to capture that image – it’s pretty thought provoking. Plus, the complaint most readers of the book have (and that King himself had) is that Kubrick didn’t make the evil entity/ghosts in the hotel powerful enough, and in fact sort of implied that they weren’t even real and that the shining visions themselves aren’t real, but that Jack simply went mad and abused his son and tried to kill his family.
Doesn’t this sound more like King himself – what he was contemplating by writing the story? He was apprently contemplating some implied violent thoughts within himself and his alcoholism, and added in the horror elements that he had learned about from some kind of news article. Hmm… in fact that’s exactly what Torrance does in the movie.
“Just like pictures in a book – it isn’t real”.
This seems to be pretty clear evidence that the shining visions themselves aren’t real but are ‘like pictures in a book’.
Kubrick is well known for not being true to the material he’s adapting but for using it as a platform from which to examine real life situations (corrupt politics, the absurdity and horror of war, sexual abuse, etc).
“How do you know that Kubrick’s film isn’t about Kubrick directing The Shining? Instant karma, baby.”
Matt – that’s what the documentary was about – the movie is about a writer who’s based on King. Or were you joking?
Actually, I have just been informed (at Rob Ager’s forum, where I cross-posted this thread) that my idea already was brought up by Rob in his Shining analysis. Oops!! Not so original as I had thought! It’s been a while since I read the analysis (I’m currently re-reading it, and have downloaded the novel to my Kindle).
Also, I don’t mean to say that what I’m suggesting here is the “real meaning” or the only thing Kubrick was doing behind the scenes on this film – just one of the many things he’s able to weave into the multilayered tapestries of his films. I completely agree that Kubrick’s films are very cinematic, and in fact he himself has repeatedly said that they need to be understood visually rather than by listening to dialogue or following the basic plot development that happens on what he calls “the simplest level”. This is why his films always depart so drastically from their source material – he just uses the ‘story’ as a simplistic surface element into which he begins his real work.
Indeed, his films are like dreams in that when interpreted, they open up to reveal a myriad of interwoven meanings. Unlike dreams however, the buried subliminal messages in his movies are very consciously created and skillfully hidden with repeating motifs so that by careful analysis they can be teased out and connected up and reveal a definite statement he was making that he didn’t want to be too obvious. But Ager’s alanyses reveal this a lot better than I can just in a few hastily-written paragraphs here.
In fact, here’s a perfect example of Kubrick’s purely visual encoding – I decided to capture the picture I mentioned earlier of Wendy and Danny kneeling directly over the typewriter:
]
Could it be any more clear what this means? What an awkward composition and odd visual alignment otherwise.
And also, here’s Jack’s typewriter from an earlier shot:
Campare it ti the typewrite seen in the picture aboce. They’re not the same typewriters! Why is that? Could the little white one have malfunctioned and he had a spare that he switched to, in a scene that was later removed, or does one represent the typewriter King himself was using when he wrote about Torrance, who is using the big battleship grey model with his family members emerging from it as if to say “this is inside the story he’s writing”?
Polaris, very interesting that King has changed his initial opinion of the film. Glad to hear it. I was googling him and discovered he is writing or has just written a sequel to The Shining focusing on Danny all grown up and working in a hospital apprently using his Shining abilities to help terminal patients face their last days.
Thearshman, you want to talk about mirroring between the book and the movie? Another article I looked at today listed the differences and apparently Kubrick very deliberately changed almost everything into its opposite… made everything yellow from the book red, and everything red yellow (Jacks’ VW for example), changed Wendy from a tough competent blonde to a ditzy submissive brunette, made Jack unstable and abusive from the beginning rather than slowly breaking down, elevators that are worked by the hotel in the book simply are never seen moving in the film – character actions and motives are taken away and given to different characters… on and on.
It’s amazing how much depth there is in his films to mine out. I hadn’t noticed all the details you picked out in the opening and closing shots – need to re-watch again soon. One thing I picked up on though in the opening scene, we move from heavily forested slopes gradually to bare rocky mountains (allegory for deforesting of America?) then back into forests and finally snow. Travelling back and forth in time, as the characters at times seem to do (different generations of Torrances and Gradys represented)?
Matt Parks, maybe you could elaborate on what you’ve said – there may well be something there but your comments have been so brief and cryptic I’m not getting anything out of them.
Oh – one other thing I discovered that backs up my theory – in the novel Torrance was writing a play – the manuscript Wendy saw in the movie (even though it contained only one phrase endlessly repeated) wasn’t formatted like a play but more like a novel.
Introvertion is not the same as social anxiety or shyness. Let me paste this in here:
Introversion:
Contrary to what most people think, an introvert is not simply a person who is shy. In fact, being shy has little to do with being an introvert! Shyness has an element of apprehension, nervousness and anxiety, and while an introvert may also be shy, introversion itself is not shyness. Basically, an introvert is a person who is energized by being alone and whose energy is drained by being around other people.
Introverts are more concerned with the inner world of the mind. They enjoy thinking, exploring their thoughts and feelings. They often avoid social situations because being around people drains their energy. This is true even if they have good social skills. After being with people for any length of time, such as at a party, they need time alone to “recharge.”
When introverts want to be alone, it is not, by itself, a sign of depression. It means that they either need to regain their energy from being around people or that they simply want the time to be with their own thoughts. Being with people, even people they like and are comfortable with, can prevent them from their desire to be quietly introspective.
Being introspective, though, does not mean that an introvert never has conversations. However, those conversations are generally about ideas and concepts, not about what they consider the trivial matters of social small talk.
Extroversion:
“Most people believe that an extrovert is a person who is friendly and outgoing. While that may be true, that is not the true meaning of extroversion. Basically, an extrovert is a person who is energized by being around other people. This is the opposite of an introvert who is energized by being alone.
Extroverts tend to “fade” when alone and can easily become bored without other people around. When given the chance, an extrovert will talk with someone else rather than sit alone and think. In fact, extroverts tend to think as they speak, unlike introverts who are far more likely to think before they speak. Extroverts often think best when they are talking. Concepts just don’t seem real to them unless they can talk about them; reflecting on them isn’t enough. "
So basically – the true rest is this – if you’re alone for more than a few minutes, does the cell phone come out? Or do you take the opportunity to think?
“There have been plenty of exploitation movies directed at heterosexual men, but how many for heterosexual women? Think of Magic Mike as an act of egalitarianism.”
This raises an interesting question..
If the female equivalent of ‘guy flicks’ is ‘chick flicks’, then what qualifies as exploitation in movies made to appeal to women?
I always figured guys like explosions and chicks in bikinis (or less), and women like emotional connection. So they dig RomComs and romantic dramas (RomDrams?).
So – if Lifetime TV is the women’s equivalent of Spike TV, then what’s the women’s equivalent of Skin-emax? Is there any such thing?
“I think it seriously underestimates the variety in female sexuality to assume that the only thing women are looking for is emotional connection. If male strip clubs exist, then it follows that a movie about one should attract the same crowd that actually attends and also the crowd too timid to park their cars in front of one; no one will think ill of you if you walk up to a movie theatre.”
Nobody is saying its the only thing women are looking for. I simply aked for “the female equivalent” – does that mean you think all men are looking for is sex?
It’s apparent that women in general don’t respond to porn the same way men do. If they did there would be as much porn made by women for women as there is by men for men. But there isn’t.
Ok, I know this is a very charged topic – but I wish people could try to think realistically about it.
Is it sexist to say “porn turns men into slavering steely-eyed single-minded beasts”? Yes. Is it true? Well… yes.
So what I’m asking is – what does that to women? Does anything? Or is there no female equivalent?
Babies and weddings was supposed to be funny – although it was a stab at an answer. My hope is that some women or someone familiar with female psychology might have a better answer.
“As evidenced by both the existence of male strip clubs and the existence of Magic Mike, maybe we could say that guys like Channing Tatum (and Tom Selleck) have the power to turn women into blathering idiots?”
I don’t think it’s the same though. I believe there are a lot more clubs with female strippers than male, and from what I’ve seen (admittedly it’s only in movies though) women laugh and have a fun time when males strip – it’s like a social event. Males mostly sit transfixed and silent or start demonstrating their testosterone-laden dominance.
Wait – that’s not true – I did once see women with a male stripper – at a birthday party at work. And it was like I described – they laughed and had loads of fun. Not like the men I’ve seen at a strip club.
My thinking here is that male sexual drive is an evolutionary mechanism, which helps to promote survival of species.
And I hope I can say this without sounding stupid or sexist – I don’t mean it that way, but it seems to me once the male sex drive has done its thing – resulting in pregnancy, then the female takes over – caring for the baby and bonding with it in a way no male can. Is it unfair or wrong to say that babies are a subject that many women respond very strongly to? More strongly as a whole than men do?
Babies and weddings – honestly those are the 2 things that I’ve seen women go totally crazy about – and it would make sense since they’re both things that relate to survival of species in a way that the male sex drive doesn’t. Men want to make the babies women want to care for them and make sure the men stick around to help.
I think the people getting offended are misunderstanding what I’m asking, and are themselves making some generalizations that I’m not.
They are very general questions, dealing with very broad sweeping biological issues, and the answers by defintion would have to be pretty broad and sweeping – as they always are for sociological or biological questions.
Is it a sweeping generalization to say “chick flicks are the female equivalent of guy movies”? No, because it doesn’t imply that all men like ‘guy movies’, or that all women like ‘chick flicks’. But guy movies most definitely appeal to a certain subset of the male audience much more so than to any subset of the female audience.
By the same token, it wouldn’t be fair to say that all men immediately become slobbering horny idiots as soon as they see a female stripper or a bit of porn – so again, we’re dealing with a particular subset of ‘males’.
And to be completely honest – I have seen a roomful of women suddenly become steely-eyed and single-minded when a news item came on concerning a baby in trouble.
I would think, if there is any female equivalent to the male sex drive, it would have to also be in response to the same biological imperative – not only the survival of species, but more specifically the carrying on of your own DNA to the next generation.
Is it fair to say there’s a mother-and-child bond that fathers can’t really compare with? Or is that a cultural myth?
Maybe not weddings so much, though I have heard women get pretty intense talking about their weddings. Men not so much. But then a wedding is less closely accociated with passing on the DNA than the actual birthing and raising of the child – a wedding is just the official recognition of the union in which the child will be raised.
The birth of children is the only subject I can think of that is so vitally important biologically to both genders but that separates them – men and women seem to have 2 distinctly different drives that both contribute to that birth and to the raising of the children.
And I know this treads dangerously close to feminist territory, but feminism doesn’t deny that the biological imperative to pass on our DNA is represented differently in women than in men, does it? I wouldn’t think so – if some branch of feminism tries to imply this then it’s out of touch with reality.
Again – I ask those who seem to be misunderstanding my question to reconsider – I don’t think I’m making any unfair sweeping generalizations. I’m not so much saying “Do all women feel an intense connection with babies?” as “Is it fair to say that as many women respond strongly to babies as men to strippers/porn?”.
Or, to get back to the original question as I first asked it – if you don’t believe that babies are to women as strippers/porn is to men, then what is? (And of course I don’t mean in a sexual way – I mean what do women respond very strongly to (in general) that men (in general) don’t, at least to the same extent/in the same way?)
Do you think there’s a female equivalent to the male sex drive? Something (some) women respond to as primally as (some) men do to visual depictions of female sexuality?
Prometheus and Childbirth 12 months ago
The first Alien features a theme of birth trauma which origintes from Freud. Rob Ager has done an excellent analysis of this theme for his Collative Learning site, but unfortunately it’s not posted on the site itself and you have to buy one of his DVDs to get it. I recommend it though to anyone who’s interested – his analyses are amazing (you can read many of them on the site). I’ve bought most of his DVDs and have not been disappointed.
Not sure if I can post a link but here goes: http://www.collativelearning.com/FILMS%20reviews%20BY%20ROB%20AGER.html
Here’s a quote from Freud: “The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety.”
And I wouldn’t say it’s just a male anxiety – everyone experiences the trauma of being born.
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Prometheus and Childbirth 12 months ago
Sorry for the double post, but I found a blog that reprints Ager’s Alien analysis almost word for word: http://www.orble.com/alien-a-deeper-meaning/
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Prometheus and Childbirth 12 months ago
I do see where you were coming from Lisa, the chestburster does offer a way for a male to experience life growing inside and then giving birth… but that seems to be only one in a myriad of birth related fears explored in the film. As Rob suggests in his analysis, that whole angle may have come from Giger’s obsessive sexual imagery more than from Scott. Personally I’m not aware of any other films that explore birth trauma themes in such an imaginative way (I haven’t seen Prometheus).
And speking of 2001, Ager has recently posted a new and fascinating installment in his ongoing explorations of that film. I only discovered it last night when I grabbed the link to his site for posting here, and my mind is still being blown in slow motion!
As for what the theme of birth trauma may represent in Alien – I can’t add anything to what Ager has already said about it. But it sure is a fun subject to explore, isn’t it?
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R.I.P Ray Bradbury. What is your fav film or television adaptation of his work? 11 months ago
The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Not a great film of course, but it’s Bradbury and Harryhausen – 2 of my all-time favorite geek-out people. Put the 2 Rays together and for me it’s magic!
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DVD Sales Fall As Streaming Increases 11 months ago
@ Scampi, the issue is with restoring the film itself. Old film suffers from all kinds of damage, and must be cleaned and restored before being transferred to DVD Blu-Ray or before a streaming copy can be made. That sometimes also involves finding prints from other sources (other countries in some cases) that have undamaged portions correlating to portions that are heavily damaged or have been removed from the original source print or negative.
This is a very labor-intensive and expensive process. A studio will only undertake it if they expect good revenue from DVD or Blu-Ray sales.
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Wait – before anybody points it out – yes, I know – Wendy looked at ‘the manuscript’ and all it said over and over is “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.
But stop and think about this – Steven King wrote a story about a writer…
Wait. Back up a bit. Steven King discovered a news item (supposedly based on the same incident from the Eagles song Hotel California) and wrote a story based on it – a story about a writer who takes his family to a closed-for-winter hotel for solitude so he can write a story and subsequently is overtaken by the evil forces in the hotel and attempts to murder his family.
I haven’t read King’s novel, so I don’t know if that’s exactly what it’s about, but I know it’s close to that.
The fact that he was writing about a writer writing makes me believe that, to some extent anyway, Jack Torrance can be seen as King’s alter ego. I don’t know if the novel includes the scene where Wendy finds his manuscript consisting only of repetitions of "All work and no play.. " or if that was entirely of Kubrick’s devising, but there is one simple clue even in that repeated sentence that the author Jack Torrance was writing about himself… the name Jack. At the very least we can infer that Jack Torrance was writing about someone named Jack. Could he in fact have been writing about his family?
The movie begins with Jack meeting with the hotel manager (or whatever he was), who after explaining the nature of the job, tells him about the horrific incident involving another caretaker some time in the past, at which Jack’s face lights up (could he have become inspired to write about that event just then?) and he actually says “Well, that’s quite a story!”.
King frequently wrote about Maine and surrounding areas, where he lived. I believe he also frequently included lots of details from his own life in his work – ‘write about what you know’. So did Kubrick make a movie about Steven King writing The Shining? It fits – the main character is an author who discovers a juicy real-life event about a grisly murder that supposedly involved supernatural forces, and then proceeds to write such a story based on himself and his family. This is exactly what King did when he wrote The Shining, and it’s exactly what Jack Torrance did (at least in Kubrick’s The Shining).
Most people (myself included until recently) assume that what we see onscreen – namely Wendy finding the manuscript consisting of only one repeated sentence – is literally what Jack Torrance the author was writing – from which it follows that the rest of the movie actually happens. But consider for a moment – IF we’re actually seeing the story that Jack was writing at that point, the story-within-a-story (meaning “All work and no play..” is not what Torrance was writing, but what his CHARATER was writing), then it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that the entire second half of The Shining in fact represents that manuscript, craftily told in story-within-a-story form.
What bothered me about this idea was “Well, then what REALLY happened to Jack and his family?”
Then it occurred to me – if Kubrick was giving us a clever story-within-a-story, and didn’t want to advertise that fact, then he couldn’t really pull back from it at the end and show that everything was alright and the Torrances were all alive and well and sane – that would ruin the effect! It would give away the fact that all the ghosts – all the Shining visions – all the murder and attempted murder and craziness and the evil of the hotel itself – were all simply elements in that manuscript. And where would be the fun in giving it away like that?
When I realized that, that’s when I began to think it’s not just the second half, but the entirety of the film, that represents the manuscript.
There are a couple of clues that this might indeed be what Kubrick intended. For one, many people have pointed out that several sequences are jarring due to weird visual qualities or what seems like oddly bad writing. For instance, the sudden jarring closeup on Jack’s frozen corpse just before the end, and the similarly odd shot of him with that crazy intense look on his face. There’s weird lapses of logic in some of the dialogue – for example when Halloran (Scatman) calls for a snow cat to drive up to the snow bound Overlook and tells the guy on the phone that the Torrances “turned out to be unreliable assholes and they need to be replaced”. Huh?! This just doesn’t fit at all with what happened – according to what we’ve seen Halloran had shared a Shining vision with Danny and apparently understood that there was some kind of trouble, and was going to HELP the Torrances. Remember, before leaving his house he called the Forest Service and asked them to check on the Torrances and make sure they’re ok.
However, all of this would make sense IF the movie was meant to represent a first draft of a manuscript by a perhaps untalented writer that’s in need of some polishing up and editing.
Also, the movie is broken up into ‘chapters’ by black title screens saying which day it is.
Another clue is right after Danny sees the twin girls and they say “Come play with us Danny – forever and ever and ever!”. He covers his face with his hands (it’s a kind of weird gesture – maybe like one invented by a writer who relies on melodramatic cliches?) and then he goes into his Tony talk and says “Remember what Mister Halloran said Danny – it’s just like pictures in a book”.
But wait – there was never a scene in the movie where Halloran said that! Of course it could refer to something in a conversation they had that we weren’t privy to. But if you think about it – what does that even mean, and why would Halloran say it? Most likely he was referring to Shining visions – but in what way are they like ‘pictures in a book’? The visions Danny has are totally immersive – there’s movement and sound and he is inside of them, more like a dream or an actual event than flat silent pictures in a book. And why say “in a book” at all? Why not just pictures?
It could be a clue that the Shining visions themselves are actually something happening in a book – the book Jack is writing.
There are other clues to this effect – remember the scene where Danny walks in with his collar torn and Wendy runs and kneels by his side to comfort him? There’s a shot of it from over Jack’s shoulder in which Wendy and Danny are visually placed directly over the typewriter – in fact exactly where the paper would be. It’s a weird looking shot and seems almost designed to say “this is happening in the manuscript!”
Ok, well, I’ve gone on long enough. And yes – before anybody tries to hurl accusations that I stole all this from Rob Ager, I AM familiar with his analyses of The Shining and other Kubrick films, and my thinking is largely based on his writings. I don’t think he’s ever suggested directly that the entire film is the manuscript though, or that it’s the story of King writing The Shining. I believe that part is original to me (though I could well be wrong). These ideas are spurred by the intriguing title of his planned-but-as-yet-unwritten next chapter in his Shining Analysis, called “Pictures in a Book”. That made me start to think a lot about why Halloran would have said that, and that’s what led to this theory. I strongly suspect it parallels Ager’s theories too, and in fact I believe it’s what his next chapter is going to present.
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Yes, both of those things, plus partly based on King himself writing The Shining.
Since King did write about himself, and Jack was writing about someone named Jack, did Kubrick take several steps back and write about a writer (King) writing about a writer (Torrance) writing about himself murdering his family exactly the way he had heard a former caretaker of the same hotel had done?
It’s also been said that Nicholson was a sort of alter ego for Kubrick – the crazy hair and intense eyes, the scraggly little beard he was starting… so there may well be another level of complexity in which Torrance also represents Kubrick making a movie about King etc…
But at that my mind is beginning to boggle. I won’t even begin to think about that just now – I’m still trying to absorb the implications of the ideas I presented above, and that may take some time.
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Lol me too!
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Oops! Hellshocked, your post wasn’t there when I replied!! So this is intended for Scottie:
That’s very encouraging. I do apologize for my long and somewhat rambling initial post above – I was still working out my ideas and probably shouldn’t have posted yet.
Let me try to refine the basic premise a bit -
I do not think Kubrick’s film is necessarily about Steven King himself – but if you accept that the entire film represents the manuscript Jack was writing, then by default it’s a movie about a writer writing about the events depicted in The Shining.
I don’t really see any parallels with King himself, other than the fact that Torrance is the author of the story (The Shining). But that fact in itself does begin to suggest a sort of infinite regress – or at least a several-layers-deep regress.
Yeah, it’s definitely time to watch it again!
@ Hellshocked:
Thanks for the info about King as a writer and about the sequence of events from the book. I can certainly understand your viewpoint as well, and I suspect most people will agree with it. But I’m having a blast with this and I’m pretty well convinced, though I have no real proof as yet. It would be very hard for me to believe that Kubrick actually made a film (after Strangelove anyway) that had little or no more going on in it than the surface narrative. The most interesting things in a Kubick movie happen beneath the surface and need to be teased out through careful analysis.
“.. or are you saying these were also products of the manuscript?”
Well, if my theory is right, then everything that happens in the movie IS the manuscript, and that manuscript is The Shining, but sort of a first draft that isn’t fully developed yet, so that could account for the differences. I began by thinking only the second half represented the manuscript, but then realized it actually makes more sense if the entire movie is the manuscript. And the fact that King writes about himself plays into this idea very well, since it would be about a writer writing about himself and his family – undoubtedly ‘versions’ of themselves, or characters based on them rather than being exactly like themselves.
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Heh…
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
^ I disagree.
Have you looked at Rob Ager’s Kubrick analyses? http://www.collativelearning.com/2001%20chapter%201.html
Here’s his analysis of 2001 (the first video segment is missing for some reason) – if you’re not interested in digging in to all the reading (it could take days or even weeks) maybe at least watch one of the videos, just to get an idea of how in-depth and convincing his investigations into a movie are.
Did you realize that never once is alien life or alien intelligence mentioned in 2001, and that there’s a mountain of carefully hidden evidence (planted by Kubrick the chess master who had a special interest in code and code breaking) which suggests quite plainly that the monolith itself is a fake planted by the government and used to manipulate the public?
Yes, there’s a fairly coherent surface narrative that’s simple enough a child can grasp it easily, and even that has different interpretations. The monolith could be planted by aliens or could be god or something planted by god. But for a director known to be exacting and to demand countless takes in order to get everything perfect, he sure did include a lot of incredibly noticeable continuity errors, such as for instance the fact that as the camera tracks upward to follow the spinning bone, there is a cut and suddenly the bone is spinning the wrong way! Could ANY director have let that slip through? Or could he be using carefully planned ‘continuity errors’ to draw attention – to say “here… look closer at this part – there’s something going on beneath the surface”?
But I won’t go on – people who refuse to believe this won’t be swayed. I’m not accusing you of being a strict denier – a lot of people simply refuse to believe that any movie has anything beneath the surface simply because that’s the way 99.99% of movies are, and some deny these ideas about Kubrick’s films because it goes against some belief of theirs. I have no idea if you fall in to one of these camps or if you’re open minded but haven’t seen convincing evidence yet. As far as I’m concerned, even if you refuse to believe in some of Ager’s ideas about what Kubrick has hidden in his films, it quickly becomes obvious that Kubrick was definitely putting SOMETHING there.
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Sorry if I sounded a little vehement there Hellshocked – I didn’t mean to be insulting to you. And I do appreciate your not retorting angrily. And now I understand better where you’re coming from – you don’t deny deeper meanings in Kubrick.
I don’t think my interpretation of The Shining necessarily renders a surface reading incompatible so much as simply reframes it. When you watch The Shining (if my theory is right) you certainly are seeing exactly the story you first think you’re seeing… but that story is a ‘story within a story’. It’s just a matter of stepping back and realizing it’s framed within another – hinted – story, not something that utterly changes everything. I don’t think that changes the basic character of the original story – just adds a level of complexity that gives it ‘legs’ – it stands up to years’ worth of rewatching and still rewards you with new interpretations that don’t destroy the original experience but only enhance it IMO.
And thank you Bijoux – was the character of Torrance an alcoholic (and implied child abuser) in the novel?
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Ah, well that last bit actually lends credence to Ager’s theory that at different times Nicholson is playing Jack’s father or even grandfather rather than Jack (when he’s at the bar drinking for example) and that at times the boy is actually supposed to represent a young Jack rather than Danny, and that the ‘Party Guest’ with the bleeding head wound is meant to represent Jack’s father (or was it his grandfather?). That fits in with the idea that Charles Grady and Delbert Grady are two generations of their family.
To me it makes sense – Kubrick saw that King had essentially written a story about himself writing a story, and that King was in fact envisioning the possibility of himself going mad – and then he made a movie about THAT, which IMO is more interesting than a direct rendition of the surface story itself. And by not making that very obvious, he was giving us something to ponder deeply and discuss on Mubi decades after the film’s release.
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Sorry to double-post, but I’ve thought of something to add that actually develops this quite a bit, referring back to a rather offhand statement I made earlier.
I had mentioned a certain apparently deliberate similarity between Kubrick and Nicholson (which is stressed strongly by the fact that, in the documentary shot by Kubrick’s daughter, he is seen typing on the set, just as Jack does in the movie). My earlier tentative idea was that Nicholson represented an alter ego for Kubrick, but I think it’s actually the other way around. Kubrick is deliberately inserting himself as Jack into yet another framing story (the documentary, which is a film about a film about a story about a story… in which incidentally a man named Jack {Nicholson} plays a man named Jack and a boy named Danny plays a boy named Danny… can you stand any more parallels??!!). This is similar to the documentary about Apocalypse Now in which Coppola’s situation echoed that of the main character and the actor who played him (Essentially they all had breakdowns).
I think Kubrick is doing some things very deliberately – such as making sure that in the doco we see him mistreating Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers a lot but always being nice to Nicholson. This parallels the way Jack Torrance acted in the second half of the film. I know, it would be a stronger case if he also mistreated Danny, but that would have been going too far – there would have been a public outcry if he was seen mistreating a child.
SO… if I have this right – the documentary is a movie about a movie (shot by a Kubrick, unless his daughter was married?) in which the director is a tyrannical dictator mistreating the women children and ethnic minorities involved. Exactly like Jack does in the story.
And if I know my Kubrick, his themes tend to run across several films rather than just appearing in one isolated project… so it’s not much of a stretch to assume that it’s meant to say “the power brokers behind the movies you watch (represented by Kubrick in the documentary) are using those movies as propaganda for the benefit of white adult males against everyone else”. I don’t think he means the actual directors themselves (of Hollywood entertainment) are deliberately making such propaganda – unless it’s at the service of those power brokers (against whom it seems most of the hidden messages in his films are aimed).
The end of the documentary showed how Kubrick played games with the hedge maze – moving sections of it each day so the crew would get lost while his voice was heard laughing cruelly from somewhere. This backs up the idea that at that point he represents “the power behind the surface” ie the financers and government/military institutions who have ultimate say-so over what films get made and how because they supply much of the money and/or have the power to shut productions down if they don’t like what’s being filmed.
Wow – ok my brain is twisted like a pretzel now!! But I feel like I’ve seen pretty successfully through the maze of this intricate and confounding film. Now I’m beat. Been up all night wrestling with this and should have slept hours and hours ago, but it overtook me and wouldn’’t let me. Now I fear I look a bit like a deranged Kubrick/Nicholson (I do have the scruffy little beard for the part)..
Wait – I just gagged!
So – if Kubrick is essentially ‘playing jack’ in the doco, then is he a stand-in for Steven King? Gah!! Too many levels of impersonation and identity/crossover!!! Losing my mind now!!
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
So sorry for triple post! But nobody has interpersed anything, and this is too closely related to start a new thread..
I just watched the documentary again and had another thought..
There DEFINITELY is an infinite regress going on here. I believe Kubrick’s film IS about King writing The Shining, and that what he’s implying is that King must have had some level of madness and abusiveness in himself to fuel that project. The events in the story were based on his own fears about things he might be capable of. This is hardly groundbreaking I know, but it gets better.
Buried INSIDE that story is the story most people believe the movie really is about – ghosts and evil entities haunting a hotel and possessing a man named Jack Torrance.
Pull back a level to the documentary and you have essentially the same story repeating, only this time Stanley Kubrick (who happens to share initials with Steven King) is the madman who’s doing the writing and making the descisions and mistreating everyone except the white males (all the crew seemed to be white males). He and Nicholson are seen pandering with stars in the doco, and Shelley Duvall talks about how much people seem to love Nicholson and she demonstrates jealousy over it. This is related to little Danny’s 2 interview scenes where he seems really excited about all the money he’s making from this project, and he talks about how his friends give him a hard time about ‘thinking he’s really smart’, to which he says that he really does think he’s smart. He’s a little entitled upper class white male in the making, soon to be hobnobbing with stars and world leaders like Nicholson and Kubrick and King et al.
Then, pull back yet another level – from the personal to the collective. The buried symbolism implies that what’s been suggested about King, Nicholson, Kubrick and even Danny aplies to an entire group – namely the white upper ‘ruling’ class. The entitlement we see developing in Danny, the madness growing in the hearts of all the adult white men who are in positions of power…
An infinite regress. Like nested Russian dolls, all infected with the same madness. This is also why we see multiple generations of the Torrance males… infinite regress. Kubrick is saying the same story has happened, is happening, and will happen again and again, on multiple levels socially, politically, and interpersonally.
A very interesting thing I noticed that I don’t remember if Rob commented on yet or not – we see Kubrick and his crew emerge from ‘behind the scenes’ of the hedge maze into the hedge maze set itself with a cameraman and he begins to direct Danny. Danny turns and runs away through the maze (during the shot) – followed by the cameraman and Kubrick. Kubrick is CHASING Danny through the hedge maze – which immediately brings to mind the ‘entity’ represented by the camera which chases the car at the beginning, chases Danny’s tricycle, and of course Jack chasing Danny in the maze and through the house etc. I think it’s very deliberate that the camera is between Kubrick and Danny – this is after all the Steadicam Movie – first real use of the steadicam after its development (and doubtless its best use so far) – the swooping movements of that camera are tied intimately to the evil entity.
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Thanks you two.
DFFOO: My reading of this was that Halloran doesn’t want to let everybody know that he’s pretty much psychic. So them being unreliable was a cover story so he wouldn’t have to say “a boy in danger beamed me some telepathic brainwaves asking for help.”
lol yeah, well of course that makes sense. I guess that scene doesn’t support my theory after all.
“It’s been a while since I read it, but I’m 99.999% sure that Halloran said that in the book. I’m pretty sure there was some kind of thing about Danny having a scary illustrated book of Bluebeard, and Halloran was saying that the ghosts are just like the pictures in that book. I guess this takes a little bit away from the “first draft inconsistencies” part of your theory…”
Maybe it doesn’t. Kubrick didn’t film the scene where Halloran said that, or else removed it during editing. So having Danny refer to it is a continuity error that Kubrick or someone else probably should have caught. In a sense it actually strengthens the first draft theory I think, because it’s as if the author (Torrance/King) hadn’t thought of that scene yet but only came up woth it now and still needs to go back in and add the earlier conversation. Oh, but he did include a strange statement by Halloran about burning toast being liek the Shining. Was that in the novel? Did it make more sense there? It’s as if the story isn’t properly edited yet. He needs to go back and take out the weird burnt toast lines and instead inser the Bluebeard illustration thing.
I honestly believe that Kubrick frequently plays with the fact that we’re used to seeing movies with bad plot holes and errors that we need to ignore in order for the story to make sense, and he takes advantage of that fact by deliberately putting such mistakes in, but in such a way that if you investigate further it leads to some other meaning. Of course he’s not superhuman, and is certainly capable of making errors himself. It’s just that when he does it it seems profound, whereas when another director does it it’s just a mistake.
I have gotten more sleep now, thank you! I’m left feeling really strange and zoned-out.
Bijoux, I agree that the cycle issue is key. One very interesting thing I noticed when re-watching most of it in a sleep-deprived daze earlier is that immediately after Danny first sees the twin girls for the first time we cut directly to the scene where Ullman is ushering Jack and Wendy in to their room to show them around, and right at the beginning of the shot 2 girls walk past them (young women actually) and Jack swivels his head almost comically to watch them walk by. Hmm…
Personally now I’m pretty well convinced Kubrick deliberately inserted the nested framing devices idea… the documentary (doubtless directed by him) is a movie shot by a Kubrick (Vanessa) about a movie shot by a Kubrick (Stanley) about a book written by an author (King) about a book written by Torrance.
I really wasn’t able to find any more evidence to support the idea that the movie is the manuscript, aside from what I presented already (which isn’t strong I know), but to me it seems likely that once Kubrick had hit on the idea of the infinite regress, both through the nested framing devices I just mentioned and through the multiple generations of Torrance men passing on the cycle of abuse down the line, that it would occur to him to present the movie itself as the manuscript. One piece of supporting evidence – why is Jack’s typewriter small and white at first, and then large and battleship gray later? Is one the ‘real’ typewriter? Also, note that as he’s writing, Jack has a huge scrapbook open on the table next to him that seems to contail pictures and newspaper articles about the Overlook (Rob Ager presented evidence for this in one of his analyses). This scrapbook is apparently where he saw the article about Grady – remember he tells Delbert Grady that he saw his picture. So it really does seem like he was writing a story about the Overlook, and at the very least with himself in it (the repetitions of Jack in the manuscript Wendy finds). Since there’s already an infinite regress theme going on, why would he pass up an opportunity to add this rather interesting layer, which to me takes it all to a new level?
The main reason as I understand it that King hated the movie was because Kubrick had changed so much, and he even said that Kubrick ’didn’t get it’ and placed the evil mostly in people rather than in the hotel. This makes sense if he was making a movie about the author who [i]wrote[/i] that story, rather than the simple horror story itself. Also, if he presented himself as Jack Torrance in the documentary, and had Nicholson sometimes playing Jack and sometimes playing Jack’s father and/or grandfather, and was probably playing on the idea that the actor’s name is the same as the character (and his initials are the same as King’s) – he’s definitely drawing the ides out into the real world. In fact that’s what the documentary does really – it says “Look – not only are we filming a movie about a guy who bullies and mistreats everybody under him, but that’s exactly what happened during production too!”. So if he’s presenting himself as ‘the director gone mad’, then he’s at least strongly inplying King was ‘the writer gone mad’.
I feel that, even if I haven’t found any definite evidence inthe movie itself, Kubrick most definitely had that interpretation in mind. And if he did, then it’s almost certain that the manuscript Wendy found is not meant to be what her husband was writing, but what his character was writing. I firmy believe parts of the movie represent the Torrances and parts represent them as he described them in his story.
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Heh heh – yeah, I’m definitely getting the book now.
VERY interesting that Torrance was researching the Overlook hotel, and apparently Grady. That means the book he was writing was meant to be about that event and about the Overlook. And since we’ve already established that King has a tendency to insert himself as an alter ego into his stories (and since even in the disputed manuscript we see in the movie he’s writing the name Jack over and over – an infininte repetition of himself) then it’s not much of a leap to assume that indeed Torrance was writing about himself and his family going to the Overlook hotel, learning about Grady, and repeating the murderous rampage himself.
AND, if that’s the case, since he was writing about HIMSELF going to the Overlook to write – what would THAT writing have been about (his character in the book would also be a writer)? Infinte regress right there. Personally I suspect “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is what Torrance’s CHARACTER was writing. This would help explain the mysteriously changing typewriter and the weird shot of Wendy and Danny kneeling right over the typewriter where the paper would be, which couldn’t be a more clear metaphor for “this is what’s happening IN THE MANUSCRIPT”.
I need to capture that image – it’s pretty thought provoking. Plus, the complaint most readers of the book have (and that King himself had) is that Kubrick didn’t make the evil entity/ghosts in the hotel powerful enough, and in fact sort of implied that they weren’t even real and that the shining visions themselves aren’t real, but that Jack simply went mad and abused his son and tried to kill his family.
Doesn’t this sound more like King himself – what he was contemplating by writing the story? He was apprently contemplating some implied violent thoughts within himself and his alcoholism, and added in the horror elements that he had learned about from some kind of news article. Hmm… in fact that’s exactly what Torrance does in the movie.
“Just like pictures in a book – it isn’t real”.
This seems to be pretty clear evidence that the shining visions themselves aren’t real but are ‘like pictures in a book’.
Kubrick is well known for not being true to the material he’s adapting but for using it as a platform from which to examine real life situations (corrupt politics, the absurdity and horror of war, sexual abuse, etc).
“How do you know that Kubrick’s film isn’t about Kubrick directing The Shining? Instant karma, baby.”
Matt – that’s what the documentary was about – the movie is about a writer who’s based on King. Or were you joking?
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Thanks Thomas.
Actually, I have just been informed (at Rob Ager’s forum, where I cross-posted this thread) that my idea already was brought up by Rob in his Shining analysis. Oops!! Not so original as I had thought! It’s been a while since I read the analysis (I’m currently re-reading it, and have downloaded the novel to my Kindle).
Also, I don’t mean to say that what I’m suggesting here is the “real meaning” or the only thing Kubrick was doing behind the scenes on this film – just one of the many things he’s able to weave into the multilayered tapestries of his films. I completely agree that Kubrick’s films are very cinematic, and in fact he himself has repeatedly said that they need to be understood visually rather than by listening to dialogue or following the basic plot development that happens on what he calls “the simplest level”. This is why his films always depart so drastically from their source material – he just uses the ‘story’ as a simplistic surface element into which he begins his real work.
Indeed, his films are like dreams in that when interpreted, they open up to reveal a myriad of interwoven meanings. Unlike dreams however, the buried subliminal messages in his movies are very consciously created and skillfully hidden with repeating motifs so that by careful analysis they can be teased out and connected up and reveal a definite statement he was making that he didn’t want to be too obvious. But Ager’s alanyses reveal this a lot better than I can just in a few hastily-written paragraphs here.
In fact, here’s a perfect example of Kubrick’s purely visual encoding – I decided to capture the picture I mentioned earlier of Wendy and Danny kneeling directly over the typewriter:
]
Could it be any more clear what this means? What an awkward composition and odd visual alignment otherwise.
And also, here’s Jack’s typewriter from an earlier shot:
http://www.collativelearning.com/PICS%20FOR%20WEBSITE/SHINING%20EXPANDED%204/typewriter%20pan%20out%20to%20jack.jpg
Campare it ti the typewrite seen in the picture aboce. They’re not the same typewriters! Why is that? Could the little white one have malfunctioned and he had a spare that he switched to, in a scene that was later removed, or does one represent the typewriter King himself was using when he wrote about Torrance, who is using the big battleship grey model with his family members emerging from it as if to say “this is inside the story he’s writing”?
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Ah crap – that din’t work, and now I can’t edit!
Let me try the pictures again:
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Is Kubrick's film actually about Steven King writing The Shining? 11 months ago
Wow, lots of activity since last I checked!!
Polaris, very interesting that King has changed his initial opinion of the film. Glad to hear it. I was googling him and discovered he is writing or has just written a sequel to The Shining focusing on Danny all grown up and working in a hospital apprently using his Shining abilities to help terminal patients face their last days.
Thearshman, you want to talk about mirroring between the book and the movie? Another article I looked at today listed the differences and apparently Kubrick very deliberately changed almost everything into its opposite… made everything yellow from the book red, and everything red yellow (Jacks’ VW for example), changed Wendy from a tough competent blonde to a ditzy submissive brunette, made Jack unstable and abusive from the beginning rather than slowly breaking down, elevators that are worked by the hotel in the book simply are never seen moving in the film – character actions and motives are taken away and given to different characters… on and on.
It’s amazing how much depth there is in his films to mine out. I hadn’t noticed all the details you picked out in the opening and closing shots – need to re-watch again soon. One thing I picked up on though in the opening scene, we move from heavily forested slopes gradually to bare rocky mountains (allegory for deforesting of America?) then back into forests and finally snow. Travelling back and forth in time, as the characters at times seem to do (different generations of Torrances and Gradys represented)?
Matt Parks, maybe you could elaborate on what you’ve said – there may well be something there but your comments have been so brief and cryptic I’m not getting anything out of them.
Oh – one other thing I discovered that backs up my theory – in the novel Torrance was writing a play – the manuscript Wendy saw in the movie (even though it contained only one phrase endlessly repeated) wasn’t formatted like a play but more like a novel.
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Do you love cinema and consider yourself an introvert? 11 months ago
Introvertion is not the same as social anxiety or shyness. Let me paste this in here:
Introversion:
Contrary to what most people think, an introvert is not simply a person who is shy. In fact, being shy has little to do with being an introvert! Shyness has an element of apprehension, nervousness and anxiety, and while an introvert may also be shy, introversion itself is not shyness. Basically, an introvert is a person who is energized by being alone and whose energy is drained by being around other people.
Introverts are more concerned with the inner world of the mind. They enjoy thinking, exploring their thoughts and feelings. They often avoid social situations because being around people drains their energy. This is true even if they have good social skills. After being with people for any length of time, such as at a party, they need time alone to “recharge.”
When introverts want to be alone, it is not, by itself, a sign of depression. It means that they either need to regain their energy from being around people or that they simply want the time to be with their own thoughts. Being with people, even people they like and are comfortable with, can prevent them from their desire to be quietly introspective.
Being introspective, though, does not mean that an introvert never has conversations. However, those conversations are generally about ideas and concepts, not about what they consider the trivial matters of social small talk.
Extroversion:
“Most people believe that an extrovert is a person who is friendly and outgoing. While that may be true, that is not the true meaning of extroversion. Basically, an extrovert is a person who is energized by being around other people. This is the opposite of an introvert who is energized by being alone.
Extroverts tend to “fade” when alone and can easily become bored without other people around. When given the chance, an extrovert will talk with someone else rather than sit alone and think. In fact, extroverts tend to think as they speak, unlike introverts who are far more likely to think before they speak. Extroverts often think best when they are talking. Concepts just don’t seem real to them unless they can talk about them; reflecting on them isn’t enough. "
So basically – the true rest is this – if you’re alone for more than a few minutes, does the cell phone come out? Or do you take the opportunity to think?
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What's Magic About Mike? Nothing 11 months ago
“There have been plenty of exploitation movies directed at heterosexual men, but how many for heterosexual women? Think of Magic Mike as an act of egalitarianism.”
This raises an interesting question..
If the female equivalent of ‘guy flicks’ is ‘chick flicks’, then what qualifies as exploitation in movies made to appeal to women?
I always figured guys like explosions and chicks in bikinis (or less), and women like emotional connection. So they dig RomComs and romantic dramas (RomDrams?).
So – if Lifetime TV is the women’s equivalent of Spike TV, then what’s the women’s equivalent of Skin-emax? Is there any such thing?
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What's Magic About Mike? Nothing 11 months ago
I’m looking for some biological equivalent of the male sex drive – that turns women into slavering steely-eyed single-minded beasts.
Maybe it’s babies and weddings?
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What's Magic About Mike? Nothing 11 months ago
I had cmpletley missed this response:
“I think it seriously underestimates the variety in female sexuality to assume that the only thing women are looking for is emotional connection. If male strip clubs exist, then it follows that a movie about one should attract the same crowd that actually attends and also the crowd too timid to park their cars in front of one; no one will think ill of you if you walk up to a movie theatre.”
Nobody is saying its the only thing women are looking for. I simply aked for “the female equivalent” – does that mean you think all men are looking for is sex?
It’s apparent that women in general don’t respond to porn the same way men do. If they did there would be as much porn made by women for women as there is by men for men. But there isn’t.
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What's Magic About Mike? Nothing 11 months ago
Ok, I know this is a very charged topic – but I wish people could try to think realistically about it.
Is it sexist to say “porn turns men into slavering steely-eyed single-minded beasts”? Yes. Is it true? Well… yes.
So what I’m asking is – what does that to women? Does anything? Or is there no female equivalent?
Babies and weddings was supposed to be funny – although it was a stab at an answer. My hope is that some women or someone familiar with female psychology might have a better answer.
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What's Magic About Mike? Nothing 11 months ago
“As evidenced by both the existence of male strip clubs and the existence of Magic Mike, maybe we could say that guys like Channing Tatum (and Tom Selleck) have the power to turn women into blathering idiots?”
I don’t think it’s the same though. I believe there are a lot more clubs with female strippers than male, and from what I’ve seen (admittedly it’s only in movies though) women laugh and have a fun time when males strip – it’s like a social event. Males mostly sit transfixed and silent or start demonstrating their testosterone-laden dominance.
Wait – that’s not true – I did once see women with a male stripper – at a birthday party at work. And it was like I described – they laughed and had loads of fun. Not like the men I’ve seen at a strip club.
My thinking here is that male sexual drive is an evolutionary mechanism, which helps to promote survival of species.
And I hope I can say this without sounding stupid or sexist – I don’t mean it that way, but it seems to me once the male sex drive has done its thing – resulting in pregnancy, then the female takes over – caring for the baby and bonding with it in a way no male can. Is it unfair or wrong to say that babies are a subject that many women respond very strongly to? More strongly as a whole than men do?
Babies and weddings – honestly those are the 2 things that I’ve seen women go totally crazy about – and it would make sense since they’re both things that relate to survival of species in a way that the male sex drive doesn’t. Men want to make the babies women want to care for them and make sure the men stick around to help.
Hey – put those stones down! :O
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What's Magic About Mike? Nothing 11 months ago
I think the people getting offended are misunderstanding what I’m asking, and are themselves making some generalizations that I’m not.
They are very general questions, dealing with very broad sweeping biological issues, and the answers by defintion would have to be pretty broad and sweeping – as they always are for sociological or biological questions.
Is it a sweeping generalization to say “chick flicks are the female equivalent of guy movies”? No, because it doesn’t imply that all men like ‘guy movies’, or that all women like ‘chick flicks’. But guy movies most definitely appeal to a certain subset of the male audience much more so than to any subset of the female audience.
By the same token, it wouldn’t be fair to say that all men immediately become slobbering horny idiots as soon as they see a female stripper or a bit of porn – so again, we’re dealing with a particular subset of ‘males’.
And to be completely honest – I have seen a roomful of women suddenly become steely-eyed and single-minded when a news item came on concerning a baby in trouble.
I would think, if there is any female equivalent to the male sex drive, it would have to also be in response to the same biological imperative – not only the survival of species, but more specifically the carrying on of your own DNA to the next generation.
Is it fair to say there’s a mother-and-child bond that fathers can’t really compare with? Or is that a cultural myth?
Maybe not weddings so much, though I have heard women get pretty intense talking about their weddings. Men not so much. But then a wedding is less closely accociated with passing on the DNA than the actual birthing and raising of the child – a wedding is just the official recognition of the union in which the child will be raised.
The birth of children is the only subject I can think of that is so vitally important biologically to both genders but that separates them – men and women seem to have 2 distinctly different drives that both contribute to that birth and to the raising of the children.
And I know this treads dangerously close to feminist territory, but feminism doesn’t deny that the biological imperative to pass on our DNA is represented differently in women than in men, does it? I wouldn’t think so – if some branch of feminism tries to imply this then it’s out of touch with reality.
Again – I ask those who seem to be misunderstanding my question to reconsider – I don’t think I’m making any unfair sweeping generalizations. I’m not so much saying “Do all women feel an intense connection with babies?” as “Is it fair to say that as many women respond strongly to babies as men to strippers/porn?”.
Or, to get back to the original question as I first asked it – if you don’t believe that babies are to women as strippers/porn is to men, then what is? (And of course I don’t mean in a sexual way – I mean what do women respond very strongly to (in general) that men (in general) don’t, at least to the same extent/in the same way?)
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What's Magic About Mike? Nothing 11 months ago
Lol ok, so Im the only one not afraid to take this thread to a place that’s really interesting?
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What's Magic About Mike? Nothing 11 months ago
“What would be “really interesting?””
Someone trying to answer the question I asked.
Do you think there’s a female equivalent to the male sex drive? Something (some) women respond to as primally as (some) men do to visual depictions of female sexuality?
If so, what?
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What's Magic About Mike? Nothing 11 months ago
Ok well, I thank you for at least answering.
I guess this isn’t really the thread to get all serious up in here.
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