“All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy”: Class Struggle in THE SHINING

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is both deeply terrifying and deeply layered with subtext. At the level of plot, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicolson) and his family agree to care for the secluded Overlook Hotel during its closed winter season, giving Jack an opportunity to work on writing his novel. However, through an enigmatic connection to the hotel’s violent history, a murderous hysteria slowly overtakes Jack, and we soon find him wielding an ax and chasing his wife and child about the hotel grounds. But this is no random act of violence. The events that unfold at the Overlook function as a lens into the culture from which they arise.

Decades worth of keen film observers and Kubrick fans have been rewarded generously in deciphering The Shining’s visual cues and coded language, unearthing a latent history of colonialism and genocide built into the foundations of the Overlook Hotel. Strewn about the spacious wings of this mountainside resort are the repressed traumas of western culture. From the sweep of America’s western expansion to the Holocaust of the 1940s, the bloody horrors of history stalk the rooms and corridors of the Overlook.

Common readings of Jack’s mania distill these horrors down to their most essential vehicle — white, patriarchal violence — a symbol as elemental to our repressed…