Excerpts from The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust

Toward the Blue Mercedes

Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999), contains a scene in which actor Tom Cruise is elbowed off the sidewalk by a group of college boys. In a block packed with parked cars, the one Cruise falls against is a blue Mercedes-Benz. The choice of car against which Cruise stumbles–surely unnoticed by almost everyone who has seen the film–is anything but an idle one. As we shall see, a Mercedes the color of blue is a carefully chosen reference to the Austrian novella on which Eyes Wide Shut is based. And, like many details small and large in Kubrick’s films, it is an example of the way in which Kubrick communicates meaning. And that it is a Mercedes is, moreover, a typically tiny clue to Kubrickian passions and concerns directly related, though most often indirectly expressed, about the problematic nature of human existence in general and the dangerous history of the modern world in particular.

Nineteen years earlier Kubrick had created one of the most unsettling scenes in all of cinema. A medium shot of two sets of red elevator doors flanked by vaguely moderne armchairs. Ominous music–Krzysztof Penderecki’s The Awakening of Jacob–on the soundtrack. One of the doors slides open and in slow motion a thick torrent of what we know is blood pours into the corridor. The livid purple-black flow bursts into a lurid red spray on the floor and walls. The flood languidly carries the furniture toward the camera–toward us–then the blood washes up the camera lens and the screen goes black1. A long version of this scene from Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel The Shining (1977) was the first released to the public–at Christmas 1979–as the advertising trailer for the film. Such a scene appears nowhere in King’s book and is thus another instance of Kubrick’s inveterate shaping of the sources for his films to his own vision 2. Some reviewers complained upon release of the film over the Memorial Day weekend in 1980 that the elevator scene was "suspended in the movie without meaning" 1. According to this line of reasoning, the image seems fits only as a marketing gimmick, as it certainly must have been on the part of both Kubrick and Warner Bros. But a close reading of Kubrick’s life and work reveals that the ocean of blood flowing from the elevator in The Shining in its sheer volume is the blood of centuries, the blood of millions, and, in particular, the blood of war and genocide in Kubrick’s own century.

It is images such as these in the cinema of Stanley Kubrick, and especially in The Shining, which confirm a preoccupation with the Holocaust, a concern hardly surprising for a denizen of the twentieth century. His partner in Harris-Kubrick Pictures from 1955 to 1961, James B. Harris, has confirmed Kubrick’s interest in the Holocaust, but has argued that it was "no different than mine, or millions of others" 4. This is certainly the case in terms of general cultural influence, but no person’s experiences or perceptions are exactly like that of another. This is particularly the case with Kubrick, who rigorously transformed his interests and concerns into art. There is copious evidence of a concern with the Holocaust in particular in Kubrick’s films, especially in response to the surrounding culture’s turn to almost obsessive interest in that event after 1960. Kubrick was an especially observant child of his time. He cannot be understood without knowledge of the historical specifics surrounding the experiences that informed his worldview and animated his films. For Kubrick, at varying levels of consciousness, the Holocaust was at the center of the harsh realities of the modern world entire that made up the subject matter of his films. His thirteen feature films all in one way or another address human struggles with and over power and violence. Fear and Desire (1953), Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Dr. Strangelove (1964), and Full Metal Jacket (1987) are films about war; Killer’s Kiss (1955), The Killing (1956), and A Clockwork Orange (1971) critique society through the lens of crime; 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) sees alien intervention as the only solution to human folly; Barry Lyndon (1975) is a sorrowful meditation on ambition, social cruelty, and the birth of modern state power; The Shining parodies in agonizing historical fashion the horror genre; and Lolita (1962) and Eyes Wide Shut balefully examine the dangers of sexuality. But at the center of this body of work–like the Minotaur in its maze–lies The Shining, for in that film there slouches a deeply laid subtext that positions the Holocaust as the modern benchmark of evil. An analysis of many otherwise inexplicable visual and aural aspects of The Shining demonstrates that this film was an artistic and a philosophical response to the horrors of the Second World War. As such, it was modeled on German novelist Thomas Mann’s similar response to the First World War in The Magic Mountain (1924) as well as being just as strongly influenced by Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle (1922) and historian Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). That Kubrick was able to approach the subject of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust only indirectly–systematically in The Shining and spasmodically elsewhere in his oeuvre–was due to the nature of the beast and the nature of the man 5.

The Jewish Perseus

But if Kubrick were so concerned about the horrors of the modern world, why did he not make a film about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust? He was on record as wanting to make such a film, telling Michael Herr in 1980 "that, probably, what he most wanted to make was a film about the Holocaust, but good luck in putting all that into a two-hour movie" 6. He subsequently wrote a screenplay, "Aryan Papers," from a novel about the Holocaust, but that film, as we shall see in Chapter 7, never got beyond pre-production. There is clearly great ambivalence about the prospect in these words and in/actions. Such ambivalence was not unique to Kubrick, but it was a powerful element of his person and his art that relates directly to the deep, rich, and curious layers of meaning and method in The Shining. Of course, one does not have to be Jewish to confront and struggle with the Holocaust, but that Kubrick was Jewish made him especially sensitive to the Nazi manifestation of violence and evil. This sensitivity was modulated by the events and culture of the postwar decades, becoming manifest–or manifestly latent–only as a result of changes in cultural discourse regarding Western society in general and the Holocaust in particular during the 1960s and 1970s.

Kubrick came from a secular family background and "was known to have said that he was not really a Jew, he just happened to have two Jewish parents" 7. Such a point of view was consistent with Kubrick’s modern agnostic outlook, but it was also a gloss on a much more complicated relationship with the world in part determined by his Jewish past. Indeed, his remark about only having Jewish parents could have been meant jokingly as a statement about the obvious fact of his Jewish background. In any case, as a Jew in a Gentile world, Kubrick would use his position as an outsider with a deep sensitivity to social injustice to expose the dark underside of society. His deep distrust of the world stemmed at least in part from consciousness of the historically precarious position of Jews in particular within a Christian society afflicted most recently by even more radical racist notions of Gentile superiority. As Kubrick once put it, "Gentiles don’t know how to worry" 8. To be sure, this remark too could be passed off as a light take on cultural difference. But Herr, who worked with Kubrick on Full Metal Jacket, uses these words as the epigraph for a chapter on Kubrick’s mania for control, rightly pointing to it as another expression of a deep fear of a hostile world born in part of being a Jew. The Holocaust in particular would also have mobilized aggressive feelings by what Conrad labeled the "fascination of the abomination" in facing great evil and horror 9.

Frederic Raphael, who co-wrote the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut, has argued that Kubrick found the extremity of the Holocaust especially threatening 10. Raphael sees Kubrick’s unwillingness to confront anti-Semitism in general and the Holocaust in specific as complementary with his choice of profession. According to Raphael, Kubrick made movies to keep the violence of the world on the other side of the camera and thus under his control. Such a judgment, if accurate, confirms the importance of being Jewish to Kubrick’s outlook on affairs. But it also points to specific aspects of his worldview that rendered the Holocaust a particularly difficult topic for him to confront. First, unlike the rational systems whose breakdown Kubrick habitually contemplates in his films, the Nazi Final Solution was not a rational system gone wrong, it was a rational–or rationalized–system gone horribly right. Second, the Holocaust at its black core is a horrible mystery of irrational evil that has in new and extremely powerful ways thrown the nature and even the existence of civilization and God into question. And, third, the threat posed by the Holocaust was personal and familial. Kubrick’s avoidance–or, rather, to amend Raphael, approach-avoidance–of the Holocaust indicates that its horror was too great especially for someone like Kubrick who took serious matters very seriously. Married to fear was outrage at the injustice of the world that simply could not endure a direct contemplation of the bottomless gloom of the Final Solution. Tellingly, after his death his wife recalled that the entire time he worked on the "Aryan Papers" screenplay Kubrick was horribly depressed 11.

Kubrick’s reluctance to confront the Holocaust directly in his films was also tied to ethics and aesthetics. His remark to Herr about how to get the Holocaust ("all that") into a two-hour film is evidence that his concern ranged beyond the personal. Like Theodor Adorno, who famously declared that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz, Kubrick was aware of the problem of how to do ethical and artistic justice to depiction of the horror of mass extermination. This was especially true in his case, since his chief means of critical artistic inquiry was a satire whose style reflected not only the postmodern practice of play but also the tradition of "Jewish comedy [that] mixes laughter and trembling . . . [and] pain and pleasure"11. Kubrick himself noted "it was only possible to be a satirist briefly nowadays, as reality soon outstripped you" 13 But Adorno also said that art in general after Auschwitz cannot ignore the Holocaust. It was, after all, despair over civilization after Auschwitz that gave decisive impetus to the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment project: "In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant"11. Many excellent films have addressed the Holocaust directly, so that when created and apprehended with proper skill and conscientiousness art in general, as Adorno argued, is appropriate, even necessary, for an examination of the subject of mass extermination 15. Such films have ranged from documentaries to dramas, with Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) representing a radical critique of these traditional forms through its total reliance on contemporary filmed accounts by survivors and eyewitnesses to the exclusion of the "impossible" recreation of the event through historical or fictional footage. Given the especially gruesome nature of the Holocaust, another–or the only–way for art to confront it, it has also been argued, is by means of indirection, like Perseus seeing Medusa reflected in a mirror. (In terms of the Oedipal theme in Kubrick’s films it is interesting to recall that Perseus, like Oedipus, accidentally killed his own father.) As Raphael mused–reflected–in his notebook in May 1995, "‘S.K. proceeds by indirection . . . [his] work could be viewed, schematically, as responding, in various ways, to the unspeakable (what lies beyond spoken explanation)’"16. Here "unspeakable" means above all the Nazi evil Kubrick could not approach directly, particularly through the medium of words he very psychoanalytically regarded as inherently inadequate and duplicitous. "He seemed not very interested in words," Raphael concludes 17. Although, as we shall see, Kubrick often used words with great effect, he noted that "film operates on a level much closer to music and to painting than the printed word. . . . The thing a film does best is to use pictures with music" to create a dynamic living space of rich allusive potential and effect 18.

Since Adorno, many historians and philosophers, as well as artists, have wrestled with the issue of how art can–or cannot–treat the horrors of history and the Holocaust in particular. The fundamental problem lies in "representing events that insist that they cannot be put into words even as they insist upon the need for transmission" 19. There is, first of all, the gulf between those who experienced such extremity and those who attempt only to describe or evoke it 20. There is also the problem of finding the right balance between narrative and theory, allowing the story and the storyteller to speak from and of experience while also applying external analysis for purposes of the production of knowledge. Along with this comes the allied conundrum of attempting to find redemptive meaning in such horrors while also acknowledging the irreducible horror and meaninglessness of mass extermination.

Kubrick developed his own creative strategy for representing the Holocaust, one that expands the definition of a Holocaust film to include those reflecting a trauma-like induced discourse. Kubrick’s personal hesitations and artistic sensibilities are manifested most evidently in the systematic burial of a Holocaust subtext in The Shining. Such indirection fit Kubrick’s open-narrative style of filmmaking, the narrative economy of film, the priority he gave to images over words, and the dreamlike structure of his films. The use of a horror film might seem in particular to trivialize the Holocaust as well as satisfy indulgence of viewer and creator in the violence characteristic of the genre. Extreme indirection arguably avoids or mitigates these problems, although it risks cold abstraction, robbing the Holocaust of its specific Jewish agony, or being overlooked entirely. But such an approach can, particularly through the vehicle of a horror film, also encourage the critical contemplation of the horrors of the real world. An emphasis on the historical also strengthens the film’s interrogation–in line with contemporaneous blurring and exploding of genre boundaries in general–of film horror’s fictional and commercial conventions, while exploiting horror films’ own recourse to indirection to heighten suspense and terror (e.g., Cat People [1942], which Kubrick most likely saw in the Bronx in January 1943, and The Haunting [1963]). These levels of discourse in The Shining reflect as well postmodern insights into the value of multiple narratives and points of view (e.g., Atom Egoyan’s Ararat [2002]), which help avoid the trivialization that would come, regardless of genre, with unexamined cultural and ideological agendas and assumptions 21. The greatest problem with Kubrick’s indirect approach is that his Holocaust subtext has gone almost–almost–unnoticed. But this inaccessibility testifies not only to the rich subtlety of Kubrick’s films in general but in this case to deep personal hesitations that, ironically perhaps, reveal even more about Kubrick and the times in which he lived and worked.

The Wolf at the Door

Night. Winter. Jack Torrance is about to murder his family. He hunches at the door of the room in which his wife is trapped, the words dripping and then–as he straightens to splinter the door with an ax–lunging from his mouth:

Little pigs, little pigs,
Let me come in.
Not by the hair on your chinny chin chin.
Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff,
And I’ll blow your house in 22.

In this scene from The Shining the wolf is literally at the door. And he is there because Stanley Kubrick and history ordained that he be. Fairy tales play an important role in The Shining and we know that Kubrick was well read (to) as a child in Grimm’s fairy tales 23. It is true that "The Three Little Pigs" is not a Grimm fairy tale: "The Story of the Three Little Pigs" was first published in England in J. Q. Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Tales in 1843. But while the story was anything but unknown in the United States, its popularity was massively boosted by the cartoon version released in movie theatres by Walt Disney on May 7, 1933.

Disney’s "Three Little Pigs" became the most successful cartoon in the animator’s "Silly Symphonies" series, won an Academy Award in 1934, and the song composed for the eight-minute short by Frank Churchill, "Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?," became a national theme song in defiance of the Depression. It is anything but clear if the politically conservative Disney in fact intended the moral of the story to address the economic crisis. But the tone of the film reflects the vigorous optimism of the new Roosevelt administration in 1933 and is of course in line with the main–and very profitable–purpose of the entire Disney enterprise of "sentimental populism . . . the attempt to create a cultural space where people could experience, however briefly, freedom from fear" 24. According to Richard Schickel’s iconoclastic portrait of Disney, the message in "Three Little Pigs," however, "is more that of Hoover than of Roosevelt . . . stressing self-reliance, the old virtues of solid, conservative building and of keeping one’s house in order" 25. In both constructions, in any case, the wolf retains its old European and American symbolic meaning of, originally agrarian, fear of hunger and starvation. This association had a long history. The fifteenth-century English satirical poet John Skelton wrote of keeping "the wolfe from the dore," an image given new expression by American feminist and social activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman in "The Wolf at the Door" (1897), an attack on the obscene extremes of wealth and poverty of the Gilded Age 26. The image of the constant threat of hunger and starvation was powerfully revisited in industrial America during the Great Depression, when in 1932 the number of unemployed reached 18,000,000.

But, as Catherine Orenstein has pointed out in her recent study of "Little Red Riding Hood," the meanings of fairy tales change with time and place. And it was the change in the cultural meaning given to the wolf in literature and film during the 1930s that would place Kubrick’s Jack Torrance at the door. For its part, "Little Red Riding Hood" originated as a seventeenth-century French warning against female promiscuity in an age of sexually predatory male court life, the wolf retaining a sexual meaning in twentieth-century American culture as well. The German Brothers Grimm, however, reflected the Victorian nineteenth century in their removal of the tale’s sexual content and substitution of lethal violence and the moral of obedience. Unlike the original story by Charles Perrault, in the German version Red Riding Hood escapes being eaten when a handsome young hunter shoots the wolf 27. The wolf underwent a change in symbolic meaning in the 1930s and 1940s due not to cultural difference but to events. The Depression went away as a result of the New Deal, the mobilization of the American economy during the Second World War, and the postwar economic boom produced by the GI Bill and the Korean and Cold Wars. Poverty, inequality, and malnutrition still existed in the United States, but general prosperity and the creation of a new large middle class all but banished the specter of starvation from public consciousness, thus rendering the original wolf at the door a quaint, if also memorably cruel, anachronism.

Overseas, the rise of fascism and militarism, and in particular Nazism, during the 1930s and the world war in the 1940s restored the image of the wolf as predator in place of his meaning as a harbinger of hunger and starvation. For centuries human populations, particularly in densely populated Europe, had to deal with the reality of wolves as a mortal danger. And as far back as Titus Maccius Plautus, the Roman comic dramatist of the third century before Christ, who observed that "man is a wolf to men," the wolf has been a central symbol of merciless violence. In the twentieth century, the gargantuan war that spread across the entire world beginning in 1941 with the German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor created an international environment of massive military mobilization. And while evil was vanquished in the Second World War, its horrors remained palpable, with the Holocaust eventually emerging as a phenomenon that has permanently darkened the human prospect. To many, including Kubrick, man did indeed seem to be a wolf to men. As Kubrick put it in 1971, "‘man is the most remorseless killer who ever stalked the earth’" 28

This impression of the world was all the more marked for Kubrick because of the reality of anti-Semitism in America... The 1930s saw an unprecedented rise in American anti-Semitism that affected all Jews in the United States. Even after the war, according to a cousin on his wife’s side of the family, Kubrick himself on at least one occasion was subjected to anti-Semitic prejudice. During location work on one of his early films out in the country, it began to rain heavily. Cast and crew repaired to a restaurant to wait out the storm. Stanley did not receive his order and when he asked where it was, the manager replied that he did not serve Jews 29. Kubrick remained sensitive to this issue right to the end of his life. In 1999 he remarked in a phone call to Michael Herr that the head of a motion picture studio had just bought an apartment in Manhattan and that he was the first Jew allowed to buy in that building: "‘Can you believe that?’ Herr quotes him as saying, ‘What is it, 1999? And they never let a Jew in there before?’" 30

But before the war things were much worse. One of the most disturbing effects of the Depression was the consequently greater appeal of fascism and Nazism in America. This appeal could also draw upon a long history of nativist religious, ethnic, and racial prejudice in the United States whose "paranoid style" had been further inflamed by the large numbers of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century up until the time when the Immigration Act of 1924 put strict quotas on categories of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. During the 1920s and 1930s such attitudes metamorphosed into an anxious cultural discourse about "racial" threats to an idealized homogeneous Anglo-Saxon America. The domestic Nazi movements were of course the most dangerous anti-Semitic expression of this: for them, among other things, "Jewish control" of Hollywood, for example, was a major concern 31. The accession of the Nazi party to power in Germany spawned a variety of imitators in the United States after 1933 such as the German-American Bund, the Gray Shirts, the Silver Shirts, the Black Legion, Phalanx, and the National Gentile League. These groups were supplemented by the right-wing extremism of the ilk of Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith and the anti-Semitism of Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.. And New York City was a major hub of pro-Nazi activity in the 1930s, as pro-fascist meetings, rallies, marches, and demonstrations spilled out over the entire metropolitan area. Jewish businesses in the Bronx were picketed and Nazi and "Christian Mobilizer" meetings and demonstrations in that Jewish and immigrant section of New York were common 32. Actor Tony Curtis has recalled rabid German nationalists of the Yorkville section of Manhattan who would beat up any Jews found in their area 33. As an organizational high point, on February 20, 1939 the German-American Bund held a rally at Madison Square Garden that attracted a crowd of 20,000. It is not known whether the Kubrick family was exposed directly or indirectly to this type of harassment, but it is unlikely that an educated family such as the Kubricks would have been oblivious to such an obvious and distressing feature of the immediate social and political landscape.

Given such distressing developments inside and outside of the country, it is not surprising to find that the symbolic meaning of the Big Bad Wolf in Disney cartoons began changing from hunger to aggression during the mid-1930s as Disney moved to exploit the success of "Three Little Pigs." In 1934 "The Big Bad Wolf," featuring "Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, and Grandma," was released. The Big Bad Wolf now clearly represents a more generalized threat to life and well-being in a fable about the danger of taking short cuts through a dark forest. The Practical Pig’s brick house–a symbol of modern individual industriousness–is no longer enough to keep the new wolves in the world at bay. One must be armed: The Practical Pig has a corner shelf devoted to various types of "Wolf Exterminators." The hit song of 1933, "Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" is reprised twice, the first time by the unprepared and oblivious Fife and Fiddler Pigs and the second by the entire cast (sans wolf) after a Wolf Exterminator has done its job. And no longer is the Big Bad Wolf run off by falling into a boiling cooking pot laced with turpentine, as in the original Disney version, which was a less violent adaptation of the English fairy tale in which the wolf is cooked and eaten by the third little pig. This resolution indicated the wolf’s status as a cultural symbol of hunger and want, while the psychological dynamics behind his demise also have to do with the satisfaction of the reader’s aggressive drives as well as defensive identification with the aggressor (eat instead of being eaten). In the cartoons of the mid-to-late 1930s the implements of defense and destruction have changed to machines of war against the wolf portrayed as foreign aggressor against peoples and nations.

This change is even more explicit in "Three Little Wolves" (1936), Disney’s next attempt to capitalize on the popularity of his porcine stars. In this cartoon the Wolf explicitly symbolizes an enemy that is a threat from abroad. The film opens with the Big Bad Wolf instructing his three cubs in the culinary art of pork preparation, reciting with the class in a German accent, "Ist das nicht ein Sausage Meat?" and so on. On a tree near the Three Little Pigs’ house, there is a sign with a horn attached that reads "Wolf Alarm," while the Practical Pig is constructing a huge mechanical contraption called a "Wolf Pacifier" (unlike "Exterminator" a bow to American isolationism or even, though early, sensitivity to the [possible] plight of Nazi victims?). To save the Fiddler and Fife Pigs (who have made the same mistake as "The Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf’"), Practical Pig disguises himself as an Italian tomato salesman and traps the Big Bad Wolf in his machine which, after bopping him with mechanical rolling pins and kicking him with mechanized boots, uses a cannon to shoot him out of sight. The cartoon closes with the Three Little Pigs with fife, drum, and flag à la "The Spirit of ‘76" playing "Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" The discourse of this cartoon clearly displays the influence of threatening events in Europe that surely aroused fear and patriotism on Disney’s part reflective of trepidation–and, for most, a resultant isolationism–amongst the American populace as a whole.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the American film industry mobilized itself to produce propaganda for the war effort. Like other characters, the wolf had new roles to play. Even those productions not–primarily or at all–inspired by patriotism reflected the change. By 1941, Universal Pictures had initiated with The Wolf Man what would become the most popular monster genre of the war, a clear indication of the changed status of the wolf as a cultural marker. The Wolf Man films reflected the traditional portrayal of the old world of Europe as the locus of horror and mystery, a tradition now terribly reinforced by images of Hitler’s goose-stepping legions. Even Val Lewton’s Cat People had begun as a war story, with the people of a village in the Balkans turning into "werecats" at night to slaughter German soldiers. Cartoons as well signed up for the duration. Maverick animator Tex Avery’s "Blitzwolf" (1942), for example, has "the three little pigs face their old enemy the wolf, who has now taken on the persona of Adolf Hitler"35. As a strongly patriotic American, Disney of course had his studio do its part for the war effort. "Der Fuehrer’s Face" (1943), featuring Donald Duck as a flustered Nazi war worker, won Disney another Academy Award. Even before the United States entered the war, Disney had recast "Three Little Pigs" as a Canadian war bond trailer entitled "The Thrifty Pig" (1941) and dressing the wolf in Nazi armband and hat 36. In "Home Defense" (1943) aircraft spotter Donald plays "Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" on a bugle, which not only transforms the spirit of optimism in confronting economic disaster into a spirit of resistance to German and Japanese aggression, but is another obvious transmutation of the wolf from symbol of want to symbol of war. This association was reinforced in the daily press by the actual names of Hitler’s headquarters (Wolf’s Gorge, Wolf’s Lair, Werewolf) echoing his nickname "Wolf," "allegedly the meaning of ‘Adolf’" 37.

In another unique, curious, and troubling way, Disney’s "Three Little Pigs" reflected the impact on American culture of the events of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe in particular. There are, coincidentally enough, three versions of "Three Little Pigs" and they differ from each other in one small but significant way. In each of the versions, the original one released in 1933, a second that replaced it shortly thereafter, and a third released during the Second World War and subsequently issued on video in 1996, the wolf disguises himself as a "Fuller Brush Man" trying to work his way through college in order to trick the pigs into letting him in. The character in question is a caricature of a Jewish peddler as well as of the more recent American upward educational mobility of Jews. The only human being portrayed in "Three Little Pigs" thus gave the young Kubrick a short primer in contemporary American anti-Semitism. The wolf wears a disguise comprised of a long nose, black beard, small round glasses with green lenses, a small, flat, round cap, and a long coat. On the soundtrack is Yiddish fiddle music. In the original version, the wolf speaks in a "Jewish" voice and accent. The second version of the cartoon substituted a vaguely eastern and perhaps "dumb jock" voice, but kept everything else. However, in the 1940s, certainly under the impact of the Nazi persecution of the Jews that had begun achieving a new and broadly noticed ferocity from 1938 onward, Disney made further changes in the character. He reanimated the entire scene to eliminate the nose, beard, and original glasses, leaving the coat, the same type of glasses but now perched down on the wolf’s snout, a bowler hat, and the original music 38. But Disney, who shared the polite (by and large) anti-Semitism of the day, persisted with an image of the wolf in this scene that was closer to Nazi stereotypes of the Jew than anything else. Disney’s original Midwestern anti-Semitism had been aggravated by difficulties with Jewish-dominated segments of the motion picture industry, something he confided to Nazi film director Leni Riefenstahl when he was one of the few in Hollywood to welcome her on a visit to Hollywood in November 1938 39. That he changed the cartoon a second time was certainly due not only to the populist solidarity of a country at war, but probably also to the impact of growing knowledge about the unprecedented extremity of Nazi persecution of the Jews. That he did not eliminate the character entirely demonstrates the ongoing social prejudices of the day as well as Disney’s own apparent reluctance to incur further criticism by admitting that anything was wrong in the first (or at least the second) place.

The "Big Bad Wolf" in The Shining, therefore, is the product of many years of cultural evolution and reflects in particular the transformation wrought in the symbolic meaning of the wolf during the 1930s and 1940s. It is also an indication that European and world events surrounding the threat and reality of war against the West and against the Jews were of greater moment to the solidly and securely bourgeois precocious Kubrick than poverty, unemployment, and economic catastrophe. And it is an indication of the role that the world of movies played in Kubrick’s life from the very beginning, for the lines Jack quotes are those of the Disney version rather than those from "The Story of the Three Little Pigs." The wolf also satisfied to some degree Kubrick’s unconscious aggression as well as serving as a defense against his fear of the dangerous world by means of an identification with the aggressor. But, however informed by personal and familial conflict, the cognitive and cultural dimensions of Kubrick’s artistic investment in the figure and symbol of the wolf in The Shining and by general thematic extension in all of his films are even more important. As we shall see in Chapter 8, any mention of the wolf in The Shining is a(n) (in)direct expression of a growing preoccupation in the 1970s on Kubrick’s (and the culture’s) part with the subject of Nazis, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. In this respect, it is significant that Jack, like the Big Bad Wolf, does not make it through the door to get at his wife, but remains on the other side. This is in line with Kubrick’s use of camera, film, and narrative and symbolic indirection as a means of distance from and control over the subject of the Holocaust in particular. Instead of his wife and son, Jack Torrance’s only victim (besides himself) will be Halloran, the black cook whose arrival at the Overlook Hotel just as Jack has broken through the bathroom door saves the lives of Wendy and Danny Torrance. By having an African-American as the victim of Jack’s–and the hotel’s–murderous rage, Kubrick underlines, as we shall see, a twinned theme in The Shining of an American and, underneath, a German past of racial persecution.

The House of Harlan

When Kubrick went to Munich in 1957 to film Paths of Glory, there was a sense in which he never returned from Germany. For in the process of hiring local talent, he met, courted, and eventually married an actress with the stage name of Susanne Christian. Susanne was in fact not a Christian, but she was a Gentile. She was also a Harlan, from a family of fairly famous–and in one case extremely infamous–members of the German artistic community during the first half of the twentieth century. Kubrick’s relationship with Christiane, which would last for the rest of his life, was to entangle him suddenly and deeply with the "Aryan" side of Germanic Europe’s recent history and its attendant horrors. Kubrick of course did not go to Germany with the aim of establishing intimate ties with a German family, but the effects of his attraction to Christiane Harlan were nevertheless to aggravate and stimulate, respectively, the psychological and artistic confrontation between his Jewish identity and Germany’s immediate past.

Susanne Christiane Harlan was born on May 10, 1932 in Braunschweig. She was the daughter of Fritz Moritz and Ingeborg (de Freitas) Harlan, both of whom were opera singers. Christiane grew up in Karlsruhe where she learned to dance and paint. As a girl she was a member of the Bund deutscher Mädel, the Nazi organization for girls that paralleled the Hitler Youth for boys. She liked parading about in her uniform, but has asserted–dubiously in terms of its generality–that "‘all this Heil Hitler thing was really tongue-in-cheek, even with the most emotionally committed Nazis’" 40. She also once saw Hitler and recalls what she labels as the insanity of his voice. In late 1942 she and her younger brother Jan, along with their nanny and the nanny’s family, were sent from the large city of Karlsruhe to the small village of Reihen near Heidelberg. Christiane and Jan lived on the grounds of a brick factory, went to school by train, and worked as members of the Hitler Youth in the fields alongside French prisoners of war and Ukrainian slave laborers. Christiane occupied much of her time with crafts, puppetry, and drawing. Her drawings were loaned for a Russian exhibition after the war but were never returned. One of her postwar paintings, "The Brick Factory," however, portrays aspects of life in Reihen during the war: the harvesting of grain, the firing and stacking of bricks, children’s games, the crash of an American bomber, the entrance to the air raid bunker. She later spoke of her drawings of her wartime surroundings as "‘a child’s view of war. I was the little girl who moved in where Anne Frank was pushed out’" 41. Christiane of course was right to contrast–not compare–and, as we shall see below, juxtapose her war experience with that of the young Jew Anne Frank, who fled Nazi Germany with her family to Amsterdam in the Netherlands only to be rousted out of hiding in 1944 and sent to Auschwitz.

The Harlan family would make major contributions to the production of Kubrick’s films. Most important were the immediate members of his family, who created an immediate environment of love, security, artistic inspiration, and intellectual stimulation that generated a unique style of careful and richly informed filmmaking 42. Christiane herself provided paintings for A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut while paintings by the daughter from her first marriage, Katharina, appear in the latter film as well. Several other members of the Harlan family also became important parts of Kubrick’s creative empire. Christiane’s brother Jan, who did pre-production work on the ill-fated Napoleon, served as an assistant on A Clockwork Orange and was executive producer for Kubrick’s last four films. Jan’s wife Maria arranged for the German version of The Shining and their sons, Manuel and Dominic, have also worked for Kubrick. Manuel was video assist operator on Full Metal Jacket and location photographer on Eyes Wide Shut while Dominic played piano for Kubrick’s last film 43.

By marrying into the Harlan family Kubrick was also once again brought into the realm of German filmmaking. Only this time it involved the controversy over Christiane’s uncle Veit, an elder brother of Fritz Harlan, who had been the most prominent film director of the Nazi period. His infamy rested mostly on two films that had aggressively promoted Nazi racial and military aims, Jew Süss (1940) and Kolberg (1945). The former film, loosely based on the career of Süss Oppenheimer, a financial advisor to the Prince of Württemberg in the eighteenth century, depicts its main character–and all other Jews–as members of a devious and destructive race. Oppenheimer manipulates the Court to his benefit, rapes the daughter of one of the government ministers, and is hanged. Jew Süss was the most popular film in Germany in 1940 and was also shown around occupied Europe. Like Fritz Hippler’s much less popular and even more odious "documentary" of 1940, The Eternal Jew, Harlan’s artfully dramatic but vicious film was designed to convince "Aryans" of the necessity of dealing harshly with the fantasied social and racial parasitism of Jews. The film was even shown to concentration camp guards for this purpose 44. After the war Harlan was brought before an Allied denazification tribunal and acquitted of crimes against humanity, but for a time was prevented from working as a filmmaker in the Federal Republic of Germany. By the early 1960s Harlan was writing his autobiography, in which he attempts to show–the public, his family, and perhaps also himself–that he was not "that strong an anti-Semite or that convinced a Nazi after all" 11.

Kubrick met Veit Harlan in 1957 and wanted to make a film about him and, in Christiane Kubrick’s words, "the absolutely normal life under the protection of Joseph Goebbels" 46. Jan Harlan has recalled that Kubrick had "a very positive relationship to Germany . . . and was not prone to prejudgments" 11. This is to say, of course, that Kubrick as always was clear-eyed about the subject of human history. Surely what fascinated him most with respect to Veit Harlan was the artist’s pact with the devil and the everyday insidiousness of evil as well as its blatancy. This cohabitation of the banal and horrific was the moving force behind a sixteen-hour German television serial Kubrick much admired, Edgar Reitz’s study of a small town during the Third Reich, Heimat (1984). Indeed, when it came to the preparations for the unfilmed "Aryan Papers," Kubrick had hired Fritz Bauer, the designer and set dresser for Heimat, to help Jan Harlan scout locations in Hungary and Slovakia, because Kubrick wanted that look for his Holocaust film 48. The type of traditional genre films in which Veit Harlan specialized were more effective in creating the satisfied obedience the Nazis required of the German populace than overt propaganda films were in producing active fanaticism. In this regard, films like Jew Süss were vitally important in advancing the regime’s most horrific aims, as anodyne rather than emetic, more the narcotic discipline of Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) than the rant and truncheon of Orwell’s 1984 (1949). The social realities and moral challenges of life in the Third Reich were in fact as complex as they were lethal. Everyone to varying degrees, even those opposed to the regime, was morally compromised simply by functioning–as a soldier, as a professional, as an artist–within the large and complex racial, military, and industrial state forged by the Nazis. This was an extreme instance of how Kubrick viewed human society, as a moralist but also as a realist. Kubrick’s films are not just about evil, but about the confrontation with evil: how people deal with the evil around them and within themselves. Some of Kubrick’s characters–Colonel Dax, President Muffley, Group Captain Mandrake, Wendy and Danny Torrance, Dick Halloran, Bill Harford–confront this evil, but most don’t, and many can’t. The major problem for Kubrick is that evil is pervasive within the systems as well as the inhabitants of the world, all of which is a reflection of a hostile or indifferent universe 49. Thus attempts in Kubrick’s films to counter evil fail. The pattern Kubrick saw early in life of evil lurking behind the façades of security and diversion is a deeper one, for evil is within the façades themselves. As water to fish, as air to humans, we live in it and are of it. As such, the Nazi era was exceptional for Kubrick only in the nature and degree of its evil and its violence, though exceptional to such a degree that he could not confront it directly in his films.

Kubrick’s antennae thus must have been especially attuned to the critical vibrations in the Harlan family caused by sorrow and outrage over Veit Harlan’s close collaboration with the Nazi cultural and political elite. Closest to him of course was Christiane, who, as Natalie Zemon Davis has observed, "must have rejected Veit Harlan’s years of collaboration with Joseph Goebbels even before her lifelong companionship with Stanley" 50. Veit’s children were subject to the stresses and strains of their parents’ stormy marriage as well as to the legacy of their father’s involvement with the Nazi regime. Although she has claimed she was forced to do it by her agent, Veit’s daughter, actress Maria Körber (like sister Susanne and cousin Susanne) dropped the Harlan name, taking as a postwar stage name her mother’s maiden name. While Körber’s protestations of love for her father are no doubt sincere (she took him into her home during his final illness in 1963), it would be naïve to assume that her feelings for her father were uncomplicated 51. She too would contribute to Kubrick’s cinema, providing the voice of the psychiatrist in the German version of A Clockwork Orange 52.

Veit’s son Thomas had an especially complicated and confrontational relationship with his father. Thomas Christian Harlan was born in 1929, received his first model train set as a present from Goebbels, and became a leader in the Naval Hitler Youth 53. But things change. In 1954 Thomas accompanied his father on a trip to Switzerland for a burning of the back-up print of Jew Süss, which critics interpreted as a publicity stunt to allow the export of his other films to Switzerland. Thomas also collaborated (as it were) with his father on the screenplay for Harlan’s first postwar film, Germany Betrayed (1955), about German correspondent who was a spy for the Russians in Japan during the Second World War. Since the Cold War was raging at the time, the film was censored for its pro-Soviet stance, which resulted in changes, including the abandonment of the original title, The Case of Doctor Sorge. This sympathy for the Russians was due to Thomas, who from his days at the University of Tübingen had embraced radical leftist politics. At the same time Thomas was preparing a stage play and film on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, a project that was inspired by his meeting in Israel in 1953 with survivors of the revolt. While it had long been rumored that in the 1950s Thomas had set fire to theatres showing his father’s films, it was only after Veit Harlan’s death in 1964 that he expressed publicly his hatred for what his father had done for the Nazis 54. In 1985 Thomas released a semi-documentary anti-Nazi film entitled Wound Passage. In this film a convicted mass murderer, an SS man by the name of Alfred Filbert who had been released from prison for health reasons, plays Veit Harlan, who is sadistically interrogated and condemned to death. The film is typical of the vindictive anger many in the early postwar generation in West Germany felt toward parents who had in one way or another collaborated with the Nazis. For his part, Kubrick extended some financial support to Thomas, but not as backing for Wound Passage or any of his other projects 55.

Kubrick, however, had an instance of the moral challenges of the Nazi past even closer to home in the person of his father-in-law, a tale that may have had a direct or indirect effect on a film which, unlike the unrealized project on Veit Harlan, he would make. Fritz Harlan, after beginning his singing career in Berlin in 1926, performed between 1929 and 1942 as a concert and opera singer in Lübeck, Braunschweig, and Karlsruhe before accepting a teaching post at the University of Freiburg. Before the war, around 1937 or 1938, he had taught and performed in Barcelona 56. According to Christiane Kubrick, Harlan, like most members of the German artistic community, was closer to being a Bohemian than a German and more interested in art than in politics. Both she and her brother declare that their father never joined the Nazi party. His life, like that of most of the members of his family, seems to have been mostly that of an artist in a profession whose members were diverse and international in origin. He had served in the German army near the end of the First World War and, in late 1942, in order to avoid being drafted again, Harlan accepted a job at the German Theater in The Hague 57. Such enterprises were a part of overall Nazi policy in occupied Europe to strengthen German influence. The Netherlands was a showplace for this policy and Reich Commissioner for the Netherlands, Artur Seyss-Inquart, was himself the moving force behind the establishment of the German Theater 58. Over time, however, Harlan and his wife spent less and less time at the German Theater and more and more time entertaining troops throughout Holland. They stayed in the Netherlands until late September 1944 following the Battle of Arnhem in Belgium that marked a failed attempt by the Allies to break the German lines in Western Europe. He returned to southern Germany to be near his family, but was drafted into the army, captured by the French, and spent a year in a prison camp 59.

In the Netherlands Harlan and his wife had for the first time been brought face to face with Nazi racial policy. In Germany adults were usually insulated from the exercise and effects of inherent and systematic Nazi brutality. It was different with German children, Christiane Kubrick remembers, who were instructed daily in school of what it took to extend the dominion of the Master Race over all lesser human beings. It did not take long for Christiane’s parents to learn the same lessons in a country under German occupation. Aside from the poor treatment of the Dutch in general by the Germans and the resultant hatred for any and all Germans, the "aryanization" of Jewish business and property through the divestment of their owners and employees and the distribution of assets to non-Jews was well along by 1942. In the Netherlands various German looting agencies coordinated, among other things, the seizure of the premises of all Jewish music businesses and organizations as well as the confiscation of all privately owned musical instruments, books, and sheet music. The plunder was stored in Germany or distributed to German organizations in the Reich and in occupied Europe. By 1941, when the decision had been made to deport Jews from all over Europe to killing centers in the East, another material bonanza fell to Germans, the sudden massive availability of Jewish apartments and houses. Germans taking up residence in the occupied countries or "Aryans" bombed out of their homes were often provided with housing seized from Jewish owners 60. The official and unofficial reallocation of Jewish residences to "Aryans" took the place of a systematic policy of construction and improvement of housing as well as being a means for Germans to get their hands on valuable property. An early and famous example of the latter was the elegant Jewish apartment in Cracow that German industrialist Oskar Schindler was given in 1939 61. Germans less well connected than Schindler had to wait longer, particularly in Western Europe, where the exclusion of Jews from society took longer than in the East, even though liquidation of Jewish real estate in the Netherlands had been authorized by the Germans as early as 1941 62. The deportation of Jews from the Netherlands began in July 1942 and within fourteen months almost all of the approximately 140,000 of them had been sent East 63.

The Nazi occupation government was therefore in the position to kindly arrange housing for the visiting members of the German Theater from Germany. Fritz and Ingeborg Harlan initially moved into lodgings on Van der Aastraat in the wealthy Benoordenhout district northeast of the city of The Hague. While in the eighteenth century most of the richer Sephardic, or Western, Jews had lived near the Prince’s Court and during the eignteenth and nineteenth centuries most of the Ashkenazic Jews lived near the town center, there had never been a Jewish district or ghetto in The Hague. In 1942 on the very short Van der Aastraat there were at least two apartments formerly owned by Jews. Erhard Bernhard Matthias and Herbert Nikolaus Waldemar Hirschland had lived at 52 Van der Aastraat, while at 51 there had resided a Mrs. Fanny Judith Henriëtte Oppenheim-Jospehus-Jitta. While the fate of the Hirschlands is not known, Mrs.Oppenheim was deported in 1942 and died at Auschwitz. It is therefore likely that the Harlans were housed in one of these two apartments, probably that of Mrs. Oppenheim since it had only two-rooms and we know the Harlans found their first lodgings too small 64. The Harlans did not live on the Van der Aastraat for long because they wanted space for their children when they visited. Jan and Christiane had been sent to Reihen to live with their nanny’s family. It was the nanny’s family who owned the brickworks and, unwillingly, had taken the Harlan children in. Like most of the five million other children who had been evacuated from cities threatened by air attacks, the Harlan children spent much of the war apart from their families, staying in Reihen until almost the end of the war 65. As early as Christmas 1942, however, Fritz had been allotted a larger apartment in the central Bezuidhenhout district on the Van der Bosstraat and the children spent that holiday and several others in The Hague with their parents. This apartment, too, had been taken from its Jewish owners. Ingeborg Harlan, who had Jewish relatives, could tell from the furnishings of the apartment that its former owners were Jews. The children were also exposed to the resentment of the Dutch population against the Germans living and lording in their midst. Even the Dutch members of the German Theater had to eat in a crummy dining room while the Germans took their meals in an elegant one 66.

Christiane has maintained that her parents were appalled and depressed by their new knowledge of the explicit evil of Nazi designs. According to a member of the Harlan family, who wishes to remain anonymous, Christiane once said that her father was indifferent to the sufferings of the Jews, that he had indeed taken over the apartment of a Jew or Jews who had been sent to the extermination camps in Poland, and had heartlessly thrown away many of the departed residents’ possessions 67. Kubrick herself denies that she ever said any such thing. She is, however, a member of a generation of Harlans that has, like many of the members of the postwar German generations, loudly and rightly rejected their family’s Nazi associations and their preceding generations’ crimes, complicities, and cowardice under the Hitler dictatorship. This was particularly the case in the decades following the war when youthful idealism and adolescent intolerance, combined with the older generation’s long and culpable silence on the subject of National Socialism, produced angry condemnations on the part of many young Germans of their parents’ collaboration with the Nazi regime. What is likely, therefore, is that Christiane’s general criticism of her parents’ crimes of omission were translated, through a mixture of error and–perhaps–animus, into the rumor of a condemnation of explicit anti-Semitism on her father’s part. There is no evidence that the Harlans were involved in anything abroad (like spying) other than cultural activities. There is also a strong ring of truth in Christiane’s painful memories of the encompassing sadness of her visits to The Hague, a truth–and pain–which are evident in what turns out to be a geographically literal and eloquent memory of being the child who "moved in where Anne Frank was pushed out."

The cosmopolitan artistic background Christiane inherited from her family, reinforced by the horrors of the Third Reich, in any case, caused her not only to reassert a rejection of nationalism after the war but also to develop an aversion to Germany in particular. As she has recently noted, "I am not normally a defender of Germany." Her art instructor in New York has recalled that "‘[s]he never talked about her German background, never’" 68. Since leaving Germany with Kubrick in 1957, Christiane has avoided returning to her homeland. She, together with Stanley, only attended some family birthday celebrations there and she, though not her husband, also went back for the funerals of her parents. Fritz Harlan, who was a cofounder of the Musik Hochschule Freiburg after the war, died in 1970. Her mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, lived briefly in England with the Kubricks and then in an institution in Germany and died in 1991 69. That Christiane, like her cousin Susanne, married a Jew and left Germany is certainly also consistent with her uneasiness over the Nazi past of her homeland and her family. Still, she and Stanley had an apartment on the Upper East Side just two blocks south of what during the war had been "‘Hitler’s Broadway’" in German-American Yorkville 70. Clearly, like Kubrick himself, Christiane’s rejection of Germany was understandably colored by an ambivalence and even affection stemming from her family background.

It is certain that the echoes of these events and their discussion within the Harlan and Kubrick families found their way into Kubrick’s life and work. They seem to sound geographically in a conversation with Michael Herr on the Friday before Kubrick died in 1999: "In Holland, he’d heard, there was a football team called Ajax [Amsterdam] that had once had a Jewish player, and ever since then, Dutch skinheads would to all the team’s matches and make a loud hissing noise, meant to represent the sound of gas escaping into the death chambers. ‘And that’s Holland, Michael. A civilized country.’ Laughing" 70. Once again, surely, it was too sad to cry. This family referent may also be strongly represented in Kubrick’s indirect Holocaust film, The Shining, by the empty rooms of the shuttered Overlook Hotel haunted by the ghosts of departed residents murdered in the hotel’s bloody past 72. This is likely given the common trope in Kubrick films of space and enclosure representing threat, the former communicating universal contingency and chaos and the latter representing earthbound entrapment 73. As the characters in Kubrick’s cinema move into or through these spaces, they confront a world of pervasive individual and institutional evil. It must have struck Kubrick that as Christiane’s parents moved into the rooms formerly occupied by Jews who had been sent to Poland to be exterminated, the emptiness of those spaces was itself eloquent testament to the greatest of evils. Here the beauty of music through its embodiment in musicians was confronted with the pervasive evil drifting in the air of empty rooms vacated for Auschwitz, where prisoner orchestras played for Jews descending into the gas chambers. Such evil also pervaded the musicians, for music and the musicians, independent of their own goodness, were part of the system of evil through their participation in cultural projects designed to extend and bolster Nazi rule. Even Nazi fanatics, as Kubrick himself gloomily observed in discussing the marriage of Beethoven and violence in A Clockwork Orange, appreciated high culture: "Hitler loved good music and many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men, but it didn’t do them, or anyone else, much good" 74.

In his films, Kubrick is not concerned primarily with whether the evil in the world is extrinsic (universal) or intrinsic (natural). He may have had a Manichean dualistic perspective on the universe as created by both good and evil, with the world as a battleground between these forces. He definitely did hold a modern Freudian view of the inextricable mix of good and evil in the human psyche, was eclectic in his pessimism, and with his bent for history had a strong appreciation for ambiguities of all types. In 2001 he suggests the smallness of humanity’s moment in the infinite sweep of time, thereby rejecting the anthropocentric bias of traditional religious belief 75. In A Clockwork Orange he presents but undermines novelist Anthony Burgess’s Catholic equation of morality with individual free will, a point of view that, because it does not view human beings as in part essentially evil, rejects Manichean dualism. Kubrick was also a Stoic in terms of being resigned to evil, but his films are fierce enough in their eloquence and passion to constitute the type of rebellion inconsistent with resignation, particularly in the face of horrendous mass evils like the Holocaust that make a mockery of the Stoic emphasis on individual acceptance of evil as part of a larger order one should humbly accept 77. But more than divining the nature and meaning of evil in theological or philosophical terms, Kubrick is interested in how humans deal with the commingling in life of evil and good. And he is interested in this question not simply in terms of individual cases, but in the flow of time and particularly, as we have seen, over the course of the modern era. His frequent recourse to narration and voice-overs demonstrates not the conceit of godly omniscience but the fact that, as we have observed, Kubrick favored the long and detached view of the artist-as-historian. Given this historical long view, nevertheless, there does loom in his films a mythopoeic suspicion that behind all the conflicts of human existence there is "a large and inexplicable universe" 78. In the wake of the Holocaust many Jews in particular came to the conclusion that the universe was indifferent or even hostile. The questioning or even the abandonment of a belief in a just–or any–God was replaced by a deep dread and anxiety in contemplating the realm of the divine 79. The Shining presents such a trembling confrontation with the otherworldly and, even more than Kubrick’s other films, conjoins realism and the fantastic in its own fearful examination of this world’s problems.

The long and extensive relationship between Kubrick and the Harlan family was of course a function of his accidental attraction to Christiane as well as to the relatively small community of international filmmaking in Europe 80. But Kubrick’s marrying of his domestic and professional life also became both a cause and an effect of his intense preoccupation with things German, particularly when they had to do with the Second World War. What are we otherwise to make of the fact that when he took Christiane on a first, and rare, holiday after finishing Lolita, it was a five-day tour of the Normandy invasion beaches and their German bunkers?81 Kubrick’s complicated processing of his own Jewish past was now colliding directly with a German presence. Ironically, perhaps, this helped produce an enduring and satisfying marriage. Others close to Stanley and Christiane sometimes assumed a tension between them because of their different backgrounds at this particularly tragic juncture in history 82. But if there were tensions within the Kubrick marriage and family between Jewish past and German presence, it seems certain that it was a creative tension that did little or nothing to harm either the personal or the artistic partnership. Probably a more telling indication of the dynamic status of the relationship between the German Gentile Christiane and the Eastern European Jewish Stanley was a typical instance of Kubrick’s ready sense of humor. Once he and Christiane were watching Magdana’s Donkey (1955), a Soviet film co-directed by Georgians Tengiz Abuladze and Rezo Chkheidze. In one scene five hundred dark-haired bearded eastern European extras suddenly rush on camera and Christiane remembers Kubrick exclaiming, "They all look like me!" 83

All his adult life Stanley Kubrick manifested a distinct and complex ambivalence toward modern Germany and the Germans. He married into a prominent German family of artists, filmmakers, and writers. He loved Black Forest cooking 84. He admired German literature, German films, and German technology. But he feared their history. When Michel Ciment observed to him that in their use of German music (e.g., in 2001, A Clockwork Orange), among other things, his films seemed "to show an attraction for Germany," Kubrick replied, "I wouldn’t include German music as a relevant part of that group, nor would I say that I’m attracted but, rather, that I share the fairly widespread fascination with the Nazi period" 85. Indeed, Kubrick much more often would have recourse in his films to the music of Eastern European composers, much of which had been written in response to the Nazi horror. Though often cast in shadow in his films, therefore, the Germans and their most recent Nazi past were a constant presence. For Kubrick, as for Conrad, deep within modern German history beat the most modern and savage heart of darkness.

Aryan Papers

The outright Holocaust film Kubrick came closest to making–and in the event not all that close–was to be based on Louis Begley’s novel Wartime Lies but became only a screenplay entitled "Aryan Papers." The novel concerns a young Polish Jew–another child confronting a dark "found world"–who under the Nazi occupation is hidden as a Catholic. "Aryan papers" was the term used to describe living under a false identity with the protection of phony documents proving one was not Jewish 86. Begley himself had lived in Poland during the war and so had autobiographical knowledge of the time, the place, and the events, a fact underlined by the first-person narration by the young boy Maciek as well as the novel’s personal and contemplative tone. Kubrick and his associates poured a great deal of work into the project, including the scouting of the Czech town of Brno to serve as wartime Warsaw 87. The novel obviously had personal appeal for Kubrick on a number of grounds. Begley, first of all, draws heavily on Freud to describe the heavily charged Oedipal scenario of a young boy living alone and being protected by his audacious and courageous aunt Tania, who had always been his surrogate mother, replacing the real mother who had died giving him birth. There is also the repeated motif, familiar to Kubrick at American remove, of the boy Maciek’s identification with the aggressor. This takes the form of admiring the hard, efficient, and apparently invincible German Wehrmacht and SS as well as relying on the "heart-freezing Teutonic efficiency" of his aunt-protector: "I could be a hunter and an aggressor, like SS units destroying partisans in the forest or, very soon, rebellious Jews in the ghetto of Warsaw" 88. Even the German soldier, Reinhard, who falsely promises to protect Tania and "Janek" must have struck a responsive and ironic chord in Kubrick due to the fact that he wears a Strangelovian glove on the end of a mechanical arm 89.

Begley’s novel also represents an indirect approach to the subject matter of the Holocaust since it is the first-person fictional account of a Jew in hiding from the Nazis rather than a factual account of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. And the theme contained in its very title offered a reprise of Kubrick’s own much more benign experience of the façade of Hollywood films and general wartime disinclination to fully comprehend reports of the extermination. In addition to a mention of "talk of a camp in Bełżec, near Lublin," Kubrick’s approach-avoidance syndrome must also have been engaged by Maciek’s first words which open the novel: "I was born a few months after the burning of the Reichstag in T., a town of about forty thousand in a part of Poland that before the Great War had belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. My father was T.’s leading physician. . . . My mother’s older sister was . . . [of] the close world of wealthy Galician Jews" 90. T. by its population has to be Tarnopol, the only town of that size in Galicia beginning with that letter. It was thus close to Buczacz and Probużna, while Kubrick’s father too, as we know, was a physician. Begley’s book, due to its detailed geographic proximity to the history of Kubrick’s own family, was both attractive and threatening to Kubrick and one of the reasons why he was dreadfully depressed the entire time he was writing the screenplay for "Aryan Papers." The personal nature of the project was also reflected in his decision to write the screenplay alone, but that only compounded the emotional burden; he never even spoke directly with Begley 91. He was therefore even more distracted by two other projects, one that became the posthumous production A.I. and the other Eyes Wide Shut. And, finally, perhaps in this regard The Shining had satisfied–and/or repelled–him at some subliminal level. That perhaps was as close as he felt he could come to the subject.

Kubrick also apparently felt that Spielberg’s Schindler’s List had beaten him to the punch 92. This latter rationale, while commercially logical, seems somewhat lame in light of Kubrick’s deserved reputation as a courageous risk-taker. It is also artistically questionable since Kubrick, like others, later went on record that Spielberg’s film was not about the Holocaust. As he told Frederic Raphael: "The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about six hundred who don’t" 93. Interestingly, Kubrick uses the present tense for the event and the past tense for the film, indicating the proximity the Holocaust itself had to Kubrick as well as dismissal of the film by consigning it to history. He was moved once again (see Chapter 8) to contact Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, saying that Spielberg had not made the right film. He even invited Hilberg to St. Albans, but Hilberg did not have the time. Kubrick suggested that Hilberg read the novels of John Dos Passos to see how characters could disappear in the middle of a film and be replaced by other characters, but Hilberg thought this would be too "panoramic" and reminiscent of the flawed American television miniseries Holocaust (1978). Subsequently, Hilberg thought that a film simply titled Auschwitz and chronicling the construction of mass destruction would be compelling. He almost called Kubrick "to remind him we were mortal," but did not since Kubrick by then was already working on what would become his last film, Eyes Wide Shut 94.

Kubrick’s dismissal of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is problematic in terms of the projected Aryan Papers, revealing once again his personal and artistic hesitations in directly addressing the subject. Begley’s novel–unless Kubrick was going to change the ending–involves physical if not complete psychological survival for Maciek. Jan Harlan has suggested that Kubrick took his cue in dropping the project from the response of Isaac Bashevis Singer to his earlier request to write a screenplay on the Holocaust. Singer had said that he was honored, but the problem was he did not know anything about the Holocaust. Kubrick, who had never even been (and would never be) in Eastern Europe, could well have taken this as an artistic admonition to say nothing about a subject that was not just unsettling to him but inexplicable to everyone. Indeed, to approach Singer, whose work concentrates on the intimate world of pre-Holocaust Jewry in Eastern Europe, was perhaps itself an indication of reluctance to confront the subject 94. Kubrick’s hesitations about the subject had been manifest as early as 1962 when he turned down an offer to direct the film (Sidney Lumet, 1965) of Edward Wallant’s novel, The Pawnbroker (1961) 96. Kubrick’s personal and artistic hesitations were also reflected in, and reinforced by, the general culture, a culture, as we shall see, that was about to change. Among other things, this change would play a great role in ushering Kubrick toward a devilishly unique treatment of the horror genre in The Shining.

"The Most Horrible Dream I Ever Had"

The music too in The Shining bears the heavy historical weight of the Holocaust. With the exception of four British dance tunes from the early 1930s, the film’s music comes from Eastern Europe during the era of that region’s greatest suffering and tragedy. It is somewhat ironic in this regard that The Shining follows the lead of The Magic Mountain in its use of music. Mann had adopted Richard Wagner’s concept of a leitmotif, a unifying theme that preserves "the inward unity and abiding presentness of the whole at each moment" 97. Mann, however, rejected Wagner’s surrender "to the irrational power of nature" in music, fearing the abandonment of reason in "the catastrophic music of Dionysian frenzy" 98 Kubrick too listened to Wagner 99. But he never used a Wagner composition in any of his films, since he, like Mann, must have distrusted Wagner for his elevation of feeling over reason. Kubrick of course also had a sad advantage in this respect over Mann, for he had had occasion to observe the worst possible consequences of the loosing of "feeling with the blood" in the fact that Wagner scored much of the soundtrack for the Third Reich. This close identification with Hitler and Nazism made Wagner for Kubrick an inappropriate choice of film music, even–or especially–for The Shining. Wagnerian motifs also would have made it distractingly easy for a post-1970s audience to create associations with Nazism. For Kubrick as artist and individual, Wagner was too close to the beast to be as good an example of the cohabitation of good and evil as, say, Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange. And finally, although The Shining, like other Kubrick films, focuses on the perpetrators of evil, in this case Jack, the music in the film is predominantly that associated with the Eastern European victims. Because of his personal and artistic reservations about the cinematic depiction of the Holocaust, the more intuitive, indirect means of music too allowed him to confront and express this particular historical agony.

In general, as we have already seen, Kubrick always chose music appropriate for the mood of a given scene, seeking to exploit the quality of great music in deeply touching the emotions as well as the intellect. While Kubrick’s facility with numbers, his abilities as a chess player, his penchant for organization, and his eye for detail marked him as left-brained and thus sensitive to the modern communication–by music as by other means–of ideas, he was also right-brained in his ability to intuit the meanings and effects of music congruent with a postmodern artistic indulgence in play 100. But this combination of cognitive and intuitive artistic ability was also nourished by his great knowledge of, and interest in, history. And this meant that the music he chose appealed to him not only in terms of mood or of universal message but also on the basis of its reflection of–and his own reflection on–the historical and cultural conditions that influenced its aims and effect. Ever since 2001, moreover, Kubrick’s musical interests for the most part gravitated to the past, most often toward that music composed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe 101. The popular dance music he uses diegetically in The Shining was drawn exclusively from the 1930s. These four tunes play during the interwar party Jack discovers in the Gold Room after storming out on Wendy at her suggestion they leave the hotel. Another example of Kubrickian objects communicating ideas, the songs all have titles directly suggestive of the social and historical concerns of the film: "Masquerade" (1932), "Midnight with the Stars and You" (1932), "It’s All Forgotten Now" (1932), and "Home (When Shadows Fall)" (1931). With the exception of two Carlos/Elkind electronic treatments ("Dies Irae" and "Rocky Mountains") and the unnerving atmospheric use of Ligeti’s Lontano (1967) that accompanies Danny’s first visit by the Grady sisters at the Overlook, the extra-diegetic music used in The Shining, more than in any other Kubrick film, reflects by theme and/or by time period the horrors–observed, anticipated, or recalled–of Nazism and the Second World War. Two compositions, one by Hungarian Béla Bartók (1881-1945) and the other by Pole Krzysztof Penderecki, predominate, expressing "the disarray of contemporary humanity in the face of his maladjustment to the world, the failure of his beliefs . . . terrified by past cataclysms and agonized by the apocalypse to come" 102

Musicologists have argued that the value and meaning of such music is formal, written for reasons intrinsic to the artistic form rather than to comment, consciously or unconsciously, on the outside world. But there is evidence that both Bártók and Penderecki were very much influenced by the historical events that intruded upon their lives and that imprints of such intrusion are left in the music to affect and inform the listener about the world in which the music was written. Even in the unlikely event of Kubrick having no knowledge of the lives and concerns of these composers, he would have intuited them through their expression in the music. This was especially the case since their historical concerns overlapped with his, for both Bartók and Penderecki were directly affected by the disasters of fascism, Nazism, and war. The former, a vehement anti-Nazi, immigrated to the United States in 1940 while the latter lived his youth in the Poland of German jackboots and extermination camps. Bartók refused to play in Germany after the Nazis came to power; his last performance there came seven days before Hitler became Chancellor at the end of January 1933. In 1937 Bartók even forbade broadcasts of his music in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. His Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936) was created as a "solemn" work for the tenth anniversary of a chamber orchestra in Basel, Switzerland: "it soars from the initial fugue, through a turbulent dance fantasy and a nocturnal monologue, to the hymnic dithyramb, thereby symbolizing in itself the Inferno of the age and its progress toward Paradise" 103. Just as Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin (1923) had reflected the chaos in Hungary after 1921, his 1936 composition marked a direct and concerted attempt in part to confront and musically overcome the massing darkness of fascism in the 1930s.

But while Bartók, in spite of all his own troubles and those of the world, would maintain the overall optimistic structure of the 1936 composition in his music until his death in 1945, Kubrick characteristically as well as appropriately uses just one section of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, the "night music" of the third movement, an apprehensive adagio that reflects the black shadow of prewar Nazism. Kubrick plays over nine minutes of the adagio (which itself is only a little over eight minutes in length) in the course of three scenes early in the film. Kubrick places this music, by intuition and/or by calculation, in a manner congruent with its original historical context as well as with the mood of a film of horror. The nocturne plays exclusively beneath scenes early in the film that, like Central Europe in the 1930s, quiver with dread at anticipated horrors to come. We first hear a sad creepy passage from the adagio after the dissolve from our initial sight of Jack and his typewriter to Wendy and Danny as they enter the hedge maze for the first time. Then, under strings, Bartók’s signature single urgent celesta note rings as Jack approaches the model of the maze in the hotel lobby, the repeating and accelerating tempo of the note suggesting the germination in his mind of the single, piercing thought of murder. This music ends abruptly and loudly in Kubrick’s parody of the startle effect with the title card "Tuesday." The same musical passage resumes in the middle of the next sequence as Danny rides his Big Wheel into the more modern wing of the hotel and passes the double, locked doors of Room 237. The music continues unbroken to Jack typing, ending abruptly once again as he, interrupted by the arrival of Wendy, pulls a sheet of paper from the typewriter. The final segment of the Bartók is heard four scenes later. This time, following directly upon the Summer of ’42 scene, Kubrick quotes the opening measures of the piece, which begin with the deep, bulging notes of a tympani followed by the single high celesta key struck sharply and ever more rapidly. The celesta creates a disquieting urgency that inspired the Ligeti theme written against Stalin Kubrick would use in Eyes Wide Shut. The passage continues under the only conversation between Jack and Danny in the entire film, during which Danny first begins to intuit the danger to himself and his mother that his father represents. The soundtrack carries this apprehension into the next scene with a seamless segue into Penderecki’s The Dream of Jacob, the film’s "elevator music," as Danny plays in front of the elevator before venturing into the suddenly unlocked Room 237 104.

There is an additional, and ironic, aspect to the use in The Shining of Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. Kubrick’s historical blade is twisted by the music credits for the piece that appear at the end of the film. The performance Kubrick chose is from 1966 by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Herbert von Karajan and recorded on Deutsche Grammophon. The Bartók credit appears first among the music credits and it is the only one that includes the name of the composition, the conductor, the orchestra, and the recording company. There is a prosaic reason for this: permissions for Deutsche Grammophon recordings by von Karajan normally stipulated listing his name and that of the company 105. This may be seen to be the case with 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon as well as with The Shining. However, considering Kubrick’s historical interests and his maniacal eye for detail, it seems likely that he was aware of the irony of having the music of the anti-Nazi Bartók played by a German orchestra under a German conductor. Of course, the Berlin Philharmonic in the 1960s and 1970s was not the same orchestra as it was under the Nazis. But... von Karajan had first risen to musical prominence during the Third Reich. This diegetic-cum-non-diegetic fusion of anti-Nazi composer and Nazi conductor appears to be another dreamlike construction built from Kubrick’s Freudian conviction that good and evil, beauty and horror, are inextricably woven together deep in human character and history.

Given the close relationship of the extended Harlan family to the Nazi cultural empire under Joseph Goebbels and Kubrick’s great interest in that particular realm of the Third Reich, it would not be surprising if he had long been aware of von Karajan’s career as a conductor during the Third Reich, particularly since, as we also noted above, von Karajan was the object of American Jewish boycotts in the 1950s. Whether he knew of Bartók’s anti-fascism is perhaps more open to question, but once again we should not be surprised if Kubrick’s interest in the period and his wide reading gave him knowledge of that as well. His appreciation for irony would also have made him alert to the juxtaposition of anti-Nazi composer and former-Nazi conductor. And if he did not know before, the typically long gestation of Kubrick’s films would have given him ample opportunity to learn of it, particularly since music is one of the last things added to a film. It is possible that the original inspiration for using Bartók was a line in King’s novel about Wendy: "Today even Bartók would have made her sleepy, and it wasn’t Bartók on the little phonograph, it was Bach" 106. But the key is not the state of articulation of Kubrick’s inspiration at the start of work on a film it is the state and articulation of expression in the finished product. And even in the unlikely event that Kubrick had no inkling of historical irony in the prominent placement of these music credits, the irony is there and contributes to the effect on the audience of those symbols and representations relating to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in The Shining for which there is considerable evidence of authorial intent as well as cultural influence.

In contrast to the Bartók composition, which presages the renewed outbreak of violence at the Overlook Hotel, the music of Penderecki accompanies the actual horrors of the Overlook past and present. This is significant, for Penderecki’s father was a lawyer during the Second World War when the Nazis killed a large percentage of the lawyers in Poland 107. Born in 1933, Penderecki watched Jews being taken away by the Germans and has devoted his subsequent postwar musical career to the exploration of the themes of tolerance and intolerance. His compositions therefore convey a universal human message about the presence and challenge of evil that is also intensely personal and emotional. His Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1961), with its coruscating, burning electronic screams, is perhaps the most famous example of this preoccupation with suffering in history. A Second World War companion piece, the Dies Irae (1967), composed for a commemoration at Auschwitz, had grown out of personal experience: "the problem of the great Apocalypse (Auschwitz), that great war crime, has undoubtedly been in my subconscious mind since the war, when, as a child, I saw the destruction of the ghetto in my small native town of Debiça" 108

Penderecki has most often conveyed his message in works based on Christian scripture and liturgy, two of which Kubrick uses in The Shining to link Christianity, Judaism, and Poland into a cinematically reproduced locus for contemplation of the Holocaust. In keeping with the oneiric structure of the film as well as with his own personal and artistic commitment to indirect discourse on the subject of the Holocaust, Kubrick provides one extremely subtle visual clue to this geographic and historical construction. In so doing, Kubrick dramatizes the partial breaks in our repression of past horrors that allow only distorted fragments of the underlying events to be expressed in dreams. And since the Holocaust was the greatest horror of our or perhaps any time, it is buried the deepest and thus traces of it are especially rare, odd, and difficult to detect. This was particularly the case with Kubrick, as we have seen, for at whatever level of consciousness he chose to symbolize the geography of the Holocaust in this manner, his reluctance to confront the subject directly in his art shines through the fact that this particular detail requires special attention to detect. If one looks closely, one can see that the baseball bat with which Wendy slugs Jack bears the signature of Carl Yastrzemski. We know this because Wendy holds the side of the bat with Yastrzemski’s signature facing the camera in fourteen extended one-shots in the scene that leads up to her at-bat. Most of the sequence is comprised of Steadicam shot/reverse shots between a retreating Wendy and an advancing Jack so the name on the bat flashes on and off at us just like the 42 on Danny’s jersey during his conversation with the doctor 109. This underscores the dreamlike nature of the name’s appearance as well as its significance as a sign of greater underlying meaning and association. Because the unconscious exerts constant pressure on the conscious mind, such symbols are not only overdetermined but also occur singly and without apparent relevance to the immediate context. But is the name on the bat important? Or was its choice arbitrary? Given the number of takes on which Kubrick usually insisted and the fact that the name is exposed to the camera in every one of fourteen separate shots over two scenes, intention seems evident. Moreover, there is no bat in the novel, only one incidental mention of a cap Danny wears backward like Boston catcher Carlton Fisk. Narrative economy led Kubrick to create a bat from a hat and substitute it for the novel’s roque mallet. And since the Torrances are from Vermont, it makes sense that Danny would have Red Sox paraphernalia. Kubrick’s own commitment to realism would thus have prompted him to get a bat with a famous Boston player’s name on it. But since there are consistent and dynamic levels of historical symbolism in the film, it is also likely that Yastrzemski was chosen since he was the only baseball star in the 1970s of Polish extraction. This connects his repeatedly displayed name with the musical references to Poland as the geographical location of the Nazi Final Solution 110.

This same indirection applies to the use of Penderecki’s music. Kubrick excerpts six Penderecki pieces in The Shining: Polymorphia (1961), Kanon (1962), De Natura Sonoris No. 1 (1966), Utrenja (1969-70), De Natura Sonoris No. 2 (1971), and The Dream of Jacob (1974). Kubrick did not use Penderecki’s Dies Irae, also known as the Auschwitz Oratorio. But the similarity of sections of the Auschwitz Oratorio and parts of Utrenja and Polymorphia led one reviewer of The Shining to hear Penderecki’s Dies Irae in the film while another just as wrongly concluded that the Carlos/Elkind/Berlioz Dies Irae under the opening credits was that of Penderecki 111. If Kubrick knew the Auschwitz Oratorio, he probably found it too direct by subject and by title for his indirect discourse on the Holocaust. And he may have found the musical qualities of the pieces he did pick more suitable for the manifest universal message of The Shining than the more idiosyncratic sonic ruptures of voice and instrument characteristic of the Oratorio. In any case, while the other Penderecki pieces lend only their eerie and dramatic quality to the mood of their respective scenes, Utrenja and The Dream of Jacob (aka The Awakening of Jacob) are closely related to the Holocaust subtext of the film. Utrenja, Ukrainian for "Morning Prayer," is a choral piece based on the Eastern Orthodox liturgy for Christ’s Entombment and Resurrection. Kubrick, with savage irony, uses excerpts ("The dead shall rise again!") from this composition to underscore the emergence of the Overlook Hotel’s murderous horrors near and at the end of the film: as Wendy defends herself with the baseball bat; when she sees Danny’s scrawl of "Murder" in the bedroom mirror; when Jack axes through the bathroom door and chases Danny through the maze; and as Wendy discovers Hallorann’s corpse, witnesses the Overlook’s ghosts coming to life, and sees blood flowing from the elevator 112. We are reminded of the deep and dark irony of the marriage of this music to these scenes since Easter represents the good tidings of the redemption of the world through Christ as well as the human victory over death. These are of course not the messages the hotel or the film sends. There is only the bloody history of the Overlook as a representation of the deadly horrors of the world.

It is The Dream of Jacob that assumes the greatest importance in the film’s Holocaust subtext, for it is the music heard before, during, and after Danny’s first, extended vision of the blood flowing from the hotel elevator. The opening ninety seconds of the piece plays immediately after Jack’s (reflexive) remark about Wendy being "a confirmed ghost story and horror film addict" that concludes the Overlook interview scene. It also accompanies Danny’s vision of Jack’s exploration of Room 237 and it underscores Jack’s own dream ("the most horrible dream I ever had") of killing his family 113. Kubrick once commented on The Dream of Jacob when asked about the type of music he used in The Shining. After listing Bartók, Carlos and Elkind, and Ligeti, Kubrick said most of the music was by Penderecki. Then he brought up several coincidences, including the "strange coincidence" of Jack’s dream being accompanied by The Dream of Jacob 114. One can imagine that Kubrick initially chose the music and only later noticed the similarity of the names. But given what we know about Kubrick’s meticulous preparation and investment of objects, colors, and music with meaning, we should assume some levels of intention with regard to the composition’s name at one or more junctures in the construction of historical significance in The Shining. There is in any case a whiff of "doth protest too much" in this ostensibly offhand statement, as if Kubrick wanted to suggest something to us–and to himself–by seeming not to suggest it, that is, to dismiss the possibility of significance out of hand. Since he shared Freud’s view of coincidence as personal and historical he was most likely aware that instances of his father’s name were anything but merely accidental. Dismissed intention would also be consistent with Kubrick’s desire for the audience to construct meaning actively in response to the symbols and ideas he places in his films. The other remarkable "coincidence" in Jacob being his physician father’s name is that Danny’s first vision of the elevator occurs as he stares into the mirror of a medicine cabinet. We must also remember Kubrick’s flirtation with Jung’s concept of coincidence as sign of larger forces at work in the world as basis for hope in higher, beneficent powers. This provided some psychological compensation for his basic Freudian pessimism about a cold, indifferent universe, a universe that most recently and horribly had permitted the Holocaust.

Jacob, moreover, is he in the Old Testament who is renamed Israel and whose sons are the ancestors of the twelve tribes of the Jewish people. The text is Genesis 28, 16: "And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not’" (emphasis in original). Jacob is experiencing a torment of the soul in the presence of the divine. The context of a horror film itself reminds us of a psychic "slippery slope between gods and monsters" 110. In The Idea of the Holy (1917) Rudolf Otto describes the monstrous as a suitable expression of the holy. He points out that the Hebrew word for "dreadful" that Jacob uses to describe the place of the Lord might be rendered as unheimlich, or "uncanny," in the sense of the old English meaning of the world "awe-ful." Our awe at the mystery of the universe is shaded by fear and of a feeling of the uncanny, that which is familiar and strange, comforting and disquieting, all at the same time. This is the fearful realm of the ultimate questions of evil, suffering, and the possibility of redemption in the face of death. Richard Rubenstein, in After Auschwitz, has also suggested that the pact between God and Man represented, among other things, by God’s promise to Jacob that his posterity would inherit the land of Canaan has been a means by which human beings have disenchanted the world by making a transcendent God the repository of all value. Contained within this construction is the temptation to murder God so that all things may be permitted on an earth now freed from natural limits. This temptation is a manifestation of hubris, "man’s rebellion against his limits," as acted out symbolically in the crucifixion of Christ. According to Rubinstein, Christians have often projected this wish to usurp God’s moral authority onto the Jews, a myth the Nazis used in their campaign toward genocide 116. The Nazi genocide itself drew much of its organizational strength from the Judeo-Christian disenchantment of the world that was a result of placing all moral authority in God. Instead of the ancient natural world of magic and divinity that human beings had to appease, now they only had to believe in and obey God. The Protestant belief in salvation through faith alone was the culmination of this trend. The world was now free to be organized by rational, secular authority and it is no accident, again according to Rubenstein, that it was in the land of the Protestant Reformation, Germany, that the modern bureaucratic order was first perfected. It was this system that Weber described as heartless and dehumanized and whose deadly efficiency under the Nazis Hilberg detailed in The Destruction of the European Jews 117.

In The Shining, therefore, The Dream of Jacob is testament to violent repetition in history, for its music accompanies Jack’s dream of the future (the murder of his family) as well as Danny’s visions of the past (the Grady sisters) and the present (Jack in Room 237). As with the shared stain of Advocaat, the overdetermination of dreamwork that also serves narrative economy comes into play since music associated with the victims of the Holocaust here underscores the dream of perpetrator Jack. Kubrick reinforces the explicit links among these dreams and visions by subtle but powerful visual clues in one darkly eloquent sequence that once again by means of a Kafkaesque grotesquerie of the fantastic in the everyday underscores in particular the modern mechanical means of mass murder. As Wendy checks the heating and electrical systems in the basement, we hear the deep, slow, opening chords of The Dream of Jacob. All around her in the dark boiler room filled with ominous machinery are reminders and prophecies of death. Right next to one of the boilers (real and not fake as in The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse) and on top of a white refrigerator sits an antique picture of two little girls, the juxtaposed machines themselves a menacing symbol of the cold of human organization and the heat of murderous human passion. As the camera follows Wendy in a panning shot to the left, we see in one corner of a bulletin board over a desk a large Red Cross logo and in the other corner a sign on what to do in the event of choking. This anticipates the Torrances’ discovery in the very next scene of Danny having apparently been grabbed around the neck by the naked corpse of the woman in Room 237. The bulletin board itself is surrounded, realistically but also symbolically and presciently in terms of what Jack will discover in the bathroom of Room 237, by pin-ups of nude women. The camera concludes its pan with the red "Danger High Voltage" warning sign on the hotel’s large electrical box. Camera left in the resultant stationary shot is the dark gray flank of a large engine with a single yellow pipe elbowed upward toward the edge of the screen. It is at this moment that Wendy hears Jack’s cries and screams from his nightmare and rushes upstairs as the music builds in intensity behind her. As she leaves the boiler room she passes a large red fuel tank, a red fire extinguisher, a red fire alarm with bell, a large red circular casing on the wall, another set of Red Cross and Choking posters over a row of green washing machines, and finally several tall yellow institutional gas dryers. Cuts to Jack during this Steadicam exit sequence show him slumped forward in his chair with his head on the desk next to the red-and-white "crush-proof" pack of Marlboros and the now solid blue Adler typewriter 118. The Dream of Jacob continues as Wendy lamely reassures Jack that everything is all right and as Danny arrives bruised and mute from his experience in Room 237. The music then segues into De Natura Sonoris No. 2 as Wendy accuses her husband of abusing Danny, and Jack, confused and then enraged, finds his way to the Gold Room for an appointment with Lloyd and Jack Daniel 119.

For Kubrick, like Hilberg a Jewish child of the twentieth century, the most vital questions of history are those manifested most horribly in the Holocaust. The coincidence of the fearsome and the divine as expressed especially in The Dream of Jacob represents another of Kubrick’s abiding concerns, the inextricability of good and evil, and precisely here in its highest cosmic sense and its worst terrestrial one. For Kubrick the cosmic is the inscription of the mundane. As Kafka too held, the realm of the monstrous, the grotesque, and the uncanny is not that of demons beyond our world, it is our own history: "the realm of primitive fears, of what has been forgotten and left behind, yet returns on occasion to plague us; it is the sense of alienation, of things we have made turning against us, of historical and social forces that we are helping to shape and that yet escape or our control and even our knowledge; and it may be also be a sense of the ‘wholly other’ invading our lives, of a deus absconditus choosing, suddenly, to reveal himself" 120. Even this God is of our own making. In the modern era we have killed God while failing to assert a new morality in God’s place. We are adrift, paradoxically, in an iron cage of institutions out of which fall, like hammers, the hard edicts of the heartless. The implications of The Dream of Jacob as composed and as placed within the dreamlike symbolic structure of The Shining are rendered brutally clear. The world has often been an abattoir and never more so than during the Holocaust. As, in Danny’s inner eye, the mountain of blood cascades from the elevator (a mechanical Jacob’s ladder), we are instructed in the single most terrible lesson of modern history: In twentieth-century Christian and Nazi Poland the descendants of Jacob–Israel’s father and Stanley’s–would awaken not, like the Biblical Jacob, to salvation, but to slaughter.