The Shining Scene-by-Scene

The Shining Scene-by-Scene

In this new book by cultural critic John David Ebert, Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film masterpiece "The Shining" is analyzed in a scene-by-scene breakdown. Drawing upon such theoreticians as Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Ebert sees the film as the attempts of a human singularity, a boy with psychic powers, to rupture the Eternal Returns of the temporal sinkhole represented by the Overlook Hotel, a place full of dead memories which recur over and over again (as the hotel's name suggests). Ebert tells the tale of the achievement of the boy Danny Torrance in breaking the hotel's repetition of events endlessly with a "difference" that cuts the circle of Mythic Repetition and traces a line of flight out into the unknown possibilities of the future. Thus, it is Danny Torrance's "difference" rather than his father Jack Torrance's attempt at "repetition" that prevails, and Ebert describes, in intricate detail, the processes that lead to this eventual breakthrough.