#047 The Shining

Well, I finally understand what that poster of Jack Nicholson peering through door frame is all about.

I appear to be on a bit of a Stanley Kubrick high at the minute. All of his movies make very good use of music and used a lot of groundbreaking techniques in scoring his films. Obviously he was very into music himself. Being a music student, this appeals to me. I'm told a lot of Ligeti's music and style is used in the score for this movie. Ligeti was modern composer, influenced by many different styles and recognised for his ability to always be exploring music further and further. He was also notably very critical of other people's work, with very few musician's he truly admired, but that's a story for another day.

Having been told all this in a lecture at university, I went into the film purposely and consciously listening to the music in it. I thought the score was rather ingenious. Without sounding too much like an essay, I feel the music builds the tension of the movie very well. We are reminded throughout that it is a horror movie, with the intense music continuing, even at moments when there appeared to be no reason for it whatsoever. A character would simply be walking into a room and yet this bizarrely dramatic music would be playing. This just makes it all the more frightening when something horrifying (both psychological and physical) actually happens. We are all very aware of the cliche'd anti-climax - a character goes to open a door, the music gets louder and more intense, before suddenly revealing...an empty closet. It often happens in the beginning of horror movies, to build tension and get the audience into the right sort of mood. This movie, however, seems to take this technique to a whole new level. We get loud, intense music when nothing is happening at all and often no music when one might expect it. This also makes the music more noticeable on a conscious level, since it is not necessarily what we are used to.

Can I also say that this is the first movie on the list I've watched that I can classify as "horror". I'm a big fan of scary moves. There aren't a lot of films that truly terrify me but something about scary films, perhaps the adrenaline rush or the emotional attachment you get with the characters, is extremely appealing to me.

The story is rather odd and doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. Perhaps I would get a lot more from it if I read the book, but I feel the movie was entertaining enough that the plot being a little odd didn't spoil it at all. Danny, the son, is blessed with "the shining" - a kind of psychic ability - although he is clearly to young too understand exactly what his gift is and how powerful it is. Most of the time in the movie it just seems to cause him distress. Danny has an imaginary friend, Tony. It took me a while to make up my mind as to whether or not Tony is a real character or just, as everyone assumes, imaginary. I eventually came to the conclusion that he is simply Danny's method of dealing with his gift and the emotional trauma it causes. In this sense he is as "real" as a person with a multiple personality disorder "really" having two people inside them. Jack, the husband, gets driven mad by the hotel, although we are not sure why. Wendy, Jack's wife, seems to be the only sane person, what with Jack talking to ghosts and Danny pretending to be Tony, or not talking at all. This clearly causes her extreme distress.The audience obviously will identify with this character the most.

My favourite scene was when Wendy discovers that Jack's "writing" consists of hundreds of pages where he has typed "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" over and over again. The scene actually lasts quite a while, since Wendy is looking through the hundreds of papers hoping that at some point he will have written something else. The thought process that went through my head - which I'm assuming would be similar to Wendy's thought process - was "perhaps he started out intending to write coherent sentences, then, as he got more and more insane, he began to write the same thing over and over." But alas, all she could find were more and more pages all containing the same words, implying that he had been doing this since they first moved there. I find it very realistic that she would spend quite a while checking through all the pages. I also thought it was a nice touch that even the same sentence over and over still had punctuation and paragraphs. Repeating the same words again and again may be considered crazy, but it seems ten times crazier that he would bother to organise them into paragraphs. That's some psychotic behaviour, that is.

All in all I can see why this is a classic. If dead twin girls holding hands don't creep you out, I don't see what will.

#059 A Clockwork Orange

Watching this Movie immediately after having just given a talk about it at university is an interesting experience. We were learning about Beethoven's ninth Symphony. I, in particular, focused on its use in popular culture. It was used quite cleverly in "Die Hard" to characterise Hans Gruber, the villain (played by Alan Rickman). The most obvious usage of the "Ode to Joy" theme in Die Hard is when Hans has finally managed to open the vault containing $640,000 although the theme is hinted at throughout the scoring of the movie. In this instance, the theme is used as a kind of triumphant fanfare.

Having studied its usage in many mediums the overall theme appears to be an association with masculinity. In the case of Alex DeLarge, the main character from A Clockwork Orange, it is used to fuel his violent and sexually devious behaviour.

I hadn't, at first, realised how important this piece was to the whole film. Excerpts from the symphony, often bizarrely played by synthesised instruments, fill the scoring of the whole film and are also very important to the plot. It's worth noting also that this particular piece was selected explicitly by Stanley Kubrick, the film director. Perhaps it was chosen for its association with masculinity and often violent times in history (naziism); the original book by Anthony Burgess included many different pieces of music including works by Mozart and Bach.

The movie of course deals with rape and murder and so is very much not for the faint hearted. The movie also deals with the idea of free will. The priest at the Prison argues that Alex's Correction therapy forces him to feel ill in the face of violence, without him having free will. The scientists, however, argue that they are correcting the violent behaviour and so the issue of morality is irrelevant as long as the outcome is the same.

So enough of what appears to be a strangely educational movie review, what did I think? Well, I did enjoy watching it. Clearly it is a clever piece of filmography if not a fun film to sit down and watch after a long hard day. It certainly makes you think and very often makes you feel sad. One particular bizarre thing I kept noticing was that Alex appeared to be shouting most of the time, even when other characters were right next to him. This did get rather annoying at times, but perhaps it is signifying some kind of bravado that he is hiding behind. I daresay it was very likely a conscious decision on either the actor or director's part.