The Plot: A family are assigned to look after The Overlook hotel throughout the unforgiving snowy season. Isolated there, the father, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), descends into madness, driven by a strange and spiritual presence. His son, Danny, changes too, beginning to see nightmarish forebodings of the future and frightening flashbacks of the past. The Subtext: Shining theories are prevalent and plentiful, but the one with perhaps the most weight is that it's an allegory for the decimation of the Native Americans by the White Man. A film which has inspired countless interpretations - so much so that a documentary, Room 237, was made about some of the most rampant ones - The Shining is a sub-textual haven, with everything from the fake Moon Landing to The Holocaust cited as possible subliminal meaning in Stanley Kubrick's cerebral masterwork. To take just one, The Shining can be seen as a metaphor for the Native American genocide, as notable in the little things - the carefully placed cans of Calumet baking powder in the two key scenes in the food pantry (a Calumet is a Native American peace pipe) - as it is in more obvious instances, like the fact that the Overlook was built on Native American burial ground - a "confirmer" explained near the start of the picture, and one replete with lines of dialogue not found in Stephen King's source novel of the same name. Many frames of The Shining contain Native American artwork, and the film's European poster indeed stated that "the wave of terror which swept across America is here", alluding cleverly to both the furor the film caused stateside and the idea that it might have something greater to say about the US's belligerency towards the Native American race.
