Avocaat Party

How I got here

I got here by trying to break away from watching the movie.
The movie always gratifies me intellectually when I rewatch it.
So I get hooked on it periodically, find a way to quit, then relapse.
Currently, my movieholic log looks like this:

1. My first quitting attempt was a cognitive solution: I explained the conception to myself from the director’s perspective and not from the events inside the movie. To forget/dilute The Shining, I started watching more different movies, mostly horror.
2. The second time, after relapsing, I did a creative way of exiting: first, I found an actual exit point for the viewer in the movie (it’s quite elaborate), then I also arranged the Snakes and Ladders post that has evolved in meaning for me since then. Then, later, I quit watching anything.
3. My current attempt is a pre-cognitive mechanism: by simply solving the disgust layer in the movie, I’d get repelled. Instead, it got humorous, and I’m happy with in even more.

Traumatic partying

The movie, by itself, is like a trauma if viewed seriously.

• Cognitively, there are always new connections to make in it, so the interest in the movie returns, and there are always new ideas to mine.
• It’s also a collection of some of the strongest emotional stimuli, but they are mostly negative, and it’s not a healthy relationship to return to such.
• Additionally, there are plenty of insights, but they are non-expressible (like Redrum), so there is an isolation component.

Non-expressibility is interesting. I see it this way: insights are visuo-spatial and so interconnected that extracting any one of them doesn’t make sense for another person, yet devalues for one who expresses by the limitation of the form of communication.

Fishing rod (spoilers)

Anyway, the movie lives in my blog so much that I feel compelled to include at least some higher level spoilers about my experience with it.

In Taxi Driver’s commentary track, the writer touched on his process.
Basically, he takes a problem, finds a metaphor that roughly fits, then driven by exploring the metaphor he finds insights and novel ways of looking at the problem.

My first notable gratification with The Shining was when I connected these elements: Jack resembling a bull during a dissolve cut, the maze, and the axe. Together, they confirm the metaphor of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. Now, the director can do with it whatever he wants, but knowing he played with the metaphor gives the viewer a framework to interpret the picture.

From this metaphor, you see a Jack-centric perspective. When Danny throws darts, it references corrida and the concept of “death from a thousand small cuts.” The Native American profile with feathers then indicates that these cuts are into the head. What means that Jack can’t function because of insecurity inside of his family.

There is a web of such metaphors, frames and clues that give ideas about ways of looking at the movie or characters. So by choosing your metaphor or clues of interest you choose your own cinema.

But overall the point is, your understanding is always incomplete, because the movie is bigger than you think. So however rich in the moment it is, it’s inherintly unsatisfactory, and therefore should either be mastered or abandoned, while things in the middle are indecision and are of horror genre in themselves.