SOURCE: “‘Come and Play with Us’: The Play Metaphor in Kubrick's Shining,” in Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1986, pp. 106-11.

In the following essay, Caldwell explores the way the metaphor of play undercuts form and content in Kubrick's The Shining.

Critical interpretations of Stanley Kubrick The Shining (Warner Bros., 1980) have depended upon two putative assumptions: 1) that Kubrick “is the cinema's anthropologist: a hunter in the atavistic jungle of human nature …,” that Kubrick “is looking for human essentials” which reveal themselves “when the shell of society and manners … is broken,¹ and 2) that the logo “A Stanley Kubrick Film” is a supra-generic imprint which predisposes one to expect this thematic predilection.² Nonetheless, some critics have noted that an ironic principle is operating in the film and that it is presumably a “crazy comedy” of some kind.³

Thus, while the meaning of The Shining is seen as ultimately serious, indeed pessimistic...