The Shining at 40: Revisiting Stanley Kubrick’s cautionary tale of isolation, creative frustration in times of lockdown

You’ve been stuck in quarantine for the past two months, but you convince yourself there’s a silver lining. It has been 40 years since Stanley Kubrick locked us up in The Overlook — and its tale of creative frustration, domestic abuse, loneliness and madness takes on fresh resonance amid the ongoing global crisis. The ghosts of Overlook embody Jack’s own inner demons: the bartender Lloyd personifies his issues with alcoholism; the woman in Room 237 gives form to both his sexual and death instincts; the former caretaker Delbert Grady represents his desire to relinquish all familial responsibilities, the burden of marriage and fatherhood. Besides Jack’s madness, The Shining is also a tale of the domestic horrors of a wife and child, whose cries of distress are stifled by a snowstorm. Instead of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, the German-language version of The Shining uses the alternative phrase: “Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen."