And I thought Writers' Block Drove ME Crazy

Kubrick’s 1980 horror film “The Shining” begins, as so many horror movies do, with a perfectly normal family. The father, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is a writer, or at least he wants to be. As the film begins, he gets a job working as caretaker to a giant, secluded hotel, prone to getting snowed in during it’s off season. He hopes that this will give him time to focus on his writing, but our danger sensors begin to beep when the hotel manager warns Jack of a tragedy that occurred some time ago involving a former caretaker and an axe.
Nevertheless, Jack and his family settle into their new winter home. But as the days go by, we begin to sense that this is not the coziest of families. As Jack recklessly pounds away at his typewriter, his son Danny (Danny Lloyd) begins to see visions of the hotel’s morbid past. Only Jack’s wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) appears to keep a level head as the people around her rapidly descend into various states of madness.
Usually we are drawn to movies that absorb us, that draw us in and make us feel as though we are “right there” with the characters. But “The Shining” holds us at arms length. When the film was first released, it was criticized for under-developing its characters, thereby blocking any empathy the audience could feel for them and stripping Stephen King’s original story of its terror.
However, Stanley Kubrick was a director who tried to connect with the audience on a psychological rather than an emotional level. As we watch “The Shining” we are witnessing, from a distance, the disparaging affects of isolation; of being trapped within one’s self, while coping with those around us. And in a strange way, we start to feel claustrophobic. We are cut off from the characters, but we internalize their madness.
As with “2001: A Space Odyssey” and other Kubrick films, the “true meaning” of “The Shining” is left unexplained. We sense that there is more to the story than meets the eye, yet Kubrick leaves that to be interpreted by the viewers.
Is it an allegory about the genocide of the Native Americans? Is it about humankind’s inability to cope with solitude, even when surrounded by beauty and luxury? Is it simply a clichéd horror flick that serves no purpose other than scare the living daylights out of us for two and a quarter hours? Theories about the story behind the story are not hard to come by, who knows if any of them are right? Kubrick wants us to make up our own minds...or else we may lose them.