The Shining lives in my consciousness like no other work of art. I grew up with it as it grew up with me—an older friend I had to mature for. The film premiered just as I mustered a new hold on my surroundings, becoming aware of time—the days in the year, and the twelve months it took to get to another Thanksgiving, Christmas, and birthday. The film premiered in the United States, on May 23, 1980. I was three months shy of six years in the world. I didn’t see it—I was too frightened to see it. But I imagined it and what I pictured scared me. Both a color and blood signified my soon to become infatuation with this horrorshow.
I have an explicit memory of yellow. Saul Bass (Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous credit sequence designer) created the movie poster, which also served as the cover to the rereleased Stephen King novel: pure canary yellow, the title askew in black bolds and in the towering “T” of “The,” a distorted face made out of pointillist black dots. Those bits of black on yellow were an unwonderful color combination because of its buzzing resemblance to the bee, the hornet, the wasp, the yellow jacket—frightening things that hurt humanity impudently, an early opinion based on one sting. (When I read the paperback years later, I would find it did have a significant scene with bees.) I had seen 1978’s The Swarm on TV, where bees attack a family and a young boy drives a bee-drenched, yellow Mustang to escape them, using the windshield wipers to shuck them off. Soon, I became brazen about wearing yellow in summer, worried it would attract them the way golden anthers of flowers did.
Unearthly pain came from cutting my finger on Christmas Eve a half year before the premiere—a long, deep cut for a small boy. I studied the seep of blood, made by a toy car, and a flush of feeling bubbled in my brain—a strange anticipatory admixture birthed from my eagerness for presents and a hurt I didn’t recognize. If the color of hurt was red running warm out of me, I soon came to feel loss equaled the most frightening moments in life. No wonder I maniacally babbled when someone I wanted to stay went away—I needed their shade to comfort me. A finger cut only reminded me of the awful that could occur. Weren’t many grimy things happening of late in my young life? I noted more sorrow (Why does he get to play with it? I would complain of another little boy), I noticed my sex. I began to think those big people who went to work every day only to come home crushed and craving a drink weren’t the most fun to be around. I kept looking at that poor finger, judging it for hating me so—ruining my holiday and putting a frown on baby Jesus’ face.
As my gardens gained rot and April became May, I heard of a film coming soon, but probably already arrived. A family living in a large hotel for the winter. In previews, a boy my age with my brown hair and eyes cycled about on a Big Wheel-type tricycle—my Big Wheel? These famed images were the sweets tempting me into the labyrinth. To be so small in a space so vast as that old hotel on a mountain, surrounded by wilderness sounded like a fairy tale. At that time in Milwaukee, there existed two national chain bookstores, B. Dalton and Walden Books. One B. Dalton was located in Southridge—the gigantic mall that would play a considerable role in my early involvement with The Shining. That Saul Bass cover nearly made me pee my pants. Inside were black and white stills from the film. Photographs in 1980 were quite unique, photography still an admirable art. Most people couldn’t afford to fuck around unless they had a Polaroid. Without me knowing who Stanley Kubrick was or what his name meant, my eyes fixed on images he had produced out of thousands of still possibilities. But even if still, when I examined Scatman Crothers’ wide-eyed terror-stricken close-up when he is in a Florida bed receiving Danny’s “shining” after the boy is attacked by the woman in the bathtub of Room 237, I felt an emotion I couldn’t factor into my five fumbling years of existence. I knew this benevolent Black man was not happy. The hairless head, the glaze of the eyes, the enormous nostrils, the open mouth that fright would give a wiggle to in live action—each detail told of supreme disturbance. What could bring a man to such a brink? What could be happening in that world? Would the boy be alright? I had to find out, but I couldn’t.
Gradually, I came to realize the story of the film and the problem implicit in the story. The father was turning into a murderer and trying to kill his family. Jack—how could he?
I began to look at my own father. A man given to anger, he was often reserved and, out of the company of familiars, silent as stone. In dampness below earth, my father went about business. Enamored of tools—he held half dominion over the basement, with the washing and drying machines, the washtub, and the full size freezer clearly distaff. Productive and cunning in his carpentry and metallurgy, here I also witnessed him do things to wood I never dreamed possible, as he made dressers, cabinets, and bookcases. In this damp underground den there were power drills, vices, saws, hammers, glass jars of screws and nails, and the tart scent of turpentine. His collection also sported many tools of violence—an ax stood upside down behind a basement door and upstairs, in an underused closet, lonely in its green sack, a rifle from his service days.
Violence is associated with the human being that is a man. Women may do many things when they go crazy, but men often coldly kill. What lies inside, beyond the sacks of semen, is the power to impress physical pain. I’d watched my father batter materials—whether wood or the engine of a car—in disgust. Toxins released with those swings—all his yesterdays didn’t feel so slight after he magically drove his frustration into objects, never flesh. As I knew Jack swung an ax in the film to kill—his version of work, of duty—my awareness of the main man in my life mushroomed and I became uneasy. Yet, I’d already had good reason.
My mother and father didn’t exactly get along. A pained duplicity marked their interactions. My mother didn’t like what my father had become: a county parks supervisor, who stoically came home from work and slumped in the blue recliner to watched TV. My father didn’t care for a person nagging at him to do more, give more, and make things more special for the family. He wanted to relax.
Does it surprise that they physically resembled Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall?
My father was a few inches above his bride—the same as the stars. Like Shelley, my mother was taller than average with dark hair and a pale face. Balding like Jack, my father carried the same average build and green eyes, even sporting flannel shirts akin to the one Nicholson spends most of the film in. Like the character Wendy Torrance, my mother cooked and cleaned. She was the socializer. She volunteered at the church and school, seeing us through our Catholic education, including the abandoning of one parish and its persnickety priest for another. Though my older sister stood a distant seven years away, my parents were people I’d know anywhere.
In the cinema showing The Shining, they would be larger than life, with someone like me at their side. Our story or what would become of us played in theaters with thousands going to see it. What was the difference between the actual I woke up to each day and the type of reality on the screen? Why couldn’t people be in two places at once? When the dream of seeing oneself so giant and important comes true, the mind fires into a heat beyond understanding. Films hold zero fiction for a child. It’s just a movie means as much as telling someone shot that It’s just a bullet hole. As Guy Davenport wrote, “Childhood is spent without introspection, in unreflective innocence.” A child’s mind is so slackened, a feather could push it around. So the spur remained. Even unseen, The Shining burned because on one level I was living it, but the film had its own myth.
Kubrick had constructed a dysfunctional Americana, cohering as the spread-eagled sensation of actual life lived with a wash of intimate intricacies and references no one could miss. Art touching bone. His vision infected many my age. We could easily place ourselves in his very up-to-the-minute mythology with the Big Wheel and the Road Runner cartoon. We were his scared shitless star-children. His portrait of an American family was no simple picture. It played with the uber creation myth itself: the comingling of a hating heart with a soft, boundaryless one creates a third who is friendless, fearful, and lost. How could Wendy Torrance stand her despicable husband? After she interrupts his writing, Jack makes a new rule that he’s never to be disturbed if he is in his creative study, the Colorado Lounge. When she agrees, he says, “Good, now why don’t you start right now and get the fuck out of here?” Enduring years with someone often means you come to treat them anyway you desire—at least until they can’t take it anymore. There is no affection between Jack and Wendy; only once, in public no less, do they walk with arms ringed. I witnessed this same show from my parents. They lived in the same house but they kept separate and cold, preferring loneliness to the maddening prospect of body to body contact. They married two years before the Summer of Love with a baby girl born a few days after Sgt. Pepper was released, but both were a little too grown with responsibility to ride to the hippy wave. Did they endure because of their children? I should pause before them on the page, bow and peck their feet, because they sacrificed much of their lives and their happiness to stay together for the sake of their daughter and son. We couldn’t have asked for more.
The pretty reality of the common myth Kubrick mined detours today because parents hardly stay bonded and family can be as sacred as many a playbill at the end of the show. The matrix of visitation rights and carting kids to meeting points, like the bundling, transporting, and then unpackaging of refugees, was well underway in the summer of 1980. In the Kubrickian myth, the husband, so frustrated with himself and his station in life, is driven to exterminate his wife and son—a not so uncommon occurrence in the bloody United States as mothers and fathers killed 10,331 children under the age of five from 1976 to 2005. Some may contend ghosts push Jack. Is the alcohol supplied to him real? He laps it with his own tongue, his eyes crossing in relief after a gulp of bourbon followed by confessing to once hurting his child. The catalyst to Jack’s destruction is his own failed family.
My parents did stay put and suffered—we all did. If suffering could be quietly treated like a skin rash with cold cream, the world might be a different place. It can’t, so it doesn’t, and, yet, suffering’s widespread character allows for manifold mysteries—it can act as a lynchpin to some lives, while being only as strong as cheap string for others. Suffering is what most characters in drama have to feel, otherwise the audience does it for them. Though I was blithely part of my parent’s problems, suffering didn’t overtake my consciousness until their actual separation at age twelve. At carefree five (no job, kindergarten but a half-day) I saw my family and whatever they did as normal.Still, the iconography of suffering, that which children learn before words, exemplified in The Shining by constricted or anguished faces full of terror, was enough to brand my soft head. In his films one gets the sense Kubrick exquisitely knew this uncanny emotion better than most, and he once said:
I think we tend to be a bit hypocritical about ourselves… We are capable of the greatest good and the greatest evil, and the problem is that often we can’t distinguish between them when it suits our purpose.
Kubrick was an artist selling grand emotion and the artfulness of his images informed me about the world, while those of Obi-Wan and E.T. failed because of their cloying and popcorn depictions of how one spends a day, no matter what planet they lived on. If instead I’d grown up attached to those films with such cloying and popcorn depictions of the every day, I might have believed in a good American government every step of the way from Uncle Ronny to Bush the younger. The poster, the still shots, the bent visage and moans of Jack in the previews: all these told me this thing called The Shining would deliver the hurt unctuously existing elsewhere and almost everywhere in the world. Yes, the perplexity of being and the impulse to destroy looming in civilization had been boiled into less than two and a half hours.
Though I would not watch the film for nine years, the very idea of it kept me up at night. I left my bedroom because I didn’t want to be hemmed in with no escape but through a window. I bivouacked in a bed nestled against a white wall near the staircase that also had a doorway to the second floor porch. There, with a fuller view, I kept track of the sky and stars. In night light the white wall sparkled bright like the door of the bathroom Jack cuts up with the ax. Still, staring down the wall’s straightaway of puttied dry erase board, many times I imagined an ax violently swinging downward at its end, about ten feet from my head. Into my purview it would again rear—my little life officially ending with its next swing. No death in my family would introduce me to the besickled dark matter of demise like my own imagination. Images are not insoluble. If they are strong enough, they stay in mind until there is no mind. The laughing face.The ax smashing wood, and Wendy, Danny, and Halloran each screaming open-mouthed—it was all I needed to know that I had to keep myself and my family safe.
Adults tell children they are just being silly. A movie can’t hurt you. There’s nothing to worry about. Those lines are lies. Their parents and teachers said it to them. Where do we go from these false comforts? Eventually, we will find out there are things to worry about, people to avoid, places not to be. Maybe I just came too soon to the tree of knowledge, a piece of nature splintered by the violence of the human hand, as the impulse to first kill others had been done in communion with fear and anger by the ape in 2001. Marooned in my bed, I felt the specter of the end or a possibility of the end and sunk while grasping the first ropes of romanticism aching to take me to a life of melancholy, black birds, and dark relationships—corridor after corridor of sadness and regret. Pictures and images, yes, but if I had never seen full motion-filled clips, how could I qualify as completely scared? The dirty little secret was I had seen the film—or enough of it—against my will at the Southridge multiplex in Hales Corners, a suburb of Milwaukee.
Southridge was one of the first prototypical supersize malls created in Southeastern Wisconsin. It included a multiplex with three box-shaped screens, each much smaller than the majestic theaters of old. My fogged memory tells me my father and I had just seen something with Elliot Gould—a forgotten film called The Devil and Max Devilin. Its eerie and obnoxious title captivated me and I made a mantra out of it, screaming the double dose of “devil” aloud to gain the attention I needed to survive. We did see that there, but almost a year later. In actuality we had just seen The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark with Elliot Gould and boy actor Ricky Schroeder. The Shining lurked like a shark on the other side of the wall. I don’t know why my father decided to teach me there was nothing to be afraid of that afternoon. He well knew of my anxiety around it. There was everything to be afraid of, especially after leaving Noah and being about fifty feet from the entrance to the temple where the terror would be projected onto an enormous screen. My father’s thinking? As in the film, one has to plunge into the psychological makeup of men, their own fears and anxieties, how they were reared, and what they were combating on a day-to-day basis to find what sends them to such ends.
I gained my affection for films watching my father watch them. In our living room he set up camp and chugged a few gallons of TV a day, including old movies, mostly westerns and Laurel and Hardy two-reelers. Mimicry is a child’s lifeblood and so I stole away hours from my life by watching cartoons, game shows, dramas, comedies, and movies, both Hollywood and made for TV—an ominous B-aesthetic curse showcasing a sentimentality to buckle anything half-human either in tears or laughter. The hours grew more widespread and detrimental in the advent of cable and endless choice. Since my father sometimes worked nights and weekends for the parks, we spent some weekdays traipsing around the city of Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin. This time was happily sought after because of its adventuresome qualities—we went to rummage sales, stores (not food stores though, which was my mother’s thankless task), parks, and movies. Often we had company.
I learned the behavior that would govern my life from both my father and his father, men made on the same first name. They took me along with them as they scoured the junky wares, plain rubbish, and some genuinely decent items at rummage sales or the new stuff at hardware stores. Beyond adding such items as World Book Encyclopedia sets from the late 1950’s, mason jars and coffee canisters of screws, washers, nuts and bolts, and the odd saw or table vice, we had fun, hung loose, and proverbially shot the shit, though I had little, myself, to shoot.
My grandfather was a bear of a man—barrel-chested, with big hands, and a full head of snow white hair, the scent of Borkum Riff pipe tobacco abounded from his person. His general largesse with me, the youngest of his then seven grandchildren, probably colored him as candy, and I looked forward to no one more for the first ten years of life. He was retired and had a happy, friendly, golden aura about him. Everyday worries didn’t keep him down. A man of the people, he’d ride about the neighborhood on his bike, a pipe set in the side of his mouth, eagle eyes casting for neighbors to talk to.
My father wanted to spend time with my grandfather—his “best friend in the world” according to later proclamations. As I sat buckled in the back seats of a parade of cars they each owned, I fantasized at the jubilation of finding loads of models, matchbox cars, and baseball cards, but up front a wisecracking and sometimes inhospitable banter reigned, and, like an accomplished supporting player, I dropped my dreams to witness these two men at their finest. They were something like a great, though ignoble team—a great ignoble comedy team. They played off each other, they infuriated each other, but each also had the ability to make the other laugh so hard they’d shout, “Shad up, will ya. I’m goin’ ta piss in my pants.” At times my father would even walk around his father’s house like a suitor, calling, “Hey Moose. Moose!” A pet name.
One episode stays particularly memorable. On a winter’s day we were on our way to the Sears at Southridge in my grandfather’s yellow Mustang Cobra. The snows had subsided a bit and now great pools of sludge adorned every street gutter and sidewalk opening. My father insisted on driving and grandpa relented. We sped up the two-lane 35th Street Bridge over the Milwaukee Railroad, keeping in the fast lane. As we descended my grandfather spoke enviously of a Craftsman hammer, “I want that bugger you got a few months ago.” Near the bridge’s end on a small strip of curbside pavement stood a city worker in an orange utility uniform investigating a water main break. Floating right next to this man was a deep puddle of that gray winter goop, its surface calm like a patch of mud.
Seeing a green light ahead my father changed lanes and accelerated down the right side so the passenger side tires roiled in the thick liquid and sprayed ripples of cold dark water and ice particles up and down this worker from face to boots. I looked back to see the poor man holding his arms before him, his crooked mouth barking at our disappearing Cobra. Grandpa slammed the dashboard, huffed and on cue exploded, “That man is going to be son-of-a-bitching you all day!”
My father had often repeated this story to me over the years. He had fun pushing the line to see how much he could get away with. I surmise he did it just to elicit some colorfully profane response from his father and continued to at least for the sake of his ghost.
Tease. A double-jointed word and one I’ve struggled with since I knew its definition, though I’d known the action much sooner. Teasing made up a great deal of my early relationship with my father. See a child slapping at a father’s hand as the elder pulls it away. That passed a good twenty minutes, day after day. I learned a language, though one shadowed—half dead to some people, yet, as in backgammon, a novice could bury someone fully fluent in the gummy bric-a-brac of such sequestering emotions. Why do people tease each other? Maybe there is no mystery—it’s what makes us human. My grandfather teased my father unmercifully. Was it any surprise this tradition would be carried on? I was tickled, touched, mocked, and mangled—but with love? I have no doubt love existed. I felt loved and cared about, but I also sensed an affection that could cloud over into chaos. Was love both love and lie? Why kiss comfortably one minute before deceiving the next? The hand is there and then it goes away again. There for you, then away from you. Sometimes, hiding from me, I looked for my father and he would come upon and grab me from behind. Where was this going? And why did it go in that direction? We see games played with children every day, play and acting—something often akin to The boogeyman is going to get you, itself a mythic beckoning to the simple stories of old: “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Three Little Pigs,” and “Hansel and Gretel.” Children’s fairy tales often have to do with tricks, the tease, and a game or chase. The same aspects blown into Kubrickian proportions are played out in The Shining. The mother protecting her child from the Big Bad Wolf is etched into infamy by the scene at the bathroom door, where Jack says, “Little pigs, little pigs. Let me come in.”
Something along the lines of teasing would lead to my being tasered by The Shining. To state simply—upon coming out of one film my father promptly went over to the teenage ticket taker, a tall and powerful blond-haired girl to my small self, and cajoled her into escorting us into the theater projecting The Shining just for a minute. He had sold his scheme well. The girl led us to the theater and laughed at my innocence. She kept saying something akin to: “It’s okay, really, don’t worry, nothing to be afraid of.” I certainly did not want to go. I said No countless times, but my fate had been set. He had to prove there was nothing to be afraid of, but there was everything to be afraid of. What was already a little frightening became immensely traumatic.
As I squealed, we entered the theater where the film had been playing for a good hour or so. He pulled me by the hand and I pulled back to not go. Are there not times when something about to happen blatantly shouldn’t? The talking heads of today can grease their way to money by talking down parents who aren’t in their children’s lives enough, but the arguments about mistakes in parenting, more the territory of one’s later therapist, should also be considered. Such powerful violations would be enough to call for prosecution if matters had been between two adults. You want torture? Think of being fed to the fire, of walking into a knife—I was brought into the place I couldn’t bear more than any other in the world. And what did I do? I had no choice. I’m sure my father thought what he did was for the best—simply him helping me.
As Danny does when he rounds a corner and finds the twin girls standing and then butchered in the hallway, I looked through my mostly closed hands. By some cruel miracle the scene we stepped in on involved Danny and his Big Wheel, so identification was immediate and supreme. Unbeknownst to him he has just ridden by Room 237, but he soon stops and looks back at the door. To frame the revelation of the room, Kubrick employed an incredible camera angle from ground level through Danny’s arms still holding onto the handles, so the viewer sees what Danny sees—the gold stenciled letters of the dreaded room in focus while in the foreground he and the bike are a bit blurry. Next he goes up to the door and tries to get in, accompanied on the soundtrack by the eerie tympanum of Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. It is the most frightening set-up in horror—opening a door where the bad probably stands at attention. I was with my father, but I was also on screen, advancing toward the end of life. How fitting to die hand in hand with one’s progenitor, the father who dropped the seed that would sprout into me, his force like the Egyptian Ra, the solar deity, giver and destroyer. Danny’s fate perfectly superimposed over my real time one and, whether premeditated or off the cuff, the topsy-turvy Kubrick would then also direct my life into the next dimension. I not only had a glimpse of death, I felt it. The cycle from birth to the end. In coming from darkness, we return to semi-darkness, before the finality of black and no breath. Maybe the handholding saved me. My father had me, but one might think he had a fright in watching as well. He had to stay strong to bear out his contention that Jack and Danny and their lives were make believe, not real. If he was plagued he didn’t show it. Yet, my hands were covering my eyes. How could he hold my hand if I covered my sight? I remember it both ways—with my one free hand, I covered both eyes while the other asked for comfort. Kubrick’s images had superseded the fact I had a father, for he couldn’t save me or the boy on screen. As it was, my father told me nothing had happened after the Bartok crescendoed. The boy tried the door, but it would not open. I believe I had stopped watching after Danny had only looked at the door. I sweated every second in the theater—even as we walked out I still feared some djinn would assault us.
Returning to the afternoon light of late May a crying and angry boy, my eyes carried a few full rounds of tears, yet it wasn’t Kubrick’s images that flashed in the interstices of my mind while blinking. When basic human rights have been violated, trust gets broken. After being forced to submit, the kind of suffering I did not know to exist suddenly did. The cruelty the film portrayed had been mirrored in my family and in my best friend. A shock for which there could be no reconciliation. I needed protection. To demonstrate anything else but mercy and compassion in such a situation was criminal. I’d been unwittingly introduced into the tyrannical world I would need to occupy along with everyone else via a film inebriated with an American family’s dysfunction.
Grudge? Not much happened after the incident—no one was called out or censured. I got over it. I forgave quietly and effortlessly—though no one asked forgiveness. Still the event served to illuminate the horned plot of the film and life itself, what Philip Larkin would assiduously state as:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Later that same night I plunged into my bed trying to think about something else—the next day of sun and play or the possibility of a trip—but the fingerprints of disturbance remained. For the first time life demonstrated that it could not be sweet. A smile might mean it was not so mixed with good intentions as when first formed. At home, I lay in bed, but I wasn’t safe.
In the binding of the film to my consciousness, I shouldn’t underestimate the mark of the Midwest winters in my young life. The Milwaukee winters of 1978 and 1979 constitute some of the harshest in memory (my family even owned a few I Survived the Winter of 1978 t-shirts), with record blizzards each year. Walls of snow dominated my homemade world for a good three to four months. Knowing the Torrances were a family caught in a giant snowscape I was frightened for them. To be cut off and surrounded by what turns people and itself blue by the light of the moon, creating silence to hear one’s heartbeat—this was too fearsome to comprehend. The stranglehold of snow on a Milwaukee winter set me in the “mind of winter” that Wallace Stevens promulgated in his poem “The Snow Man.” And soon, in snow, with my father, I bled blood, my life closing in on a full lampooning of The Shining. In the winter following the appearance of the film, I went walking with him in one of the few hilly parks in Milwaukee County. A clear weekday, the city had been covered by a good foot of snow between the last two sunrises. We hiked up a one-hundred foot incline that to me was towering, tamping down the already packed path with our bootprints. Once higher up, owing to curiosity, I walked to the edge and slipped and slid down headfirst. I speedily made my way to where my face crashed into a boulder while my mind still had me sliding.
This time my father became the father. He picked me up and rushed me to the service building, with which he was well acquainted, being a park supervisor himself, and, at one time, actually worked in the park of happenstance. The parkies had no towels or cloth to stop the seep of blood from my face, mostly from the forehead, and the backs of sandpaper was used. In this angst, another conjunction with a film fittingly put up against The Shining at the time (Kramer vs. Kramer—its mushy sister film—parents with a son split apart) occurred. Robert Benton’s Best Picture winner, released six months before Kubrick’s, includes a scene where the young boy falls from a jungle gym and is rushed to the hospital to get stitches. I went to the ER as well, getting a decent number, while being held, or so I wished I would remember, as Dustin Hoffman held his son while the surgeon sewed his face shut. My mother had taken my older sister and me to see it in the spring of 1980. It was rated PG. My mother liked Dustin Hoffman. Did she even then contemplate the divorce she would carry out seven years later? Did Dustin stand for the type of man she would rather see hoist me onto his shoulders? The hospital scene, as well as the beating-for-eating-ice-cream scene, stirred and I viewed the film compulsively, before I could ever take in The Shining, taping it off ABC with a beta recorder and editing out the commercials while watching. That film maintained me when my parents couldn’t. Already before I could understand what movies were doing to me, I had the obsessive re-watching therapy down. One of America’s most famed film critics, Andrew Sarris, said of the medium:
Film has everything. I think it’s an emotional medium, above all… What you derive from a film depends very much on what you bring to it. It allows you to focus emotionally on things you already know. It brings things to a point. Like music. Film is the art to which all other arts aspire. It produces the most sublime emotions.
What I brought to the film world was a sense of insecurity about living and a mounting confusion about the roles of family. Why did parents argue, lie, obfuscate, not touch, and look dispassionately at their surroundings and sometimes their children? I received certain answers—mainly through the performances of Kramer vs. Kramer’s actors. Mushy, but real in terms of how people fade from each other.
Watching, I reentered my past by fast forwarding through all the less meaningful parts to get to the hard core of living—what you feel when you get hurt and who helps you get through it. What I took away was resolution. My six-year-old body could fall, and it did, but someone would save me, and they did. Through the process of rewatching the fall and hospital scenes, my salvation came to be more realistic in images harpooning my own memory of the real event. In recall of the reality, my mind skips over the ER and the stitching, ironically the part ultra-present in Kramer vs. Kramer, and goes right to placing me on my parent’s bed, a prized place to be put—though why? Their bedroom was downstairs and next to the noisy kitchen, as opposed to the quietude of second floor sleep. In the next room my father further explained to my mother, who had left work to meet us back at home, what happened. No matter if she held him responsible for my calamity, safety briefly reigned. And it was an accident, completely unintentional. It could’ve happened to anybody. There was and would be much more my mother could never let him forget.
Whether this event competed with the theatrical breaking of trust (it certainly wasn’t overshadowed) I now had two unique experiences of my father as the sun god, giver and destroyer. Perhaps, I have been trying to rectify these two dichotomies for some time, and I have not found a film portraying such a beast as strongly as Jack in The Shining. A slight case can be made for Dustin Hoffman, but in the end, after losing his son, he gets him back and the dramaturgy doesn’t have the supernatural in conversation with the family—what goes on in a child’s head can’t fit in something not very spectral, only into Central Park.
Even with The Shining’s“happy” ending (only Halloran the cook gets killed, Jack dies, and his family escapes), Kubrick continues to keep me off-balance with this frosty family. Because Jack lives on forever in the Overlook, the nightmare can never go away. It will affect others and the date on the photograph he is frozen in (July 4th) attests to what country and what people Kubrick is speaking about. Our parents stay with us our whole lives.
Many years later, I found myself near Bordeaux, France at Plum Village, a meditation practice center led by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. During one of his morning dharma talks he spoke on the question of our parents and quietly mused, “How can we hate our father? We are our father.” I have felt hatred more than I would like to in this life, but I have also crept closer to love. A few times during my teens and twenties, my father asked me if I hated him. It was an unimaginable yet fertile question. I answered in the negative, but surely I hated him hard in more than a few instances. There is no blandishment to my existence by saying I treat people based on the craggy, unkempt, and honest upbringing I endured, but this vexing see-saw has made life a challenge. I don’t know what else it could be.
Greg Gerke
Greg Gerke has published See What I See (Zerogram Press), a book of essays, and Especially the Bad Things, a book of stories (Splice). He edits the journal Socrates on the Beach.