Monday, October 8, 2012
Paranormal / Neighborhoods / Moviegoing / Film The Shining at midnight: am I Blu?
Posted by Ben Sachs on 10.08.12 at 06:00 PM
Do good intentions make up for lackluster presentation? The Logan screened The Shining from BluRay, and, to paraphrase Roger Ebert, the screen looked just like a giant television. The images were clear but lacked depth; there's a shrink-wrapped look to movies projected from DVDs for which no quality sound system can compensate. (Another distraction: the theater didn't mask the image, so one had to look at several feet of dead screen space on either side of the frame, not to mention the hard, ugly, and very digital-looking edges of the frame itself.) I'd seen The Shining at least a half-dozen times before, so it didn't bother me too much to watch the movie in such a compromised version. And since the Logan lets you drink beer inside the theater, I was far less discerning about matters of projection by the end of the movie than I was at the beginning.
I just hope that no one in the audience was seeing The Shining for the first time. If I could only discover a movie on DVD, I'd rather watch it at home than in a theater, where the enlargement of the digital image has the effect of keeping the movie itself at arm's length. But based on a show-of-hands conducted before the show, it seemed like everyone in the room had seen it before. Such is the current nature of midnight movie audiences, apparently. Where an earlier generation would stay up for, say, The Holy Mountain or Eraserhead in hopes of seeing something weird and new, today's (or, rather, tonight's) audiences seem more interested to share a familiar experience with a group. How else to explain the frequent midnight revivals of The Goonies and The Big Lebowski?
I've never been curious to check out these nostalgia-driven midnight shows. I'm just not possessed by that mood at that hour, and I fear that everyone else in the theater will go just to talk back to the movie, something I find distracting. I was able to set aside my misgivings and go to Friday's show because Stanley Kubrick's art resists nostalgia—or any form of easy assimilation, for that matter; The Shining in particular is one of those inexhaustible masterpieces, like Vertigo or Metropolis, that operates on multiple levels simultaneously and yields new meanings every time I see it. This time around, I thought I'd consider the argument that the film is an allegory about the Europeans' genocide of Native Americans. I found it made for a provocative experience, and it certainly framed the movie better than the projectionist did. Consider the basic set-up: a white family, headed by a domineering patriarch, discovers a world of plenty; the patriarch begins a campaign of terror to assert his attachment to the environment. The film makes it ambiguous as to whether his homicidal rage is something innate or something triggered by the place itself; this poses the question whether imperial domination is simply a fact of civilization, an aspect of mankind doomed to perpetuate itself as long as humans exist.
The audience on Friday night was relatively quiet (and no one texted!), allowing the movie to cast its spell. There was some laughter and catcalling during the opening scenes, but they felt less derisive than convivial, as if to recast the movie in the aura of the neighborhood. My favorite moment? When Barry Nelson's hotel manager told Jack Nicholson that the Overlook Hotel recently hired a decorator from Chicago to handle some refurnishing, some guy in the front row cheered.
Ben Sachs writes about moviegoing every Monday.
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