The Shining is Not a Holocaust Film

Review of Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust. NY: Peter Lang, 2004, paperback, ISBN 0-8204-7115-1, pages xii, 338, $29.95.

Stanley Kubrick, who directed fewer films than most well-known directors, has produced more “classic” films than most directors. Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Stangelove, and The Shining established him as one of the great film makers of our time. The films of this unique man with his own vision are always well made and meticulously thought out. Even though you may not always like it, when you see a Kubrick film you do not easily forget it. He is one of those film makers whose work stays with you long after you see it. I remember first seeing Paths of Glory when I was in high school. Even though I did not quite understand why, it stayed in my mind. It was only when I saw it again years later that I realized that it was a truly great film.

Professor Geoffrey Cocks’ volume on Kubrick was a chance to learn more about one of my favorite filmmakers. As a psychohistorian I look at popular film and “classics” to try and understand what they communicate to us the audience about shared fantasies operating in the society. All films communicate, those that are popular succeed, and those, which are not, serve as “trial balloons” that somehow miss the dominant shared fantasies of the culture at the time they are released. This book is well written and appears to have been meticulously researched. This is not a psychobiography—Cocks gives general information about Kubrick’s life but devotes most of the book to his films. He is most informative, although I am a keen student of cinema and have seen most of Kubrick’s films at least once, I learned of several I had never even heard of before.

The Professor then makes his case that Kubrick wanted to do a film on the Holocaust and that The Shining was that film. Sadly, this is where this otherwise admirable book does not hold up despite the author’s considerable ingenuity in seeking to prove his theory. Had Kubrick wanted to do a film on the Nazi assault on Jews, I am absolutely certain that it would have been a strong film. Cocks argues that “Kubrick developed his own creative strategy for representing the Holocaust, one that expands the definition of a Holocaust film to include reflecting a trauma-like discourse.” Furthermore, “Kubrick’s personal hesitations and artistic sensibilities are manifested most evidently in the systematic burial of a Holocaust subtext in The Shining,” even though such an indirect approach “risks cold abstraction… The greatest problem with Kubrick’s indirect approach is that his Holocaust subtext has gone almost – almost –unnoticed” (pp. 16,17). The Professor claims that Kubrick had, since the 1970’s, been “actively pursuing the possibility of his own Holocaust film” (p.

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167). He goes on to argue that hints of such concern can be seen in A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, but “such wisplike traces were to be manifested almost as subtly but also much more numerously and powerfully in The Shining” (p. 167). Much of the book is an explication of the author belief that The Shining is filled with symbols indicative of the Holocaust. It is not directly elaborated in the story, but rather through very elaborate and arcane schemes of symbols. In my view, Cocks is reaching way beyond his evidence and therefore his argument is simply not convincing. He is trying to create an interpretation where none previously existed. He even admits having virtually nothing to work with. As I read through The Wolf at the Door, I kept wondering why he bothered writing it.

Cocks leaves an important question unanswered: why would Kubrick need to be so indirect about the Holocaust? His other films are not indirect. Films like Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, and A Clockwork Orange are very much the opposite. Why would someone who had the nerve to make a “comedy” like Dr. Strangelove, which makes a straightforward and powerful case that the world will end because our leaders and military are psychotic lunatics, need to be indirect about the Holocaust? I agree that films can be interpreted on a variety of levels, but much of Cocks’ approach relies on the use of color, numbers and music which are presented in ways that seem essentially divorced from the story, consciously or unconsciously.

Ironically, Cocks fleetingly alludes to what, in my view, would be a much more forceful line of argument about Kubrick and his films: “There is throughout Kubrick’s films an Oedipal pattern of youth against patriarchal authority… Whatever the specific successes or failures with Oedipal lineaments…the paternal order always reigns supreme.” However, Cocks goes on to write, “there is more going on in Kubrick’s films than the working out of an Oedipus complex, a pre-Oedipal fixation on his mother, or the repression of homosexuality. His films reflect an ongoing confrontation with the world outside the family that in a patriarchal family structure is almost always represented in psychodynamic terms by the father” (p. 26). Certainly, The Shining fits this argument far better and more clearly than the tortuous efforts Cocks makes in service of trying to convince us that it is about the Holocaust. The Shining has to do with fantasies of patricide (the son leads the father outside to his death in the freezing snow) and could more profitably be interpreted from that perspective. The abusive father goes mad and murderously turns on mother and son. The son vanquishes the father and becomes an Oedipal victor while the father joins the ranks of the many ghosts who haunt the hotel.

In conclusion, the fact that the author fails to take into account the more in-depth aspects of Kubrick’s work, makes this book a major disappointment.

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