The Shining: Oppression Olympics at the Overlook Hotel

In this episode, about Stanley Kubrick's classic movie The Shining, we divide our interests neatly between sexual trauma and racism. Well, we attempt to divide them neatly. Andy and Alicia on the side of sex, Jake and Sagi on the side of Race.

Andy starts us off by hypothesizing, in intricate detail, the possibility that the movie is about the actual sexual assault of young Danny by Jack Torrance. He also brackets everything with a comment about how endless the interpretations of this movie can be, and that we the "critical readers" end up trapped in the snowy labyrinth that awaits Jack outside.

Sagi is all about this word Overlook, and the way it is tied to the manifest destiny of the white man. He also thinks about the way the white man goes into trance or self-hypnosis in order to Overlook the violence he commits.

Jake introduces us to Frank Wilderson's theory about the difference between the grammar of violence committed against Native Americans and that committed against Black people. Jake reads this into the movie, since there is a famous interpretation that the Shining's violence represents the violent genocide of Native Americans, but few people have discussed the gratuitous murder of the Black man Dick.

Alicia brings it home for us, thinking about the traumatic sexual encounter that occurs in room 237, where Jack meets a gorgeous naked women who decays into a corpse. What does this say about the male gaze? What does this say about our objects of desire? And how does the trauma of sex relate to racist violence?

Jake and Sagi go Beast & Sovereign for the most part, and Alicia and Andy give us some good 'ole Pervs 'R Us.