Study Questions: Week Six

Bad Daddies and Dreams of Home

The Shining (1980) and Artifical Intelligence: AI (2001)

Both these films are as much a comment on film genres (here the horror film and the science fiction ). The Shining locates the heart of horror not in an alien other but within the heart of an American family. Consequently, these films demand an attention to detail and to filmmaking technique seldom required by familiar genre films. Eyes Wide Shut, uses the conventions of the melodrama to explore the hero's dilemma of being caught between a comfortable middle-class culture and the desire ti escape into a world of bizzare sexual experience.

The Shining: Honey, I'm Home!

1. What is revealed about the Torrance family in the opening sequences (before they leave for the Overlook)?

2. How do the settings (and the way they are filmed) during Jack Torrance's (Jack Nicholson) interview with Ulman (Barry Nelson) contribute to a sense of foreboding and danger?

3. Note the manner in which Kubrick uses background images to comment on the nature and/or fate of the characters. For instance, what is the significance of Danny watching the Roadrunner cartoons? In what ways might Danny's (Danny Lloyd) situation be compared to the Roadrunner?

4. How are we to take the supernatural elements in the film, particularly those that seem to warn of dangers to come (i.e. the bloody elevator, the Grady twins, the woman in the bath)? Are they to be taken literally (as Dracula in vampire films), or are they images which indicate the states of mind of the characters?

5. Why did Jack injure his son (before the film opens)?

6. What is the significance of Jack's manuscript? What is the relation between his writing and his increasingly violent impulses? What does it say about Jack's dream of being a writer, and artist?

7. What is the significance of his meetings with Grady (Philip Stone)? Although Grady was real enough, is his encounter with Jack to be taken literally or as a way of seeing into Jack's mind?

8. Likewise, what is the significance of his encounter with the bartender at what seems to be a party taking place in the 1920s? What do you learn about Jack's feelings toward his family? Is he really drinking, or is he regressing into fantasy?

9. Why is Wendy (Shelly Duval) so passive? How does her behavior (consider her conversation with Danny's doctor) make the family more vulnerable to Jack's violence?

10. How does Jack get out of the refrigerator room? Is this one incident where we are to take the supernatural literally? Is there any other incident which insists that the ghosts are real? Or are the conventions of the horror genre a red herring drawing viewers from the true horror. Which is . . . ?

11. What is "the shining"? Consider Hallorann's (Scatman Crowthers) encounter with Danny and his decision to return to the Overlook to help him.

12. What is the significance of the photo which shows Torrance in a group of Scott Fitzgerald-like characters?

Artificial Intelligence: AI; Mommie!

1. What similatities in plot and theme concerning mothers and sons can you see between The Shining and AI ?

2. How does Kubrick use the contrasts between a mecha (David) and a real human (Martin) to explore the ironic contrasts between a "human' and a "machine"? How does the bridge to Rouge City offer a visual image of these contrasts? how are these constrasts embodied in the Flesh Fair and Rouge city sequences? How is this theme typical of the science fiction genre?

3. What burden is placed on David by giving him a humanlike interior (memory, soul, desire)?

4. How do the repeated references to the story of Pinoccio point up the confusions between fiction and fact, between reality and dream?

5. How are the mobile over David's bed, the corporate logo of the company that developed David, the statue of the Blue Fairy, and David's "mother" alike. What do they symbolize?

6. What fate of the human future is reflected in the Flesh Fair anf Rouge City?

7. What meaning is implicit in the images of David frozen in ice before the Blue Fairy?

8. In the opening of the film prof. Hob by justifies creating a loving mecha by saying "didn't God create man to love him?". Near the end he tells David that he is David's "Blue Fairy." How do these comments reveal Hobby's hubris, and what do they imply about the creation of human beings?

9. In what ways might the aliens be seen as liberators and friendly as in ET: The Extra-terrestial (1982)or close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977/80) rather as dangerous invaders as in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)?

10. in the closing sequence, David's mother says, "I have always loved you." Later David awakes and claims that he 'went to that place where dreams are born." Is this an optimistic or pessimistic ending? is it typical of a Kubrick conclusion or is it more similar to one by Spielberg?

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