Manifest Destiny, A Repeat of History: Scoring Stanley Kubrick's The Shining

In this paper I will examine Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining through the lens of Manifest Destiny. Using this angle, I discuss how protagonist Jack Torrance takes on the role of a settler as he cares for the Overlook Hotel and becomes verbally abusive and controlling to his wife and son. I use the disconcerting, avant-garde scores of Twentieth Century modernist composers Béla Bartók, György Ligeti, and Krzysztof Penderecki to analyze how this story of westward expansion is conveyed. This chilling soundscape involving extreme dissonance, complex rhythms, layering of sounds, and unconventional techniques scores Jack’s psychological descent into murderous insanity and lures him into his doomed fate of death, the karma one receives when settling over Native American land. Additionally, I touch on how Kubrick conveys this tragedy all while showing no violence on the moving image, proving that without this haunting soundscape, the film’s unnerving plot and tension would lose its potency, thus demonstrating that the auditory experience is an essential part in amplifying the horror of a psychological narrative. This analysis will provide the history needed to depict The Shining as more than just a haunted hotel story; an exploration of the music will also enable listeners to make more sense of the disjointed sounds and understand why musical editor, Gordon Stainforth, made his strategic choices.