The Shining part 2: The Interview
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- “Hi, I’m Jack. I’m totally not crazy.”
The Shining opens with a series of glorious shots of a yellow VW bug driving up a mountain road. The mountains are large, the VW is small.
The car, we will soon learn, belongs to Jack Torrance, who’s driving up to the Overlook to interview for the chopping up his family caretaker job.
Why doesn’t the movie open with a scene of Jack, in the car, listening to the radio as he winds his way up the road? Halloran gets shots like that later, while he’s driving his snow-cat up those same roads through the snow.
The difference between Jack driving up in the fall and Halloran driving up in the winter is: Kubrick wants us to identify with Halloran, and he wants Jack to get lost in the landscape. The landscape overwhelms the yellow VW, even swallows it up at one point as he drives through a tunnel. Because the VW is the first relatable thing we see in the movie, the viewer identifies with it and shares its sense of being a tiny thing in a vast, forbidding landscape.