Sunday, August 4, 2013

On being a child of one's generation.

I watched for the first time last night, in the pleasantly disorienting setting of a screen-walled cube with the movie projected, in three dimensions, on all four walls at once, backwards-running superimposed over forwards, with crushingly loud ambient sound, the classic 1970s horror film "The Shining," by Stanley Kubrick, with Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, from Stephen King, with its well-known visions of axe attacks, mutilated bodies, death by freezing, ghostly children and possessed children, mad men and terrified women. It was compelling and effective. By far my biggest, palest, most startled flinch was in response to the use of the N-word.