Narrative Theory

We applied the theories and ideas of four narrative theorists to The Shining. Propp was a Russian critic who explored the underlying structure of folk tales and proposed a set of universal character and narrative functions which he thought were the basis for all stories. His ideas are an uneasy fit with the Shining as even thought there was a clear villain and hero, there were potentially more than one and some character’s roles were unclear. For instance Wendy could have been seen as a hero and she had the guts to stand up to jack and lock him up in the food store room. Also Halaran could be seen as the hero as he communicated with Danny the little boy and came all that way to the hotel because he could sense there was something wrong happening. Even though he got murdered before he could help anyone, he supplied the Snowplough which in the end helped Danny and Wendy escape, leaving Jack (the villain) dead. Jack’s role changes from the beginning of the film to the end. He is seen as harmless to begin with, but it is unclear whether a supernatural entity has turned him loopy or the isolation of the conditions in a big hotel, away from any other civilisation. Either way he is seen as the villain because of his actions towards Wendy and Danny in attempting to kill them with an axe. We see earlier traits of his strange behaviour, when he speaks rudely to Wendy and swears at her. He also loses his sense of time; as we witnessed when Wendy brought food up to him he asked what the time was and it was 11:30am, which for a man who claims he has lots of things to do is not a sensible time to wake up. Later on we realise that he wasn’t actually writing he was writing a repeated phrase on hundreds of pieces of paper “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”.

Propp’s outline of the functions in a horror film are somewhat followed by The Shining. The preparation that starts with a member of the family leaving home relates to the film, the preparation, complication, transference and struggle are followed by The Shinning. However, the return and recognition is not a part of the story outline of the film. The film ends with the villain (Jack) eventually dying, and the heroes escaping.

Claude Levi-Strauss looked at the narrative of horror films in binary oppositions. They are sets of opposite values which reveal the structure of the media text. An example of this would be Good, and Evil. Other examples used are:

Earth/space

Past/Present

Humans/Aliens

Normal/Strange

Natural/Supernatural

He was not focused on the events which took place in the plot, but instead more for the deeper meaning of the themes. He looked at how the narrative might be a property of the human mind. He extracted common myths and crossed them with cultural boundaries. These binary oppositions where seen to structure our understanding of the world.

The hotel in the film is seen as a bad place, from the beginning of the film, as the film went on it increasingly got a worse image. Jack, Wendy and Danny were seen as the innocent people coming to take care of the hotel. This illustrates the example of good and evil. Also when Jack becomes a villain, it is him against the good Wendy and Danny and he turns into the evil presence. There is a large sense of past and present in the film, some of which is unexplained. The cook Halaran tells Danny that the past usually comes back to haunt the hotel, as a warning.  Jack is haunted by the past which could have been one of the reasons why he became a villain. He may or may have not just imaged the ball where he met O’Grady, it is not explained. It is still questioned whether he was possessed, or he became a villain through paranoia and isolation. This brings us to the normal and paranormal part of the film. There were lots of paranormal activity occurring. Such as it is unexplained how Jack escaped from the food storage room, after being locked in there by Wendy. It can be argued that every time he images things there is a mirror in the room, therefore he could be imagining it, but we as the audience do not know for sure whether he is really seeing this, as a result of the haunted hotel, or he is just imagining it, going mad. The idea of humans and aliens could relate to what Danny is seeing when he sees the two girls around the hotel, he isn’t going mad like Jack but he is seeing these paranormal images too, therefore it could explain what Jack is witnessing. The humans are Wendy, Danny and Jack, but could it be argued that Jack turns into an alien? The old woman in the bath, the twin little girls, and the ball were all a sign of alienism because theoretically they were not meant to be there.

Bordwell and Thompson’s theory was that the narrative is a “chain of cause and effect occurring in time and space.” The delineation of time and space: the screen duration, plot duration, and story duration. The film The Shining itself is 115 minutes long. In this amount of time the plot duration was around 6 months long, and the story as a whole was set through 60+ years. For them, a narrative typically begins with one situation, a series of changes occur depending on pattern of cause and effect, eventually a situation arises that brings the end of the narrative. The narrative shapes the material in the time and space, it defines where everything takes place, when, and how fast they take place. It uses technical techniques to manipulate the audience’s awareness of time and place by using: flashbacks, replays of action, slow motion, speeding up, jumping between places and times.

As audiences we connect events to make sense of what is happening. For instance a shot of the hotel, then a shot of the family in a room signify that the family are in the hotel. This is an important factor in narrative because even if there is no obvious connection, we still try to make one. This is a humans natural reaction because making connections is how we natural make sense of the world around us and we transport this into films. The director can create a mood or atmosphere by choosing certain shots in certain order to build up a picture in our minds, so that the film makes sense. There is an instant link to what happens in one shot in those either side of it, in the same way it would happen in real life.

Lev Kuleshov, a Russian filmmaker in the 1920’s experimented by showing people shots of actors in between shots of different objects of food, a dead woman and a child. The audience interpreted the actor’s affectionate. This is because the brains try to make continuative sense of what we see. This is called montage, the placing together of images. Sergei Eisenstein is another Russian filmmaker of the same era, he believed that it was more effective if consecutive shots were not obviously linked as the audience were forced to think and interact more o make the mental jump from shot to shot. In a more light-hearted way montage is used today in pop videos and advertising, to encourage the audience to make associations and link ideas.