Overlooked: A detail in “The Shining” that you’ve never seen | Hacker News Reader

Overlooked: A detail in “The Shining” that you’ve never seen

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29 pointsNKosmatos18 comments

> I don’t think anyone has ever noticed it before, because I cannot find anything about it. No article, no video, nothing.

So... if it's not mentioned on social media it didn't happen? What is happening to this world?

Probably a better way to criticize this comment would be to find a counterexample instead of overextending to a commentary of society at large.

I think the writer's point is that Kubrick has been analyzed _to death_ on social media. It's true - there's a huge ecosystem of YouTube explainer videos, listicles, in-depth articles about his shooting style, camera tricks, editing, symbolism in his films, etc. So, I don't think he's actually wrong. In previous decades there was an ecosystem of books and magazines about films (for example I have books on the making of Dune, the making of Blade Runner, the making of Star Trek, books of essays on X-Files, Serenity, and Cinefex magazines that go into amazing detail on how the visual effects for Lord of the Rings were made). But most of this sort of thing seems to have shifted to online.

My point was that these details can't possibly only be noticed by "the ecosystem". Movies are for everyone. Most just don't care enough to mention it.

Just because a bunch of nerds didn't notice something doesn't mean nobody else has.

The sound of one influencer crapping

If an influencer craps himself where no one can hear, did he really crap himself?

Also, the author contradicts himself in tweet 17 of 50: "In this scene from the documentary Making the Shining, Kubrick explicitly asks Nicholson to find a way to look down, right where the camera is." Anyone sufficiently familiar with Kubrick knows it wasn't a mistake.

> Anyone sufficiently familiar with Kubrick knows it wasn't a mistake.

I don't think the author at any point claims it's a mistake, they make it clear how deliberate it is. They are asking what the effect is.

Yep, high chance. People post almost everything and this is too interesting to have been missed posting on social media.

Some of those shots to me come across as if the character's glance just happens to be where the camera is. It increases the realism to me.

Even if intentional on the part of the director or actor, there's a bias I think people have to assume something like "all glances at me are because of me". As in, if the events of The Shining were happening, without a camera, surely Torrance would look at the spot the camera happens to be. Or, alternatively, if he never looked in the location of the camera it might be interpretable as avoidance.

I think there's more to it than that (subconsciously drawing you into the diagesis?) but that's how I've interpreted some scenes.

Nicholson's eyes don't just graze the camera or sweep past it - he's clearly been directed to pause (even for a tiny moment) looking directly at the lens. It's the opposite of what film actors are trained to do, which is avoid looking directly at the lens. In a typical dramatic film a shot where an actor looked directly at the lens would be a ruined take.

From the context of the book, it also makes sense. SK writes in a style that is almost like he's talking to you (the reader) but not exactly. I wouldn't be surprised if Kubrick wanted to convey that in a subtle way.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1663917603662835714.html

Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr6PgWFs0Pw

Look, this is interesting, but why can't this be a blog post?

Why does it have to be chopped up into individual chunks and put up on twitter?

It's main format, it seems, is a youtube video essay, which is the appropriate format, IMO, not a blog post, linked in this thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36151612

Because the author likes Twitter threads and decided to make it a Twitter thread.

Good but I can never finish them. Especially when they deliberately keep beating around the bush for 20 tweets, as if someone is paying them by the number of tweets I've glanced. It's insufferable.

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