Kubrick and the Paranoid Style: Antisemitism, Conspiracy Theories, and The Shining

If, as I have argued elsewhere, Stanley Kubrick is an intellectual, Jewish, and “Talmudic” filmmaker, his text most susceptible to Jewish or Talmudic readings or, at least which has attracted the most scholarship akin to that of the Talmud, is The Shining (1980). Perhaps of all his films, The Shining lends itself to a particularly Jewish Midrashic, Talmudic, and Kabbalistic mode of thinking. It can be read as a possible meditation on Genesis 22, known as the Binding of Isaac, where Abraham (Jack) is willing to carry out the sacrifice of his only son (Danny) on the say so of an unseen higher authority (“orders from the house”). But also, the film’s circular structure suggests both an afterlife and metempsychosis or reincarnation. Jack can therefore be interpreted as a dybbuk, a type of demon in Jewish mythology that has attached itself to a lost, dead soul who for one reason or another, has not been able to transmigrate successfully. The demon then guides the renegade soul into the body of a living person, providing it with a refuge, and the demon with an opportunity to take control of the possessed person’s body. This would explain why Jack has “always been the caretaker” and has an uncanny knowledge of the Overlook hotel, as “though I had been here before […] as though I knew what was going to be around every corner.” It also explains why he appears in the photo dating back to 1921 at the end of the film: is he the real Jack who has died but whose soul has cleaved to the body of the current caretaker?¹

Ephraim Lilien, The Talmud Students, engraving, 1915.

Jews Studying the Talmud, Paris, c. 1880–1905. Author unknown

Stanley Kubrick famously cultivated an aura of “secrecy” around his films and his persona. This has fed into a discourse of secret coding with sinister messages purportedly contained in his films, which is further enhanced by him being crypto-Jewish, thus tapping into the Medieval imaginary of Jews as dabbling in child abuse, pedophilia, mesmerism, alchemy, and satanism (reinforced by the image of him as a cat lover – the Devil’s familiar). It also taps into the very Mitteleuropa idea that Jews, through esoteric and occult knowledge, know more than the rest of us. Yet, rather than being seen as the source of evil, the later, bearded Kubrick’s tsaddik-like allure is not to impart a form of evil conspiratorial sheen, but rather to a man who tries in a coded way to enlighten the masses to society’s secrets. Surely, it is no coincidence, therefore, that the films that attract the most attention are those in which conspiracy has been detected, namely 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), and The Shining (although, counter-intuitively enough, Lolita [1962] does not). It is this very susceptibility to such readings that makes The Shining Kubrick’s most “Jewish” film, and this may be the reason why it has attracted the obsessive attention of conspiratorial fantasists.

Kubrick’s 1980 film has certainly inspired reams of particularly labyrinthine scholarly and critical analysis, YouTube fan videos, and blogs, mirroring the hedge maze in the movie. It has spawned a mainstream (or cult?) documentary devoted to unlocking its purported secrets, Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 (2012). Named after the eponymous room in The Overlook Hotel, the deadpan documentary deconstructs the horror movie from a variety of perspectives. “Room 237 conceives of the film as resembling the Da Vinci Code, the viewer as Alan Turing confronted with an Enigma machine, and Kubrick as like Walter Sickert supposedly confessing in one of his East End paintings that he was Jack the Ripper.”²

Kubrick and The Shining have stimulated the production of non-academic books as well. Derek Taylor Kent’s novel, Kubrick’s Game (2016), is constructed around the conceit that there was “a hidden game within [Kubrick’s] films.”³ Ian Christopher’s The Games Room (2020) is subtitled “A novel insight into Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining.” It alleges that “The Shining is a puzzle, a maze” to be solved.⁴ Simon Roy’s Kubrick Red: A Memoir (2014) is both an interpretation of the movie and a memoir in which the two are intertwined.⁵ There is even a podcast, The Shining 2:37, dedicated to parsing the film 2 minutes and 37 seconds at a time.⁶ Jack Torrance’s nightmare of cutting up his wife and son into little pieces precisely augurs what this podcast, as well as what other scholars, fans, and critics, have done to The Shining.

Objects within the film, its props, have been obsessively scrutinized as revelatory clues. This includes a ski lodge poster, the patterns of the carpet, the sweater that Danny wears in the movie, the scrapbook, and the tin of Calumet baking powder in the pantry. I myself have probed the can of Heinz Kosher Dill Pickle Slices as telling.⁷ But the object that has received the most attention is the typewriter and its accompanying ream of typed pages.⁸ Taken together, these texts have spawned such theories as that Kubrick’s film is about the genocide of the Native Americans, the Holocaust, Kubrick’s confession for having faked the NASA moon landings, or the myth of the Minotaur. Behind these exercises lies the belief that Kubrick had indeed laced the film with hidden meanings.

What all these approaches have in common is what K. J. Donnelly refers to “Medieval Biblical exegesis.”⁹ Whether he was referring to Talmudic exegesis, I doubt, but the two share a similarity in their approach. Donnelly continues that such scholarship “manifests a pervasive cult of interpretation inspiring unprecedented degrees of obsession among devotees […] The Shining has produced a ‘purer’ more obsessive cult of devotion, whereby an object is almost openly worshipped, along with its director accorded the sort of respect given to a unique creator. The Shining is not seen as a wonderful object of enjoyment as much as it is seen as the solemn bearer of deeper truth, making it a grave and momentous object, which derives its status from its hidden importance.”¹⁰ This outpouring, or deluge – millions of words written and uttered by thousands of people – has reached an “almost Biblical level of exegesis,” Donnelly says, giving it the status of “quite possibly the most scrutinised film of all time.”¹¹ Shawn Montgomery has called this treatment “Crypto-Kubrology.”¹²

In line with a Talmudic approach, scholars even deconstruct with laser-like precision the work of other scholars. In his book, Donnelly notes how Roger Luckhurst (author of the first English language book specifically on the film) misspells the name of the hotel manager, Stuart Ullman, as “Ullmann.”¹³ This, Donnelly goes on to suggest, makes Ullman “appear more Germanic and less Jewish.”¹⁴ Interestingly, neither myself nor Geoffrey Cocks (those of us responsible for the most Jewish interpretations of The Shining) made this connection. A quick Google, in fact, reveals the opposite, that “Ullmann is a German surname also associated with Jewish Europeans.”¹⁵ A further search reveals this curious fact from Ashkenazic Jewry in Transition (1975) by Bernard Rosensweig, “The mother of R. Seligman of Ulm was forced to flee from the city of Kubrick and she found a haven in the city of Ulm together with her son.”¹⁶ Presumably, the “city of Kubrick” refers to an actual place, but a search for somewhere with the name of Kubrick (or Kubrik, Kubryk, Kobrik, Kubrick, Chubrik, or Kobrick, etc.) turned up no hits. The original family name was Kubrik and a search for that turns up the “Pub Kubryk” some 900 km from Probuzna in what was then eastern Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian empire, but is today Ukraine, from where Kubrick’s great-grandfather, Hersh Kubrick, emigrated to America.¹⁷

Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud [A Controversy Whatsoever on Talmud] by Carl Schleicher

Those theories, as articulated in Room 237, are motivated by the belief that Kubrick is an “infallible perfectionist” with “overwhelming, God-like control and agency,” whereby every ambiguity, continuity error, prop, and artistic decision is interpreted as a coded message and analyzed for hidden meaning.¹⁹ And The Shining is full of them – the hotel’s structural impossibilities, the items of furniture which mysteriously vanish, the hedge maze that is not visible in the film’s opening establishing shot, and whose layout allegedly shifts during the course of the film, the uneasy tension between the psychological and the supernatural – to cite just a few.

What is it about this seemingly simple “ghost story” that has inspired such devotion?²⁰ First, Kubrick’s films were full of ideas and not just “hollow entertainment.” But they transcended arthouse cinema to become mainstream and hence attract much more attention. Part of its mystique lies therefore in its creator. Kubrick has earned the (undeserved) reputation of being a hermetic, Howard Hughes-like, paranoid individual, cut off from the world. So allegedly reclusive and anonymous was Kubrick that a man could get away undetected with impersonating him for several years, the subject of the film Colour Me Kubrick (Brian Cook, 2005), which was based on this real-life story. Bertrand Tavernier, Kubrick’s press attaché in France, described his “employer’s compulsive need to spy indiscriminately on relatives and associates who visit him at his home.” He elaborated:

To visit him was to enter a kind of little Fort Knox, or little Xanadu. The house was not extraordinarily luxurious, but it was surrounded by all sorts of signs of warnings: Do not Enter, No trespassing, Beware the dog. Finally, you were not to touch the doorknob, because everything was connected to the police. It was a hell of protection, and I wonder how he could have died.²¹

“He runs the world from his house,” said Michel Ciment, referring to the fact Kubrick owned his own camera, sound, and editing equipment, and did casting via video tape.²² At the same time, this ability to stay home in order to make his films, coupled with quotes like that from Ciment, invest Kubrick with a power (“he runs the world”) beyond simply that of making a film according to his whims and timetable. Such words as “he runs the world” — undoubtedly not deliberate given their utterer’s own Jewishness (and, of course, it is different when one Jew speaks about another) – nevertheless tap into the conspiratorial discourse of Jewish elders who control everything behind the scenes. It is for this reason that, among other urban legends, Kubrick is credited for faking the moon landings or, at least, providing alternative faked footage in case the real ones failed.

A meme and a social network posting alleging that the Jewish Kubrick faked the moon landings

The seemingly autobiographical nature of The Shining, particularly its vision of a blocked writer, isolated in a remote and grand locale, appears to collapse creator and protagonist, reinforcing this image of an all-powerful creator. As if to confirm this reading, both the Adler typewriters seen in the film belonged to Kubrick, and in the film’s accompanying documentary, Vivian Kubrick’s Making of “The Shining” (1980), Kubrick can be seen pecking away at a smaller, portable typewriter, as he incorporates the latest changes to the daily script. Luckhurst also points out how “Kubrick had a habit of throwing baseballs hard at the wall in the early days of scriptwriting”; thus, it is tempting “to read the retreat to the Overlook as a repetition of Kubrick’s own progressive withdrawal into creative seclusion in the backwoods. And doesn’t the endless repetition (with modulation) of the same line in Jack’s writing recall the exasperation many felt with Kubrick’s insistence on multiple, virtually identical takes?”²³

Further, if we can read Jack as being Jewish, it reinforces the autobiographical blending of the fictional Jack with the real-life Kubrick.²⁴ There are many coincidences – the writer of the source text having the same initials as its adapter; that Stephen King wrote the novel in the Stanley Hotel; that the characters of Jack and Danny were played by actors with the same given names; that Kubrick’s father was called Jack; that, like the hotel in the novel, the set of the Overlook Hotel burned down. In 2019, there was also a fire at the actual Timberline Lodge, which had provided the exterior shots of The Overlook Hotel. That Kubrick died in mysterious circumstances for some, is reinforced by the reappearance of Jack at the end of the film – (“perhaps neither Kubrick nor Jack really died…?”). Adding to the film’s mystique is his daughter’s short film about the film, which fans revere with near sacrosanct status because it is the only extant footage of the legendary director at work, and an unvarnished window of sorts onto “the truth.” They privilege this over other extant footage (such as Kubrick’s conversations with Jeremy Bernstein) possibly because it has image and not just sound.

Kubrick told Alexander Walker, “I’m sure that there’s something in the human personality which resents things that are not clear, and conversely, something which is attracted to puzzles, enigmas, and allegories.”²⁵ His long-time assistant, Anthony Frewin, recounts how one of Kubrick’s favorite books was David Kahn’s The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing (1967).²⁶ He elaborated: “A thousand pages plus on the history of codes and ciphers written in an engaging and direct style that left no stone unturned. S[tanley] K[ubrick] saw this as one of the great works of 20^th century historical scholarship.”²⁷ It is no stretch, therefore, to believe that Kubrick used any knowledge gained on cryptography in his films and particularly in The Shining. He compared his role as a director to that of “a detective looking for clues,” as he told Ciment.²⁸

Knowledge that Kubrick was fascinated by codes and code-breaking cements the view of him as a twentieth-century rendition of the magical rabbi or medieval kabbalist, dabbling in the occult, to create a golem which, of course, was activated and deactivated by a (secret) code. And Kubrick did create a golem in 2001: A Space Odyssey’s (1968) HAL 9000 and was planning to make others for A.I. Artificial Intelligence (the Gigolo android was even played by an actor called Jude – German for Jewish – Law). Post-Ludovico treatment Alex in A Clockwork Orange sat between the two as “Halex,” a mechanical organism. The Marines of Full Metal Jacket (1987) are referred to as “Mother Green and her lean, mean killing machine,” suggesting a cross-fertilization of automaton and clay (as in Mother Earth) from which the golem was formed. Jack acts as a virtual golem in The Shining – created from flesh but activated and automated to do the hotel’s murderous bidding. Here, Jack would be more akin to the golem in Paul Wegener’s Der Golem (1920).

Reproduction of the Golem of Prague

At the same time, the instinctive appeal of puzzles, enigmas, allegories, codes, secrets, and code-breaking encourages the viewer of Kubrick’s films to act as “a detective looking for clues” that he deliberately left in his films. Here a comparison can usefully be made to Jewish philosopher, Leo Strauss, who, according to Larry N. George,

describes at length both the virtues and techniques of esoteric writing: the hiding of politically controversial or dangerous interpretations, beliefs, or claims openly within a text – for example, by presenting them in specific prearranged locations, by intentionally committing amateurish “errors” that signal meaningful intertextual links to other works or authors, or by providing linguistic or numerological clues or contextual references that can enable trained readers to uncover these meanings.²⁹

In this vein, picking up on the errors, numerological clues, or contextual references, besides Geoffrey Cocks’ study which finds that The Shining refers to the Holocaust, Ian Christopher’s novel The Games Room is a compendium of theories around The Shining, the finale of which indicates (of course!) that Kubrick was just playfully messing with the viewer keen on investigating the mysteries of the Overlook Hotel. This falls into line with Kubrick’s “detective” nature, looking for clues — and leaving them for readers/viewers to find. It has to do with forensic meticulousness (and cryptology), as it were. In turn, the keen-eyed viewer becomes the “detective” with the Google map street names in Boulder, CO giving away clues about the film’s purported meaning, the reading of each and every newspaper cutout in the scrapbook (see Christopher in this dossier), the novels and magazines shown in the Torrance apartment as well as in the hotel and so on.

Perhaps there is one more factor to be taken into account here. The fascination with Kubrick and The Shining respectively can be attributed to a long-present dimension in US (and European) culture, what historian Richard Hofstadter in 1964 called “the paranoid style.” He elaborated how “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” manifested itself in recurring obsessions with various internal and external enemies: Catholic conspiracies to subvert protestant America; Illuminati plots to impose a free-thinking rationalism upon its religious land; Masonic clandestine meetings of elites that threatened to undermine the democratic openness of America and Communism’s attempt to convert America to atheistic socialism.³⁰ Of course, this obsession with conspiracies is nothing new. B.L. Keeley wrote, “The millennium is nigh, and with each passing year, the American consciousness is in the grip of conspiratorial thinking.”³¹ Jonathan Freedland commented: “This readiness to believe in conspiracies goes beyond the church, of course. Deep skepticism of authority, a staple of the thriller genre, is now an ingrained feature of the US landscape. It always had deep roots, but the Vietnam and Watergate experiences entrenched it. Who knows, the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq might have dug that cynicism in a little further still.³² And Fredric Jameson who wrote the well-known and early piece on The Shining, famously deconstructed the paranoid film and mindset in The Geopolitical Aesthetic as the inability to totalize but also as the (failed) attempt at cognitive mapping.³³

Kubrick has gripped the imagination perhaps because he slots neatly into a discourse of a secret conspiracy. Described as “paranoid,” “mysterious,” “reclusive,” even “obscure,” who refused to be filmed and was rarely interviewed as he grew older, he confined his filmmaking to a loyal band of collaborators and, in turn, perhaps unwittingly (but then again maybe not) helped to create a cult following around his films. Films such as Room 237 circulate rumors and whispers that there is a secret Kubrickian teaching – either guarded by some sect of his surviving collaborators, or perhaps directly accessible through some an esoteric reading of his films. Kubrick’s fans want to solve the riddle of Kubrick’s “true” teaching, a way for them to keep on engaging with his films “forever and ever” — perhaps.

In the case of Kubrick, who was Jewish, talk of conspiracy feeds into earlier and much older discourses of antisemitism. The reason for this is because at the heart of many conspiracy theories has been Jews and secret societies. According to these theories, the members of these so-called secret societies are, in many cases, Jews. The Jewish banking family, the Rothschilds, have frequently been the target of antisemitic conspiracy theories and they have been linked to Eyes Wide Shut through a remarkably similar costume party they threw in 1972 coupled with the use of one of their mansions (Mentmore Towers) as a location for the film. Antisemitic thinking is fueled in the mind of the conspiratorial fantasist by what is perceived as the existence of esoteric thinking and writing among Jewish people.

Such a reading was reinforced by Eyes Wide Shut, in which Kubrick “blew the code” (earning its status as a “White Nationalist classic”!). This reading promoted the idea that Kubrick was part of a sinister cult replete with secret rites of initiation. In his final film, the argument goes, through the lens of fiction, he provided bits of insider information about real Illuminati or Masonic clandestine meetings of elites, possibly plotting to undermine America’s democratic openness, and/or to subvert Protestant America. Kubrick did this, it is contended, by rewriting Arthur Schnitzler’s Jewish Fridolin from being an outsider in antisemitic Vienna to an insider in echt-Jewish New York City where the pariah is no longer the Jew (as Fridolin was in the novella), but WASP and goyish as Bill Harford / Tom Cruise is in the film, and the cult is run by a Jew: Victor Ziegler, who is the Jewish middleman — servicing profit and orgies (with echoes or foreshadowing, of course, to Jeffrey Epstein).³⁴

In this respect, the following story is telling. When Kubrick asked Frederic Raphael for some “plausible background for what the orgy’s master of ceremonies, a millionaire whom I called Ziegler (played by Sydney Pollack), regularly organized,” he “typed out several pages of what purported to be an undercover FBI agent’s dossier on Ziegler and his friends. Their sexual extravaganzas were alleged to have been staged in honour of J.F.K.” Raphael then recounts how:

I faxed my pages to Stanley and was almost instantly called back, in a voice I had never heard before. He wanted me to tell him right away where I got “this stuff”. I said, “From between my ears.” He said, “Freddie, don’t fool around with me. This is confidential material. Where did you get hold of it?” “Stanley,” I said, “I’m a writer. I make things up.”³⁵

If Raphael is to be believed, Kubrick was willing to take at face value the writer’s fiction. He was obviously fascinated by secrecy and mystery and something in his personality also saw conspiracies and the paranoid style. Michael Herr recalls how he quoted Stanley William Burroughs’ line to Kubrick, “A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what’s going on,” Kubrick took it to heart and gave it pretty wide use, telling everyone he knew, says Herr.³⁶

Kubrick’s intimation, in his final film, of a hierarchical but shadowy (Jewish) ruling class that is complicit in occult ritualistic orgies has prompted a retrospective search for signs of its existence in his other films. And where better to look than The Shining, which provided the Kubrickian ur-text for displaying the playground of “all the best people”? By this argument, the hotel serves “as a metaphor for the horrors wrought by the American elite, which ties into the cloistered world of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and his career-long skepticism of the powerful.” As he is given a guided tour, Jack is told that the Overlook was “one of the stopping places for the jet set,” where the rich and powerful, including four presidents, vacationed and whom surely made consequential decisions as they stayed there.³⁷ The very name of the Gold Room in the film implies an elite (as in “gold membership”), the sort of place where the money of a justifiably angry white man is “no good” as ruled by the “orders of the house.” That the “house” might be controlled by Jews is echoed in such statements as, “‘Orders from the house’ could be referring to the European-based House of Rothschild, a banking dynasty which had dominated and controlled the majority of Europe’s central banks for hundred’s [sic] of years and which was also rumored to be the behind-the-scenes controlling force of the Federal Reserve System.” It is well known that the Rothschilds are Jewish and stand in (like George Soros) for an antisemitic, dog-whistle trope, whether its utterer is conscious of this or not.³⁸ It also suggests that the rich party guests represent an “elitist political crowd” either the Freemasons or the Illuminati.³⁹ This mention of the Rothschilds leads us back to Eyes Wide Shut where a password was needed to enter just such a “house” whose name—Somerton—implies exactly what the Overlook hotel is – a summer dwelling place. And the exterior of Somerton was shot at the Rothschilds’ property, Mentmore Towers. Indeed, Eyes Wide Shut both mirrors The Shining and is in dialogue with it.

Jack (like Bill Harford) is a man whose status is only seen in the eyes of other subordinate and subservient workers (Lloyd, Grady, Milich). And the scene of a man wearing a bear or dog costume performing fellatio on a man dressed in a tuxedo, supposedly the successful accountant, inventor and entrepreneur who once owned the Overlook Hotel, intimates at the sort of liaisons that were showcased in more detail in Eyes Wide Shut. By this reading, sympathy for Jack whose privilege has been unfairly denied in his eyes, is heightened and his attack on those forces that seek to undermine him (blacks, women, children) are justified. Comments featured on Stormfront.org, a White Nationalist forum, express admiration for The Shining, especially in what their writers see in its politically incorrect language and content: “I wasn’t aware Kubrick was a Jew, but I have always been a fan of his adaptation of Stephen King’s ‘The Shining.’ In fact, he changed the story around from where the black cook is the hero in the novel to where he’s killed in the movie.” Another agrees, saying, “I’m watching it now, I was thinking another white woman was gonna be saved by a negro …. well I’m glad I was wrong this time.” Other posters express their approval for Kubrick’s thrice repeated use of the word “nigger” (as well as its appearance in Full Metal Jacket among other racial epithets, including “kike” the only explicit reference to Jews in all Kubrick’s films).⁴⁰ For White Nationalists, The Shining is not past history, but a narrative still happening in contemporary America, and Kubrick was “woke” to it.

Kubrick’s revelations have led the conspiratorial fantasist to look backwards to find its origins in The Shining and 2001 whereby a ruling cabal asked one of its own to fake the moon landings. As I have mentioned above, strangely they do not go back to Lolita which foregrounds pedophilia. Maybe it is because Lolita is too obvious and does not require much detective work; or maybe because the same degree of Talmudic sophistication is absent from Lolita, as it is only with 2001 that Kubrick begins to work in a mysterious, Kabbalistic way in comparison to his earlier films that do not shake or disrupt our conception of the diegesis and the world beyond, or challenge cognitive mapping, in the same way? Kubrick and The Shining have helped to feed, but also have fed upon, the appetite for conspiracy theories in the wake of September 11^th, 2001. Since 9/11, this was most clearly manifested in the popularity of Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code which tapped into what Martha Ellen Stortz (2005) called “a deep suspicion of power and the powerful, a tendency to read everything in terms of power, and a penchant for conspiracy theories.”⁴¹

This same impulse has and continues to motivate the fascination with Stanley Kubrick and The Shining. The film, together with Eyes Wide Shut and 2001, for those who care to view the world in this way, reinforces images of conspiratorial cabals, engaged in shadowy, esoteric, sinister, occult, illicit, and corrupt practices. And, unfortunately, like most age-old conspiracies, this mindset places a Jew firmly at its heart. Where, in the film, Jack says, “We all have moments of déjà-vu, but this was ridiculous,” what we see in the reception of The Shining is the return of the  eternal fascination with yet simultaneous hatred of the Jew.

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