“Orders from the House”

This chapter takes its title from an essay about The Shining by Fredric Jameson, “Historicism in the Shining,” which, for all its acuity about the film’s awareness of economic history, demonstrates a notable blind spot around issues of race and the violence subtending America’s past in regions like the U.S. west. It shows a troubling alliance between Jack Torrance’s will to mastery and director Stanley Kubrick’s unique wielding of cinematic omniscience, suggesting the film’s awareness of the frontier as both a space of supposed white sovereignty and aesthetic spectacle. It employs key visual tropes and verbal details as well as the film’s stylistic excesses to suggest the history of genocide embedded in both the Overlook Hotel’s history and in American historical concepts such as manifest destiny. Its conclusion utilizes Gilles Deleuze’s model of the time-image to describe an apprehensible historicity in the film’s dual ending.