In The Shining, Danny wears a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and in another scene you can see a Winnie The Pooh in the background.
"Now are you a Winnie or a Freddie?" - Hallorann
Winnie the Pooh - a brainless bear and the phony best friend of a young boy (Christopher Robin) - seems to be one of many "bear" references in the film. Danny also has 2 bears above his bedroom bed, one big and one small. Other big bears are seen in the Colorado Lounge (a giant bear rug), the pillow upon which Danny ominously lays when speaking to the doctor about "seeing bad stuff", and when a man in a bearish costume performs oral sex on a seated gentleman of good-standing.
Small bears appear in the Boulder appartment, on the chair when Wendy prepares to face-off Jack, and on the floor where Jack smashes his tennis ball. Some believe the famous yellow/black "Shining" poster is itself a subliminal picture of a bear. It's as though the big bears represent bad stuff and the baby bears represent Wendy and her naivity; the delusions which hide bad stuff behind cuddly toys.
A final, omited scene had Ullman in a huge, bearish fur coat, facing off with Danny, who wears the small, bearish fur coat we see him wearing earlier in the film (whilst catatonic).
I think the point of the "Mickey Mouse" shirt in "The Shining" (taken from "Micky Mouse's Touchdown") was two-fold. Firstly, it mirrors an earlier scene; Danny wears a sweater of a lift off (Apollo 11) and then of a mouse scoring a touchdown (Mickey). And of course Apollo was man's first touchdown on the moon. Secondly, "touchdown" and "scoring" are sexual euphemisms, and Danny is led to the bedroom whilst wearing a giant football on his chest just as, earlier, a tennis ball leads him to 237's door.
In Full Metal Jacket there's a Mickey Mouse in the background and also the musical number in the final scene.
The 1970s are when philosophers who wrote about postmodernism (Michel Foucault, Guy Debord, Umberto Eco etc) began using "Disneyland" and "Mickey Mouse" as "symbols" for a hyperreal, consumer culture; a "heterotopia" which destroys all culture, all history and reorders everything toward buying, selling and exploitation. Time itself is bulldozed in favour for a "perpetual now".
In "Full Metal Jacket", Joker is basically exporting American-style Disneyfication to Asia. This is made most apparent when we first see Vietnam, which Kubrick portrays as a world of giant billboards, consumer goods and "mutually beneficial market transactions" ("Fifteen dollar?", "You're thinking too hard Rafterman, it's just business" etc etc), a notion which the film mocks.
I like to think that these Mickey Mouse references are also a call-back to "The Shining". It's as though Joker is a grown up Danny Torrance, wise to the Overlook and its workings. And yet he still finds himself trapped in the labyrinth and doing the Overlook's bidding, just like his Dad (the offscreen voice of "the Army" in the film is even "Hotel One"). The film's final audible words are also "who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me?", a Mickey Mouse club which Danny thinks he's cunningly escaped at the end of "The Shining".
and Winnie The Pooh in the last scene at the toy store.
The last scene of "Eyes Wide Shut" also has Nicole Kidman in a huge, bearish coat which resembles the one worn by Ullman in "The Shining's" deleted scene. Beside her are a stack of similar, giant bears.
If you look at Kubrick's final four films, they seem to revisit the same themes and characters, at different points in history. So you start in "Barry Lyndon", where monarchy and "feudalism" (historians don't like to use the word "feudalism"; it didn't really exist as we think of it) give way to the French Revolution (date at end of film).
"The Shining" then moves from the early colonisation of America (a period of primitive accumulation - bye bye Indians!), to the 1920s (the Roaring Twenties, the rich living it up whilst the Great Depression appoaches), to the mid 20th century, where a new lower middle class (a bigoted Jack) scapegoats minorities, kids and women whilst idealizing the rich.
Jack then goes abroad ("Full Metal Jacket") to colonise the new "Indians" (Vietnam, Latin America, Asia etc), exporting the Overlook Hotel's brand of techno-capitalism to all and sundry. "Eyes Wide Shut" then finds us at the heart of a new Empire, with its new aristocracies, castles and Barry Lyndonesque losers. Watch Kubrick's "Spartacus" and "Eyes Wide Shut" and notice the big similarities in the way he portrays New York and ancient Rome.
The way these films broadly sketch whole periods of history is what would have made a Kubrick "AI" interesting. "AI", of course, is another film with a bear (this time as a central character) and which has a whole "Disney subplot" (Disney princesses, Pinocchio, "when you wish upon a star", amusement parks etc).
But Spielberg's film had the surface story, but didn't really have the subtle background politics of a Kubrick picture. You can imagine a Kubrick "AI" with some kind of end-stage capitalism background story, the world reeling from eco-collapse, labour shortages (robots everywhere) and extreme class divides. But the "world" in Spielberg's "AI" is mostly decor, and you don't really get that Kubrickian feeling of place and history.
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