THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF PERFECTION

Throughout The Shining, objects of normal household uses take on, slowly, but surely, an altogether more sinister tone. A typewriter becomes the first visible sign of Jack�s psychosis. A child�s tricycle becomes the vehicle by which Danny unwittingly stumbles onto the scene of a murder. A tennis ball becomes an invitation to an obscene attack. A fire axe becomes a murder weapon. A mirror becomes a window into an alternate reality. It is the very banality of these objects that makes the Overlook so threatening, the intention by which the ordinary becomes the dangerous, the comforting the threatening, and in such a slow and precise manner that the true intentions of these objects only become apparent too late, it seems, to head off these apparently unstoppable events.

The nature of this opening sequence is to present a seemingly normal scene, yet present it in a disconcerting fashion - cars are parked and abandoned at seemingly random places - a stationary limo just before the tunnel, parked halfway up the mountain, for example, unusual camera moves (such as the shift from one view to another, from grass to snow, etc) seem to add an otherworldly, disjointed look to this scene, as if things are incoherent, and that transitions are not always linear or related, jump-cutting from one scene to another later in the same sequence of events whilst missing out the connecting action : from grass to snow, from rising in the bath to suddenly standing up and walking far away from it, and back again.