The Overlook Hotel: A Monstrous Reminder

By Sophie Torres

The presence of Native American-esque imagery in The Shining is impossible to ignore, showing up in almost every scene inside the Overlook Hotel, the primary setting of the film. Yet, despite dedicating such a large visual space to this culture, there are few overt mentions of Native Americans by any of the characters. Certainly this visual choice was not purely for set decoration; the director of the film, Stanley Kubrick, is infamous for his exigent directorial style and his obsessive attention to detail. His decision to prominently feature this particular aesthetic at the Overlook was instead part of a larger, more subtle message that pervades The Shining. Through his use of decor, Kubrick positions the Overlook as a monstrous embodiment of the genocide of Native Americans carried out by the United States.
As mentioned previously, the hotel is fully decorated in Native American-like imagery, creating the undeniable connection between this culture and the Overlook. This connection is explicitly reinforced when Wendy, one of the main characters, asks the current hotel’s manager, Stuart Ullman, if the “Indian designs [are] authentic?” (The Shining 00:20:35 – 00:20:39) In response, Ullman says that they “are based mainly on Navajo and Apache motifs” (The Shining 00:20:39 – 00:20:45) letting the viewer know that, in fact, these designs are not Native American but rather American bastardization of these tribes’ imagery. This decoration also speaks to a darker past associated with the hotel that Ullman relates to the Torrence family, saying, “the site is supposed to be located on an Indian burial ground and I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it” (The Shining 0:23:23 – 0:23:30). Not only is the very ground that the Overlook stands on stolen land built on the corpses of Native Americans, but the building has been decorated to reference its relationship to Native Americans while, simultaneously, ignoring the violence associated with its history. This reflects the way in which the United States has created narratives, such as the one surrounding Thanksgiving, of a peaceful, non-violent relationship between American settlers and Native Americans, to paint over the atrocities the country has committed towards these indigenous people.
The hotel becoming monstrous through its embodiment of such a violent period in American history is consistent with the way monsters are often understood, according to the monster-theorist Jeffrey Cohen. In his book “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”, where he lays out seven different conclusions for how monsters provide insights into the cultures that created them, he states that “[t]he monster is born... as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place” (Cohen 38). Whereas Jack Torrence and the ghosts inhabiting the hotel are embodiments of white rage and violence, the Overlook is a visual symbol of the atrocities specifically carried out towards Native Americans. As stated by Ullman, the hotel’s creation encompassed both physical violence against Native Americans and symbolic violence through desecration of their burial ground. This violence is an intrinsic part of the hotel’s creation story. Despite the fact that, to many viewers, the Overlook serves as the setting for the film, it is a monster in and of itself and should be understood as such.