Few pieces of art, I think, are deserving of their hype, mentions in top 100 lists, or their numerous AI-generated video essays on YouTube, but sometimes you have to give a work its due. The work for this post is the ballroom scene in The Shining. A colossal cliché for a site on the topic of hauntology, as well as the inspiration for The Caretaker project, which would eventually give us the magnificent Everywhere at the End of Time. A scene that nearly made me cry aged 13, not just for its beauty, elegance, and flicking a light switch on a man’s mental state, but for its utterly flawless execution.
It still has much the same effect on me today. I’ve watched the film countless times, become familiar with the music, taken an interest in the technical aspects of Kubrick’s filmmaking, and developed a rather extensive affection for the period in which the ballroom is supposedly taking place. Yet none of that familiarity has diminished the peculiar emotional response I have to those few minutes.
If anything, it has made things worse.
I find myself watching with an almost ridiculous appreciation of every detail, occasionally feeling quite overwhelmed by it. There is very little conventional horror involved. The menacing implications are obvious, particularly given what we know about the Overlook Hotel, but the scene itself is extraordinarily pleasant. There is music, laughter, conversation, dancing, and a room full of people apparently enjoying themselves.
For a moment, the hotel seems like somewhere I would rather like to spend an evening.
Which is a rather peculiar response to a building that is actively attempting to destroy a family.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the scene, however, is something I only properly appreciated much later.
Jack Nicholson walks into the ballroom, and you barely notice him.
This is an extraordinary achievement when you consider the actor involved. Nicholson is a colossal screen presence, and Kubrick has spent much of the film allowing him to dominate almost every environment he occupies. His expressions, physical movements, increasingly erratic behaviour and unmistakable voice demand our attention, even when he is doing very little.
The Overlook’s enormous, empty interiors seem almost designed to accommodate his personality. He occupies them with an increasingly unpleasant confidence, his frustrations and resentments gradually filling the spaces left vacant by the departed guests.
Then, quite suddenly, Kubrick introduces us to a room that is considerably more interesting than Jack Nicholson.
The hotel has already established itself as a place of uncomfortable emptiness. Its enormous corridors, public rooms and lounges remain meticulously maintained despite the absence of almost everyone who might reasonably use them. We see furniture arranged for conversations that will never take place, tables awaiting customers, and vast quantities of space serving absolutely no practical purpose.
There is a peculiar sadness inherent in an empty hotel. Unlike an abandoned building, which has visibly surrendered to its fate, the Overlook remains entirely prepared for the arrival of people who are not coming.
The lights are on. Everything is clean. The furniture is immaculate.
It is waiting.
And Jack Torrance, supposedly there to maintain the building and complete his writing, is becoming increasingly incapable of maintaining himself.
From the beginning, Jack is a man deeply dissatisfied with his circumstances. He considers himself a writer, yet we see remarkably little evidence that he is capable of writing anything. His family obligations appear to be an inconvenience, and his conversations with Wendy gradually reveal a man who regards almost every interruption as a personal affront.
Nicholson plays him with a fascinating mixture of self-importance and barely concealed resentment. Jack believes he deserves considerably more than life has provided, although he demonstrates relatively little willingness to accept responsibility for the situation in which he finds himself.
His history of alcoholism and violence towards Danny makes this particularly uncomfortable. Jack is not simply an unfortunate man being driven mad by supernatural circumstances. There are already dangerous qualities within him that the hotel appears increasingly willing to accommodate.
The Overlook doesn’t necessarily create his worst instincts.
It gives them somewhere to flourish.
His first encounter with Lloyd, the bartender, is revealing. The Gold Room is empty, yet Jack finds himself sitting before a perfectly obliging barman who offers him a drink and an attentive ear.
Lloyd is courteous, reassuring and completely uninterested in challenging Jack’s version of events. He listens to the grievances, accommodates the self-pity and provides precisely the sort of sympathetic company Jack believes he deserves.
There is something rather pathetic about the exchange. A man who cannot maintain a healthy relationship with his own family has found comfort in a bartender who may not exist.
But there is also something sinister about the hotel’s apparent generosity.
It seems to understand exactly what Jack wants.
Not simply alcohol, but recognition. An environment in which his frustrations are acknowledged, his authority is respected and nobody expects him to account for his behaviour.
This is important when we come to the ballroom.
By the time Jack returns to the Gold Room, his relationship with ordinary reality has deteriorated considerably. The hotel’s supernatural influence, or the increasingly unreliable contents of his own mind, have begun to replace the world inhabited by Wendy and Danny.
Then he hears music.
Jack Hylton’s 1932 recording of Masquerade emerges from somewhere beyond the corridor, suggesting an ordinary social gathering taking place inside a hotel we know to be deserted.
The music has arrived before the people.
Jack follows it, and the camera follows Jack.
Then he enters the ballroom.
And the world changes.
The room is absolutely packed.
Guests stand around in evening dress, talking, laughing, drinking and dancing. Waiters move between tables. An orchestra plays. The lighting is warm and inviting, and the entire room possesses the sort of effortless social activity that is extraordinarily difficult to reproduce convincingly on film.
Nobody appears surprised.
Nobody stops dancing.
The orchestra doesn’t miss a beat.
Jack Torrance, who has spent much of the film becoming an increasingly threatening and unpredictable presence, has entered a room that apparently couldn’t care less about him.
I think this is the defining brilliance of the sequence.
Ordinarily, cinema arranges the world around its principal characters. When a protagonist enters a room, we tend to experience that room through their arrival. People look towards them, conversations stop, and the camera directs our attention towards whatever is important to their particular story.
Kubrick allows the ballroom to behave almost independently.
The guests appear to have been enjoying themselves perfectly well before Jack arrived, and there is little indication that his departure would make the slightest difference to the proceedings.
The room has its own existence.
It is populated by people who appear to have conversations, relationships, intentions and experiences entirely unrelated to the man we have spent the previous hour watching.
For a brief moment, Jack Nicholson becomes another face among hundreds.
And yet something rather important has happened to Jack himself.
He appears almost comfortable.
The agitation and bitterness that have characterised so much of his behaviour seem momentarily displaced by the pleasure of discovering somewhere that welcomes him. He smiles, moves among the guests, and behaves with a social confidence conspicuously absent from his interactions with his family.
The transformation is particularly revealing because his circumstances have not actually improved.
He remains an unsuccessful writer, an alcoholic with a history of violence, and a man whose family relationships are disintegrating. Nothing about his life has been resolved.
But suddenly he is surrounded by people who seem to recognise the version of himself he would prefer to believe exists.
Here he is not a struggling caretaker responsible for looking after an enormous hotel during the winter.
He is a gentleman attending an elegant party.
The distinction is enormous.
Jack’s sense of entitlement, which has been so unpleasant in the family environment, seems perfectly accommodated by the customs of the ballroom. The waiters are attentive, the surroundings are magnificent, and the atmosphere suggests a world organised around social confidence, masculine authority and the expectation of being served.
Nobody asks him about his writing.
Nobody questions his drinking.
Nobody reminds him of his responsibilities.
The hotel has created an environment in which Jack’s particular weaknesses can be mistaken for qualities that deserve respect.
And there is something almost tragic about how readily he accepts it.
The Overlook is not simply frightening Jack into submission. It is offering him an alternative identity, one that seems infinitely more attractive than the ordinary responsibilities he has come to resent.
In that sense, the ballroom is not a sudden interruption of his psychological deterioration.
It is the moment that deterioration begins to resemble a reward.
What makes this so effective is that Kubrick barely needs Nicholson to perform the transformation. The room does much of the work for him.
John Alcott’s extraordinary cinematography creates a warm, golden environment that seems to exist independently of the camera. The elaborate lighting, the movement of the guests and the impeccable period detail combine to produce something that feels less like a film set than an actual social occasion.
Everything is carefully constructed, yet almost nothing appears to be happening for our benefit.
This is an important distinction. We have all seen period dramas where the costumes, hairstyles and interiors are immaculate, but everything possesses a faint air of theatrical artificiality. The actors look like contemporary people who have been carefully dressed and instructed to behave as though they belong to another century.
The Gold Room largely escapes this problem.
Nobody is conspicuously performing the 1920s. Their clothes are simply clothes, their hairstyles are perfectly ordinary, and the orchestra is providing the sort of music one might reasonably expect to hear at an evening of this kind.
The past is not being presented as a novelty.
For the people occupying the room, it is simply the present.
And then there is the music.
Ray Noble and his Orchestra’s 1934 recording of Midnight, the Stars and You, featuring Al Bowlly, is inseparable from the atmosphere of the Gold Room.
Bowlly possessed an almost supernatural ability to make a listener feel personally addressed. His phrasing is intimate, gentle and conversational, giving the impression that he is confiding something to one particular person rather than performing for an audience.
There is nothing sinister about the recording. Its warmth and romantic sincerity are completely unaffected by the circumstances in which Kubrick has placed it.
The orchestra plays, Bowlly sings, and the guests continue enjoying themselves.
Everything is beautiful, and everything is wrong.
A singer who died in 1941 is providing the soundtrack to a gathering of people who should no longer exist. The recording has outlived its performer, its original audience and much of the society that produced it, yet it continues fulfilling precisely the function for which it was intended.
Providing music for an evening.
This is where the scene enters the territory of hauntology in a much more interesting way than simply depicting ghosts from the past.
We tend to think of history as something fixed and inaccessible. Photographs, recordings and films preserve fragments of it, but they also remind us that the moments they depict are over.
An old photograph of a crowded ballroom is inherently rather sad when examined closely. Every person in it was once occupied by the ordinary concerns of life. They had plans, relationships, ambitions, anxieties, and perhaps an evening they were looking forward to.
The photograph preserves them at a moment when none of those concerns has yet been resolved.
But we know what they do not.
Their evening has ended. Their conversations have stopped. The music has finished.
Eventually, the people themselves disappeared.
Kubrick somehow appears to reverse this process.
The ballroom does not look like a memory. It looks like an ongoing event. Its occupants are moving, conversations are continuing, and the orchestra is performing as though nobody has ever suggested that the evening might be over.
The people seem completely unaware that they have become history.
This is particularly interesting because the Overlook’s reconstruction of the past is not entirely consistent. The film’s final photograph identifies the July Fourth Ball of 1921, while the recordings used in the ballroom belong to the early 1930s.
There is no requirement that the ballroom sequence and the photograph depict precisely the same evening, but the confusion seems appropriate.
The hotel has collected fragments of different periods and assembled them into an environment that feels complete.
History has become atmosphere.
This fascination with the strange relationship between recorded sound, memory and absence would become central to Leyland Kirby’s work as The Caretaker.
Beginning with Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom in 1999, the project drew inspiration from Kubrick’s film and transformed old ballroom recordings into ghostly fragments of an apparently inaccessible past.
The project eventually developed into the extraordinary Everywhere at the End of Time, in which musical memories gradually deteriorate and become increasingly difficult to recognise.
There is an interesting contrast between the two works.
Kubrick presents a past that has impossibly survived intact.
Kirby explores what happens when the ability to remember that past begins to disappear.
But what fascinates me most about the ballroom isn’t simply its recreation of a vanished world.
It’s the way that world gradually takes possession of Jack.
The subsequent encounter with Delbert Grady develops the hotel’s peculiar psychological manipulation. Grady initially appears as an apologetic waiter who has accidentally spilled a drink over Jack, offering the same elaborate courtesy that characterises the rest of the ballroom.
The conversation soon becomes something considerably more disturbing.
Grady discusses his murderous past with an unnerving formality, and speaks of Wendy and Danny as obstacles requiring correction. Jack’s family, already the focus of his resentment, are now being presented as a problem for which the hotel possesses a solution.
The supernatural and the psychological become almost impossible to separate.
Is the hotel manipulating Jack, or is Jack finding supernatural encouragement for violence he has already begun to contemplate?
The film offers evidence for both, without allowing either explanation to make his behaviour comfortable.
Grady’s insistence that Jack has always been the caretaker introduces another possibility. Perhaps the ballroom isn’t simply offering him somewhere to escape his ordinary life.
Perhaps it is claiming that he has always belonged to the Overlook.
That is an extraordinary escalation.
Jack enters the room apparently as a guest, delighted to have discovered a party.
But the hotel increasingly suggests that he is not a visitor at all.
He is part of its history.
The final photograph makes this possibility almost unbearable. Jack’s smiling face appears among the guests at the July Fourth Ball of 1921, with no satisfactory explanation for how he came to be there.
The photograph doesn’t resolve the mystery.
It makes the whole concept of chronological time feel unreliable.
Jack’s psychological deterioration has apparently become indistinguishable from the hotel’s capacity to absorb people into its past.
Yet I find myself less emotionally affected by this sinister revelation than by the moment he first walks into the populated ballroom.
There is something about that entrance that continues to overwhelm me.
I have spent years trying to understand why.
Part of it is certainly an appreciation of artistic achievement. There are occasions when a piece of music, a painting or a sequence in a film is so completely realised that ordinary admiration seems inadequate.
Kubrick achieves something similar in 2001: A Space Odyssey during the extraordinary sequence accompanied by Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube. The movement of spacecraft becomes inseparable from the rhythm of the music, producing something that feels almost beyond ordinary cinematic construction.
The Gold Room produces much the same sensation.
The lighting, music, staging, costumes, performances and camera movements have been brought together in almost impossibly precise proportions.
Change the music, and the atmosphere changes.
Make the lighting colder, and the room becomes less inviting.
Reduce the number of guests, and the extraordinary sense of independent social activity begins to disappear.
Have everyone stop and acknowledge Jack’s entrance, and the illusion collapses into a conventional supernatural encounter.
It is the accumulation of these decisions that produces something approaching perfection.
And the greatest achievement is that none of those decisions demands our attention.
One of cinema’s most meticulous directors has created a sequence whose defining characteristic is its apparent spontaneity.
Hundreds of people, carefully dressed, positioned, lit and directed, appear to be doing nothing more remarkable than enjoying an evening.
And one of the most commanding actors of his generation walks among them almost unnoticed.
I think there is also something deeply affecting about the fact that Jack appears so genuinely pleased to be there.
For all his unpleasantness, resentment and increasingly monstrous behaviour, there remains something recognisably human about his desire to belong somewhere.
That desire is precisely what makes him vulnerable.
The ballroom offers him something that seems absent from the rest of his life: recognition without responsibility, acceptance without accountability, and an identity untroubled by his failures.
It is an extraordinarily seductive proposition.
We are watching a man being welcomed into a world that might ultimately destroy him, yet the welcome itself appears completely sincere.
And perhaps that is why the scene is so much more disturbing than a conventional depiction of possession or madness.
Jack doesn’t seem to be losing his mind in the ballroom.
For a few minutes, he seems to have found exactly where he wants to be.
But there is another emotion involved in my response, one that has very little to do with Jack himself.
The ballroom is a world that exists only because somebody has gone to extraordinary lengths to recreate it.
We are allowed to witness it, but never to participate.
We can study every face, listen to every note of music and examine the smallest details of the room, yet the people will never acknowledge us.
They cannot know that we are watching.
They cannot know that their world has disappeared.
And they cannot know how desperately we might wish to spend just a few minutes among them.
There is a peculiar loneliness in that relationship between audience and image.
The ballroom seems almost close enough to touch, yet remains completely inaccessible.
I first encountered this scene at thirteen, long before I knew much about Kubrick, Al Bowlly, cinematography or hauntology. I couldn’t have explained the sensation then, and even now I suspect an explanation will always be slightly inadequate.
I just knew that something about it was impossibly beautiful.
Years later, I still watch Jack Nicholson walk into that room and find myself looking past him.
At the dancers.
At the orchestra.
At the tables, the lights and the people having conversations we will never hear.
A world that doesn’t know it has ended.
A party that doesn’t know it is being remembered.
And a ballroom so perfectly realised that, for a few minutes, the ghosts seem more real than the man who has come to haunt them.
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