BROWN, JOHN

Brown, John: translation

   John Brown, assistant director of the Scottish Film Council from 1970 to 1989, is a Scottish screenwriter and critic who produced several television series, including The Justice Game. Brown wrote a chapter on STANLEY KUBRICK entitled “The Impossible Object: Reflections on The Shining,” for Cinema and Fiction: New Modes of Adapting, 1950–1960 (Edinburgh University Press, 1992), edited by John Orr and Colin Nicholson. Although “completely dazzled” by 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Brown was no fan of Kubrick’s cinema, which he viewed as “essentially about failure and defeat” and distinguished by “a kind of nihilistic delight in the repeated representation of defeat. ” The only “moment of positive triumph” was “the birth of the star-child in 2001,” aside, perhaps, from BARRY LYNDON, which “presented its characters, self-deluded or malignant, with some generosity and compassion.” Brown’s faith in Kubrick was revived by THE SHINING, however, an “endlessly fascinating, astonishing and exhilarating” film which he considered “Kubrick’s masterpiece to date. ”An extended speculation follows, surveying the film’s reception and positing three readings linked to contemporary literary theory. Setting aside the hypothesis of P. L. Titterington from Sight and Sound “that the film is a relatively unproblematic fable,” Brown’s readings suggest that the film may be “a self-portrait of Kubrick as an artist,” or “a kind of critical parody” of the horror genre, resulting in an “anti-horror movie, an inexplicit critique of the genre. ” But Brown prefers a third reading, based on the postmodern assumptions of David Lodge and Philip Stevick concerning “the ‘writer’ in crisis and his alter-ego/enemy the almost mute child with the gift of shining that becomes a metaphor for the rival medium, cinema; the relishing of banalities in characterization, acting, and dialogue; the multiple references to other movies, including Kubrick’s own; the playful use of conventionally-read symbols such as the hotel; the displaced black humor and the flat anti-logic of the plot; the lapses and ‘mistakes’ in detail and continuity that break the illusion of the illusionism; and the remorseless teasing of every narrative assumption, and of any hypothesis or reading which we might try to construct. ” For Brown, The Shining “both necessitates and defies the critical act. ”

   J. M. W.