Kubrick Gave Us the Plan to Kill the Neoliberal Hypnotic Death Machine

Last updated on June 5, 2025

On a recent KLM flight, I had a plethora of media consumption options to keep me docile and entertained as I travel in a giant soda bottle from continent to continent – somehow arriving alive and ready to dump out and be examined at the border of the forever fascist imperial core. Between bouts of frantically deleting media from my phone so I do not get sent to one of a set of extrajudicial concentration camps around the world, and worrying about neighboring passengers judging my viewing of ‘We’re Here’ which is a fantastic show on HBO about our drag brothers and sisters shining their light into bastions of regurgitated hate – I was able to do a full and focused re-viewing of Kubrick’s ‘The Shining”. Herein further contained are my thoughts on how this film lays out a precise plan to kill the Western Imperial Forces with their own poison. If you don’t know by now that this film is about the largest genocide in the history of human life on earth, well dear reader, you have some real learning to do – and we’re going to delve even deeper because I am stuck on this plane for ten hours and my mind is going full throttle.

Some of my directional steerage is/was provided by the great Rob Agar of Collative Learning. I highly highly recommend checking out his content. I believe where I take this perspective and run with it is in this new era of open genocide coupled with mass hallucinatory spells and propaganda to diffuse any hostility towards actions of empire, its subservient + spear colonies, and 850+ military bases and dozens of nuclear submarines – each singular one having the capability to destroy Earth.

My most esteemed reader – You and I both know that I always think it wise to periodically re-view films of days gone by with the ever changing and new lens installed into our brains as we learn and grow.

I’ve found several competing theories in regards to what people think underlying tones in The Shining are about. Many are obviously valid to a degree, I just do think that people are missing the boat in regards to the competing genocide theory. The Shining is a film about the larger system of imperial violence perpetuated upon population after population around the world in order to maintain a singular hegemonic power structure that kills and murders those in the global south, and subjects citizens in the global north to mental spells and torture to maintain stability and general wealth concentration to the top. The thing is – – – Kubrick is showing us how to destroy this evil by having it devour itself into a frozen lump. There ya go. I gave you the conclusion so you can whisk yourself away to the next hurried thing – or continue onward in our journey. Here – take my hand. We’ll be ok.

Trigger Warning: murder, genocide, racism

We can break this down into the following sections: (Yes, I am skipping other gigantic themes to focus on one)

1. Jobs/Work/Subservience to Capitalism at all cost – including lives of others and/or your own life. Jack is very quickly consumed by his new job and erodes into a murderous maniac. This happens to ALL human life under capitalism to varying degrees.
   
2. Ideology of the American Nuclear Family – adherence to the idea of a family despite serving a system toxic to living a life and raising the lives of others inside of a system we know cultivates mental illness at mass scale. I am not going too far into this and would refer to you Dr. Harriet Fraad and her series “Capitalism Hits Home’. No one else in the world will explain it better.
   
3. Ghosts/Spirits -The haunting sounds in the overture, coupled with obvious use of the requiem, foreshadow what is to come. The layered messaging does distinctly indicate that part of Imperialism’s effort is to launder the mass slaughter of innocents as ghosts from the past, hell bent to haunt the actual murderers that caused the death and destruction in the first place. It is no coincidence this lore continues to this day and we are taught that ghosts and spirits are evil which is a direct mirror of the truth. Redrum being seen in the mirror as murder is so significant because all the slaughter is put right before our eyes and then cast as something different and without education and training, we just do not see or understand what is directly in front of our faces.
   
4. Evil – No doubt a simple and perhaps overused word, evil under Imperialism takes on chameleon form, shifting narrative as needed to mask the truth.
   
5. White Mans Burden – The burden of having to eradicate a population of native peoples, as well as absorb others if eradication is not possible, then convert them into willing participants of mass exploitation.
   
6. Symbolic Representation of Various Elements (possible multiple meanings exist)
   
   The Maze – the spell and propaganda engine that is fueled by death and genocide – fogging in front and behind to prevent anyone from breaking out of the spell.
   
   The Gold Room – Represents the success of the eradication of natives from the US, as gold represents the extracted rare resource, along with oil (aka black gold) a bit later on.
   
   Naked Woman in Room 237 Tub – this represents the story we are told/sold about the West. Which, once the artificial veil is gone, the true rotten corpse of what the West really is is exposed but at that point it is too late to retract. (She represents other things as well which are not a focus of this write up)
   
   The Elevator of Blood – you got this one, I know you do (because I said it further up in this doc)
   
   Shining/The Ability to Shine – this represents abilities outside of the western hegemonic capability. To be able to truly see and love another being is not possible from under the western system, and the soul is sublimated into a system of false idols and gods. All that matters is that you serve the existing system completely. Living things like plants and animals and love and care are just not relevant and therefore largely not taught or learned. The system will teach people what it wants them to think love is, which is reflected in the Disney-fication of…..everything. Ugly cry at every Disney movie you want, this is not love.
   
   Danny riding freely over the Native American Rugs + Kubrick’s Poster – Danny carelessly driving over beautiful Native Rug Art Pieces obviously represents the settler destruction and infestation of the continent of N America. Kubrick clearly layered this into his poster below as well. What in the fuck do you think the tide of terror that swept america was?????
   
   Jack’s Typewriter – Pointless jobs.
   
   Alcohol – Cope.
   
   Jack’s ability to get out of the locked pantry/storage room – This represents the ‘magic’ of guns from the perspective of victims of genocide. Guns and bombs were actual magic to them as they had no idea how they were made or used. There is no way that Jack could realistically get out of that storage room and yet he did.
   
   Murder of Dick H. – It is imperative to maintain the system in exact and unchanging form by completely destroying any chance that it could be threatened. Dick comes to help Danny and Wendy and is quickly murdered.
   
   Here’s Johnny – Humor layered in to mass death and destruction is a classic form of neoliberal entertainment. I need not list out the constant diarrhea stream of superhero content, etc that people sop up like cake and candy without realizing it is blood and body parts.

The whole point of this write up is to cast a re-appreciation for Kubrick’s ability to craft a film that not only feeds America’s insatiable desire for blood, violence, and death as entertainment, but also fully exposes and mocks their own subservience to the system of evil that forever perpetuates blood, violence, and death all around the world in order to maintain itself. This evil is indeed going to kill all of us if we let it continue to ravage our Mother Earth and all life residing upon her. We have reached a time where the Internet, in all its sad and disgusting glory, is finally doing good and exposing imperialism across the globe, and the furnace of genocide that fuels the West in Palestine, the Congo, Sudan, and other regions of current imperial exploitation which cannot be hidden and must be fogged and propagandized while we are kept busier and busier to toil in the waste and progressing ecocide slip-streamed in with exhaustive wage slavery, exploitation, disease, poverty and mental spectacle to keep it all going. This my dear brothers and sisters, is where most all mental illness comes from. They’ll try to convince you to hyper-individualize your mental illness and suffering back into yourself so as to not expose the fact that you have to operate in an inhuman and dehumanizing system which breeds mental and other illness into you.

All work and no play does not just make all of us a dull human. Inside this system, it does not matter to what degree you work or play – it all leads to physical and mental mutilation of humanity regardless of which direction you take. It is exceedingly difficult to not participate in the system. Furthermore, we are perpetually threatened with poverty and homelessness if we deviate. This is why homelessness will never go away in the US, it must always be visually exposed in our day to day lives as a persistent threat which keeps us all obedient. This system is entirely optional, and any new system could be put in to place at any time. Just as Delbert Grady ‘corrected’ his wife and 2 girls, we, the working class of the planet could at any time, ‘correct’ the current paradigm and shift to a world that thrives on care and love and not exploitation and death.

The final shot of the film shows Jack at a party in 1921. 1921 WAT?!??!?! How could he be there in 1921?!

My wonderful gentle reading creatures – if you’ve gotten this far into my diatribe, you’ll no doubt find it clear that Imperialism is forever. It is multi-generational and spans across the entire globe. There is nowhere to hide once it sees the resource you have. There is always another Jack Torrence, ready to come knocking.

If you are still yet to be convinced what this film is really about, let me throw the final brick.

I am tired so I am not going to weave this into some long blithering banter.

The name Overlook represents the fact that not only was the US founded on the blood of millions of Native American souls, but that it is continually upheld only by ongoing mass murder and extermination. The entire population of the US and the Western world overlooks this clear truth.

And uh, so yeah – Benjie – uh, how exactly do we kill this beast then??

Kubrick SHOWED US IN THIS FILM!

Jack’s soul is extracted and subsumed. He becomes a manifestation of death and a tool used to maintain status quo and achieve dominance at any cost. He represents the centuries of capitalist rule and in his reckless fury, is fed into the maze of propaganda that the system itself created.

—We kill the system by feeding it its own sludge—

A ddee abade abade abade abade….. That’s all folks. (bugs bunny reference lolz)

We get the system lost inside of its own fog until it fucking freezes to death and dies.

This system is fragile as fuck and is currently exposed to a degree that the fangs are out and are staying out. All YOU need to do as an individual is recognize it, expose it, and not participate in the engines of consumption that lead to the need to ravage the planet to keep it all going.

Just stop consuming. Only consume the bare minimum from sources that are not giant corporations.

Start to recognize the lust you have for buying things and analyze it.

Be very careful to not criticize others for resource use when our government + military + war machine consume levels of magnitude more than we and our friends/family could ever exhaust. You ‘doing your part’ to recycle or drive less is giving the machine a total pass to continue to kill at mass scale. That is far worse. (The point isn’t to just not care, but to focus attention on the real fossil fuel consumers.)

Finally, never forget that other struggling people are not the enemy.

FIN.

~Benjie

<3