The Shining Hedge Maze Recreated by Mythbusters’ Adam Savage

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1. elective-affinity

   It’s certainly a very intriguing and resonant model reproduction replete in verisimilitude: the ‘identical twin’ of the (original, long gone) model of the maze in the Overlook’s foyer, imbuing it with a certain fascinating uncannyness analogous to the spectral Grady twins in the film.

   It is almost like, unlike Danny Torrance in the film (who seeks to escape from the sinister Overlook), but like Jack Torrance, many viewers of the film are unconsciously seduced and captivated by the Overlook, want to “go play” there, to be enticed by the Grady girl revenants, to ‘come play with us’ forever and ever and ever, continually drawn back to its hauntological and hypnotic spaces.

   (BTW, I don’t think Savage has ‘donated’ the model to the Kubrick Exhibit as it visits various cities so much as loaned it out to it: it’s clear from the videos that he’s (Adam Savage) a pretty shrewd pragmatist (“I wouldn’t even know how much to insure it for!” he delightedly anticipates at one point in the video). He knows that lending it to the travelling Kubrick Exhibit will hugely enhance its ‘market value’, seeing as it is an accomplished one-off, custom reproduction of the original. Even already, a museum, archive or specialist collector would probably fork out anything from fifty to one hundred grand for such an artefact even though it is just an imitation. And Savage already knows this … I’m already picturing thousands of guys rushing out to make their own model maze according to Savage’s design, and some Hobby Store offering a Maze Kit for sale. Perhaps with some robotic, remote-controlled, battery-powered little figurines of Jack Torrance, blood-splattered axe in hands, chasing after Danny in a snow-covered version of the maze, complete with accompanying soundtrack and dialogue).

   Savage mentions four ‘versions’ of the maze in the film, but in many ways there are really SIX parallactic instantiations of the maze:

   1. The model of the maze in the foyer of the hotel, the one Savage reproduced.

   2. Jack’s subjective POV of the model of the maze (an imaginary maze that is doubly symmetrically mirrored and seemingly infinitely expanding, with a miniature Wendy and Danny at its centre).

   3. An old map of the maze on a sign beside the entrance to the external maze.

   4. The actual external maze as seen during daylight, both on Closing Day and when Wendy and Danny visit it.

   5. The external maze, covered in snow at night, as seen towards the end of the film as Jack chases Danny into it. This is different to the ‘daylight’ maze as the entrance to it is now directly facing the hotel (on the long-side of the maze), whereas the earlier maze had its entrance perpendicular to the hotel (the entrance on the short side of the maze).

   6. This is the most mysterious version of all, the version of the maze that does not exist: all of the ‘long shots’ of the Overlook hotel, those actually shot on location (external helicopter shots and ground-level shots of the actual Timberline Lodge hotel at Mount Hood) reveal that there is no maze outside the hotel at all, neither at the front of the hotel nor behind it. This is quite deliberate, another Escheresque feature of the film’s aesthetic and metaphysical design (if the filmmaker had wanted us to see the maze in these shots, he could easily have inserted one, ‘airbrushed’ one into the film, much like the superimposed image of Wendy and Danny in the miniature imaginary model maze). It is the Overlook itself that is the Real maze, the real labyrinth in which a now-psychotic Jack Torrance is condemned, overwhelmed, lost, and permanently enslaved, his past and his spectral traces and remainder now an immanent part of the Overlook itself ….

   Like . Dislike . March 5, 2015, 2:14 pm .