A friend of mine asked me this morning a question about this film and I don't remember the film well enough to tell her the answer.

At the VERY end of the film after all the bad stuff has gone down, l there is a long camera shot of the wall of photos in the inn. The camera zooms to one picture in particular that shows the entire staff of the inn in its hayday, and sitting in the front row is Jack Nicholson. But the picture is dated 1921.

So...

What does it mean that the picture shows HIS face?

Is he a ghost? Is he reincarnated? Was he predestined to find this hotel to reunite with his earlier soul? What's the deal?

You've opened a can of worms here, Dan. This topic has been much discussed over the years. Kubrick was, of course, silent on the matter. King's book is no help.

I'm going with predistination. There's the earlier scene of Jack dreaming/ halucinating that it's 1921 and he's drinking at the bar. Then he goes in the bathroom and starts talking to a man who helps him clean up. Jack realizes it's the former caretaker who killed his family in 1921. He asks the man something like "Didn't you kill your family? Aren't you the caretaker?", etc. and the man tells Jack "It's you sir. You were always the caretaker.".

I'd go more with the idea that the Overlook Hotel exists in some sort of not-of-this-world eternal outside-of-time sort of place, where (like heaven, but different) it's all jumbled up together. Sort of like Tillich's "eternal now," which Tony Campolo picked up in one of the talks he often gives on the Bible and the post-Newtonian view of time, both of which are preceeded by those mid-century British Christian poets and writers who were fascinated with parallel time and converging time and eternity and all that - Charles Williams, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden ("For The Time Being"). Only not the heavenly side of eternity, but the darker side.

Don't know if I can contribute much towards answering your question, DanBuck, but I posted some first reactions to the film here when I went through all of Kubrick's films four years ago. There's a sentence or two that might touch on your question in this paragraph, in particular:

Finally, I am struck by the film's many references to television; a few shots begin tight on a TV and then pull back, and Danny says he heard about cannibalism on TV (prompting Nicholson to say, sarcastically, "See? It's okay. He saw it on the television"), and there are frequent references to Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons (Danny's parents call him "Doc", as in Bugs Bunny's line "What's up, doc?"), and of course there's the famous shot of Nicholson hacking through the bathroom door with an axe, sticking his head in the hole, and saying, "Here's Johnny!" It occurred to me that I couldn't think of any other Kubrick film that was so concerned with popular culture; most of his films take place in the past or the future, and his cultural references tend to consist of classical musicians and paintings or, at the most recent, standards like 'We'll Meet Again'. Was this all part of Kubrick's effort to be more "commercial", or did he mean something deeper by it? For example, when Danny says he heard about cannibalism on TV, is Kubrick making the same point he made when Barry Lyndon told his son bedtime stories about decapitation, namely that violence is ingrained in us from an early age, or that children have an innocent fascination with violence, or that early exposure to violence anesthetizes us to the horror of violence, or something similar? Or is something else going on? Is Kubrick, perhaps, saying television is a force similar to "the shining", whereby thoughts and images, some of which are linked to people now long dead, are transmitted over great distances without physical form? Is the confusion between past and present in the hotel (and in Nicholson's mind) supposed to resemble the confusion between past and present in a post-modern, TV-obsessed world, where old and new programs share the same airwaves? And how does all of this square with Nicholson's claim that Kubrick believed The Shining was an "optimistic" film, because *any* story which says that life goes on after we die is inherently "optimistic"? Is pop culture being held up as a materialistic substitution for immortality?

FWIW, I posted this message to another list, too, and it prompted an interesting discussion about the themes of nihilism and the self, beginning with this comment:

Why would a horror film need a "point." Isn't the essence of horror a non-point, that is, something we cannot wrap our minds around? In other words, isn't horror about death? The desire for coherence, or a film that "works," or a place "to go" is to desire for that which is comforting, and sensible.

The Shining is Borgesian through and through. It strikes me that the repetitions, the mazes, the silences throughout the film do nothing but make us face the void.

And, perhaps this movement toward caricature on JN's part (that Peter describes) is also part of this: as a cartoon, he loses that authentic, individualistic identity that we all suppose we possess. . . .

This temporal confusion you describe is similar to what I am sketching above: the more lost we are , the less sense of self we have, the less certainty we have. Again, the void creeps in....

Followed shortly by:

The reams of duplicate pages next to the typewriter points to his absolute recognition that he can't create something original. That he is himself simply a reproduction of another (someone on the wall? In a photo?). That, in other words, he is Nothing.

For whatever that's worth.

This was the first film that I showed my film class last Spring. We had an excellent discussion on it afterwards and this last shot was one of the more confusing aspects of that conversation. I think I finally came to the conclusion that the whole film was about the evil that exists within man. The Overlook Hotel being built on top of a Native American burial ground was an important point insinuating that American culture is largely built upon the evil of eviscerating a culture and building ours on top of it. Then when Grady, the butler type guy from the bathroom, tells Jack that "you've always been the caretaker" we realize that Jack is in a timeless place, so to speak.

This is how we arrived at the explanation of the picture on the wall. Jack existed as the embodiment of the evil that is timeless, that lives within the hotel/culture/man.