The Shining : Jim Morrison in The Shining during final scene.

I never noticed until I bought a bigger tv and stood close to it while watching the final tracking shot towards the 4th of July picture but if you look at The Gold Room stand to the right as the camera passes by it you notice an advertisement for two different performers playing the room…the one on the left appears to be Jim Morrison….very strange. What could it mean?

Certainly looks a bit like him, but I'm not convinced. Are there two Gold Room signs?



Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride

There's a Gold Room sign near the wall where the 1921 photograph is (which seemed to flip from one side of the room to the other throughout the movie), and one just outside The Gold Room itself. Both have the same pictures. The musician on the left is Danny Haynes, and the one on the right is Kim Woodman.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/16/c5/38/16c5381ba820fdb00b8c7952d5977cf9.jpg

I believe both are fictional.

You've had your whole *beep* life to think things over!

Thanks for the picture

Interesting spider web sort of feature to the print, and a strange connection to the Cold Room of the Overlook.



Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride

It doesn't look like Jim at all. He never sported a "Jewfro" did he?

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com:443/data.filmboards/images/upload/QH9tAfL.jpg


http://www.doorshistory.com/santaclar5_19_68.jpg


It's not him, but it was worth a thread.


Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride

Also not the first to think it was Jim Morrison.

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20131106161528AALUlGo

http://www.jeffreyscottbernstein.com/kubrick/images/OneShotInTheShining.pdf (ctrl+f morrison)

Even so, it'd be a bit odd to feature Jim Morrison at The Overlook sometime in the mid to late 70s' (I'm not really sure when it was supposed to take place), when he died in 71'.

You've had your whole *beep* life to think things over!

What, again, is of greater interest and intrigue here is how this sign advertising the resident musicians in the Overlook's ballroom simultaneously resonates with many of the themes of the film as well as adding yet more inconsistencies, deadlocks, and impasses that are an inherent feature of the film's narrative structure.

First, the title on the sign itself, its lettering, is ambiguous: is it "Gold Room" or "Cold Room"? It's a further confusion that serves to contrast the 'warmth' of the gilded age ballroom with the 'cold' of the outside, the cold of the Overlook snow and the freezing hedge-maze where Jack will later freeze to death. Note: this ballroom is a reproduction of an Art Deco ballroom from the 1930s (not the early 1920s; Art Deco architecture and design flourished from the late-1920s up to WWII; the ballroom's predominant 'sun burst' motif was a fundamental characteristic of the Art Deco movement; it is the only Art Deco room in the Overlook that we see, apart from the red bathroom and the green bathroom in room 237), further reinforced by the four early-1930s pop songs on the soundtrack during these scenes in the ballroom and the fact that the bar is a post-Prohibition, a post-1920s bar serving alcohol.

The hours advertised on the sign ('unwinding hours' perhaps having a doubled meaning here, referring both to a return to the past, to history, as well as to leisured relaxation, to a release of tension: Jack does both in these scenes, talking about his past to the spectral barman Lloyd as well as drinking and laughing) are inconsistent. For example, the hours for "Kim Woodman" have a different syntax and contradict the other hours stated in the sign: instead of "9.00pm-1.00pm", it's "5.0 8.0pm", which makes little sense, but is yet another of the film's many temporal discontinuities and distortions.

The first name of one of the musicians is, again, a "Danny", another repetition, the same name as Jack's son, Danny. Furthermore, both these names correspond to people actually living in the state of Illinois, where the actor Danny Lloyd was from, and graduated from highschool as the "Class of 1978", the year the film was being shot and the year in which it is set.

The two photos of the musicians are clearly from the 1970s and are photos from the Warners archive (all of the photos and all of the film clips we see in the film are from the Warners archive). They are most likely folk musicians as opposed to pop or country singers. (A contemporary Scotish rock band, formed in 2010, calls itself "The Unwinding Hours" in direct reference to the film, while another contemporary musician calls himself "The Caretaker", just as numerous previous bands called themselves after various artefacts in Kubrick's previous "A Clockwork Orange" eg Heaven 17, Moloco, etc). Having two photos of folk musicians is also consistent with many other 'folk' and traditionalist allusions and references throughout the film, not just in music, but also in literature and folk tales. We see a vinyl LP record in Hallorann's bedroom by one of the most well-known folk bands of the 1970s, Steeleye Span (their 1975 album "Commoner's Crown", many of the tracks being versions of old folk tales and poems). And the film has numerous references to and quotes from many of the most well-known folk tales or fairy tales (which in their original forms were very gruesome and brutal, featuring cannibalism, abduction, and murder, all folk tales told to children as warnings about the outside world and being careful or fearful of strangers), including The Three Bears, The Three Pigs, Hansel and Gretel, and Red Riding Hood

"The hours advertised on the sign ('unwinding hours' perhaps having a doubled meaning here, referring both to a return to the past, to history, as well as to leisured relaxation, to a release of tension: Jack does both in these scenes, talking about his past to the spectral barman Lloyd as well as drinking and laughing) are inconsistent. For example, the hours for "Kim Woodman" have a different syntax and contradict the other hours stated in the sign: instead of "9.00pm-1.00pm", it's "5.0 8.0pm", which makes little sense, but is yet another of the film's many temporal discontinuities and distortions."

I agree largely with what you say here about the 'unwinding hours', but I would add another nuance-- the reference to Ariadne's ball of thread that Theseus must 'unwind' to assure his path out of the labyrinth. I think it is also a clever reference to the mythology here.

When Jack gets pissed at Wendy for accusing him of hurting Danny, he walks into the Gold Room to vent to Lloyd. You can see that sign fairly clearly and the picture on the left does indeed appear to be Jim Morrison holding his tambourine. I have gone to other websites and others agree it is indeed Morrison and feel that Kubrick was probably pointing reference to Aldous Huxley. What's curious is that this isn't mentioned once in the "Room 237" documentary.

I could see the Huxley reference and I'm really surprised this hasn't been mentioned. Morrison often sang about death and was generally darker than his contemporaries so I could also see it as a direct reference to him…forever young like Jack only the price is great and eternal.