Welcome back to Wednesday night here at BCB After Dark: the hippest hangout for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. So glad you decided to join us. We need to stick together in times like this. There’s no cover charge. The dress code is casual. The hostess can seat you now. Bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Congratulations to the Milwaukee Brewers, which is something I never thought I’d write over the course of my life. To be fair, as I’ve admitted many times, they were the best team in the majors all year long. I did think the Rays would give more of a fight. To be fair, the Rays could have won Games One and Two. Also to be fair, the Brewers could have easily won Game Four as well.
Anyway, enjoy it Wisconsin. I haven’t been back to my home state in 30 years, but I know I’ve probably got some relatives who are happy about this.
Last night, I asked you who would say no in a trade that would send Matt Shaw to Cleveland for Steven Kwan. This one got a lot of comments and I love that, especially since I just came up with it after Game Four never ended. In any case, 41 percent of you think the Cubs wouldn’t/shouldn’t do that deal. Another 35 percent thought the Guardians would/should pass. The final 24 percent think that’s a fair deal that both sides would take.
So here’s the part where we listen to music and talk movies. Please join us if you want. But of course, you’re free to skip ahead to the baseball stuff at the end.
I have a tradition of always using the final After Dark to feature the vocal trio of [Dave] Lambert, [Jon] Hendricks & [Annie] Ross singing “Halloween Spooks.” This is from 1961.
Enjoy and have a happy holiday. The Christmas music starts on Sunday. Not here, but you know, everywhere else you go.
My final film essay before Halloween is on director Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece The Shining. I can’t remember when I first saw The Shining and I certainly hadn’t seen it in many decades. But it’s a film that I feel like I’ve seen so many times because of the way it has become imbedded in our daily cultural lives through memes and references to it in so many other works. In recent years, it’s been unfairly reduced to a series of images—ghostly twin girls, floods of blood, Shelly Duvall’s distinctive face of sheer terror and of course, Jack Nicholson with an axe, Jack Nicholson frozen solid and Jack Nicholson in an old photo.
It’s really a shame because none of those images really capture what the film is about. To be sure, Kubrick makes sure that The Shining is about images. The Shining is a very scary movie and it’s not quickly apparent why. There’s very little blood and gore compared to a lot of movies. The first half of the film is simply a marriage falling apart. Sure, there are a few spooky things going on, but all of it could just be in the imaginations of the characters. It’s a lot of stuff that wouldn’t be out of place in a John Cassavetes film. But through settings, camera angles and especially music, Kubrick makes a lot of mundane things seem terrifying. Maybe that’s the point. Our biggest fears are the realities of our own lives.
The second half of the film takes a darker turn as the subtext becomes text. Nicholson’s Jack Torrance goes from being an abusive alcoholic to an axe murderer as he listens to ghosts or just the hallucinations in his head. Nicholson’s performance quickly goes from odd and quirky to either over-the-top or just plain camp, depending on your point of view. You can say the same for Shelley Duvall’s portrayal of Jack’s poor wife Wendy.
I don’t normally write about films like The Shining because I assume that most of you who care have already seen the film. Also in the case of The Shining, there are so many other pieces out there about it by people wiser about movies than I am. But I do know a lot more about film than I did whenever I first saw this film, and so I’m sure that my reaction to it is different today than it was back then. For one, I can see how Kubrick borrowed from Alfred Hitchcock in the way he used color to set a mood and recall a theme. He also used many of Hitchcock’s techniques to create suspense, although the way Kubrick own touch often defuses the suspense at just the right moment, turning it into a false alarm, keeps the audience from ever assuming too much.
But most of the film is just pure Kubrick. A lot of the credit goes to production designer Roy Walker, who built an incredible set of the Overlook Hotel. The set is really a character in itself—some argue that the hotel more than Jack is the villain of the movie. Kubrick shoots the long, abandoned corridors head-on and from a distance, giving the impression that they go on into eternity. That, combined with the creepy music added in by music editor Gordon Stainforth, makes the mundane act of Jack and Wendy’s son Danny (Danny Lloyd) driving a Big Wheel through the halls an ominous and foreboding act. (It helps that Danny is pretty creepy on his own, with an imaginary friend that lives in his teeth.)
The scariest thing about The Shining is the ambiguity of the whole thing. In his retrospective review of the film in 2006, Roger Ebert noted how there are no reliable narrators in the film. Not Wendy or Danny. Certainly not Jack, who has descended into madness. Not even Kubrick, if we’re to be honest. Scatman Crouthers, as the hotel’s chief who shares “the shining” (or undefined psychic powers) with Danny, may be the most reliable, but even that’s not a given. He’s also absent for most of the movie.
Kubrick had an unwillingness to explain anything to the audience. This is most famous in 2001, but in The Shining, Kubrick leaves all kinds of loose ends as well. He also doesn’t care. The Shining is about the subtext that lurks under domestic life. It’s about the things we think about (but never dare act on) coming to life. But most of all, it’s about the way that a bad man makes all kinds of excuses to justify his bad behavior.
Today, The Shining is considered a masterpiece. It ranked 88th in the BFI Sight & Sound ranking of the greatest films of all time. For most directors it would be their magnum opus, but with Kubrick, it’s probably his fourth-, fifth- or sixth-best film. Funnily enough, however, it was met with mixed reactions when it came out in 1980. Roger Ebert, for all his praise of it in the 21st Century, panned it in 1980. His TV partner Gene Siskel knocked it too, giving it two stars out of four. Pauline Kael hated it. Janet Maslin of the New York Times grudgingly liked it. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times thought it was a mixed bag. Everyone admitted that it was visually stunning, but they missed the forest for the trees when the expected it to be a tidy ghost story rather than a stunning portrait of a bad man that doesn’t offer any answers.
One thing that everyone noticed, both in 1980 and today, is that the film bears only a superficial resemblance to the book, which is one reason why Stephen King, the author, mostly hated it. I’ve never read the book, but it’s also impossible not to see Jack as a stand-in for King himself—an abusive alcoholic who fancies himself a writer. For King, the character of Jack is deeply-flawed but both redeemable and redeemed. After all, King quit drinking and straightened his life out. Kubrick is more cynical, portraying the hotel as a place where Jack can just let his true horrible nature out. Does he want to get better? Nah. He says he never wants to leave the Overlook Hotel.
Plus, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, what was that ending about?
As I wrote earlier, it’s too easy to see The Shining as a series of memes. If you actually go back and watch the film, you’ll find a challenging and cynical film with no easy answers. You can argue that Nicholson and Duvall’s acting performances are over the top, but Kubrick isn’t going for realism. The Shining is about as good a film as you can get that takes you inside a nightmare.
Here’s the trailer for The Shining.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and the movies.
The Brewers won the World Series tonight, meaning the 2026 baseball season is over. That means for more baseball, we have to wait until . . . well, we really don’t know.
Tonight I’m asking how optimistic are you. When are we going to see baseball again? On December 2, the owners will lock out the players until a new collective bargaining agreement is reached. There appears to be no chance that this will not happen.
To be clear, we will have baseball after today. The Arizona Fall League still has a couple of weeks to run. The Caribbean winter leagues will start soon and many games will be televised, although you might have to search around a bit to find them. The Caribbean World Series in the first week in February, and that’s always a good watch with many major leaguers.
Once the spring rolls around, the minor leagues will continue to play even during the lockout. If the season doesn’t start on time, there’s always NPB and KBO to watch. So we will get some baseball, even if it’s not the baseball we want.
So how long will this lockout continue? The last time the collective bargaining agreement expired in 2021, the lockout lasted into the start of Spring Training, but the two sides came to an agreement in time for the season to start just a little bit late. All the games were eventually made up during the season.
This year, however, it seems like the sides are more entrenched. The owners are talking in more absolutist terms about how they must have a salary cap. The players have said that they will never accept one. The dark scenario is the National Hockey League, which completely canceled the 2004-5 season in order to break the will of the players and gain a salary cap. If the MLB owners are that determined, they may be willing to sacrifice a whole season to get it.
On the other hand, if there are no baseball games, then the owners get no revenue and the players get no money. The players union has a war chest to keep players afloat during the lockout and none of them would get paid before April anyways. But should the strike carry on into the season, that war chest is eventually going to run out.
For the owners, many of them have big loans that will need to be repaid. And according to reports, if the season doesn’t start before around Memorial Day, another year gets added on to the end of the TV contracts. It’s no secret that MLB wants to a big increase in rights fees in 2029 when those deals expire. If the season doesn’t start before Memorial Day, they’ll have to wait until 2030 for that expected windfall.
Of course, if the World Series gets canceled again, it would be disastrous for the sport and everyone involved in it. Most fans will say “a pox upon both your houses” and just move on to other sports. It’s very possible those fans never come back. Everyone loses.
So tonight, tell me when you expect the lockout to end?
Thank you for stopping by tonight and all season. We’re so glad we had this time together. Please get home safely. Stay warm out there. Don’t forget your coat. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again next week and all winter for more BCB After Dark.
