There's Still No Real Explanation For That Disturbing Bear Costume Scene Stanley Kubrick Included in THE SHINING
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining sure takes audiences on a wild, scary, and extremely intense ride. For the most part, the film flows perfectly, and the madness of it all slowly engulfs you as the story plays out. Then during the climactic ending, the damn breaks, the blood gushes out of the elevator, and all hell breaks loose.
There’s one moment during that maddening climax of the film that jolted me when I first saw the film. When Wendy is frantically running around the hotel, at one point she looks over into one of the rooms and sees a guy in a bear costume “servicing” some random guy in a suit, and they look over at her.
I was pretty young when I first saw this movie and out of everything that happened in that film, that was the most shocking for me. I remember this intense shock going through my body when that happened, it was like this pure fear of what in the hell is going on here! Whenever I watch this movie and that scene pops up, I remember that feeling I had when I first experienced it.
I’ve actually looked for answers to this over the years, but all that I’ve found is pure speculation from fans as to why Kubrick included that scene. I’ve always wanted a real answer, and when mega fan and Pixar filmmaker Lee Unkrich went looking for his own answer in regards to that scene for his upcoming 2,200-page book, “Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,” he didn’t find one.
He did talk to Kubrick’s co-screenwriter of the movie, Diane Johnson, about the scene, and she doesn’t even know where it came from! It wasn’t in the script! Unkrich explained:
“The odd moment of the guy in the bear costume giving the guy a blowjob on the bed when Shelley’s running around? No answers on why he chose to put that in.”
Johnson told him:
“It’s not in King. It was nothing that we ever discussed — it came out of Kubrick’s imagination, as far as I know.”
Johnson also had nothing to do with the iconic shot of the blood flooding out of the elevators. In regards to that, she said: “That was already in his mind, or maybe even filmed, so I wasn’t called upon to visualize anything.”
Now, while Johnson says that the bear costume is not in King, in the book, there is a guy in a dog costume named Roger that shows up in costume at a ball at the hotel. He was asked to come by his one-time lover, Horace Derwent, one of the owners of the Overlook Hotel. Some say he is exploiting his power over Roger and flexing his dominance. But, there’s no clear explanation of if this is somehow tied to the random scene in the film. Maybe it inspired it, but there’s no context on how it fits in with the story that Kubrick was telling.
As far as what some of the fan theories are about the bear scene, some say it’s one of the many clues behind the true relationship between Danny and his father. The imagery of the bear suggests that the animal is symbolic of Jack's predatory control over his family and the sexual abuse of his son.
All we really have is speculation. Even the people who worked on the film have no idea what Kubrick was thinking when he shot that! What do you all think it means?
Source: Variety