ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses The Shining, both Stephen King’s novel (1977) and Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation. It investigates a becoming-insect that occurs with respect to Jack Torrance as a result of his enmeshing with the being of the Overlook Hotel, configured as wasp-force across novel and film. This interpretation deviates from Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of becoming to think through how becoming or swarming comes to function as politics of control. The first part of the chapter maps the processes of becoming onto The Shining and proceeds to investigate the phenomenon of fascination at work in novel and film by invoking Roger Caillois’s work on mimetic insects. The final part focuses on the insectile sound-image of the Hotel, above all using Michel Chion’s writings. The chapter uses The Shining to investigate and interrupt the automatic understanding of becoming-insect/swarming as operating beyond the sovereignty of the Father as well as to reflect on The Shining’s continued parasitic apparitions in contemporary culture and politics. As such, it proposes an addition to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of becoming in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) by offering up the ‘memories’ of an assemblage repressed in their work: memories of a Hotel-Daddy-Wasp-Machine.
