Ribbon of Memes

It's been over a century and a quarter since the first moving picture was committed to celluloid - the "ribbon of dreams", as Orson Welles mellifluously intoned.

And so, welcome, one and all, to Ribbon of Memes, a new podcast in which Roger Bell_West and Nick Marsh supply grateful listeners hot takes about films considered masterpieces by critics or filmgoers in general.

The rules: we choose one "masterpiece" from every year from the earliest days of cinema to our dreadful modern dystopia. Do we agree these films are classics? Are we entertained? Did we even understand what the film was trying to say? The questions are endless!*

We start in 1973 (for reasons explained in the first podcast) and progress vaguely chronologically (unless we think of another film that makes an interesting comparison to the one we have just seen, or are otherwise distracted by shiny new things).

Yes, that's right, we decided that what the world really needed was two more uninformed middle-aged white guys telling the world about media largely produced by similar people. Find out whether we were right or not herein!

*Actually, no, that's most of them.

We're also on iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcasts.

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The Shining (1980) 28 March 2026

Roger and Nick approach a horror classic from different angles as we take a look at 1980's The Shining.

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Tags: horror

  1. Posted by J Michael Cule at 06:52pm on 28 March 2026

    The thing that puzzles me about THE SHINING is what Danny is supposed to be.

    He is clearly innocence. He is clearly gifted.

    But his innocence and his gift have the plot function of bringing the hotel to life to consume his father.

    All the historical metaphor stuff is far above the level of the movie. The idea that it's primarily about domestic abuse as a haunting taint that spreads from generation to generation is more plausible but I still feel that the movie just isn't that deep.

  2. Posted by RogerBW at 11:45am on 29 March 2026

    Is his gift what wakes things up? Hallorann has the gift too, but he hasn't woken things up in however many years of working there.

    I agree you could find a story of generational abuse here, just as some people have found a story of the Holocaust and/or the killing of Native Americans in it, but I am sufficiently old school that I want to know what Kubrick intended the story to be. And if he intended it to be about generational abuse (or the Holocaust), he did a fairly rubbish job of putting that information into the film.

    I think it's just as valid to say that the Thing simply gloms onto Jack (a man who is already a fairly piss-poor excuse for a human being, and is thus open to temptation). That's the pattern it's used before, take over the father and use him to kill the rest of the family. I don't think it even tries to corrupt Danny or Wendy; Danny, coincidentally, is able to see the ghosts better than the others, but even Wendy sees some in the end (the blood elevator, a lovely effect but nothing to do with the story). If Danny didn't have the psychic powers the only way things would happen differently is that he and Wendy would get a bit less warning, the whole REDRUM thing, which honestly I found more risible than creepy.

    (I should say that I'm talking only about the film version of the story; Nick has read the book and may be able to say more on this. I get the impression that Jack there is intended to be much more "a good man mis-steps and can't get back" than the Jack here who's whooping all the way down the slide to hell.)

  3. Posted by RogerBW at 11:47am on 29 March 2026

    (The Non-Shining Danny Alternative: Oh, and Hallorann wouldn't be there to die and provide the second Snow-Trac. So I guess Wendy and Danny would have to fort up until spring.)

  4. Posted by Nick Marsh at 11:33am on 30 March 2026

    In the book it is fairly explicit that Danny somehow ‘wakes’ the overlook with his power. It’s really not there in the film I think. And yes, in the book Jack struggles against his fate and is really a good man who fails; this is a bit part of why King hated the film, where Jack is basically a jerk from thr start.

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