Winding
Around

The research sets scenic parkway design theory (P. L. Hornbeck's Highway Aesthetics, 1968; the U. S. Department of Commerce's A Proposed Program for Scenic Roads and Parks, 1966) against a frame-by-frame comparative analysis of Kubrick's eight opening shots. What emerges is a parkway that behaves like cinema — a linear garden whose foreground, middle ground, and background are choreographed for a viewer in motion, and which can be played forward or backward along its length.

Going-to-the-Sun-Road, one of the earliest American scenic parkways, was built alongside the 1920s boom in automobile tourism. Its brief was modest: to offer an affordable, safe route through Glacier National Park, replacing the Great Northern Railway and its horse-drawn wagons. National Park Service chief engineer George Goodwin drew the first plan in 1918 — a sequence of fifteen switchbacks climbing the mountainside to Logan Pass.

During construction in 1924, landscape architect Thomas Vint objected to the switchbacks, saying they looked as if "miners had been in there." Engineer Frank A. Kittredge re-surveyed the area and settled the debate: a single hairpin — "The Loop" — carved into the cliff. What began as an engineering brief had become an aesthetic one. The road, before it was a road, was already a composed view.

Kubrick used Going-to-the-Sun-Road as the opening of The Shining: a sequence of eight aerial shots linked by standard cuts and fades, tracing a small yellow Volkswagen Beetle along the winding road. Two details complicate the composition. First, Kubrick never set foot on the set — a lifelong fear of flying kept him in London, directing the helicopter crew by telephone. The result is the famous "lapse" at 1:11, when the helicopter's own shadow crosses the mountainside. Whether it was left in deliberately remains unresolved.

Second, the eight shots do not appear in the order a driver would encounter them. Traveling east to west — from Saint Mary Lake to The Loop — the actual sequence is C3 / C1 / C2 / C4 / C8 / C7 / C6 / C5. Kubrick recomposed the road. His camera altered Jack Torrance's hypothetical first-person perspective into a third-person aerial, building "an ominous mood" through the "vast isolation and eerie splendor of high mountains, and the narrow, winding roads which would become impassable after heavy snow." Neither Kubrick's view nor the driver's is objective: both are The Rendered Reality.

Scenic parkway design has its own literature. In the 1960s, P. L. Hornbeck treated the driver as an input-output system: inputs are spatial — edge, enclosure, visual alignment, framing — and outputs are behavioral — steering control, speed, attentional demand. A vista glimpsed after a sign "assists driver orientation and decision-making"; vegetation screens block distant views until the designer chooses to reveal them.

In 1966, the U. S. Department of Commerce's A Proposed Program for Scenic Roads and Parks formalized the Scenic Corridor: not the road alone, but the entire visual zone beyond the right-of-way — lakes, mountains, historical sites. The corridor is managed in three depths — foreground, middle ground, background — with the foreground doing most of the practical work: framing, concealing, then suddenly revealing.

Three of the eight shots are set against the driver's actual visual experience along the same stretch of road (S1D, S5S6D, S7S8D). Each pair juxtaposes Kubrick's aerial composition with the foreground / middle ground / background analysis of the same scene from within the car. What Kubrick composes through the lens, the parkway composes through vegetation, alignment, and the timing of reveal.

Through Kubrick's and Jack's perspectives, the same parkway becomes two different vehicles. One is a stage for the director's mysterious filming language and ominous soundtrack; the other, carefully — if quietly — composed by landscape architects and engineers: a linear garden for people in motion. Both are meticulously thought through. The subtleness of scenic parkway design is just like making a film; we can alter and manipulate the viewer's emotions whether they are in the theater or the Beetle.