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The Shining and The Awakening of Jacob
Stanley Kubrick made extensive use of five separate pieces by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020) in The Shining (1980), sometimes combining them in innovative ways and frequently returning to them, imbuing each repetition with new meaning. The best example is Penderecki's The Awakening of Jacob (1974), a dense, seven-minute neo-Romantic composition that marked a major turning point in his work.
Kubrick ironically associates the piece with dream states, visitations, and the relationship between father and son. The original German title of Penderecki's work explicitly nods to the dream of Jacob's Ladder and the text of Genesis 28:16 ("And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not").
“History, Stephen [Dedalus] said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
James Joyce, Chapter 2 of Ulysses (1922)
Room 237 and Point-of-View
In this key scene, The Awakening of Jacob is connected to a labyrinth on the floor, the mysterious Room 237, and oneiric violence against Danny. Ironically, it is the father who is shown waking (in terror), but the music had been associated with Danny's visions earlier in the film and the camera is directly aligned with Danny's lower-to-the-ground point-of-view as he approaches Room 237.
This is reversed later in the film when father Jack enters Room 237 and the point-of-view is clearly that of an adult. Desire transforms into horror (Eros meets Thanatos) and father and son are locked in a cyclic trap that can only be broken when Danny learns to use his wits to gain control of the space he inhabits and escape the memories and phantasms that flood out of it.
