Chicken Marsala for Two, Please

So, how did everyone spend Valentine's Day? Dressed up, at a fancy restaurant? Or perhaps carping the entire day about how cynical and commercial, and in no way a true measure of love, the "holiday" is? Well, I'll tell you how I spent mine - the same way I've spent the past four Valentine's Days: eating Chicken Marsala and watching Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

You don't need to wait until next Valentine's Day to get me this shirt.

Like every good tradition (for I feel it can now safely be classified a tradition), this originated by chance. I felt like eating Chicken Marsala, and just happened to have received The Shining in the mail at that time (for these were the days when Netflix discs in hard copy prevailed). It was only by coincidence that I found myself snowed in, newly single, eating a romantic meal alone and watching a decidedly unromantic movie about being snowed in not...quite...so alone.

The tradition has not flourished because of cynicism, though the irony does snare converts. I have enacted the tradition twice with boyfriends, once following a breakup, and one year with two beloved friends. Everyone agrees that the tradition has great merits: Chicken Marsala is delicious, and <i>The Shining</i> is a brilliant and kick-ass film. At first I enjoyed it on these factors as well as the goofy incongruity. However, as the tradition takes root and lives on, I see that it has genuine appropriateness for the occasion, to wit:

The Shining is about relationships.

Granted, the central relationships of the story are horrific (in all senses of the word) - whether you consider the main union that between Jack and Wendy, or Jack and the hotel, these are exploitative, parasitic, dominating relationships that threaten to (or succeed in) erasing one member's personality and replacing it with a gruesome shell.

The Shining is a winter movie.

 One of the winteriest movies outside of Christmas. Let's not forget that Valentine's Day is a winter holiday. Depending on your vantage point, it is a beacon in the long, gray cold, or an overhyped event upon which too much hope and dependence are stacked. Much like many relationships.

The Shining is about love.

Watch Wendy's pivot from comforting Jack after a nightmare (about killing his family with an axe) to full-body vigilance when Danny appears with his sweater mysteriously torn. There is no question which relationship takes priority, and there is no limit to what Wendy will risk for her son. Surely these, more than even greeting cards or diamonds, are genuine markers of love.

So I welcome my dearest friends to join me well into the future to view The Shining, dine on Chicken Marsala and reflect on love, Snow Cats and, yes, axe murder. Because The Shining is also about that.