hexafu

CHAPTER 6

The Shining probably has the largest cult following of any film in this book. It, like the others, was a box office success when it came out in 1980, but its rate of return was lower. The film is said to have cost $19 million to make, and it brought in $48 million at box offices worldwide. But since its release in 1980, The Shining has gone on to be obsessively studied by film and horror geeks the world over, including in the wonderful 2012 documentary film Room 237.

Beyond that, the iconography of this film crops up everywhere in horror since 1980: Axes signal Nicholsonian craziness; the unforgettable interior design of the film pops up constantly; the haunting image of Jack Nicholson frozen to death at the end of the film has become a pervasive internet meme. Recently, the carpeting in the infamous hallway scenes of The Shining showed up in another horror hallway, in Coralie Fargeat’s award-winning 2024 body horror extravaganza The Substance. In the same year, the film’s surreal scene when Jack sees Wendy and Danny walking through a model of a labyrinth on a table was echoed in Heretic. Everything about The Shining has become iconic.

In addition to its cult status and popularity as an inspiration for later horror films, The Shining is the film for which claims about domestic abuse and violence are the easiest to see, even from a distance.

Classic movie posters for the film often show a terrified Shelley Duvall, her mouth gaping in a panicked scream, behind a bathroom door that a crazed Jack Nicholson is trying to carve through with an axe. The domestic violence is not subtle.

From a sociohistorical standpoint, that makes sense.

By 1980, when the film was released, Americans had grown broadly aware of domestic violence as a problem and aware that women and children in situations of domestic violence were trapped and isolated.

What makes this film extraordinarily powerful is how it renders the dynamics of domestic violence, and in how it explores—in more fine-grained detail than in any other film so far—the psychology of the male abuser.

The opening scene of The Shining is long and ominous. From above and from a distance, the camera watches a small, vulnerable-looking car traversing mountainous roads into increasingly remote areas. We hear a heavy, low-pitched, chilling anthem pulsating in the background. The road gets snowier and snowier, more and more removed from the city, from society, from anything. Isolation is a clear, palpable dynamic the film. The ponderous soundtrack makes clear that the isolation—far from being some kind of idyllic retreat from the mania of civilization – is going to be dangerous somehow, maybe even evil.

Eventually, the car pulls up to a resort in the mountains. The Overlook Hotel is large, wooden, very much a lodge-style resort, perched at the absolute upper perimeter of the tree line—indeed, about two hundred yards behind the hotel, we see the pine trees dwindle to nothing and only bare, rocky ground beyond-no roads, no structures, no people.

A man, Jack Torrance, memorably played by Jack Nicholson, strikes out across the lobby to do a job interview. Watching him walk is unsettling; he looks like a man ill at ease in his body, ill at ease in reality. He can’t decide whether to put his hands in his pockets or leave them out; he sucks his lip; when he introduces himself to the front desk clerk, he says “Jack Torrance” with a nervous, up-speak quaver. But the camera doesn’t leave us there with Jack for long; as he settles in for his job interview with the hotel manager, we cut to his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their son Danny (Danny Lloyd) back at home in Boulder. They are talking about whether they’re all going to go live in a hotel-this is the job Jack is interviewing for, the winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel. Danny is unenthusiastic about the prospect and talks to the imaginary friend that lives in his finger – Tony—in a way that seems to smack at once of the boy’s creativity and some kind of trauma.

Something is amiss with this family, but we don’t know just what it is.

The camera cuts back to the hotel and to Jack’s interview. We learn that he’s a former schoolteacher, but not much more than that about his backstory.

Jack asks, sensibly, why the resort closes in the winter, given it seems so well positioned as a ski resort, and the manager tells him that it’s not feasible to keep twenty-five miles of road clear all winter simply to enable access to the Overlook. This fact plays an important dramatic role: If he takes the job, Jack and his family will be alone, without even roads to drive on, isolated by a span of twenty-five miles all winter long. But Jack, a writer, is excited by the prospect of this arrangement, saying, “That just happens to be exactly what I’m looking for.” Nicholson’s smile as he says this looks false, more than a little unhinged. In that, the film adheres strictly to the novel on which it is based; Stephen King’s novel describes Torrance’s smile at the Overlook manager as follows: “Jack flashed the PR smile again, large and insultingly toothy.” Nicholson’s performance took that characterization to heart. Seeing that smile, we already know that something about Jack Torrance isn’t quite right.

Quickly, things get more concerning. The manager, somewhat skeptical that Jack really understands the degree of isolation he and his family will endure, discloses that there was a tragedy in the hotel’s past, when the previous caretaker had a mental breakdown during the winter and murdered his wife and children.

The manager’s disclosure gets very little reaction from Jack, who takes it entirely in stride, saying, in a painful mise en abyme, that his wife is “a confirmed ghost story and horror film addict.” Of course, Jack’s total failure even to flinch at this disclosure of extraordinary-indeed, mortal— domestic violence puts the audience on high alert for what’s to come.

For modern viewers, it reminds us of how the COVID lockdowns of 2020 revealed that domestic violence ramps up rapidly under conditions of isolation, not only because domestic tensions run high with cabin fever, but also because no one can see what’s going on in the domestic space when people aren’t regularly coming and going.

Amplifying our anxiety at the prospect of Wendy and Danny wintering over at the Overlook, back in Boulder, Tony tells Danny that Jack got the job.

At this revelation, suddenly, Danny has some kind of seizure in which he sees a vision of two little girls and a river of blood in a hotel hallway, until things fade to black. When Danny comes to, Wendy has called for a doctor. The fade to black.

When Danny comes to, Wendy has called for a doctor. The doctor tries to get Danny to reveal something about the nature of his friend Tony; like us, she’s trying to work out whether Danny is suffering from something psychiatric, something somatic, or some kind of abuse.

Wendy watches anxiously, her arms crossed over her chest. In the end, the doctor is not particularly concerned until Wendy reveals that there is a history of violent domestic abuse in the family. She tells about how Jack, when drunk, once hurt Danny badly, dislocating his shoulder: “On this particular occasion, my husband used too much strength and injured his arm.”

The doctor looks troubled, as well she should. Wendy, during her talk with the doctor, has looked terrified-smoking nervously, her hand shaking as she tries to light her cigarette, struggling to sustain eye contact, her face tensed. She looks like what she is, namely: an abuse victim trying to cover up for her – and her child’s—abuser.

Child abuse had become a known and recognized sociomedical problem by the 1970s. A groundbreaking article published in 1962 in The Journal of the American Medical Association, “The Battered-Child Syndrome,” described family dynamics in which children were brutally beaten. That article led to a groundswell of change, resulting relatively rapidly—in about five years—in the national criminalization of child abuse.

Doctors by the late 1970s knew about the psychology of abusers, they knew the prevalence of alcohol consumption as an amplifier of abusive behaviors, and they knew about how wives tended to cover up for or minimize the abuse inflicted by fathers.

Watching the doctor’s face, and watching Wendy’s very apparent anxiety in telling this story -“It’s just one of those things that happens with kids” —we feel more than a little anxious, already, that Jack may not be the best pick for winter caretaker of the Overlook, even though Wendy swears to the doctor that he’s no longer drinking: “He hasn’t had any alcohol in five months!” she proudly informs the doctor. The doctor—who clearly knows what child abuse is and clearly thinks something isn’t right with Wendy’s story – looks at her steadily and with skepticism but decides not to intervene.

As a result, when Jack takes the job at the Overlook, Wendy and Danny accompany him, if somewhat less than enthusiastically.

At the Overlook, the family gets an orientation from the staff, during which the manager tells Jack that there’s no alcohol on the premises, and Jack confirms what Wendy told the doctor: “We don’t drink.”

Meanwhile, Danny meets the Overlook’s chef, Mr. Hallorann. Mr. Hallorann sees something special in young Danny and takes him aside for some ice cream. It turns out that Hallorann and Danny have a rare psychic ability in common. This ability, which Mr. Hallorann refers to as “shining,” enables him to communicate telepathically with Danny. Mr. Hallorann takes a few minutes to teach him about shining. Danny doesn’t quite know what to do with this information.

He shrugs his shoulders nervously, unsmilingly, at Mr. Hallorann’s questions.

Eventually, Danny reveals that Tony, the entity that lives in his finger, doesn’t like for Danny to talk about his psychic abilities. Seeing that Danny is anxious, Mr. Hallorann tries to reassure Danny about the hotel but tells him, fiercely, to stay out of room 237. So we know, from the get-go, that Mr. Hallorann, despite his reassurances, is actually not all that comfortable with young, psychic Danny spending the winter at the Overlook.

Piggybacking on Hallorann’s perspective and combining it with what we know about Jack and the prior caretaker, we as viewers are not feeling very good about things for this winter, either.

After Hallorann and the rest of the staff take off for the winter, Wendy and Danny are alone, with Jack. The hotel quickly starts to seem too large, too empty. Its corridors begin to seem labyrinthine and disorienting. The camera is often placed at a significant distance from the actors, highlighting the sheer amount of empty, quiet, eerie space they have to traverse to get from one location to the next.

Deepening the rising sense of danger and disorientation in the film, Jack’s mind seems to be coming off the rails. He types maniacally, day after day, alone in a vast room. Sometimes, he hurls a ball ferociously and obsessively against a wall. One evening, Wendy goes to ask Jack a question while he’s typing away at his manuscript. He blows up at her for interrupting him. He’s cruel, he shouts, he mocks her; Wendy’s eyes are wide, her face almost perfectly still, as though she knows anything else she says will merely provoke the bear. After Jack tells her to “get the fuck out of here,” she looks crestfallen, meekly mumbling, “Okay.” She walks out, dejected, her hands jammed into the pockets of her dress.

Something really isn’t right with Jack, that much is clear, and Wendy and Danny are the only people there, in the twisting, creepy corridors and rooms of the hotel, to be on the receiving end of whatever it is that’s wrong.

Making matters worse, they are without recourse to outside aid.

A predicted snowstorm becomes a real snowstorm, and the phone lines go down. All Wendy has to communicate with the outside world is a radio; when she radios anxiously down to the rangers’ station lower on the mountain, the rangers advise her to keep the radio on 24-7, because they don’t think the phone lines will be repaired until spring.

She is now officially locked into an archetypal situation for wife-battery: isolated from friends, family, and even the police, locked into a domestic space with a man known to have violent tendencies and an alcohol problem.

Danny asks Wendy one morning if he can go fetch his fire engine from the family’s bedroom suite. But Jack is in the room, sleeping. Wendy pleads with Danny to leave Jack alone, saying that his father only went to sleep a few hours ago. This scene is crucial to establishing the degree of Wendy’s entrapment, because it indicates that she is tracking his every move, his hours of sleep—in the way partners of alcoholics count their drinks or the way abused women track their abusers’ patterns of behavior. Throughout this scene, which is shot from behind, almost as though we are spying on Wendy and Danny, we can see heavy, relentless snowfall coursing down outside, emphasizing the profundity of their isolation.

Danny promises to be quiet and not to wake his father up, but he really wants his fire engine. This toy choice, of course, is marked: Danny wants a toy that portends the possibility of rescue from a potentially lethal situation, a truck that can extend its reach to the upper levels of a building, to pull people out of windows – something that Danny and Wendy will both specifically need but lack before the end of the film. Wendy relents, so Danny goes to get his fire truck.

In one of the most haunting scenes of the film, Danny finds Jack sitting upright in bed, in his bathrobe, looking utterly deranged. Jack calls Danny over and waits, unsmiling, as Danny nervously approaches. Jack holds him and kisses him while Danny stares ahead, wide-eyed, looking terrified. Danny seeks to reassure himself, so he asks Jack, “You would never hurt Mommy and me, would you?” And Jack responds, “What do you mean? Did your mother ever say that to you? That I would hurt you?” We can hear Jack’s gorge rising at the thought of Wendy trying to turn his son against him, though we know that’s the opposite of what’s really happening. She is, against Danny’s best interests, actually protecting Jack, while Danny is having psychic visions of murdered children.

But that changes very soon thereafter. We see Danny enter the forbidden room 237, and then the camera cuts away to Wendy in the boiler room, where she is doing Jack’s job by maintaining the massive hotel furnace. Suddenly, she hears Jack upstairs screaming a wild, insane scream. She runs up to check on him and finds him asleep and having some kind of nightmare at his desk.

When he wakes up, he reveals that he’d been dreaming of having killed her and Danny and cut them up into little pieces. Wendy freezes, as anyone would.

Suddenly Danny appears at the edge of the room. We don’t know if he’s heard what Jack confessed, but Wendy tries to cover for Jack, urging Danny out of the room to hide from him his father’s state. When Danny doesn’t leave, Wendy approaches him and realizes that something happened to his neck—it’s very badly bruised and swollen—and that he’s sucking his thumb, a classic childhood sign of trauma. Convinced Jack has attempted to strangle Danny, Wendy at last turns on him: “You did this to him, didn’t you, you son of a bitch? You did this to him, didn’t you! How could you? How could you?” Wendy runs off with Danny in her arms. But where can she go? She knows, just as we do, that there is nowhere to go: The roads are impassable, the phone lines are down. She has no car. All she has is a snowcat. And given the storm, making an exit from the hotel is all the more forbidding. We realize, in lockstep with Wendy, how very perilous her and Danny’s situation has become. They are trapped and isolated in a labyrinthine building with a madman who is dreaming of murdering them both.

Things rapidly get worse as it becomes clear both that Jack is losing his mind and that the hotel is somehow possessed by malevolent forces. Jack goes into the “gold ballroom,” muttering that he’d give his “goddamn soul” for a glass of beer. Suddenly, he sees a man named Lloyd, who has materialized as the bartender at the gold ballroom’s lavish bar. The bar, previously emptied of booze, is now amply stocked. Viewing the film, we can’t tell whether Jack is having a hallucination or the past history of the Overlook is supernaturally intruding on his present moment of life. As Jack starts complaining to Lloyd about his woes, he says, “Just a little problem with the old sperm bank upstairs” —referring to Wendy in this dehumanizing metonymy. He goes on to call her a “bitch” and to rail against her for refusing to forget about the arm-breaking scene from years before.

While Jack talks with Lloyd, we suddenly hear Wendy screaming Jack’s name. She’s running down the hallway in a blind panic, holding a baseball bat.

Gasping and looking repeatedly over her shoulder as if she believes someone is pursuing her, Wendy bursts into the barroom. Her face stained with tears and pink from exertion, she screams amidst sniffling and heaving, “Oh, Jack, thank God you’re here. There’s someone else in the hotel with us. There’s a crazy woman in one of the rooms. She tried to strangle Danny.” Jack’s response? He glares at her and asks, angrily, “Are you out of your fucking mind?” Here, the conflation of real-life, hard-core domestic abuse with the supernatural and haunted hotel becomes more acute.

We the viewers know now that Jack is feeling full of rage against Wendy, that he’s out of control of his addiction again, though we don’t know whether he’s actually drinking some kind of spectral booze or imagining drinking it at this point, and that his violent impulses are returning to him.

We know that it’s Jack who’s out of his mind, not Wendy. What Wendy knows is only what Danny has told her, which is that there’s a crazy woman in room 237.

Despite his rage and disbelief, Jack checks out room 237, where he finds a gorgeous naked woman in the bathtub. She rises to embrace him, and they kiss. Quickly, however, she transforms, and Jack realizes he’s holding a dead and rotting corpse. He is, understandably, terrified and disgusted. Yet, when he returns from room 237, he lies to Wendy, telling her he saw nothing. He ventures that maybe Danny hurt his own neck—a common defense for child abusers, to blame the injury on the child. But this time, Wendy knows it’s impossible and wants to get Danny out of the hotel.

At the thought of leaving the hotel, Jack visibly starts to panic. He turns on Wendy, verbally abusing her and gaslighting her, blaming her for all his problems. “It is so fucking typical of you to create a problem like this when I finally have a chance to accomplish something!… Wendy, I have let you fuck up my life so far, but I am not going to let you fuck this up.” Wendy sits alone and cries quietly. She is imprisoned with someone with only the loosest control over himself, someone who blames her for the failures in his own life, someone who struggles with addiction, and someone who has a history of violence. She is trapped with the absolute, perfect distillation of “compulsively masculine” domestic abuser, a figure well understood in the late 1970s. But there is nothing she can do to escape: the lines are down, the snows are in, the nearest neighbors are twenty-five miles away. There’s no one to hear her scream.

The showcasing of domestic violence in the film soon directly activates the historical logic that underpinned and justified the battery of wives and children: the logic of correction. Remember, correction is the idea that the head of household, the paterfamilias, has both the right and obligation to regulate and control the behavior of his wife and children, by physical force when and as necessary. So now, Jack finds himself back in time in the hotel.

He meets a waiter, who turns out to be Delbert Grady, the man who murdered his wife and children at the Overlook when he was caretaker years before.

Grady starts grooming Jack to turn violent against Danny. Grady induces Jack to note that Danny “is a very willful boy.” And Grady responds, “Indeed he is. A very willful boy. A rather naughty boy, if I may be so bold.”

Seeing that Jack is receptive to this line of influencing, Grady – whether truly a ghost or a psychic projection of Jack’s own abusive consciousness, we do not ever fully know-goes on, “Perhaps they need a good talking to,” says Grady, “perhaps a bit more…” Grady then talks about how he “corrected” his own wife and children; he uses the word twice, referring, of course, to how he brutally murdered them. Jack is, in Grady’s view, the man of the house; it is incumbent upon him to correct misbehavior.

After this conversation with Grady, Jack’s abusive tendencies overtake him.

Wendy goes to find Jack. When she looks at his manuscript, she finds that it’s simply an ongoing repetition, for hundreds of pages, of the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” With this incontestable revelation of Jack’s diseased mind, Wendy begins to panic because she finally sees her and Danny’s reality for what it is: domestic imprisonment. They are being held hostage by an insane domestic abuser.

In that very moment of realization, we witness Jack looking at a terrified, wide-eyed Wendy. She starts to explain that Danny should be taken to a doctor; Jack begins to excoriate her for insensitivity to his work obligations to the owners of the Overlook—again, the compulsive masculinity argument comes in, where he feels his status as breadwinner is being challenged or threatened.

She tries to get away, and Jack says, “Wendy, darling, light of my life! I’m not going to hurt you. You didn’t let me finish my sentence. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to bash your brains in. I’m going to bash them right the fuck in.” Now she’s screaming and starts swinging the bat.

Listening to this stretch of dialogue is agonizing as a viewer. Like Wendy, we allow ourselves to hope—in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary – that Jack may not be intending to harm her when he starts out with “Wendy, darling, light of my life” and promises he’s not going to hurt her. Like her, we want to believe that. But at the same time, we know he’s just trying to get closer to her so he can control her, maybe hurt her, maybe kill her.

He smiles like a lunatic, moving slowly and menacingly, like a predator stalking his prey, up the stairs, and we feel unsafe, terrorized in lockstep with Wendy.

Even so, at the last minute, when he arrives at his assertion that he’s going to bash her brains in, we are somehow still startled by the brazenness of it, by the obvious pleasure he takes in terrorizing her.

The soundtrack is a shrill, scratchy non-melody as Wendy backs up the stairs; we watch her from below, seeing her hunched posture, her weeping face, her fragility, her fatigue, her terror. Somehow, miraculously, as she flails around with the bat, she hits him on the hand; as he moves to shield the injured hand, she knocks him in the head and sends him backward down a flight of stairs. Seeing him unconscious at the bottom, Wendy screams, and the camera fades to a close-up of Jack’s face, now semiconscious on the kitchen floor, being dragged by Wendy into a food locker, where she locks him in.

Although he says he’s hurt and needs a doctor when he fully comes to, she holds her ground and refuses to release him.

For a fleeting moment, it seems she’s going to be okay, until she finds out that Jack sabotaged their snowcat, the only vehicle that might be capable of getting her and Danny down the mountain during the blizzard.

Now, in the twenty-first century, this is a known and recognized form of domestic violence—vehicular control, or restriction of movement or transportation— and has been criminalized or is in the process of being criminalized in some states.

But in 1977 and 1980, when the novel and film were released, it was a cutting-edge recognition that the physical imprisonment of women and children by hiding or sabotaging a vehicle was often key to how the abuser could maintain control.

Jack understood that physical flight was Wendy’s only escape from death, and he took it from her.