The score of the film in this scene is screaming, sharp, discordant, and metallic.
When we see Wendy outside in the garage, confirming the sabotage, her thin hair is plastered to her head, her breath comes out in jagged puffs on the frigid air, and she lamely palms a piece of machinery that Jack has physically sliced out of the snowcat. There’s no way she can fix this, she realizes at the same moment as we do.
The next scene dispels any doubt we might have had about the realness of the supernatural forces at work in the hotel because Grady comes to the door to talk to Jack, urging him to punish Wendy and Danny, and expressing scorn at Jack’s inability so far to do so: “I and others have come to believe that your heart isn’t in this. You haven’t the belly for it… Your wife appears to be stronger than we imagined, Mr. Torrance. Somewhat more resourceful. She seems to have gotten the better of you.”
Grady is goading Jack’s wounded masculinity, his sense of his life as a failure. Then, having strummed the strings of Jack’s already vibrating self-hatred, Grady ups the ante, urging Jack, “I fear you will have to deal with this matter in the harshest possible way, Mr. Torrance.” Jack responds, with the sadistic brutality of someone bent on violence, “There’s nothing I look forward to with greater pleasure, Mr. Grady.”
As Jack delivers this line, his jaw is set, jutted slightly forward, as if he’s some kind of wild boar with tusks, hungry for blood. Indeed, he licks his lips, nodding in something like erotic pleasure as he agrees to slaughter his family. Nothing, after all, would give him greater pleasure.
Somehow, Grady unlocks the door – whatever the spectral and supernatural presences are in the hotel, they are capable of moving matter, of acting both on people and on things.
Once released from the food locker by Grady, Jack grabs the infamous axe that anyone who has seen this film remembers. He finds Wendy and Danny, holed up in their suite, and begins to chop through the door with the axe, while Wendy screams and Danny appears entirely possessed by Tony.
Wendy pushes Danny up and out a window in the bathroom, into the snow outside; this is the moment at which that fire truck would have come in handy.
Tragically, Wendy, although thin, cannot fit herself through the window, so she is trapped alone in the bathroom while Jack—his eyes wild, his hair disheveled-begins quoting the story of the Big Bad Wolf, saying he’ll huff and puff and blow the house in.
With the conclusion of his deranged nursery rhyme, he begins to chop his way through the door. Wendy screams, her eyes round as coins, as she retreats into a corner. Accentuating her vulnerability, she’s clad in a bathrobe throughout these final, horrifying scenes of the film.
She is a perfect, abject, absolute picture of a domestic violence victim. Duvall isn’t really acting in this scene but channeling. She’s channeling the unheard suffering of untold thousands of American women every year who are subjected to terrifying, and sometimes lethal, domestic violence, both in 1980 and today.
In a reprieve for Wendy, Jack suddenly leaves her alone to go look for the source of a sound he hears—it turns out to be Mr. Hallorann, who’s been summoned psychically by Danny from his winter home in Florida. Mr. Hallorann’s arrival feels like a miracle, because suddenly Wendy and Danny are no longer completely alone with their abuser. Better still, Hallorann has arrived on a borrowed snowcat, which can easily hold Wendy and Danny as well as Hallorann himself, so there’s now a very real possibility of escape from the domestic prison of the Overlook. Hallorann, alas, doesn’t know quite what he’s walking into, however.
We see him walking down one of the main corridors of the hotel when—unexpectedly – Jack emerges from around a corner and chops into Mr. Hallorann’s chest with his axe. Hallorann dies immediately; with his death, our hopes for Wendy and Danny’s extrication sink once again.
Enraged that someone from the outside has attempted to help Danny and Wendy, Jack pursues Danny outside, eager to kill him.
Throughout the scene, Jack’s psychopathy is in stark focus: He’s huffing and puffing, his eyes wild like a rabid animal.
Meanwhile, tiny Danny, dressed in very insufficient clothing for a Colorado blizzard, trudges desperately through deep snow, making for the hedge maze.
Jack chases Danny in the blinding snow into the maze, and now we realize that Danny – who has done this hedge maze many times with Wendy—has the advantage.
We see him from behind, backlit, running through the snow at top speed. He seems incredibly, impossibly vulnerable in the harsh blue light of the shot, a tiny little boy in a sweater, hiding from his murderous father in a snowstorm.
While we watch him run, we hear Jack screaming “Danny!’ in a blind rage, and strange, Satanic-sounding discordant music plays in the background.
But Danny turns the forbidding and fast-falling snow to his benefit by retracing his footprints, walking backward, so that his path appears to end abruptly, for no reason. He does this slowly— agonizingly slowly for the viewer, who knows that Jack can’t possibly be that far behind him. But clever little Danny keeps at it until he gets to a fork in the labyrinth that he can hop over to, using his hands to blot out the path to his hiding place.
Jack, meanwhile, giggles sadistically and clutches his thin jacket to himself, his face lowered and his eyes gazing straight on in a bull-like expression.
Finally, Jack catches up to Danny’s last footprint, but there’s no Danny. When Jack realizes Danny has subjected him to some kind of ruse, he puffs air into his cheeks and decides to look for Danny down another path— fortunately for Danny, the wrong one.
Danny escapes the maze by racing back along his own footsteps. But Jack, in his mental disorientation, cannot escape and freezes to death overnight, as Wendy and Jack escape in Mr. Hallorann’s snowcat.
One of the final shots of the film shows Jack, frozen stiff and solid, sitting in the snow, his eyes still open and menacing, though no longer alive.
The domestic abuse dynamic in this film is far from subtle.
We know that Jack is a child abuser—he broke Danny’s arm in prior years. We know he’s an alcoholic—and we know that, whether spectrally or actually, he’s been drinking heavily again. We know he fits the “compulsively male” profile of wife beaters that 1970s-era sociological literature characterized. None of these dynamics are marginal or borderline; all are present in both the film and the novel it was based upon.
The Shining, both on the page and on the screen, is a horror about domestic violence.
Kubrick’s domestic horror changes King’s ending, however, in a way that raises an important question about domestic violence in 1980 and beyond.
In the novel, Hallorann’s life is spared, and he helps Wendy and Danny escape; in the film, Hallorann is murdered by Jack’s hand. So, when Wendy escapes with Danny, she does so with no assistance, all on her own, the “final girl” of the film. Empowered. Self-saving. Kubrick revised King’s ending to make Wendy the uncontested heroine, kind of like Ripley in Alien.
To me, the change to the novel’s ending is disappointing, even if more dramatic, because it understates the extraordinary difficulty that abuse survivors face in attempting to escape their abusers.
If the 1970s studies of domestic violence had shown anything, it was that King’s novel was closer to reality: Women did need help—usually a lot of help—to escape situations of domestic violence.
Colorado in 1980 isn’t the interstellar space of some futuristic sci-fi film; it’s reality, part of the United States of America.
The obstacles – social, financial, physical, psychological, circumstantial, legal, vehicular-faced by American women in situations of domestic violence were not just often but almost always too great to overcome on their own. Women needed shelters. They needed new laws. They needed more social support.
They needed allies. They needed family members and friends. They needed someone like Hallorann to help them drive the escape vehicle. They still do.
It’s not weakness but vulnerability to need help, and I hope we all know by now that there’s a huge difference between the two.
Abuse victims need advocates who can hear them and who will listen. And that’s exactly what Hallorann does. Hallorann saves Wendy and Danny because, through Danny, he could see and hear what was going on. Because he chose to listen, he could act.
What King insists upon in his novel is that more people need to be listening for the cries of abuse victims and to act, because those victims often cannot help themselves. The revision to the end of the film may indeed be feminist, from a certain viewpoint: Wendy gets powerful!
Go, Wendy, go! However, it is also a simplification of the ways in which women might actually achieve safety in these situations. Women need help, not because they are weak but because their entrappers are demonic. Ripley’s escape option appears to be the only one that works decisively: Blow up the domestic space altogether. Although, as we know from the sequels, even that doesn’t really work.
In fact, the idea of destroying the domestic space of violence as a way of ending things decisively was in King’s mind, too. In his novel, the hotel burns to the ground at the end – the boiler having exploded through Jack’s lack of attention and care. Whatever violent malignancy haunted that place is put to rest.
In the film, by sharp contrast, the hotel survives intact – and that particular aspect of Kubrick’s revision works beautifully.
Wendy and Danny escape in the snowcat, and Jack freezes to death, but the hotel remains, no doubt to ensnare and torment another family down the line.
Indeed, the very last shot of the film slowly zooms in on a photograph, hanging on a wall in the Overlook, dated to 1921 that features our Jack in a party scene, front and center, gazing directly and brazenly at the camera. I’m still here, he seems to say. This place of domestic terror, it appears, will not be burned down or blown up by this film, and Jack Torrance will merely be absorbed into its host of violent, misogynistic, abusive ghosts. So even though Kubrick minimizes the importance of outside aid in Wendy and Danny’s escape, he revises King’s ending to accentuate the fragility and impermanence of that escape. Horror hangover extraordinaire.
So, The Shining is obviously a film committed both to its supernaturalness but also, crucially, to its realism. It’s a film about a haunted hotel and a haunted person (Jack), but it’s also a film – like The Exorcist—about the demonic, cruel, and altogether too real forces of violence that lie in the heart of patriarchy. Jack isn’t just a scary monster; he’s a stand-in for a very real and all-too-pervasive kind of person, an abuser, a domestic terrorist, a predator in the home.
Wendy and Danny, meanwhile, represent the hundreds of thousands of domestic abuse victims in the United States every year.
That’s why I love the final zoom on the photograph so much: “Jack” is always there, staring, waiting to pounce again.
This hyperrealism is accentuated by the very casting choices of the film. It’s surely no accident that the actor who plays Danny’s real name is Danny, nor that the actor who plays Jack’s real name is Jack. When Shelley Duvall screams “Jack!” in horror, she’s screaming that at a person who is both a fictional man named Jack Torrance and a real-life man named Jack Nicholson.
The depth of horror that Duvall’s face registers throughout the latter half of the film is surely partially about the vertigo she must have felt, screaming for her life against this oddly twinned “Jack” who stood before her, looking way, way too malicious and predatory to be mere fiction.
I should note that the infamous drugging and rape of the thirteen-year-old Samantha Geimer by Roman Polanski transpired in 1977—three years before the release of The Shining – at the home of Jack Nicholson.
When Nicholson flaps his tongue lasciviously at Duvall on the staircase as he threatens to kill her, it’s somewhere uncomfortably short of pure make-believe.
Indeed, Duvall has gone on record many times saying that Stanley Kubrick himself terrorized and tormented her, to elicit the most shattered and horrified performance from her that he could.
The documentary film The Making of “The Shining” shows scenes where Shelley Duvall, drained and exhausted, is lying on the floor, being propped up with pillows and blankets, while female crew members stroke her hands and attempt to console her.
In interviews for The Making of, Duvall says the filming was so stressful that it impacted her health. Also in The Making of, we see a moment when Shelley Duvall’s hair has been ripped out during shooting of the bathroom scene. She complains, and Kubrick says to the crew, “Don’t sympathize with Shelley.” When you watch Wendy come apart at the seams, you’re seeing real psychological anguish on-screen. Shelley Duvall really was abused in the making of this film.
Precisely because of that dynamic, Shelley Duvall took a lot of heat for her performance in The Shining. Reviewers said she seemed weak and defeated.
The harshest review of her performance that I’ve read characterizes her as follows: She “transforms from the warm, sympathetic wife of the book into a simpering, semi-retarded hysteric whom nobody could be locked up with for the winter without harboring murderous thoughts.” A “hysteric” who’s asking for it – sounds an awful lot like the pre-1970s justification for wife battery.
One slightly more astute reviewer noted that she was “a cipher, a seeming amateur, a waif dragged into a house full of expert actors.” She grated on reviewers’ nerves, appearing more a “ludicrously helpless wife.” But that is the genius of her performance, not its shortcoming: She is ludicrously helpless, because that is what it means to live in an abusive household. You are helpless beyond belief because you are being held hostage by a person who likes— maybe even lives—to terrorize and torment you.
She channels a woman who has been slowly beaten down by an alcoholic husband who abuses her verbally and her son physically.
In the scene in the bathroom, as we watch Jack’s axe hack through the door, the horror that Duvall displays on her face and that Kubrick captures, telegraphs a radical and complete abjection.
She truly is a cipher—a conduit for the agony and horror endured by hundreds of thousands of American women each year who live in a home that, far from being a safe retreat from a dangerous world, is itself a world of danger and peril.
But, as I suggested in the introduction, the power of art is that it anticipates and accelerates social change.
Reviewers and many audience members at that time weren’t ready to acknowledge the torture and psychological collapse of Shelley Duvall for what it was: the picture of domestic violence.
Many Americans who viewed the film simply couldn’t process what they were seeing, so they blamed their discomfort on Duvall’s hair, or her mouth, or her scrawniness, or her “hysteria.”
As scholar Elizabeth Hornbeck also notes, people dismissed Duvall in a manner strikingly similar to how they often dismissed claims of domestic abuse – the women were asking for it, weak, or crazy somehow.
But despite those critiques of Duvall’s performance, something about the film wormed its way into American public culture and stayed there.
The film quickly became a classic of the horror genre and an absolute staple of Kubrick’s oeuvre. Within a decade, it became enough of a classic—as did Duvall’s performance in it – that reviewers sought her out to interview her about her method for channeling Wendy’s abjection.
Indeed, renowned film critic Roger Ebert interviewed Duvall ten years after the film’s release to ask her what it was like to work on that set.
“Jack Nicholson’s character had to be crazy and angry all the time,” she said, “and my character had to cry twelve hours a day, all day long, the last nine months straight, five or six days a week. I was there a year and a month. After all that work… the reviews were all about Kubrick, like I wasn’t even there.”
Duvall’s frustration at the reception of her acting in the film is telling: She wasn’t entirely acting, she was experiencing pain, suffering, fear, and stress.
When I watch Duvall’s performance, I find myself thinking about the horrific Edvard Munch painting The Scream – like that painting, Duvall’s performance is an embodiment of absolute fear. It’s somewhat depersonalized, somewhat anonymous, somewhat ethereal. And it’s all the more powerful for being that way because we can imagine ourselves—or anyone else we know – stepping into her life, into her horror, into her entrapment.
Within the same decade in which Duvall went from gangly hysteric to preeminent scream queen, the situation changed markedly for victims of domestic abuse in the United States.
In 1979, only fourteen states provided any funding at all for battered women’s shelters in the United States; by 1989, the US had 1,200 battered women’s shelters, which provided aid to 300,000 victims per year.
Much of this social change originated in activism, legal advocacy, successful prosecutions of abusers, media coverage, and pressure from grassroots organizations of women, but for American people to watch Shelley Duvall’s complete and total entrapment would have driven home the point that so many shelter-focused activists were making: Women cannot leave if they have nowhere to go.
Duvall’s performance drove home what had been right there in prior works of domestic horror art, but maybe just below the level of conscious gettability for audiences.
Sure, Rosemary can’t easily get away from the coven, but she can go see her doctors and, on occasion, her friends. Chris is in thrall to the demon every bit as much as Regan is, but she still manages to go out to see doctors and priests. Joanna has quite a bit of freedom of movement, until the end of Stepford Wives, same with Kathy from The Omen. Ellen Ripley is every bit as imprisoned as Wendy Torrance, but her imprisonment feels incidental because she’s trapped on a floating domestic space, and everyone else is trapped right along with her.
Wendy’s entrapment feels obvious, manifest, total, unbreachable. She’s trapped by the hotel; by Jack; by the weather; by the distance to any other person or place, to any kind of shelter.
The horror of The Shining isn’t ultimately the ghosts in the hotel. It’s Jack and his total imprisonment of Wendy. And, as viewers, we are trapped with her.
I often think that what people dislike about Wendy’s face, body, voice, and affect in the film is really that they see themselves too much in her. We don’t want to see ourselves as weak, trapped, panicky, shrill, or hysterical. Wouldn’t we all just find a way to get out of there? Of course we would, right? Well, historically and demographically, the answer to that question is no. And early viewers and reviewers of the film balked at that painful realization that they, too, might be made weak, terrorized, and powerless by an unstrung abuser in the house with them.
The Shining is not just a supernatural horror story about a ghost-ridden hotel; it is first and foremost an allegory for sustained domestic violence, inflicted and justified by a man who honestly believes his wife and children owe him their lives.
And, of course, this belief is precisely what drives femicide in the United States today.
As author and counselor Lundy Bancroft has amply shown in his revelatory work Why Does He Do That?, the core motivation for domestic violence against women isn’t centrally psychopathology or alcoholism— though, to be sure, as in Jack Torrance’s case, these things can be in play as well—but is instead the pervasive belief in the lesser humanity of women and children, the pervasive belief in the fundamental, categorical superiority of the male head of household and his basic right to expect and compel obedience, compliance, respect, and—if necessary—sacrifice and humiliation from those with whom he cohabits.
Jack Torrance is moved to slaughter Wendy and Danny immediately by the ghosts that have invaded his mind; the reason the ghosts are able to invade, however, is that he already possesses the belief structures that enable them to get a toehold.
Many early reviews of the prior five films in this book didn’t explicitly recognize the domestic violence and domestic horror dynamics at work in the films.
With The Shining, however, contemporaneous reviews were very clear on the abuse dynamics that underpin the film, though all put their emphasis on Jack’s portrayal of an abuser, rather than on Wendy’s abject channeling of the abused.
Roger Ebert asserted, in his luminous review of the film, that it was “not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them. Jack is an alcoholic and child abuser.”
Janet Maslin, writing for The New York Times, noted that it’s relatively easy to scare people, but that the genius of The Shining was “to accentuate the horrifying aspects of things that are familiar.” She goes on to note that Kubrick manages to make his movie thoroughly unnerving by keeping the horror so close to home.”
She even refers to The Shining as “domestic terror.”
Between 1968 and 1980, mainstream, prominent reviewers had become aware of domestic abuse. They’d become aware that familiar things, things and people in the home, are often where the danger lies. By 1980, domestic horror was a recognized type of horror, and The Shining was seen as its apotheosis.
But The Shining stood on the shoulders of Rosemary, Chris, Joanna, Kathy, and Ripley, and it took another thirty years before filmmakers really started working through the overall inheritance of these films together.
hexafu 