a psychoanalytic approach to stanley kubrick´s the shining · kubrick’s psychological and...
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José Sanz de Vicuña Casals
Facultad de Letras y de la Educación
Grado en Estudios Ingleses
2016-2017
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Director/es
Facultad
Titulación
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TRABAJO FIN DE GRADO
Curso Académico
A Psychoanalytic Approach to Stanley Kubrick´s TheShining
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Trabajo de Fin de Grado
A PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH TO
STANLEY KUBRICK’S THE SHINING
Autor:
José Sanz de Vicuña Casals
Tutor/es:
Fdo. José Diaz Cuesta
Titulación:
Grado en Estudios Ingleses [601G]
Facultad de Letras y de la Educación
AÑO ACADÉMICO: 2016/2017
3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract .................................................................................................................................. 5
Resumen ................................................................................................................................. 5
1. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 7
2. METHODOLOGY FOR THE ANALYSIS ................................................................. 11
3. OBJECTIVES OF THE ANALYSIS ........................................................................... 15
4. ANALYSIS OF THE FILM ......................................................................................... 17
5. CONCLUSIONS .......................................................................................................... 45
6. REFERENCES ............................................................................................................. 47
7. ANNEX ........................................................................................................................ 49
5
Abstract
My final year dissertation deals with the premise of a psychoanalytic analysis of the main
characters of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining. By doing this, I attempt to show
that the plot of the movie and for the most part everything that happens from beginning to
end can be explained as the delusions of three mentally unstable individuals who are
overwhelmed by their own demons and isolated from society in a place that is by itself the
representation of hell on earth. To be able to do so, I have based myself in the theory
published in 1923 by Sigmund Freud, who gave an insight about the different parts of the
human mind. I mainly refer to the difference between conscious and unconscious, and the
id and the ego.
Resumen
Mi trabajo de fin de grado se basa en la premisa de un análisis psicoanalítico de los
personajes principales de la película de 1980 dirigida por Stanley Kubrick y de título El
Resplandor. Haciendo esto, intento mostrar que la mayor parte de elementos que
conforman la trama pueden ser explicados como las ilusiones que tres individuos
mentalmente inestables sufren al ser desbordados por sus propios demonios, e
influenciados por un lugar que es directamente el infierno sobre la tierra. Para poder
conseguirlo, me he basado en la teoría publicada por Sigmund Freud en 1923, en la cual
dio su acercamiento hacia las diferentes partes de la mente humana. Hago alusión
principalmente a las diferencias entre consciente e inconsciente, e igualmente a las
diferencias del id y el ego.
7
1. INTRODUCTION
Like most of my fellow classmates, I had a really difficult time when choosing the
theme for my final year dissertation, as it is not an easy task to choose such an important
part of my tasks as a university student. At first, I wanted to do my work about comic
books and their relevance in modern society, but, I soon came to realize that this particular
topic was very broad and would take from me a titanic effort to develop it as I had planned
to, so, in the end, I chose to analyse a film from one of my favourite movie directors,
Stanley Kubrick. My other option was Quentin Tarantino, and these particular choices
where in my head not because the themes of the films, or how famous they became, but
because their way of making a movie, which I find very peculiar and special. The
particular choice of this film, The Shining, came to me because it is one of the first horror
movies I had seen in my entire life, and the way it was made, as it is an adaptation from
one of my favourite writers, Stephen King, made me take a particular interest in this film.
We also have to bear in mind that The Shining was Kubrick’s first time directing a horror
movie, but it did not discourage him at all, as he liked King’s novel very much (Polo 1999:
147).
When I started looking for sources to help me write the dissertation, I stumbled
across this review of the film by Janet Maslin, written in 1980, the year the film debuted,
and I knew I had to comment on the first paragraph to my work: it explains very well the
idea that I want to try and explain with this dissertation. In it, Maslin defines the movie, as
well as the Overlook hotel, as very frightening and prone to scare the spectator. In fact, she
says that it is the first movie to scare the audiences with a simple “Tuesday” (Maslin 1980:
1).
It has been said in several sources, for example in Ian Nathan’s review of the film
on 2012, that Stephen King, the author of the novel in which the film is based hated the
movie. This is due to the fact that Kubrick did not make a real and faithful adaptation of
the book, he left out a lot of supernatural themes and scenarios and focused in a more
ambiguous interpretation of the story, and this is precisely the core of my dissertation, how
Kubrick’s psychological and two-sided approach to the story enabled the viewers to choose
how they wanted to see the story, as a ghost one or as a psychological one (Nathan 2012:
1).
Some critics also support the idea that Kubrick saw himself in Jack Torrance, and
that the story that he wanted to represent with the film was slightly autobiographical, but
8
his real inspiration derived from Stephen Crane’s story “The Blue Hotel” (Baxter 1999:
301).
There have been, of course, some bad critics to the film from people who, like King,
preferred the book to the film, mostly because of the plot. But I have not yet encountered a
critic about this film that speaks badly of it at a technical level, since, as everyone agrees,
The Shining sits at the top of the amount of effort that a crew can make to make a movie.
In this year, I have attended a course that dealt with the making of a short movie, and we
had to, of course, re-do several scenes. But the degree of perfectionism that Kubrick
imposed to this film was a hundred times more excruciating than ours. As said by Roger
Ebert, and only to quote one example of this excessive need for perfection: “There is one
take involving Scatman Crothers that Kubrick famously repeated 160 times. Was that
"perfectionism," or was it a mind game designed to convince the actors they were trapped
in the hotel with another madman, their director?” (Ebert 2006: 1).
There is also a great summary of what the movie entails written by Paul Duncan:
Stanley Kubrick no tardó en darse cuenta de que «somos capaces de los actos más
bondadosos y los más perversos: el problema es que, a menudo, cuando nos interesa,
no distinguimos entre unos y otros». Esto se convertiría en uno de sus temas
recurrentes, un leitmotiv que repetiría en todas sus películas. El bien y el mal. El
amor y el dio. El sexo y la violencia. El deseo y el miedo. La fidelidad y la traición.
Los protagonistas de todas sus cintas mantienen una lucha interior con estas fuerzas,
mientras las circunstancias exteriores (una guerra, un romance o un crimen) sirven
para subrayar el conflicto ante los espectadores (Duncan 2003: 9)1
The main theme of this movie, The Shining, is, in fact, really common, and it is not
by any means revolutionary. It has to do with ghosts and a haunted place where the
protagonists have to face off with the dark spirits of the underworld in an attempt to make
it out alive of that place. But the interesting twist about this typical archetype of a ghost
story that is given here is that, perhaps, there is no such thing as spirits or presences, or at
least, not in a way that they would directly interfere with the real world. From my point of
view, and this is the principal aim of my dissertation, the psychological state of the
1 This and other similar quotations appear in Spanish because that is the language this and some other sources are available at the Library of the University of La Rioja.
9
characters is, if not more, as important to the dark and horrible development of the story as
the paranormal activities that happen around the Overlook hotel.
Even at the first stretches of the film, we can already feel a very unsettling
atmosphere around the story and the characters, neither their dialogue nor their expressions
are very normal. Jack Nicholson, for example, made an outstanding work with his facial
expression and gestures, giving the feeling of being literally possessed in contrast with his
calm aspect at the beginning of the film. There is also a connection between the idea of
progression and the different angles the camera uses to show that progression, for instance,
the movie opens with an extremely long shot, which starts developing into medium shots
for the first half of the movie to end up with practically a lot of closeups (Polo 1999: 150-
151).
11
2. METHODOLOGY FOR THE ANALYSIS
The methodology I have decided to use in order to analyse the movie is
psychoanalysis, and I will be basing that methodology with the theory that appears in the
2010’s republication of the 1923 book The EGO and the ID, by Sigmund Freud. There are
two chapters of the book that I am using in order to analyse the characters of this film, so I
am going to explain them in the order they appear in the book. Firstly, I will talk about the
differentiation between consciousness and unconsciousness, related for the most part to
Dany, the son of the Torrance family, who has developed a second persona inside of him,
who at some point of the movie will awaken and leave Danny in the subconscious part of
his mind. Secondly, I will explain the idea and the differences between the Id and the Ego,
two of the three parts that compose our psyche. The third one, the Super Ego, is present in
one character, Mr. Hallorann. Freud explains the Super Ego as the learnt segment of the
mind, acquired when a child has gotten rid of the Oedipus complex and therefore fixates in
the figure of his father, being it his real father or other social constructs as the laws or
Religion. Danny could be another representative of the Super Ego? Yes, but that influence
is given to him by Tony, by himself, so his Super Ego is not completely real, is
encapsulated into his own representation of reality, as Danny does not trust Jack nor likes
him in the slightest. He knows that there is nothing to be learnt from him (Freud 2010: 30-
35).
At the beginning of the book, Freud gives his explanation of what the conscious and
the unconscious are. Stating that conscious is purely a descriptive term, which is based on
the most direct and certain character. To reinforce that idea, he explains that every mental
element, giving the example of an idea, will not be, as a rule, permanently conscious. Then
he proceeds to explain the idea of the state of consciousness, which is explained by the fact
that the same idea that was conscious a moment ago might not be conscious now. That idea
is latent, in his own words, it was capable of becoming conscious at any time. After that,
he postulates that the words latent and unconscious are the same in this context.
What is to be extracted from this explanation to be used for the dissertation? The idea
of unconscious as something latent and capable of becoming conscious if certain
conditions are met is the exact explanation for what happens to Tony and Danny. In that
sense, we could say that Tony is the embodiment of the unconscious. Even though he
interacts with Danny, he is not really there at any moment, until the shock received by
12
Danny, who cannot cope with the situation that is going on around him, make him become
conscious and take Danny’s body.
For the second part I am going to explain the idea that Freud develops about what the
Ego and the Id are, and the relationship between them. Lastly, I will explain how these
ideas will help me analyse the characters of the movie.
First of all, we have the idea of the Ego, which Freud describes as follows:
The idea that in every individual there is a coherent organization of mental processes,
which we call his ego”. This ego includes consciousness and it controls the
approaches to motility, i.e. to the discharge of excitations into the external world; it is
this institution in the mind that regulates all its own constituent processes, and which
goes to sleep at night, though even then it continues to exercise a censorship upon
dreams (Freud 2010: 8).
As we can see, Freud mainly describes the concept of ego as the part of our minds
that coherently organizes the mental processes, even when we sleep, and which also is
responsible of the repression of our basic instincts. It is like a kind of resistance that we
impose to ourselves even without knowing it, that makes limitations to what we think of or
feel. The example of Jack in the movie is a very good one to what the ego is trying to
control and supress. Jack is a child abuser and hates his family. This is a fact. But it is not
until the cabin fever removes his ego, and thus, his limitations, that he finally is able to
express what he really feels. He is bored of Wendy and his son is but a nuisance for him.
He does not love any of them at all. There is also the fact that the hotel also has a great
negative influence on Jack, pushing him to directly try to kill his family, manipulating his
hatred.
Secondly comes the idea of id, which is explained as that repressed part of the mind,
the part which is behind the ego, but not completely separated from it. Id and ego, even if
by a very thin thread, are connected in every person. Now I will quote some passages from
this part of the book in the hope that they will help with the understanding of the
relationship of these two parts of our mind.
It is easy to see that the ego is that part of the id that has been modified by the direct
influence of the external world. In a sense, it is an extension of the surface
differentiation. Moreover, the ego has the task of bringing the influence of the
external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies, and endeavors to substitute the
13
reality-principle for the pleasure principle, which reigns supreme in the id. […] In the
ego, perception plays the part which, in the id, devolves upon the instinct. The ego
represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id, which contains the
passions (Freud 2010: 23-24).
From my point of view, these two fragments do great at representing what is meant
when referring to the ego and the id. One is the suppressor, the other is the supressed. At
the start of the movie, Jack is a completely normal individual who has a relatively
complete control over his desires. I mean relative because he has problems with alcohol
which led him to even hurt his son, Danny. So in my opinion his id is not completely
restrained by his ego from the first minute of the movie, and I think that the Overlook hotel
takes advantage of that fact to manipulate him more easily than, for example Wendy, who
starts as a very docile character, very restrained by her ego. But who, in the end, opposite
to Jack, will find in the release of her id the strength to fight for herself and Danny. Allen
Nelson also supports this idea, explaining that Jack is torn apart by the duality of his moral
education and his urge to release his diseased libido (Nelson 2000: 198).
15
3. OBJECTIVES OF THE ANALYSIS
In this dissertation, I analyse differences between the conscious and the
unconscious, and the ego and the id of the protagonists, as well as try and determine how
they really are, and if that has a direct impact on the action of the film itself, or not. As a
matter of fact, there is a great deal of representations of the unconscious in this movie, and
the characters are quite complex, so they will not be the same as they were when the movie
starts. We have to bear in mind, however, that this movie is in fact an adaptation from a
Stephen King book, The Shining (1977) so many details where, sadly, omitted, and that has
to do with the personality of the characters, making them less deep than they should, but
not to a point where we cannot even analyse them: they are pretty well constructed
characters.
Another important fact about the movie is the idea of resonance. Michael Clement
has pointed out that this movie and another one of Kubrick’s films, Eyes Wide Shut (1999)¸
constituted a matched pair. One as a horrific vision of what happens when a man is isolated
with his family for too long, and the other about what happens when a man ventures too far
outside the protective structure of the family (Rodney 2008: 446).
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4. ANALYSIS OF THE FILM
The film starts in a very peculiar manner, for the first three minutes of the film we
are following Jack Torrance, one of the main characters, as he makes his way to the
Overlook Hotel. These first three minutes help to build the tension for the spectators
because of the way it is filmed, with an aerial point of view, and the unsettling music that
was chosen for this scene, which, in a way, tells the spectators that what is happening
before them is the start of something bad. The kind of camera present here is a
disembodied one, there is no cameraman involved in the shot, which gives the spectator a
purely subjective impression of effortless mobility, which could be compared to Dave
Bowman’s journey. The music accompanying the shot is called “Wrath of God”, which
helps to add a sinister note to it (Rasmussen 2001: 234).
F001
Then we are presented with one of the few chapters in which the story is represented.
It is called the interview, and we are properly introduced to the character of Jack, who, at
first glance, seems to be a very polite and normal man. He is introduced to the director of
the Hotel, so we suppose he has business there.
Then, suddenly, the action shifts towards the other two main characters, Wendy,
Jack’s wife, and Danny, his son. They are arguing about the possibility of living in the
Hotel if Jack is accepted as the new warden, but Tony, Danny’s imaginary friend,
strangely does not feel very good about the idea of going. As we will see shortly after,
Tony is the representation of Danny’s unconscious thoughts, and his way to canalize his
visions, as he is very young and afraid to cope with them on his own. Wendy is introduced
as a very normal and caring mother, and her character will remain like that for the most
part of the film.
18
After the introduction of Jack’s family, we are back at the Hotel, when the interview
is being held, and Jack is told a series of characteristics of the place, as his exact work will
be to take care of the hotel through the winter, as the emplacement of the hotel, on top of a
mountain, makes it inaccessible from October 31st (note this is the night of Halloween) to
May the 15th. The director, then, reaches the part when he admits that some years ago, the
warden who was supposed to take care of the hotel went mad and killed his wife and his
two daughters with an axe, and then killed himself. Jack laughs at the story and assures the
director that “That is not going to happen to me.” This is quite a revelation, because this is
precisely what is going to happen in the end.
F002
In Jack’s first scene, we can begin to grasp his ego. He seems like a cheerful man,
eager to work and without any type of mental problems. He also seems stable enough to
not be discouraged by the idea that a man killed his family with an axe during the winter of
1970. In fact, this scene was commented by Roger Ebert, one of the most famous
American film critics, as the starting point for his review of the film, a comment that went
as follows:
Stanley Kubrick's cold and frightening "The Shining" challenges us to decide: Who
is the reliable observer? Whose idea of events can we trust? In the opening scene at
a job interview, the characters seem reliable enough, although the dialogue has a
formality that echoes the small talk on the space station in "2001." We meet Jack
Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a man who plans to live for the winter in solitude and
isolation with his wife and son (Ebert 2006: 1).
In the middle of the dialogue scene, we are introduced to the other two members of
the Torrance family: Wendy, the mother, and Danny, the son. They hold a short
19
conversation about the hotel and Danny’s imaginary friend, Tony, is also introduced,
adding that he does not want to go to the Overlook.
At first sight, it would be considered normal for a kid of Danny’s age to have an
imaginary friend, but, just after Jack’s conversation is over, we see Danny having his own
dialogue with Tony, telling him to show him why he does not want to go to the hotel. This
conversation is the first example of the paranormal in the film, because Tony already
knows that Jack got the job, and shows Danny a fragment of the future: an elevator full of
blood. But apart from the paranormal conception of Tony, it is safe to say that he also
happens to be a huge support to Danny’s fragile ego, acting as a kind of brotherly figure to
him, and giving him a way to alleviate his stress. We could also say that Tony is Danny’s
way of manifesting his powers, referred to as the shining in the film. Being a kid and afraid
of what he can do, he has created another persona inside of him that works as the
perpetrator of the powers he possesses but does not want to use
F003 F004
After the shock of seeing what awaits at the hotel, Dany is checked by a doctor.
From what we can imply from the scene, Danny has probably peed himself and passed out,
because when he was brushing his teeth and had the vision, he was wearing pants, and in
the bed, he is not wearing them. When asking about Tony, he says that “He is the boy that
lives in my mouth.” But he does not want to add any details. In this scene Wendy is with
the doctor and Dany and appears as a very loving and caring mother, a type of behaviour
she will keep for the most part of the movie. This motherly behaviour will take two
different roads, one for Jack and another for Danny, becoming fear towards Jack from the
second half of the movie and the desire to protect Danny from Jack. It is in this moment
when she will awaken as an active part of the story. After seeing Dany, the Doctor and
Wendy have a little conversation where we find out that, in a drunken rage, Jack dislocated
Dany’s shoulder when he was younger because he messed with Jack’s papers, and this
happened to coincide with the arrival of Tony, so I think it is safe to say that there is a deep
20
connection between the trauma that Danny suffered because of the physical abuse he
suffered and the need to let go of the stress caused by the shock, therefore creating Tony.
The next few scenes are all about the Torrance family arriving at the Overlook hotel
and having a tour around it, and then we see Danny, playing alone until he has the very
first confrontation with the twin sisters. A curious thing about this is that in the interview
that Jack had with Mr. Ullman at the start of the movie, he stated that the girls were 8 and
10 years old, but their real appearance is as twins.
F005
In the following scene, Wendy asks Mr. Ullman when the hotel was built, and he
answers that between 1907 and 1909, but the interesting part about that is that he also
states that the hotel was built in an ancient Indian burial ground, something that in the
American imaginary has been many times related with the idea of the haunted as if the
spirits of the Indians had made a curse of the place that was their sacred ground. This idea
is not directly related with the psychological explanation for the events of the film that I
want to convey, but we need to keep in mind that the story is never clear in this aspect,
whether the events are real but supernatural or unreal and psychological. In my opinion,
the supernatural connotations of the hotel could very well be explained in the context of
the hotel being haunted by Indian spirits, who made it with an evil mind of its own,
programmed to kill everyone he could during the winter as a vengeance towards the people
who built the hotel.
21
.
F006
On the last part of the tour, Mr. Ullman introduces Jack and Wendy to Dick
Hallorann, the head chef of the hotel and one of the most important characters from my
point of view, even if he is not of a real relevance for the story. Dick Hallorann is the one
who explains Danny what “the shining” is, and he even uses it with him, making a kind of
telepathic link that will make him go in his aid in the final compasses of the movie.
F007 F008
Another detail to keep in mind is that every time that Danny’s power manifests, there
is a very particular sound, like a squeal.
I like this character and I think that he is important because he is the one that offers
the stronger connection with the real world when madness strikes and the hotel, when
everyone is suffering and afraid, he seems as the helping had coming to aid the family,
only to be killed by Jack’s axe.
During their conversation, Dick Hallorann and Danny discuss about the real nature of
the Overlook, and Mr. Hallorann refers to the hotel as a place with a shining to it as well.
Danny knows that bad things happened there, but Mr. Hallorann tries to deny that anything
is wrong with the place so Danny feels safer. I think that Hallorann has a very paternal
feeling towards Danny, he cares about him and they connect at a very special level,
22
probably because of the shining they possess. He also has a carefree but strong personality,
given the fact of his adamant advice towards Danny keeping out of room 237.
Now the film does a jump of one month into the future, and Wendy and Jack are
having a conversation in their bedroom, when Jack tells his wife that he had fallen in love
with the hotel right away, and that when he came for the first time, it was like he had
already been there. This is a very important piece of information because in the last scene
of the movie, we can see Jack in a picture from the Ball of July of 1921. We have to bear
in mind that the film takes place during the 80s, as it was filmed in 1980 and King’s book
written in 1980.
Up until this point of the film, the behaviour held by all three of the family members
had been normal, even though they spent the most part of the day separated. Jack in the
Colorado lounge with his writing, Wendy taking care of the hotel and Danny playing by
himself. It is not until the 45th minute of the film when we get to see a significant change in
Jack’s behaviour. In the scene, Wendy arrives to check on Jack, who is writing, he gets
very angry at her because she is breaking his concentration, and kicks her out of the place.
In this scene, we witness the first sign of Jack’s mental deterioration. His ego is being
slowly but steadily being overtaken by his id, but the unnatural fast pace at which this
occurs can be explained by again two theories: that he is starting to suffer from cabin fever
or that there is something else manipulating his mind.
F009
In the following scene, we are confirmed with Jack’s insanity, as we see him looking
at Wendy and Danny through the window with a completely lost expression, swinging
between anger and laughter, demonstrating his growing mental deterioration. In this
particular sequence, there exists the perfect example of the type of view Kubrick wanted to
give to the film, and this quote from Zunzuneugi explains it perfectly:
23
Jack Torrance acecha desde el interior del hotel a su familia, que camina a través del
jardín-laberinto. Inmediatamente se acerca y observa una maqueta que reproduce
hasta en sus menores detalles el laberinto. Cuando el contraplano se produce –
vertical, gigantesco, desmesurado– mostrará el laberinto real en el que se pierden
pequeños insectos– la esposa y el hijo de Torrance.
Es, precisamente, en la fractura que introduce esta escena donde más claramente se
pone de manifiesto el dispositivo que funciona en El resplandor. Sustitución de
puntos de vista. Trampa visual en la que el espectador es zarandeado entre miradas
bien diversas. La mirada de Torrance. La mirada de Dios. La mirada de Kubrick
(2007: 590).
F010 F011
Now we experience another short jump in time, and are presented with several
scenes, like Jack writing again in his desk or Wendy trying to contact the outside with the
radio, all this is accompanied by a gloomy background music that shows how the family is
steadily getting more and more isolated with the outside world. There is just a single
lifeline left, a radio that communicates them with a forest warden station down the
mountain.
The following scene is one of the most shocking ones on the film, as we see Danny
directly confronting the two sisters, who ask him to play with them forever, mixing images
of them and their deaths, horrifying the young boy. Before that, we could see him
travelling through the hotel with his tricycle, followed by the Steadycam, which is used by
Kubrick as an exaggeration to build up the tension needed to generate that amount of fright
that is needed for a horror movie (Philip 1988: 151).
I think that it is important to note that after seeing the vision, Danny interacts with
Tony, telling him to stay calm, that the scene that he is seeing is just a remnant of
something that happened before, like “pictures in a book.” This means that even though
24
Danny is capable of feeling these leftovers, everything that he sees is in his imagination,
there is no real interaction or any kind of change in the real world.
F012 F013
The next scene features Danny and Wendy talking while watching TV. Danny is
bored and wants to go to his room to get his fire engine. Jack is there and according to
Wendy he went to bed only a few hours ago, so she does not want Danny to disturb him.
Nonetheless, Danny goes to the room, and what follows is one of the most disturbing
scenes of the movie.
When Danny enters the room, Jack is awake, and staring aimlessly through the
window. He notices Danny and they have a conversation, but it is very clear for the
spectator that Jack’s mental condition is no longer the same as the one we saw at the first
compasses of the movie, he seems deteriorated both physically and psychologically. Even
his way of speaking is no longer the same, he has a more tender, calmed voice, which in
combination with his words, the music and his expression, make everyone feel
uncomfortable, starting with Danny, who is clearly scared of Jack. In a moment of their
conversation, Jack tells Danny that he wishes that they could stay in the hotel forever and
ever, just the same phrase that the sisters had told Danny some days ago. This is a good
proof of how the hotel is manipulating Jack, but it could also be the other way around.
Could Danny’s imagination had mixed his father’s desire to stay in the hotel with the
visions he experimented? I mean, could the strong desire of Jack to stay in the hotel
manipulate Danny’s fragile psyche, making him believe that the hotel wants just what his
father wants?
25
F014 F015
Now again, the next scene is very important. Some days later Danny is playing by
himself and notices that the door of room 237 is open. This is the room that Mr. Hallorann
was afraid of, according to Danny when they met. The key is in the keyhole, and Danny,
figuring that it is his mother, gets into the room. Then the action shifts towards Wendy,
who hears Jack screaming very soundly in the Colorado lounge, beside his typewriter. In a
very frightened mood, Jack tells Wendy that he was dreaming that he killed her and
Danny, and after that, he cut them in pieces, just as the previous caretaker had done with
their family. In their conversation, and, for a brief moment, we can feel like Jack has come
back to his senses, and is admitting having gone insane. What until this time had been the
“Id” version of Jack, brought about by the cabin fever, has gone back to the “Ego” version
of him, the one we saw at the beginning.
F016 F017
Just as Wendy is helping Jack to sit down in the chair, we see Danny entering the
room. He is hurt in the neck and in shock. Wendy sees this and confronts Jack about being
him the one who hurt Danny. Jack, perplexed, does not know what to answer, and Wendy
flees with Danny to their room.
Meanwhile, a very angry Jack makes his way into the Golden room, and goes up to
the counter in hopes of finding any alcohol. It is important to remember that Jack used to
26
drink quite a lot, and it was while being drunk when he hurt Danny’s arm three years
before.
Unexpectedly, he addresses a person called Lloyd, and laughs. From behind the
counter, which was empty a moment ago, now sits a barman with a counter full of different
bottles of alcohol.
The conversation between Jack and Lloyd is of extreme importance for the plot, as it
is the first interaction that Jack makes with an entity that should not be there, and, for that,
I am going to address this idea by Roger Ebert that I feel is completely true when
explaining the plot from a psychoanalytic perspective. The idea is condensed in the fact
that every time that Jack sees ghost, there is a mirror present, which implies that he could
be talking to himself (Ebert 2006: 1).
There is also a great addition to this idea which implies that before this conversation
with Lloyd, Jack’s internal persona remains a mystery to the spectator, mostly requiring
him to act as a Shining person and interpret Jack’s real emotions through Danny’s
subjectivity or other visual details (Nelson 2000: 202).
F018 F019
The idea of the mirrors is something I had not realised when I chose to write this
dissertation. But when I started to read several articles and reviews about the movie, many
of them coincided in this aspect: whenever Jack sees a ghost in the movie, there is always a
mirror present. This theory has also been postulated by Antonio Rivera, who has compared
the use of mirrors between The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut (Rivera 2004: 75).
There is only one exception to this rule, and is the scene that tips the scales into the
paranormal explanation. I will return to the matter when I reach that particular scene, but
for now, I want to stick with these pieces of text that I extracted for Mr. Ebert’s review of
the film.
This is the key point for the explanation of Jack’s visions and behaviour. Being of a
weak psyche all along, the stories about the man that killed their family and the disease of
27
the Cabin fever have broken his mind, and he is victim of hallucinations. He could have
perfectly been the one who opened room 237 and attacked Danny in an induced trance due
to the disease. And he could perfectly be imagining Lloyd and all that alcohol due to his
extreme desire for drinking.
In his conversation with Lloyd he overtly insults Wendy, calling her a bitch and a
“sperm bank,”. The truth is that the Wendy from the film is very different from the one in
the novel, much more plain and ugly, but her spirit remains strong and she is very clever.
We are made to see her sometimes such as this one through Jack’s eyes, who labels her as
an irritating presence that does not match up with his chauvinistic, impossible idea of a
mate (Randy 2001: 233).
He also is trying to justify why hurting Danny was unintentional. He says that he
loves him but at the same time he also insults him calling him little fucker. At this point of
the movie, the “Id” part of Jack’s psyche has completely overthrown him. He is venting his
anger towards his family with a vision he himself has created. At that moment Wendy
enters the room and finds it completely empty, no sign of Lloyd or the glass that Jack had
in front of him. She seems very agitated and informs Jack that there is a woman in the
hotel with them, and that she was the one who had strangled Danny.
The next scene shows Dick Hallorann, who is watching TV, only to be contacted by
Danny through his psychic power, telling him that he is in grave danger.
F020 F021
Then the action shifts towards Jack, who is now in room 237, and will confront the
second apparition, also with a mirror always present. In this case, the ghost is the one of a
young woman, just as Danny had told Wendy, who embraces and kisses Jack, only to turn
into an old, rotten version of herself, who starts laughing and trying to get Jack as he
escapes in a fright.
28
This scene represents very well Jack’s inner sexual desire. He does not want Wendy
anymore, he wants to have a younger, prettier woman by his side, and his mind recreates
that same desire, only to twist it in an abhorrent way.
In this scene, there is also a comparative value, which is shared by another of
Kubrick’s films, Lolita. In both there exists the subjective shot, shared by Humbert and
Jack, and there is also a relation between the woman in the Overlook and Charlotte. There
is also the disgusting image of the discomposed old hag, much like the future projection
that Humbert has for Charlotte (Krohn 2007:70).
Apart from that, Baxter attributes Kubrick the sexual imagery of the film, mostly
present in this scene and near the end, when Wendy interrupts a sexual scene between two
men (Baxter 1999: 307).
F022 F023
The following scene shows Dick Hallorann trying to get in contact with the Hotel, as
well as Jack telling Wendy that there was nothing in the room, and that Danny probably
hurt himself. This is a great reaffirmation of the theory that puts Jack in a trance-like state
of mind for several moments of the day due to his illness. Maybe what Danny saw in the
room was really the ghostly apparition of the deceased woman, but maybe his imagination
mixed this with his father beating him again when he was out of his mind, meaning that
due to the high number of episodes that Danny has had seeing the images, he is starting to
mix them with the real world. This event with Danny leads Wendy to tell Jack that they
should take him away from the hotel, as he is clearly suffering. At this moment, Wendy is
reaffirming her motherly instincts and she is also starting to play a more active role in the
plot. Jack, on the contrary, blames her for trying to sink his only chance at being
successful, letting out his Id, Jack angrily confronts her about how he will not be
successful ever again in his life if they leave the hotel, and reaffirms his idea that the
culprit for all of his suffering is Wendy, but he will not let her destroy this for him.
29
The following scene shows Jack alone in the corridors of the hotel, which have
changed out of the blue from being clean to be full of balloons and decorations from what
seems a celebration. Low music can also be heard.
Suddenly, the action shifts to Mr. Hallorann again, who is desperately trying to
communicate with the hotel, as he had felt that Danny was in danger some time ago. He
contacts the warden station down the mountain so they can give them a radio call to see if
everything is okay.
The action returns to Jack, who enters the Golden room, the place where he met the
barman, only to see it full of people dressed like some decades ago, most probably the
same people who appear with him in the picture at the end of the movie, the ones from the
4th of July ball of 1921.
F024
Jack approaches the bar again, and he is greeted by Lloyd again. After being served
another whisky, Jack tries to pay, but Lloyd says that his money is no good there. Jack
feels reluctant about not having to pay, and if he was, indeed, dealing with ghosts, and he
was aware of the fact that he had always been in the hotel with them, I think he would not
have acted that way. What I think is that helped by the negative influence of the hotel,
Jack’s increasing madness is starting to make more vivid and complex hallucinations, to
the point that he feels he belongs in them, but up to a certain point, for he is still in the real
world, even if it is only a little part of him. In the end, he lets his doubts go away and
accepts the reality he thinks he is in, standing from the counter and having a walk.
30
F025 F026
What follows is again another very important part of the plot. The conversation
between Delbert Grady and Jack. Delbert is the waiter that spills a drink over Jack, so,
trying to clean him, they go to the bathroom and then Jack confronts him about his identity.
Just as a reminder, in the scene of Jack’s interview, we hear Mr. Hallorann mention Jack
that in 1970, Charles Grady had murdered his family with an axe. The girls who haunt
Danny being with almost all certainty his daughters. At this time, the same character
presents himself as Delbert, a different name. Jack keeps telling him that he is indeed the
one that killed his family, but Mr. Delbert tells Jack that he is not right, that he, in fact, is
the caretaker, and always has been. My analysis of this conversation is that Jack is, in truth,
confronting his own desire to kill his family, materialized into the character of Delbert
Grady, the desire that Charles Grady had in his own time.
F027 F028
At this point of the conversation, the powers that indeed reside within the hotel
manipulate Jack’s hallucination and tell him that Dick Hallorann is trying to save Danny
because he has contacted him through his power. Jack tells Delbert that this is all Wendy’s
fault, as always. Through the entire conversation, the spectator can clearly see how Jack’s
mental state is so deteriorated that his facial expression is no longer even capable of
staying still, moving his eyes continuously and smiling and then making serious faces all
31
the time. In the end, Delbert tells Jack in a very euphemistic way that he should kill his
family just as he did to his own family, reinforcing the idea that Delbert is indeed Jack’s
inner desire to get rid of his family, but mixed with the cabin fever and the negative
influence of the hotel, this desire has changed into directly killing them.
F029
In the scene that follows this chilling conversation, we can see a distressed Wendy,
crying and smoking in her room, cleverly planning their escape from the hotel. As I have
mentioned before, Wendy’s response to Jack’s madness is not the one that we would have
expected of her at the first compasses of the movie. She is ready to leave Jack because her
main goal is to get Danny to a safe place. She also thinks that the best course of action is to
call the mountain wardens so they know in advance that they are going out from the hotel,
so they can search for them in case they do not make it out. Suddenly, we can hear Danny
saying the famous word “Redrum,” which, backwards, reads “Murder.” When Wendy
enters her room, he finds Danny sitting on his bed, and when trying to speak with him, the
person who answers is not Danny, but Tony. He tells Wendy that Danny has gone away
and that he is not going to wake up. The explanation to this behaviour is that Danny’s weak
psyche has had so much stress in the past days, which, combined with the hotel’s
influence, have caused him a mental breakdown, which has made Tony the main entity
inside Danny’s body. This is also known as DID, or “Dissociative Identity Disorder,” as
explained by Richard Kluft,
DID is a complex, chronic, posttraumatic dissociative psychopathology (Kluft,
1987a; Loewenstein, 1991) characterized by disturbances of memory and identity
(Nemiah, 1980). It is distinguished from other mental disorders by the ongoing
coexistence of relatively consistent but alternating subjectively separate identities
and either recurrent episodes of memory disruption, frank amnesia, or both, and/or
amnesia for a period of noncontemporary autobiographic memory (Kluft 1996: 334).
32
In Danny’s case, Tony’s personality has only arisen when his main personality has
gone through a very horrifying experience, and has decided to leave the body in order to
protect itself. But when Dany was in his own house, we did know that Tony told him to do
certain things or that they even argued between one another, so I think it is safe to say that
even if Tony is another different personality of Danny, he was mostly made up by him as a
defence mechanism instead of having been inside of Danny from the moment he was born.
F030 F031
The next scene features Jack walking in the main hall towards the manager room,
where the radio is located, when the Warden station is trying to contact the hotel. He looks
inside the radio and takes three pieces out, so nor can they get in contact with the hotel nor
can Wendy get in contact with them. The action shifts again to Mr. Hallorann who is
getting increasingly worried about the situation at the hotel because the wardens haven’t
been able to contact them.
A black screen with white letters reading “8 am” informs us of the time of the day,
and after that, we can see a plane, and Mr. Hallorann inside the plane, presumably heading
for the Overlook by himself.
F032
And then we can see Jack typing again in the Colorado lounge, as if nothing had
happened. The scene is mixed with other scenes of Mr. Hallorann arriving to Denver.
33
Where he calls a friend of his from a garage so he can fix him a Snowcat in order to be
able to get to the hotel. From all these Hallorann scenes, we can already see how reliable
and noble this character is. He leaves the security of his home in Florida to go and try to
save Danny and Wendy from the crazed Jack.
F033 F034
After that, we are presented with Wendy and Tony watching TV in their room.
Wendy tells him that she is going to have a talk with Jack and that she will be right back.
Tony’s voice answers her, positive about staying in the room. When leaving, Wendy takes
a baseball bat with her. So, we can guess that she does not trust Jack anymore and finds
him dangerous enough so she has to have a way to defend herself from him.
F035
After that, we can see Wendy arriving to the Colorado lounge, which is now empty.
She seems very nervous and on alert about any sign of Jack being around. She calls Jack
several times but she does not get any response, so she gets close to the typewriter, and is
horrified at what she sees. A repetitive, and, apparently without meaning message written
all over again in the typewriter and in the sheets, that are close to it: “All work and no Play
makes Jack a dull boy.”
34
F036 F037
From behind her we can see Jack approaching, and with a very calm voice asking
Wendy if she likes his work, which both startles and scares her even further. Any grasp of
trust that was left in Wendy is gone by now, and she knows that Jack is completely insane
at this point.
What follows is the most direct confrontation between sanity and insanity in the
whole film, embodied by a scared to the bone Wendy and a mad to the bone Jack. While
their argument about what they should do about Danny and Jack’s responsibility to look
out for the Overlook goes on, we can perfectly see the difference in both characters. While
Wendy is barely capable of answering to Jack, because she is completely devastated, Jack
is mocking her every answer and growing more and more angry at her. To the point that
Wendy starts swinging the bat she brought with her in order to keep Jack away from her.
F038 F039
35
F040 F041
The tension of the scene keeps building until the climax, which happens when
Wendy swings the bat and, firstly, hits Jack in the hand, and then, in the head, which
makes him fall down the stairs. In the last moments of the struggle, the spectator can
clearly see how Jack’s facial expressions are the ones of a complete madman, changing
even his tone of voice several times, always repeating Wendy to give him the bat, so he
can bash her brain.
F042 F043
The next scene starts with Jack, visibly hurt in the head, being dragged through the
kitchen floor by Wendy, as he slowly starts regaining consciousness, but still very much
affected by the contusion he suffered both from the bat and his fall down the stairs. When
we are able to see Wendy herself, we can begin to imagine her plan, she wants to lock Jack
in the pantry so he cannot escape nor hurt them in the hope that someone will come later
and arrest him. There are moments of increasing tension as Jack begins to wake up and
Wendy cannot get to open the door because she did not unlock it correctly. In the end, she
manages to lock Jack inside, and when trying to open the door, we can see him moaning
and grabbing his leg, which with most certainty was sprained or twisted during his fall.
When Jack is finally able to get close to the door, at first, he keeps his aggressive
behaviour towards Wendy, but, when he hears her crying, Jack thinks that being the weak-
36
willed and easy to manipulate woman he thinks he is, and, who at this point of the movie is
not anymore, the best course of action would be to feign regaining sanity and starts to
weep as if he was in real pain, so Wendy pities him and opens the door. When Wendy
states that her intention is to get Danny into the Snowcat so they can leave the hotel, Jack
seems very amused by the idea, and tells Wendy to go and check the radio and the Snowcat
to see if she will really be able to escape using them. As a remainder, we could see Jack
some scenes ago taking the batteries of the radio out so Wendy could not use it, and he has
presumably broken the Snowcat in the same kind of fashion.
F044 F045
After that, we follow Wendy outside, towards the garage where the Snowcat that Mr.
Ullman mentioned to them is. The snow has completely covered the hotel, and is really
difficult to walk or see anything on that condition. When Wendy arrives at the Snowcat,
her fears become real as we can see how the cables of the batteries have been cut out.
We are prompted with another black screen that reads: “4 pm,” meaning that several
hours have passed since the incident with Jack and the sabotage of the Snowcat.
Now this might be one of the most, if not the most important scene of the film, at
least from the point of view of my analysis. We are presented with a sleeping Jack, who is
of course still inside the pantry, when we hear a knocking noise. The person outside of the
pantry is Delbert Grady, who thinks that Jack might not be able to do what he was asked
by him in the end. And refers to Wendy as “Stronger than they imagined”. When asked if
Jack gives the word to be able to kill his family, he agrees. And the door of the pantry is
opened for him.
I want to take a moment and discuss this particular scene, because it is the only one
in the film that cannot easily be explained so the events that happen throughout the story
are caused by Jack’s descent into madness and not because of supernatural entities. The
truth is, no matter how crazy Jack is, he cannot extrapolate this madness into opening that
37
door. Up until now, every ghostly apparition could have been explained by combining both
the Cabin Fever and the negative influence that the Overlook does have to the family.
We have to keep in mind, however, that several hours have gone since the last time
we saw Wendy or Danny, so, for the sake of this essay, I will do my best to convince you
that, again, what we are seeing might not actually be what is really happening.
Just as Jack has lost himself to the cabin fevers, and due to the great amount of stress
that Wendy had to go through, she reached a state of mind similar to Jack’s at some point
during those blank hours, and, out of guilt, opened the pantry to release him. She was
manipulated by the hotel too, but not in a very strong manner because Wendy’s strength of
mind is far greater than Jack’s, in spite of what it may look like through the film. And,
from my point of view, the hotel decided to give Jack that last vision to see if he was
worthy of knowing that Wendy had opened that door for him, instead of leaving him there,
without any chance for him to try to open the door again. This is the best explanation I can
give about what really happens in this scene, which is, as I have mentioned before, the one
and only scene which cannot be easily explained with a psychoanalytic approach in the
whole movie.
F046 F047
After that important scene, the action is transferred towards the outside of the hotel,
where a Snowcat can be seen at the end of the road that leads to the hotel, driving towards
it. This Snowcat is driven by Dick Hallorann, who is coming to rescue Wendy and Danny.
38
F048
We have some shots of him approaching the hotel when the action changes to Danny,
or, at this moment, Tony, who musters again the word “Redrum.” He approaches Wendy’s
bed and takes the knife she previously took herself from the kitchen, and then proceeds to
take her red lipstick. Slowly, and without a correct position of the letters. Danny writes the
word on the bathroom door. He suddenly starts shouting, which wakes up and frightens
Wendy. When embracing him to stop his screams, she gets horrified as she reads through
the reflection of the mirror what Danny was trying to tell her: “Murder.”
F049
At the same moment, a loud banging noise can be heard from the door, which ends
up being Jack, who has armed himself with an axe. Just as Delbert Grady did in his own
time to kill his family. Jack starts axing the door down. And Wendy takes Danny inside the
bathroom. I want to note that Wendy does not seem extremely surprised about Jack being
there, which reinforces my assumption of her being who let him out.
39
F050
While Jack is finishing destroying the door, Wendy opens up the small bathroom
door, and seeing how she cannot escape through the hole herself, she carries Danny and
helps him go through the gap. In other circumstances, the fall would have been lethal. But
because of the snow, there is a conglomeration by the walls of the hotel which makes
Danny slide until reaching the ground level.
F051
Now comes what must be one of the most memorable scenes in the whole history of
cinema. After making a reference to the children’s tale “The Three Little Pigs”, as if he
was the Big Bad Wolf, Jack proceeds to bash the bathroom door with his axe, to a
completely horrified Wendy, who is seeing her death very near if Jack succeeds in his
attempt. Jack finally mages to break enough space of the door to get his head inside, and
says his famous phrase: “Here’s Johnny!”. But, when trying to get inside the bathroom,
Wendy slashes his hand, making him scream in pain and leave the door.
40
F052 F053
Suddenly, the action shifts to Mr. Hallorann again, who is now seeing from afar the
lights of the Overlook. I want to point out that at this point of the movie, the music really
helps to communicate to the spectator that feeling of terror and insanity that is now
everywhere, as we approach the climax of the film. The action changes into the bathroom
again, where a frantic Wendy starts hearing the engine of Mr. Hallorann’s Snowcat. Jack
hears it too, and realizes that he is the person who Delbert Grady told him to be aware of,
as he had been called to the hotel by Danny. For a brief moment, both characters remain
speechless and try to catch their breaths, as we see the Snowcat slowly arriving towards the
main entrance.
We are presented again with Danny, who is running through the corridors of the
hotel, just as Wendy told him. Cleverly enough, he decides to hide inside a big drawer.
Next thing we see is Jack, dragging his feet through the kitchen, where Danny is hiding.
The action shifts yet again, and turns towards Wendy, who, seemingly regaining her
senses, understands that Jack has left to kill the person who was in the Snowcat, and tries
to leave the bathroom to try to save him.
We have a few seconds of Mr. Hallorann going through the main door, while also
being witnesses of Jack heading towards the reception hall. He takes a glimpse of the
elevator, which is the one who, in Danny’s vision at the start of the film was opening and
letting out of it a sea of blood.
As Jack gets closer, we can hear Mr. Hallorann shouting if someone was there.
There are a few more seconds of him walking through the reception, until the moment Jack
jumps out from behind a pillar and stabs him in the chest with the axe. At the same
moment, we can see Danny screaming, as if he felt the pain too. This particular moment of
the film is much more important than it would seem at first glance, because this marks the
moment when Jack finally becomes a murderer. He had tried to kill Wendy and Danny, but
up until the moment he kills Mr. Hallorann he had remained unable to do so, which could
41
also mean that he was not really able to take a life. This scene proves that theory wrong,
and takes away all doubts about the thought that maybe Jack would not be able to really
kill his son in the end. We also need to remember that Dick and Danny where kind of
connected by the Shinning. His scream alerts Jack, who, smiling, starts running towards
the kitchen, leaving Mr. Hallorann’s dead body on the floor.
F054 F055
While screaming his name, Jack gets closer towards Danny’s hiding place. Knowing
that is a matter of time now that Jack finds and kills him, Danny decides to outrun him. At
the same moment, Wendy is seen wandering through the hotel looking for Danny: instead
of shouting, she whispers his name. At this point of the film, the influence of the hotel is so
great, and probably fuelled by Dick Hallorann’s death, that even Wendy starts seeing these
completely bizarre scenes, as for example a man dressed in a bear suite giving oral sex to a
man dressed in formal clothing. The truth is that they do not ever get to interact with each
other. So, this could also mean a step towards the cabin fever that Wendy is yet again
suffering, combining the loss of Danny and the realization that his husband is a murderer
and has gone completely mad, it is just natural for Wendy to start losing her mind as well.
F056
Next, we are presented yet again to Jack, who, in his pursuit of Danny, gets to the
point where he thinks that he may be outside, so he turns on the outside lamp posts. Danny,
42
who was hidden behind the Snowcat, again comes to the realization that staying there
would mean his death, so he starts running towards the maze, followed by Jack, shouting
his name again and again. The next moments of the film feature Danny running from Jack
inside the maze, followed by another scene with Wendy. After seeing Mr. Hallorann’s
dead body on the floor, she is presented with another apparition of a man in a formal suite,
and also sees a ghostly version of the reception hall, full of spider webs and skeletons
dressed, again, in a formal fashion.
F057 F058
Jack’s pursuit of Danny inside the maze gets to the point where Danny, in a moment
of great intelligence, realizes that Jack would eventually get him just by following his steps
on the snow. Making an outstanding decision in a critical moment like that, he decides to
backtrack on his own steps on the snow so Jack gets confused and stops following him.
F059
The following scene featuring the frightened to the bone Wendy, is, in fact, a very
special one. As she is faced with the infamous elevator on Danny’s vision at the start of the
movie. It is curious that in the end he was not the real witness of the deeply disturbing
scene, but his mother.
43
F060 F061
After that, a very exhausted Jack arrives at the point where Danny had backtracked to
hide his real location. Just as Danny predicted, Jack becomes confused by Danny’s plan,
and goes away from the place where he really is. Fully aware that this is his only chance to
survive, Danny follows his own steps to get out of the maze, while a visibly affected by the
freezing temperatures Jack keeps looking for him. In the end, Danny and Wendy finally
reunite, embrace, and go away from the hotel in Mr. Hallorann’s Snowcat.
At the same time Wendy and Danny escape the hotel, we are shown the final
moments of Jack, who, now babbling Danny’s name due to the exhaustion that he is
suffering added to his probably severe injuries from when he was thrown down the stairs,
and his complete mental breakdown, decides to sit for a moment and rest.
F062 F063
Those are Jack’s final moments, as the next shot we see is the one of him at the next
morning, completely frozen inside the maze. It is very important to note that the maze was
not in King’s book, so these final scenes were all invented by Kubrick. In the written
version, Jack dies in an explosion from the heater which Wendy had manipulated in order
to make the hotel blow. For Antonio Rivera, the maze represents the magic inside the
hotel, as well as Jack’s tortured mind, and also the womb, where Danny has to return in
order to save himself (Rivera 2004: 76).
44
The last scene of the movie features the camera closing in to a photograph of the ball
that was held in the golden room of the 4th of July 1921. Jack can be seen just in the middle
of the photograph, which gives a meaning to Delbert’s words when they were inside the
bathroom. He is the caretaker of the Overlook hotel, and he has always been.
F064 F065
45
5. CONCLUSIONS
The Shining by Kubrick is not a great ghost story, nor is it a faithful adaptation of
Stephen King’s novel. It is something new and different, and it is because the great
difference that exists between the original and the film that I was able to make this
dissertation. This movie is the perfect example on how cinema is able to represent horror
and the unsettling in a million different ways. In this particular case, with the psychology
of the characters. Through my hours of research about the film, I came across many
authors who wrote that something that they did not like about the film as a product was
that many other people just praised Kubrick for directing and did not mention the work the
actors did in the movie, and I stand with them.
With this dissertation, I intended to give a new interpretation to Kubrick’s film,
because I thought that given the obscure nature of the movie, with many elements being
manipulated and changed by him, it could be viable to do so. And going through the
process of analyzation I have realised that the idea could fit very well in the standards of
film analysis, it was solid and many scholars, all of them quoted in this paper, shared some
of my ideas and theories. By doing so, I have created a piece of work that enables whoever
reads it to be able to understand this famous movie in a completely different way, as it
happened to me. A movie is like a person, complex. It is not something to be explained in
just a few words and with an absolute truth, there are always ramifications and different
paths to be taken while approaching the meaning of the images that are being shown before
us.
Almost every narrative resource is used masterfully in the film, the use of camera
angles, the Steadycam, whose first important appearance in cinema was in this movie, the
lighting and the music. Everything was thought by the millimetre by Kubrick. The
structure of the movie was also carefully planned. The film starts with jumps in time that
encompass even a month, time which only gets reduced as we go through the film, scaling
towards weeks, then days, and finally hours.
Every major character of the movie is the embodiment of a certain part of the human
mind, first of all we have Jack, the repression, the id, the monster inside the American
stereotype of father. For him, the Overlook is not a curse, it is a gift. His opportunity to let
loose his inner self and finally be able to be successful and recognized. Wendy represents
the ego, the restrain, the resolution. She appears as plain, normal, not really good at
anything apart from bothering Jack. But her strength of mind makes her invulnerable to the
46
hotel’s influence, and it fears her. It knows that she is much more dangerous than Danny,
she has the conviction to protect the ones she loves.
Danny represents the tormented psyche, the struggle between consciousness and
unconsciousness. He is fragile but very powerful, and needs the protection of a family,
Wendy fulfils that role, but Danny knows that Jack is not someone to be trusted. Instead,
he makes his own fatherly figure, Tony, a fragment of his own personality that guides and
helps him.
And lastly, Mr. Halloran embodies the Super Ego. The noble convictions. He gives
everything up, including his own life, to save Danny. This is not something that a normal
individual would have done, and he more than anyone knew that the hotel was a dangerous
place. Regardless of that fact, he goes there without a second thought, he is the antithesis
of Jack, a man without family who is willing to sacrifice everything for them, against a
man with a family willing to sacrifice everything to get rid of them.
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6. REFERENCES
Allen Nelson, Thomas. 2000. Kubrick, inside a film artist’s maze. Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press.
Baxter, John. 1999. Stanley Kubrick: biografía. Madrid: T & B Editores.
Berardinelli, James. “Shining, The (United States, 1980) A movie review by James
Berardinelli”. http://www.reelviews.net/reelviews/shining-the (Accessed
14/07/2017)
Duncan, Paul. 2003. Stanley Kubrick: Filmografía completa. Köln: Taschen.
Ebert, Roger. 1980. “The Shinning: great movie review”.
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-shining-1980 (Accessed
4/7/2017)
Freud, Sigmund. 2010 (1923). The Ego and The Id. USA. Pacific Publishing Studio.
Hill, Rodney. 2008 (2005) The Shining. The Stanley Kubrick archives. Ed. Alison Castle.
Köln: TASCHEN.
King, Stephen. 2012 (1977). The Shining. United States: Random House Lcc Us.
Kluft, Richard. 1996. “Dissociative Identity Disorder”. Handbook of Dissociation.
Theoretical, Empirical and Clinical Perspectives. Eds. Larry K. Michelson and
William J. Ray. New York: Plennum Press. 337-366.
Kolker, Robert Philip. 1988 (1980). A cinema of loneliness. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Krohn, Bill. 2007. El libro de Stanley Kubrick; colección grandes directores. Madrid: El
País. Trans. Natalia Ruiz Martínez. 70
Kubrick, Stanley (dir.) 1962. Lolita. USA/United Kingdom: A.A. Productions Ltd.
Kubrick, Stanley (dir.) 1980. The Shining. USA/United Kingdom: Hawk Films Ltd.
Kubrick, Sranley (dir.) 1999. Eyes Wide Shut. USA/United Kingdom: Warner Bros.
Maslin, Janet. 1980. “Movie Review: The Shinning”.
http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF1738E270BC4B51DFB3668
38B699EDE (Accessed 4/7/2017)
Nathan, Ian. 2012. “The Shinning Review”. http://www.empireonline.com/movies/shining-
2/review/ (Accessed 3/7/2017)
Polo, Juan Carlos. 1999 (1986). Stanley Kubrick. Madrid: J.C. Clementine.
Rasmussen, Randy. 2001 Stanley Kubrick, Seven Films Analyzed. Jefferson, North
Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc.
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Rivera García, Antonio. 2004. “En las fronteras del realismo: el cine de Stanley Kubrick”.
Cine y prospectiva social: actas de las I Jornadas celebradas en noviembre de 2003
dentro del programa "Plano a plano" del Departamento de Cultura de la Diputación
de Almería. Eds. J.A. Baca Martín and A. Galindo Hervás. Almería: Diputación de
Almería. 49-92.
Zunzunegui, Santos. 2007. “El resplandor, de Stanley Kubrick (The Shining, USA, 1980)”.
Contracampo. Ensayos sobre teoría e historia del cine. Eds. Jenaro Talens and
Satos Zunzunegui. Madrid: Cátedra. 586-590.
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7. ANNEX
El resplandor, de Stanley Kubrick no es una gran película de fantasmas, y tampoco
es una gran adaptación de la novela de King que sirvió como base para la película. Es algo
nuevo y diferente, y es gracias a esa gran diferencia existente entre novela y película que
me ha sido posible escribir mi trabajo. Esta película es el ejemplo perfecto de como el cine
puede representar el horror y la incomodidad de miles de formas diferentes. En este caso
en particular, mediante la psicología de los personajes. A lo largo de mis horas de estudio
de la película, me encontré con muchos autores que compartían el pensamiento de que algo
negativo sobre el film era que la inmensa mayoría del éxito que tuvo fue dedicada a
Kubrick, dejando de lado a los actores, y yo pienso de igual manera. Es tremendamente
complicado para alguien, incluso un actor, poder fingir locura si no sabe lo que es estar
loco, o fingir calma cuando la realidad es que está a un solo error de ser asesinado por un
ser querido. En esta película, los actores lo dieron todo de ellos mismos para poder
representar de manera magistral la locura y en general todos los recovecos de la mente
humana.
Con este trabajo, he intentado darle una nueva interpretación a la película de
Kubrick, principalmente porque pensé que, dada la naturaleza obtusa de la película, y
dados sus numerosos cambios con respecto a la novela, podría ser algo posible de hacer. Y
avanzando en el trabajo me di cuenta de que la idea podía encajar de buena manera con los
estándares de análisis cinematográficos, era una idea sólida y muchos críticos de cine y
eruditos en el tema compartían mis teorías e ideas. De ese modo, he creado un trabajo que,
en mi opinión, consigue que cualquiera que lo lea sea capaz de entender la película en un
contexto completamente diferente, como me ha pasado a mí mismo. Una película es, al
igual que una persona, compleja. No es algo que se pueda explicar en unas pocas palabras
o con una verdad absoluta, siempre posee diferentes caminos a seguir para abarcar las
imágenes que se nos muestran.
Prácticamente todos los recursos narrativos están usados de forma magistral en el
film. El uso de los ángulos de cámara, la Steadycam, de la cual la primera aparición
importante fue en esta película, las luces y el sonido. Todo fue pensado al milímetro por
Kubrick. La estructura de la película también sirve como recurso narrativo, empezando con
unos saltos temporales de hasta un mes, que van disminuyendo en intensidad y longitud,
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pasando luego a semanas, luego días y finalmente horas, hasta llegar al clímax de la
acción.
En mi opinión, cada personaje principal es la personificación de los elementos de la
mente que he ido mencionando a lo largo del trabajo.
Primero tenemos a Jack, la personificación del Id. El monstruo detrás del típico padre
de familia americano. Para él, el Overlook no es una maldición, es un regalo. Es su
oportunidad de desatar su verdadero yo y ser finalmente reconocido y exitoso.
Por otra parte, Wendy representa el Yo, la mesura, la resolución. En un principio se
nos presenta como una mujer simple y sin ningún atractivo o habilidad, aparte de molestar
a Jack, pero su fortaleza de mente la hace invulnerable a la influencia del hotel, y esto el
hotel lo sabe, y la teme, incluso más que a Danny o al señor Hallorann.
Danny representa la psique atormentada, y la pugna entre la consciencia e
inconsciencia, es un niño frágil pero muy poderoso, aunque necesita la protección y la
seguridad de una familia. Wendy consigue apoyarlo, pero desde un principio Danny sabe
muy bien que Jack no es de fiar. En vez de eso, Danny crea su propia figura paterna, Tony,
un fragmento de su propia personalidad que le guía y le ayuda a lo largo de su estancia por
el infernal hotel.
Finalmente tenemos la figura de Dick Hallorann, el cocinero negro del hotel, que
representa el Superyó. Dada su naturaleza moral, lo sacrificará todo, incluso su vida, para
salvar a Danny y Wendy. Esto no es algo que un individuo normal hubiera hecho, y él más
que nadie sabía lo peligroso que es el Overlook, y el hecho de que fuera hacia allí sin
pensárselo dos veces refuerza su imagen de la moralidad personificada. Hallorann es la
antítesis de Jack, un hombre sin familia dispuesto a darlo todo por salvarla, frente a un
padre de familia dispuesto a darlo todo por deshacerse de ella.