According to the film, “shining” is a rare trait of a few humans to communicate without words and see glimpses of both the future and the past. If anyone has possessed this gift in real life, it’s Stanley Kubrick. His 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), if not the greatest movie ever made, is certainly one against which all others must be judged. Its brilliance lies in large art on Kubrick’s ability to not only perceive where human evolution fits in with both his natural and created universe, but to express that vision by pushing every aspect of the medium of film- sound, color, cinematography, screenplay, acting, special effects, music, pacing- to its very limit. 2001: A Space Odyssey is still impressive and can be followed even with the audio track taken away. To Kubrick, surely, not having the ability to communicate non-verbally and see into the past and future would seem silly.
To take The Shining at face value, as being about a father losing his mind while caretaking an abandoned hotel in the Colorado mountains with his wife and son over the winter, is to miss the point entirely. Kubrick is primarily interested in the premise that humans can relate more to one murder than they can a million murders. Toward that end, he creates a hidden world reminding us of a million murders as he depicts one. The only alternative is that the movie is chock-full of continuity errors and illogical absurdities.
When Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, interviews for the job, it seems obvious that the general manager of the Overlook Hotel, or at least the person inhabiting the room behind the elevators next to the one marked as such, named Stuart Ullman, is concealing some things or stretching the truth. Everything from his horrible wig to his limp hand gestures to his shit-eating grin scream politician. His story does not adequately explain why the hotel would be shut down from October 31st (Halloween!) to May 14th; over half the year. The scene through the window in his office looks contrived, as if it’s just a plant under lights. We’re not sure what to think of Jack at first, but are suspicious when he declares his family “will love” the isolation.
The addition of the untitled Bill Watson reminds me of the guy whose only line is, “Exterminate with extreme prejudice,” in Francis Ford Coppolla’s Apocalypse Now (1979), and is perhaps there to ensure Mr. Ullman is choosing his words wisely. While Ullman is certainly a womanizer (the dance between him, his secretary and the metal paper tray when Jack first interrupts them is downright graphic), Bill Watson gives off a sadistic vibe. We are compelled to take Ullman seriously only when he describes the job is to “cope with the very costly damage and depreciation that can occur.” Watson also provides the first glimpse that something weird is going on within the movie itself, as when we get a close-up of him, stating, “Well, this ought to be quite a change for you,” he is suddenly wearing plaid pants. People don’t just change their pants. Kubrick obviously meant to include this, but why?
Just as the story of the previous caretaker is begun, Ullman reaches for something in his pocket, but it is interrupted by an abrupt edit. Jack feigns ignorance of the previous caretaker’s fate, but we will later learn the Jack not only followed the story, but recognizes the person who committed the crimes. Then we see the plaid pants again. Perhaps the person editing this film is a buffoon. But when Ullman punctuates “killed his family” with a thumbs up, there is no question this movie is taking the astute observer places beyond where the causal movie-goer will be able to follow. Kubrick is challenging us to look for things like Dopey disappearing and Goofy levitating.
We wonder who in Denver vouched for Jack, especially when we discover he and his family had only been in Boulder for three months. Why had they moved from Vermont?
When the Torrance family arrives at the hotel, the staff seems to be hustling about moving furniture. Mr. Ullman exchanges goodbyes with two girls entering the hotel with luggage. In contrast to everybody else, Mr. Watson is impatient to leave. When we first met Mrs. Torrance, she was reading The Catcher and the Rye, and now Jack is reading Playgirl. When asked about his luggage, he points to a suitcase being carried out by a girl, but we assume he means the excessive pile in the background. Just as they’re about to leave, Jack bizarrely jokes, “I’d better collect my family first,” which he doesn’t successfully do, because Danny, his son, is missing from the next scene. We see a person carrying a rug upstairs. This is immediately followed by a weird change-over in which three women and a man with a lot of luggage, surely guests although Stuart will later say the guests left yesterday, appear from the dissolving pile of the Torrances’ things and elevator doors replace the front entrance. As the camera pans away, the aforementioned group head into the elevators as two other females with luggage inexplicably go up a flight of stairs.
The dissolves between scenes almost always contain hidden messages. Take this one for example:
The main characters exit an elevator- both the elevator dial and the windows show they remain on the same level as the lobby so they must have been somewhere else in the interim. Also, the elevators and stairs are situated different from in the lobby so these are different elevators then what we saw before- for clarity, I will call these the main elevators. With Jack following behind her, Wendy Torrance asks about the Indian designs in the Colorado Lounge and Stuart claims they were based on Navajo and Apache motifs- totally contrasting enemy tribes that were not native to the Colorado area- as the camera passes by a wall of photographs, an American flag (a smaller version of which we’d already seen on Ullman’s desk), a man cleaning the glass doors of a bookcase, a large bowl or shell, a man mopping the floor, a larger piece of driftwood, yet another woman carrying luggage, a man polishing a piano, a man carrying a rug down a flight of stairs, a man vacuuming a couch and another wall of photographs. This shot does nothing whatsoever to help us understand the conversation. Instead, it makes us wonder why the hell they would be cleaning things before leaving them to collect dust all winter.
In the introduction to Dick Hallorann, where he stands in the same spot where we will later meet Delbert Grady, a woman carries out a white table cloth as a man on a ladder just behind Dick fixes something hanging from a lamp. Then we see a man run a vacuum behind Dick’s feet, after which he quickly leans down as his arms fly up. Wendy looks away as Dick’s arms come down.
I wasn’t really sure what the discussion about Wendy’s name was all about, so I looked it up: Winifred means peaceful, Winnie means pure, Freddy means peaceful ruler and Wendy means wanderer. Jack and Danny are the actors’ actual names; Jack is often generic for “man” but can mean “supplanter” or “God is gracious” and Danny means “god is my judge.” Tony seems to be a reference to the mascot for Frosted Flakes, seen several times in the film, and contrasts with Doc, which is said to be a Bugs Bunny tribute but is also one of the seven dwarfs in Snow White. The last names in the film are obvious- perhaps too obvious. The last names in the film are obvious- perhaps too obvious. Torrance= “torrents” (storms), Ullman= “all man,” Watson= “wants in,” Hallorann= “Halloween,” or “hallow end” or even “hollerin,” but I think “hallow” meaning “saint” is key here, and Grady= “greedy.” (Tellingly, Lloyd isn’t given a last name.)
Allow me to fast-forward past the morphing external structure, the omni-present ladders, the all-important “storing room” (I swear it sounds like he says “story room”), the bar dissolving into a freight elevator being filled with luggage, the fact that the walk-in freezer acts as a teleporter and the Calumet can. After all, “A lot of this stuff you’ll never have to touch.” After Stuart, Bill, Jack and Wendy walk away, leaving Dick with Danny, they, along with an anonymous worker, dissolve into Dick’s head. Less obvious to notice are the red pipes in the shape of a hangman gallows centered above Dick’s awkwardly twisted head. That this is not a coincidence is confirmed repeatedly during Dick’s conversation with Danny, as both a rope-colored frame to a picture and a wiring conduit to a light switch are repeatedly centered above Dick’s head, and he continues to hold his head at the twisted angles. “Is there something bad here?”
The first time we see the clock near the Chef’s Office, it says 12:49, but above the freight elevator, before stepping into the freezer/teleporter that led us to that clock, we had seen another clock that said 1:30. The next scene is a dissolve to a clock in the hall behind Stuart Ullman’s office and it seems to be stopped at 10:54 and 11 seconds. We had already concluded they must have been places before entering the Colorado Lounge, and we have also discovered that hallway with the two-sided clock surrounds the lounge area, so one possibility is to assume we were shown the scenes out of sequence. Another is that they are traveling backwards through time.
Jack finally catches up to Wendy in their living quarter bathroom.
The chapter entitled “A Month Later,” so we must be at the end of November, begins with Wendy pushing a food cart out of one of the two halls leading from the Gold Room into the lobby. The second mirror seems to pan in reverse starting where the first mirror faces. We suddenly cut to Danny, riding a tricycle, the type known as a "Big Wheel," past the elevators and into the Colorado Lounge. This second perspective of the lounge reveals that the chairs on the rugs are also plaid, matching those in the lobby, but we are too distracted by the drumroll sound of the Big Wheel that is muted by the unchanged rugs to notice. The space where the bowl or shell was remains just out of frame, but we can see that the lamps that were on tables in the middle of the room are gone. Why are the rugs still there? We did, after all, see two rugs in a roll being carried. The only way that all the men cleaning make sense is if they were not getting the hotel ready to close down for the winter but getting it prepared to be used. As we watch the entrance doors at the beginning of “Closing Day,” we find all manner of things being brought into the hotel, but the only thing that leaves are the belongings Jack gestures are his.
While the men are complicit or unknowing accomplices, the women are always with baggage, and the women are almost always in pairs. Certainly Bill Watson considers dealing with the luggage to be an irritating burden. I would suggest women are considered part of that burden. No children besides Jack and the sisters in the matching blue dress are ever seen.
Some other clues begin to add up. If we look closely at things repetitive patterns can appear… and disappear. We are also exploring altering perspectives- whereas when one is in what appears an un-navigable labyrinth, an overhead, objective angle reveals a map. Finally, we are forced to consider infinity- in terms both of time and macrocosm/microcosm. We are 35 minutes into the movie.
The only time Wendy isn’t wearing a watch the entire movie is when Jack asks her the time, and she unflinchingly replies, “It’s about 11:30.” This is the most normal behaving mirror scene in the entire movie, and also the one we most expect to show us something. Jack, unsurprisingly, likes sunny-side up eggs. Wendy reveals they’ve been staying up late, and we wonder why. After Jack acknowledges he has “lots of ideas- no good ones,” we see a German typewriter and discover it has now taken the place of that bowl or shell in the Colorado Lounge. A sofa has also been turned around 180 degrees to face the typewriter. We also finally get to see the other wall in the room- on which is a mounted buffalo head and, above a fireplace, a huge Native American mural depicting agricultural gods, the right edge of which Jack is repeatedly throwing a yellow ball at, and another set of elevators. (There’s a door with red panels on either side directly to the left of where Jack types, but it is just a door. We can see the backside of it during Danny’s first bike ride scene.)
We dissolve to the exterior of the building so that it seems for a moment that Jack is throwing at a weird shadow, presumably of a chimney although it is inexplicably toppling forward at an angle so that it looks like the head of a creature looking down onto the hedge maze. Wendy is saying to Danny, “The loser has to keep America clean. How’s that?” As they run into the hedge maze, we see a pile of sewer drainage pipes in the background, then the camera stops at a map, and at the bottom of it, a banner seems to read “Maize & Labyrinthe” (sic). After following the pair meandering through the maze, we return to Jack, who is now in the lobby, still throwing the ball- somehow he doesn’t break anything with it. The Big Wheel is parked nearby. Jack glances at a wooden bat and walks to a scale model of the hedge maze, which, although we hadn’t noticed before, has been there the whole time. In fact, it was framed by Stuart Ullman and Bill Watson as a man in a police uniform intently watches over it while Jack is telling Wendy over the phone, “I still have an awful lot to go through.” (He is apparently exempt from having to use one of the three pay phones in the lobby.) A man lined up directly under the model reinforces the idea that the uniformed man is watching someone.
Jack leans over the model of the hedge. It becomes huge, and he watches Wendy and Danny from a god’s eye view. They are in a henge flanked by two crosses, one upside-down. While this supernatural phenomenon comes as a surprise to the audience, it has been foreshadowed many times over. “Shining” seems to be an inherited trait. “I didn’t think it was going to be this good! Did you?”
In Greek mythology, the Labyrinth was designed by Daedalus to entrap the Cretan King Minos’ wife’s son the Minotaur- a half-bull, half-man whose father was a white bull Poseidon had given Minos to sacrifice but which he kept instead. According to Ovid’s epic poem Metamorphoses, in order to preserve the Labyrinth’s secrets, Minos locked Daedalus in a tower. Somehow Daedalus’ son Icarus ends up in the tower with him, and Daedalus builds them wings of wax and feathers to escape with, but Icarus forgets himself and flies too close to the sun, which melts the wax and sends him plummeting to his death. Daedalus, however, lands safely in Sicily and builds a temple to Apollo.
Daedalus is also credited with inventing the sail. This is notable not only because Wendy compares the hotel to a ghost ship, but because the patrons of sailors are the brothers Castor and Polydeuces (or Pollox), collectively known as the Gemini. I haven’t explored the sisters in the matching blue dress that keep appearing, frankly because they hadn’t made sense until now. Thus far, we have seen them twice: in a room wallpapered in blue flowers- a glimpse of the same wallpaper can be seen in “the staff wing of the hotel” near the Torrance’s living quarters - and in the enigmatic Game Room under a poster of a bull. Not being as familiar with the Gemini as I am with Daedalus, I looked them up. Castor and Polydeuce are usually considered half-brothers, Castor the son of the king of Sparta and Polydeuce the son of Zeus. They are twins, though, just not with each other. Castor’s twin sister is Clytemnestra and Polydeuce’s twin sister is Helen of Troy. If the creepy sisters in the movie represent Clytemnestra and Helen, the Gemini can only be Danny and Tony, but frankly that is far too tangential and speculative for my taste.
When we see Danny in the Game Room, he is attempting to throw at a bull’s eye, but does not seem to be having any luck, judging not only by the result of the three throws we witness but also the huge number 13 beside the board. His darts are stuck into the board like a picador’s spears into a bull. The room and the dartboard reflect the alternating red and green motif that we also see in the exit signs and hallways throughout the movie. The girls appear, standing in a doorway with a cigarette vending machine to their right and a water cooler and phone booth to their left. They glance at each other, smirk, and leave the room. This is only time we see them not in a place outside the hallway with the blue flowered wallpaper. The one on the right is obviously older. Soon after, Danny is found outside, and for the rest of the movie we see him riding away through hallways, but he never returns to the Game Room. It seems he has learned from the girls to reject fighting and embrace a flight response.
It is “Tuesday.” Danny rides his bike again, this time on the floor above the Colorado Lounge. The carpet is perhaps reminiscent of the Colorado flag with a different color scheme so that the circle is red instead of yellow. He starts near the second elevator exactly one floor above where his first bike ride scene begins and ends, passes room 237 on the right before going around the elevators connected to the main elevators a floor below and back to room 237, which is now on his left. To his right would be directly behind the Indian mural in the Colorado Lounge and there doesn’t seem to be a chimney there so you wouldn’t expect a fire in the fireplace…. If you were to draw a two-dimensional sketch of the Indian mural and then Danny’s route, you would have drawn a key. Then we see the Colorado Lounge from a new angle- this time as if standing in front of the main elevators. The camera lens tints the room red. The sofa has been removed and one of the lamps that have been gone since closing day has been repurposed. We might think Jack spends his free time rearranging furniture except for the fact that a chair disappears and reappears in the middle of the next scene. The camera lens makes the plaid drapes behind Wendy turn from beige to burgundy. The reflections in the bookcases anticipate her arrival just like the mirrors in the other halls, but don’t reflect her departure at all. Jack has an open book of newspaper clippings next to him as he types.
One may have expected the movie might drag through the entire winter, but we now know Jack is losing it precipitously, or rather is getting to work rather quickly. At the interview, Jack had stated, “five months of peace is just what I want.” As we are now a month into a six and a half month stay, we now realize that phrase wasn’t simply bad math. He only has less than two weeks left to find the peace he is looking for. Kubrick positions Jack between a stuffed bull moose head and a fire in the fireplace in the background as he glares out the window. We realize if he rotated the camera, he could position the antlers of the moose on Jack’s head… but he doesn’t. Kubrick had done the same thing earlier with flypaper dangling ominously behind Dick next to a sign that reads “Keep this area clear” while he walks to the freezer.
Jack is not the only one changing. On “Saturday,” Wendy is wearing a bright yellow Indian poncho, the back of which features two mountains, a man, presumably asleep, slumped against a cactus with two long upward stretched branches and two tombstones. Although she had declared her favorite colors were pink and gold, judging by her wardrobe up until now we would have assumed it was purple. Kubrick seems to be playing with the color spectrum throughout the film- blue and red oppose each other in a cold/hot sense while yellow/brown is neutral. Thus, red is used two ways- as it also juxtaposes green in a stop/go sense. This may seem complicated but it’s something we do in our daily lives every day while navigating traffic and distinguishing hot from cold. Wendy’s path as she switches from the telephone switchboard to the shortwave radio is in the shape of question marks. We see elaborate red restroom doors directly across from the front entrance. The bowls that once housed plants are now empty. Most importantly, we can see through the window in Stuart Ullman’s office that it is snowing. Wendy and the window are reflected in the top picture by the map.
Danny’s third bike ride scene starts in the hallway with the punch-in time clock that we see Stuart, Bill, Jack and Wendy dissolve into, presumably after leaving Danny with Dick on their way “through to the basement.” Cigarettes, trash cans, water coolers, telephones, fire alarms and sprinkler systems are everywhere in this movie, and we see four cigarette vending machines in this bike ride alone. We also see one water cooler with a trash can next to it, a phone above it and a sign that says, “Please put cups and other garbage in the cans provided.” He passes red doors on his right, turns right down a hall… and is suddenly transported to the hall surrounding their living quarters….
“Yes?”
“Do you feel bad?”
“No, just a little bit tired.”
“Then why don’t you go to sleep?”
“I can’t. I got too much to do.”
Danny is looking down on several toy vehicles, playing with them. This is a perspective shift from him riding his Big Wheel, and we are reminded of his dad looking down on the hedge maze model. The yellow ball Jack was throwing earlier rolls to him. The camera shifts to behind him peering down the hall, and we see that sits in the exact spot where his second bike ride started and that the carpet has magically rotated 180 degrees. (Fold-out beds have also arrived.) A close inspection reveals the toy vehicles have rearranged themselves into a more orderly crescent-shape and gives the illusion that the ball smashed two vehicles out of that shape. While Wendy sipped from a Warner Bros’ Tom and Jerry cup at the beginning of the movie, Danny, who also goes by Doc, has Bugs Bunny on his shirt (and the number 42). Later, he has a one-on-one conversation with his dad while wearing a Mickey Mouse sweater. Now, he stands and reveals an Apollo rocket. It reminded me of the scene in Lone Wolf and Cub when the Head Executioner has his son, Daigoro, choose between a sword and a ball. I also thought how in the United States space program, the Apollo project replaced the Gemini project. But my strongest reaction to this while watching the movie was, “Holy crap, he’s Icarus,” and so was not surprised by his mysterious injuries in the next scene. Wendy responding to him arriving with his injuries by posing like the Statue of Liberty caught me off guard, however. Although the sun is actually much bigger than the moon, from Earth’s perspective, they are the same size. Danny is on the moon, where the sun would appear smaller than it.
We suddenly dissolve to Wendy in the Boiler Room, and she is near the freight elevator. While the audience may be thinking she’s doing Jack’s job, it would be more accurate to realize running those boilers was never intended to be Jack’s job. She runs down the corridor where Danny’s first bike ride scene started and ended, but in the opposite direction. The cigarette vending machines have been re-arranged but the water coolers remain steadfast. A clock is on the wall but is covered with a glare so we can’t read it. Jack is grunting/screaming, then falls to all fours; disoriented and drooling.
While with Wendy and Jack under the table, her shirt cuff is pulled down whenever we could have potentially read her watch but pulled up as far as will go to reveal she’s wearing it whenever we can’t. When Danny arrives, the bookcase on his left reflects first the chair and coffee table that had disappeared in the middle of a previous scene and then the elevators… the floor dial tells us these are the main ones on the far side of the room behind Jack, Wendy and the writing table (which have all been eliminated from the reflection) and not the others that actually are across from the bookcase. Some hidden elements have gone undetected because they needed to be cross-referenced with previous scenes or we were provided with a distraction- this one succeeds precisely because we have previously seen that decoy elevator.
We finally get to read the watch as she holds Danny in her arms, and it reads 3:15. She runs away with Danny… and a moment later we see her reflection in the bookcase. Jack slumps in the chair, dazed, and that chair and coffee table behind him are gone again.
After a chandelier gives Jack a Hitler mustache, the main elevator dissolves into a mirror reflecting the mirror that hangs next to it. It sees Jack walking past that mirror, and then the third mirror reflects what that first mirror faces. The fourth mirror reflects the wall across from it but does not reflect Jack. The doors to the Gold Room reflect only after he is already past them, inside the Gold Room and has turned on the lights. “I’d do anything for a drink… my god damn soul just for a glass of beer!” Jack says, and immediately sees someone he knows by name. Lloyd is an incompetent bartender- he doesn’t even know the difference between bourbon and Tennessee whiskey. Jack seems to be mocking him, and Lloyd’s disdain for Jack is palpable. Jack follows up his own statement, “You set them up and I’ll knock them back, Lloyd, one by one,” with, “White man’s burden.”
Jack says it’s been five months since he’s had a drink, which is exactly what Wendy said about him on the day of his interview. Maybe this scene occurred after his phone call telling Wendy he’d be late on the day of the interview? He also mentions, “I was afraid (two twenties and two tens) were going to be there ‘til next April!” but then finds they’ve disappeared. What was he going to spend them on in April? He, himself will say, just before being struck with a bat, that he “has agreed to look over the Overlook Hotel until May 1st” (It would make sense for there are two weeks of staff preparation before they open for guests.)
Wielding a bat for some reason, Wendy intercepts Jack in the Gold Room to tell him about the person in room 237, apparently after a conversation between Danny and her that we never witness. We see her watch and it says 6:35, but again, it looks more like 12:05 and that she’s wearing it upside-down.
We are transported to Florida via television- we have seen several of them but never one with a power cord. Dick Hallorann wears a wedding band, but certainly looks like he lives in a bachelor pad. Probably he eats his cake at eats it to. Danny interrupts his utopia to communicate with him about room 237 being unleashed… and then we are completely disoriented. Only the lamp design and a sliver of carpet from Danny’s discovery of the open door tell us we are in room 237; nothing else about it is familiar. A door is pushed open- the mirror inside the medicine cabinet doesn’t show anything but the vanity mirror shows a door being opened (or closed) in the opposite direction. Soon, a naked woman appears from behind the door- she does not appear in the part of the mirror reflecting a green wall. We are through the looking glass, but Kubrick has given us an ultimate distraction. As the old lady chases Jack, we do not see anything reflected in the vanity mirror but we do see a naked body pass across (not through) the doorway reflected in the medicine cabinet mirror. Jack walks backwards toward the main elevators or the stairway just past them, even though it would be much closer to go forward to the other set of stairs and elevator.
Things just keep getting crazier. Literally every single scene has layers of things going on. Take the view in this mirror for example, which we see while hearing the lines, “Did you find anything?” “No nothing at all. I didn’t see one god damn thing”:
The mirror is pointed at Wendy, but instead we see Jack and a mirrored image of the cigarette vending machine and the door next to it in the hallway behind him- the machine and door are reversed from what we would see if the mirror was rotated 45 degrees or so, which makes it a mirrored image in a mirror. This is the only time we ever see a reflection in this mirror. It is also one of the few times in the movie when Wendy is not above Jack but at his height. There is also a water cooler in the scene. Wendy is wearing a sweater that matches the motif in the hotel, but we never see her wearing it at any other time in the film. She will soon show her watch- it’s difficult to read but seems to be 4:50- or 7:20 if upside-down. Jack will gradually grow taller relative to Wendy and eventually tower above her for the only time in the movie. This is by no means a throw-away moment of plot exposition that we’d expect from a typical film.
Jack trashes the employee area we saw after rounding the bend “on our way through to the basement” where Stuart, Bill, Jack and Wendy pass a man moving soda cases before they dissolve into Dick’s head, so it is a shock to see Jack turn the corner and find him near the lobby elevators. (The fire hydrant case reflecting stairs instead of him is relatively expected.) Kubrick has moved on from one of the most disorienting and horrifying sections in the movie to one of the most orienting and revealing. We now know the view through the window in Stuart Ullman’s office should not be the outdoors but a wall, behind which is this servant hall, specifically the area where Wendy is when she says, “Just like a ghost ship, huh?”
Deflated remnants of a party litter the lobby, but then Jack arrives at a party in full swing. He’s traveling backward through time. That fourth mirror in the hall, the one across from the entrance to the Gold Room, which hasn’t reflected anybody the entire film, now sees Jack. Whenever Jack talks with Lloyd, multiple personalities come out, as if he’s embodying the personalities of every person who has ever sat in that stool. We know this hotel was “for the jet set, even before anybody knew what a jet set was. We had four presidents who stayed here, lots of movie stars… all the best people,” but even here, Jack is a VIP. Who is Jack? Certainly, the Overlook Hotel remembers him. Perhaps that is the secret of Overlook Hotel- it’s a place where people come to forget, and what they forget, it remembers. Perhaps, Jack is there to honor those memories. The “fish and goose soiree” is an obvious reference to his killing Wendy and Danny, respectively.
The red restroom is directly behind the bar. The fourth mirror in from the door does tricks beyond the others we’ve seen, including two perspectives at once after a momentary pink apparition that can only be a clumsy edit appears. (The fifth mirror sees what the fourth should see.) Jack strikes a Jesus pose and Delbert Grady carefully washes him. Jack asks, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” and then studies a mirror for a moment before smiling knowingly. At first, Mr. Grady doesn’t seem to remember anything except they have been in this hotel for an eternity, but in the end encourages Jack to follow his example, not only aware but proud of his actions. It is obvious that the hotel owns and controls Jack, and not the other way around.
Dick Hallorann and the lynching images are also elaborated on in this scene- surely he represents an escaped slave.
On the surface, it seems that Jack is conflicted between the demands of his job and his love for his son, while Wendy struggles as to what to make of her evolving child.
If we look closer, we notice the sweater she was wearing is now draped across a chair. A little coffee table has been moved next to it an empty blue chair. Wendy paces and smokes while talking to herself, walking past a mirror without it seeing her, as it focuses instead on the bathroom door to its right. A hand towel has been added near the bathroom sink. Danny hollers, “Redrum!” and we can see throughout the scene that Wendy’s watch reads 10:14.
A dissolve re-orients Wendy above Jack. We see by the gold clock above the reception area, on this “Wednesday,” that Jack dismantles the radio at 11:46. We can no longer see anything through the windows in Stuart Ullman’s office. The bottom picture reflects Jack and the window. Interestingly, it was around 11:40 at the ranger station according to the clock on their wall when Wendy contacted them while wearing the yellow parka. However, we figured it was just before noon on “Saturday.” When that scene cuts to Danny near that same clock in the hall just outside Mr. Ullman’s office, it clearly says 6:10. However, if you flipped this view of the clock upside-down, it would also read 11:40. There is no way anything in this movie can be taken at face value. The man at the ranger station never replies to “Over and out.” If Jack did arrive just as Wendy was finishing her conversation, she could have snuck out the door in the office, on the other side of which is where Danny’s third bike ride scene begins.
Everything looks bright and calm from the air. The American flag on the plane faces backwards, as if blowing in the wind. We, for some reason, return to the shot in front of the elevators and behind Jack typing, but without the red lens. Then the plane lands in a snow storm, which cleverly plays into our fears. As Dick Hallorann drives, we are bombarded with a series of dissolves rotating us around the vehicle. We see a red Volkswagon Beetle smashed by a semi- the Torrances’ have a yellow one. After acquiring a Snowcat through connections reminiscent of the Underground Railroad, the camera will continue to circle Dick for the remainder of his trip.
Wendy is with Danny, looking frazzled. She checks her watch- the only time she does this in the film- before leaving, saying she’ll be back in five minutes. We see it shows 6:30, or 12:00 if her watch is upside-down; either way it is just before the time we saw when she met up with Jack in the Gold Room. She grabs a bat before leaving. Danny is finishing breakfast, has his robe on and is watching Saturday morning cartoons, (“Roadrunner- the coyote’s after you. Roadrunner- if he catches you, you’re through.”), so we assume it is the AM. In every scene in which she has the bat, Wendy is wearing the same outfit.
When Wendy enters the Colorado Lounge, it is viewed through a purple lens. The sun shines through the windows and it even appears there is grass on the ground. We see her watch again- it reads 6:40. In the winter it would be dark out… but I have a hard time trusting the windows. However, it could be 12:10 if she’s wearing the watch upside-down. She could be taking advantage of having just sent Jack to inspect room 237 to steal a peek at his work. The repeatedly typed sentence is the only concrete evidence we have of the passage of time in this film lasting beyond three days.
The camera lens switches to green once Jack arrives, and the watch gets covered, but it is still light out through the windows. He could have just come down the stairs near the main elevators after his confrontation in room 237, except that gives us the scene with Wendy in the sweater to explain. Jack said he had a dream in which he killed his family. Do we ever see any of that dream? (He is also knocked unconscious.)
The bookcases have stopped being reflective. Wendy winds a serpentine route, holding the wooden bat like a boat rudder, then switches the bat angle as if taking the rudder out of the water as she ascends the staircase, all while walking backwards. It is apparent from her avoidance of exits she’s not really trying to escape. Jack spouts a load of bull. If Danny represents space and communication and Jack represents fire and deceit, Wendy must be water and obligation. A chandelier creates a crown on Wendy, then a much larger chandelier creates a much larger crown on Jack just before his fall.
Drool runs down Jack’s cheek, but the blood on his head has dried where it ran when he was laying face-down. He has been unconscious. A freezer plugged into the wall of the Chef’s Office has been moved to under the clock on the wall, which shows 6:55 as she drags Jack toward storing room C1, and then the camera focuses on her watch as she fights with the latch, and it is synchronized with the clock on the wall.
The actual screen time between us viewing her watch at 6:40 and at 6:55 is 8 minutes, which would give her only 7 minutes to gather her wits as Jack’s blood dries, drag him down a flight of stairs and into the kitchen, but if everything is upside-down- and certainly Jack’s feet in the air give us the impression that it is- the time would have gone from 12:10 to 1:25, which would leave 67 minutes unaccounted for.
Interestingly, once Wendy shuts the door to the storing room, we will never again see Jack and Wendy together in the same room.
Jack topples three boxes of Rice Krispies (snap, crackle, pop?), something Dick had mentioned was in there but we hadn’t seen, revealing part of a No Smoking message that we could clearly see when we were shown this room. Despite Dick’s precise knowledge of the inventory, it has increased significantly. Wendy grabs the knife with her right hand and holds it pointing down.
Wendy has a red tapestry behind her we haven’t seen and passes elevators we also haven’t seen on her way out the door, now holding the knife erect. Wendy goes outside, and it seems to be dusk or dawn. The knife edge seems to keep flipping back and forth.
When Jack awakes in the storing room, we discover the wound on his head has mostly healed, but holds his right ankle gingerly, as if falling down the stairs was worse than being struck by the baseball bat. Not only has he set up a bed of sorts, but there’s also a pile of food he’s been eating, including the Rice Krispies. He is underneath where we saw Dick “shine.”
Danny has gotten dressed into an outfit we haven’t seen before. He holds the knife with his left hand, and establishes that the blade is facing him. We have seen red and purple flowers by the mirror in separate scenes, but now we see them both together. We find out why that mirror has been watching the bathroom door. Of course, since Kubrick has once again manipulated where our eyes will go, there is obviously something else going on. Besides, Wendy completely overreacts, especially considering she is barely fazed by waking up to a son holding a knife with the blade now oriented towards her. When she looks past him, she may notice not only that an ashtray is now teetering over the edge but a red necklace with a cross attached has appeared in what was an empty jewelry box. We have wondered whether the characters in the movie have noticed any of the weird things going on around them, but we now realize they are the same as us- they only notice it when they are looking at it. One oddity that had stood out at the beginning of the film is that, even though Wendy acknowledges the Indian motif, she never actually looks at the huge, bright, frankly unmissable mural above the fireplace. From here on out, Wendy is going to start to see all kinds of things… it is as if she has suddenly awakened to a reality she had been long ignoring.
Just before Jack starts chopping down the outside door, we see Wendy’s watch at 5:10… or 11:40 upside-down. That is odd/significant, because we already noted 6:10 also looks like 11:40 upside- down. As if to accentuate this effect, the top of the hour hand on the clock at the ranger station is obliterated by the reflection of the ceiling light.
Once inside the restroom, Danny holds a toy vehicle in his right hand- it looks like a yellow Snowcat. As Jack chops down the door, we can see Shelley Duvall, the actress playing Wendy, repeatedly making sure her robe sleeve is covering her watch. The actors, who have to say their lines often at very specific moments, express a huge range of emotions, hit their marks, follow specific directions of pantomime and handle props, really do an astounding job.
The hotel chimneys become search lights.
A moment after the famous “Here’s Johnny” line, we see the mirror that has been magically watching the bathroom door ever since breakfast “A Month Later,” and, seen from the bathroom door, it has returned to reflecting the bed. We are distracted by the arriving Snowcat, and then the bathroom door has had the left-side panel chopped away. The Snowcat stops suspiciously near where it was a week ago “Thursday.”
Danny, sans toy vehicle, conveniently runs down the hall with the clock showing 5:15. Upside-down, this would be 11:45- it’s as if he has made a loop that began after leaving from this same location on his third Big Wheel ride scene. The trash can next to the water cooler is gone. Just sayin’.
We return to Jack leaving the open door of storing room C1 in the kitchen. He holds the axe with both hands while stalking the hallways, but otherwise keeps it only in his left. He then comes into the lobby through doors that we’ve seen but haven’t been used, past the hallway to the right that would lead to Danny’s hiding place but continues forward so we can finally see the next hallway that goes directly behind the window in Stuart’s office. Only the overhead light that would be on the other side of that window is brightly lit. He then goes up the stairs, and we see that on the next floor, the stairs and elevator matches how they are oriented near Room 237, except we know that is above the Colorado Lounge, so this could be written off as a coincidence except that we never learn where the Colorado Lounge is relative to the lobby except that they are on the same floor. Even the railing matches up in the same way in all three stairways (in the hall next to the Colorado Lounge, near room 237 and here in the lobby.) It seems all of the Torrances are reluctant to use those particular stairs. Also, I haven’t specifically mentioned it, but there are tons and tons of references to triangles with one peculiar intersection throughout the film, most obviously the chair Jack types in and the two behind him on either side, one of which keeps disappearing and Danny’s Big Wheel, whose famous front tire we never see. The mirrors are also frequently facing in ways that shape impossible triangles. Perhaps a more abstract example would be the blue, red and red, green motifs.
Jack looks over the lobby. Is there a black cat under the Gold Room sign by the door Dick’s about to enter through? Whatever it is, it isn’t there a moment later. (A trash can moves aside in order to accommodate Jack’s hiding place.) Dick knew returning to the hotel was a suicide mission, and will unceremoniously fall under the only working chandelier in the lobby exactly where Danny’s Big Wheel was parked when Jack watched Danny and Wendy from the hedge maze model. Dick succeeds in saving Wendy’s life. I daresay that Dick’s death is treated simply as an aside- even the Overlook Hotel ignores it- is one of the most poignant messages in this film.
We never get to see what is just to the left inside the room marked “General Manager.”
Jack hears Danny, and chooses a clockwise route. We see the clock again; it is 5:25 and 10 seconds; a 180 degree rotation from the first time we saw this clock, except that was from the opposite side. This movie is overlapping onto itself like a Mozart composition.
Wendy inexplicably goes up the stairs to the fourth floor, holding the knife in her left hand. These are unnatural acts for both Wendy and her archetype. Two water coolers seem to be reminding us that water flows down.
Jack exits the same doors Wendy opened and Dick entered. (The roof makes that particular portal look like teeth.) Danny enters the hedge maze, the maze Wendy has led him through but that Jack has only seen from above.
Wendy retraces Jack’s route on his way to the party in the Gold Room, with her knife back in her right hand. The reflections create triangles while ignoring her. We can plainly see the tapestry behind her looks blood-stained. Suddenly, chandeliers turn on and we see a zombie and a rotting fish wearing a monocle in a case. She passes down the hall that should have a window, proving that there isn’t and then retraces the route she pushes breakfast through just before Danny’s first bike ride scene. The mirror on the back wall is missing. Is she going forward in time?
Danny, like Wendy from Jack and Jack from the zombie, escapes by stepping backwards.
Wendy seems to be spilling all over the place, as if she has breeched a levy or something. In the past, she has tended to underestimate herself, and so has the audience, but she is a total badass, and has always been too big for the hotel to contain. Now she is in an unfamiliar, completely red hallway, and turns a corner to face a hall with an elevator we also haven’t seen. Seriously- how many elevators are in this place? She looks surprised, not so much at what she’s seeing but that she’s seeing it. Flooding is Wendy’s domain; she doesn’t run from it. The next time we see her, she’s outside.
Although he thought he was the hunter, Jack himself has been trapped. Like the Minotaur, he is half-man, half-demon.
The final image predictably throws us a lot of new information and misinformation. The furniture has been covered as it would have been during a winter closure; the sign is on the reverse side of the door. The tapestries are hanging vertically instead of horizontally. It looks at first as if Jack is wielding a sword, but then we glimpse that he is holding his arms like some sort of god. A man’s hand holds his right arm, seeming to give him extra limbs. (Of course, this isn’t the camera’s focus.) An internet search discovers that pose belonging to the demon Baphomet, who represents the sum total of the universe. Baphomet is a hybrid, but his top half is of a goat, and there has been no sign of a goat anywhere in this film. Regardless, Jack has been considered a worthy addition to the hotel’s collection. He was the target all along- it lured him there with hopes and desires that are never fulfilled.
In The Shining, Kubrick, gives himself permission to play, and it is not dull.
Immediately after watching The Shining, my girlfriend and I watched Room 237 (2012), which I initially thought was appallingly bad, but now realize must intentionally be a mockumentary making fun of people wildly speculating on the internet about things they barely understand.
