Where's Johnny?: Questions left over from "The Shining"

Sometimes I wonder what exactly drove me to sit down and watch “The Shining” as a young boy. Perhaps it was at the suggestion of my father, or perhaps I had come across the iconic cover- Jack Nicholson’s gristly grin peering through a cracked doorframe-somewhere in a doomed Blockbuster, in a section I probably shouldn’t have been in. Whatever the case, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece has remained one of my favorite films (I still make a point to watch it yearly in the fall.).  This time around, I immersed myself in the world of Jack, Wendy and Danny Torrence and their family time snowbound in the Overlook Hotel to avoid intense feelings of claustrophobia on a 4 hour flight from Chicago to San Francisco. What keeps me coming back to this movie time after time? Simple: the burning questions I am left with when the screen finally goes black. Am I being nitpicky? Probably. 

Here are just a few of the questions that I (and viewers like me) have been left to ponder since the film's release more than 35 years ago. This review contains spoilers.

1. Does Jack tell Wendy about the Hotel murders?
     

     In one of the first scenes of the movie, Jack is being interviewed for the winter caretaker position by The Overlook’s owner, Stuart Ullman. Towards the end of the interview, Ullman begrudgingly discloses to Jack “something that has been known to give people second thoughts about the job”: a former caretaker named Charles Grady brutally murdered his wife and two daughters with an ax during his stint as the hotel’s winter caretaker. Ullman speculates that it was a classic case of "cabin fever" - a reaction to the isolation induced by being snowbound in a remote location for five months. Jack is, surprisingly, unfazed by this gristly information. Similarly, he believes that his family will not be affected by this bit of history either. He claims that his wife, Wendy “a confirmed ghost story and horror film addict […] will be fascinated.” But does he ever tell his wife about the murders?
      About halfway through the film, Jack's young son Danny appears in the Colorado Lounge with torn clothing and some mysterious bruises around his neck. Wendy immediately blames her husband to his previous history of abusing their son. She takes Danny and runs off screen, while Jack hallucinates drinking at the bar in the Hotel’s Gold Room. His vision is broken when Wendy bursts in the room in a fit of desperation. She tells Jack that Danny disclosed to her that he was not assaulted by his father - but had his clothing torn by a “crazy woman” in one of the hotels rooms - which begets many questions for a nit-picker like myself.

    First off, why does Wendy immediately assume there is a living, breathing intruder in the hotel in this scene? They are, after all, alone and snowbound in the Overlook. If Wendy is truly a fan of ghost stories, it wouldn't be much of a stretch for her to assume that the hotel is haunted. However, she does not. It appears that Wendy is completely in the dark regarding the Grady family murders. If Jack had informed his wife about these gruesome events, Wendy might have begun to assume that something supernatural is taking place. At the same time, there is the possibility that Jack did tell his wife about the murders. Unfortunately, this tale may have become just another ghost story for his wife- a fiction lost in the endless sea of fables and horror movies she enjoys so much.

2. Does Jack shine?

     Throughout the movie, young Danny sees visions of things to come and things past in the hotel – a skill that Overlook chef Dick Halloran (Scatman Corothers) terms ‘shining.’ Eventually all of Danny’s visions come to fruition - everything from his father getting the caretaker job, to the iconic tsunami of blood that flows forth from a set of red doors. Because of their prophetic nature, viewers interpret Danny’s visions as valid - a true skill - as opposed to the wild imaginations of a child or a myth from a kooky old cook. Interestingly, Jack has similar visions throughout the film, many of which also come to fruition. He hallucinates a meeting with Lloyd, the bartender, and even conspires with Delbert Grady, the Overlook’s infamous former caretaker, to murder his wife and son. Jack and Danny both interact with the same “crazy woman” in room 237 (Danny’s interaction is implied-takes place off-screen.) In Jack’s interaction with this apparition, the form transforms from a beautiful blonde woman into a rotted, decayed corpse in his arms. If both Danny and Jack interact with the same crazy woman- does Jack shine, too?

     One interpretation of this conundrum is that the crazy woman from room 237 is not a shine at all. She is one of the spirits trapped timelessly in the walls of the hotel and both Jack and Danny have merely interacted with the same ghost. In this case, Jack does not have the ability to shine. Another theory that supports the idea that Jack does not have the ability to shine is that Delbert Grady, who inspires Jack to follow in his footsteps, is meant to represent the part of Jack’s mind that is succumbing to cabin fever. This subconscious spiral manifests itself in a person that Jack is familiar with - the caretaker form the ordinal ghost story. In this interpretation, Jack is only conspiring within himself to murder his family the same way that a schizophrenic might interact with voices in their own head.

     In contrast, Jack may have a very vivid shine while snoozing at his desk in the Colorado Lounge. Wendy shakes him awake from a screaming nightmare: he recants and tells her, in horror, that he had a dream in which he murdered both his wife and son, chopping them up into little pieces. Though he expresses intense terror and resentment of this vision, viewers cannot deny the similarity between this vision and the murders committed by the former Overlook caretaker. This dream could very well be a view into the past (or the future) a vision eerily similar to the way that Danny shines. The schizophrenic self-coaching hypothesis also does not explain how Jack escapes the dry storage closet after being locked in by Wendy. In the film, Delbert Grady converses with Jack through the door of the dry storage about how he has failed in his task to murder his family and complete the process. Jack convinces Grady that he will do what must be done, and the door is unlocked. Jack is free. But how? If Grady does not exist but as voice within Jack’s head, who unlocks the door?

Like father like son.

3. How did they keep young Danny Lloyd from the movie’s plotline?

     One of the most famous trivia tidbits from “The Shining”’s production is that Danny Lloyd (film: Danny Torrence) was kept uninformed about the gruesome nature of the film he was a part of throughout production. IMDB even goes so far as to state that director Stanley Kubrick was instrumental in keeping the 6 year old Lloyd distanced from the horror of the film. The question that remains for me is, how was this possible?

     On a less serious and less interpretative note than my other nitpicks, this remains a question of logistics for me. The Wikipedia Page for Danny Lloyd is even so bold as to state that "[Lloyd] was lead to believe that he was acting in a drama film about a family that lives in a hotel." Sure, Lloyd may have been kept off-screen for the particularly terrifying scenes such as Halloran’s ax-murder and Jack’s lumberjacking of the bathroom door, but there are several distinct scenes from the film that make me wonder what pretenses were put in place to dissolve the aura of a horror movie. A great example of scene in which horror themes are particuarly unavoidable is the timeless “redrum!” scene. Here, while talking backwards in a gargled demonic voice, Danny picks up a seven inch steak knife and slides his small thumb along the length of the blade. What was the justification for this? Shortly after, Wendy begs Danny to “Run, run and hide!” from his slowly approaching maniac father. In subsequent scenes, he runs away from his father who chases after him wielding a bloody ax...a drama movie about a family who lives in a hotel? These are just some of the things that make me believe that it would have been hard for the young Lloyd to not put two and two together. Is this just another production myth surrounding an already mystical film?

     Interestingly, unlike other child-stars who skyrocketed to fame and misfortune after their first roles, Danny Lloyd declined the beckon of the silver screen and turned down a career in acting. Lloyd only acted in one film after his performance in “The Shining” (Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy [1982].) What were the reasons that the now well-known Lloyd decided to refuse fame and fortune? It becomes clearer to me when Lloyd is compared with other child stars: Macaulay Culkin ("Home Alone", "Home Alone 2") for example. At age ten, Culkin was the focal point and sole star of the Home Alone film franchise. Heck, his open-mouth gape on the original movie poster is almost as famous as Culkin himself. Lloyd, on the other hand, was playing third fiddle to Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall in “The Shining.” Perhaps not being the top-billed actor created a completely different environment for the young actor. To utilize my comparison to Culkin further, Lloyd was sheltered and removed from the plot of his film. Without sounding too harsh, one could even say that Kubrick used Lloyd for exactly what he was good for-prolonged scenes of concentration- and not much else plot-wise. Culkin in “Home Alone” would have experienced the exact opposite treatment on set. He would have been coached, trained, and immersed within his films because he was the star. In this comparison, one can see how the attention that comes with being a “star” could keep a child in the acting business, while merely being an “actor” in a film you know little about might change a young child’s perception of the occupation. Either way, last I read, Culkin was smoking 60 cigarettes a day in a London flat and Lloyd was a science teacher in the Midwest United States. Maybe declining the spotlight wasn't such a bad decision after all.

Director Stanley Kubrick (center) keeps a close watch over Lloyd on the set of "The Shining."

4. What’s next?
     I think that the question that gnaws the mind the most after finishing “The Shining”, is simple. What’s next?

     “The Shining” is filled with strange anachronisms, a literary term that Dictionary.com defines as “an error in chronology in which a person, object, event, etc., is assigned a date or period other than the correct one.” Jack Torrence and his family continually find themselves trapped in a world that mixes past, present, and future, somehow implying that all three can take place at the same time. This bone-chilling prophecy of eternity peeks its head in different points of the movie, one of the most prominent being the bathroom exchange between Delbert Grady and Jack Torrence. Skip ahead to this tense confrontation between the two at 1:27:00 for some of the finest acting you’ll ever see from Jack Nicholson.

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JT: Mr. Grady, you were the caretaker here. I recognize ya. I saw your picture in the newspapers. You, uh, chopped your wife and daughter up into little bits…and then you blew your brains out.

DG: That’s strange, sir. I don’t have any recollection of that at all.

JT: Mr. Grady, you were the caretaker here.

DG: I’m sorry to differ with you sir. But you are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been here.

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      Has Jack always been the caretaker at the Overlook? Some interpretations of the film make this possible. One device that shows this as a potential explanation comes in Jack’s choice of weapon during the finale - a fireman’s ax - the same weapon used in the fabled Grady murders. By using the same weapon to hunt down his own family, Jack is either replicating the steps that Grady took in his gristly espionage, or Jack is Grady himself, and the story is being told for the first time, again. The Overlook presents several more of these strange, anachronistic ideas throughout the film. In the finale, Wendy runs frantically through the empty hotel corridors, periodically encountering strange party guests and eventually stumbling back into the Colorado Lounge to find the once elegant room filled with cobwebs and fully dressed skeletons. If we just saw the characters in the same room, beautifully lit and decorated, how can it suddenly appear as if untouched for decades?

     The twist-ending of the film is perhaps the most perplexing of these anachronisms. If, say, the screen faded to black as Wendy and Danny growl into the distance in the Snowcat, there might be less questions to answer from a cut and dry happy ending. The family escapes with their lives, but will they readjust to a new life, sans father, back in Boulder? Will Wendy remarry? Will the cops be able to put the pieces together? Fortunately, these melodramatic questions are overshadowed by head-scratcher that is Kubrick’s twist ending. For more than 35 years viewers have been left mouths agape by the film’s final shot: a black and white photograph that shows a man who appears to be Jack Torrence amidst a crowd of party goers: July 4th, 1921. Shivers trickle down my back. Perhaps Jack has been here all along, and the gristly murders are repeated continuously as time passes. One final question remains for me, however. We learn that Grady succeeded in murdering his entire family before committing suicide. If Delbert Grady and Jack are one in the same, the prophecy has been fulfilled before. However, in the retelling of these events that is “The Shining,” Jack Torrence fails to murder his family and perishes by himself in the cold. With the prophecy left unfulfilled, does the evil at the Overlook finally rest? For me, it is interesting to note that this is far clearer in Steven King’s novel, “The Shining.” The entire hotel explodes due to a boiler malfunction, thus eliminating the hotel forever. As far as us movie-lovers are concerned, the Overlook Hotel may open again next May.

Here’s to hoping they have a good maintenance crew.