The Shining was re-released last year to the big screen, and through a series of misadventures, I ended up going to what felt like countless showings of it. Other than being impressed with the sound design more (Penderecki never sounded so wildly desolate), more than anything else, being sequestered in what felt like numberless windowless rooms, watching the same story play out again and again, I think the movie’s true terror opened up to me.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you drive yourself to the brink of unquiet desperation by endless repeated viewings of The Shining, but if you want to take part in the protagonists’ claustrophobic, doomed ennui, there’s no experience like the verite sort. Maybe it was sometime around my third go-around with the film that I started to think about an aspect of the movie I had never really thought much about--the batshit lunacy of the romance between Jack and Wendy.
Listen, there are two kinds of people in the world and they will never, ever agree. Forget Deplorables vs. Liberals--long before our nation decided to rip itself in half, the horror subculture felt the true sting of the eternal question: Kubrick or King? As all good, right-thinking people would agree: Kubrick. Of course. But I’m not here to tell you the obvious facts. I bring this up merely as an olive branch of sorts. The common theme I’ve heard from all poor, misguided King supporters is that the novel is rich in psychological insight, that novel Jack’s slow-burn descent into madness is Dostoyevskian in quality (if not quantity--really, Raskolnikov had several nervous breakdowns in the time it takes Jack to get pissed off at some hornets), that movie Jack already seems one inciting incident away from active shooter status, etc.
Ok. You got me.
In the battle of lonely dudes trapped in hotels, I’d waste away in Kubrick’s cold blizzard before I even touched the unedited mess of King’s novel again, but I do have to admit: what the hell is up with movie Jack? Movie Jack is introduced to us as a smug, unbearable asshole, glibly tossing off answers at a job interview and reading a Playboy issue about incest in the lobby of a luxury hotel, and...he doesn’t get better from there. Not only does the film take the tragedy out of Jack, but it also gives a chilling undercurrent to his relationship with Wendy.
King, to his credit, tries admirably to give his heroine a degree of depth the film never approaches. Through several flashbacks, Wendy recounts her own fledging experiences with “shining,” and most tellingly, her early romance with Jack, the literary bad boy of their tiny liberal arts campus. Watching Jack slowly devolve from the big man on campus, holding court with a bunch of beatniks in an apartment more overwhelmed with books than Gertrude Stein’s atelier, into an abusive monster, it becomes more real, and as a result, more heartbreaking, that Wendy allows her devotion for the Jack that was to keep her from seeing the Jack currently stalking the halls of a tacky resort with a croquet mallet (or something--it’s the novel, who can remember what happens after watching Danny stare at a water hose for fifty pages?)
But I digress into unnecessary bitchiness--
While the novel shows the poignancy of a relationship at its moment of decline, the film shows a marriage that was possibly never healthy. In the infamous scene where Wendy interrupts Jack at his typewriter, he snaps her and tells her, in so many, to leave him the fuck alone. Wendy’s eyes widen slightly, but otherwise doesn’t seem shocked that even completely sober, Jack is a raging, disrespectful creep. Other scenes hint at the poisonous nature of their relationship--whereas the novel depicts Jack at least trying to keep up with his responsibilities as an innkeeper, the movie shows Wendy, decked out in coveralls, uncomplainingly attending to all of Jack’s duties while juggling domestic chores like food prep and child-rearing. Later, when Danny wants to get something from their room upstairs, Wendy repeatedly cautions him not to wake Jack, each time, a little more anxiety edging into actor Shelly Duvall’s voice.
This film, like the others in this series, has some strange resonances with the idea of “amour fou.” All of the films depict couples isolated from the world, and this movie more than the others really lays into the drama of this loneliness. The entire third act is devoted single-mindedly to Halloran braving the horrors of nature only to be killed with a shocking lack of ceremony seconds after his arrival, plunging the couple into isolation again. Like Hour of the Wolf, both films devolve into ghostly orgies in their final minutes and culminate in surreal shots that imply that both men have been consumed or assumed by malignant forces. Just as Antichrist features one partner becoming a violent psychopath and turning like a mad animal on their former loved one, so too, The Shining at its most terrifying shows the turmoil of domestic abuse as Jack tortures his terrified family. I saved this iconic film for last in the series because even though it’s not the earliest example of cinematic amour fou in horror, it’s certainly the most well-known and most celebrated of these four, and in its artistic clarity and chilly, unrelenting savagery, it’s a perfect distillation of love gone horribly, irrevocably awry.
It’s hard to say that a unifying lesson or observation can be gleaned from enduring all these films. Maybe it’s just this: Take care. In a world that tells people their worth is only measured by how much love they elicit from others, maybe misery doesn’t always need or want company.
Pennie Sublime