I love The Shining, it's right up there with Dark Water as favourite horror movie ever.
One thing I wonder, if you've spent so much time analysing it, what do you make of the "you've always been here", and the picture of Jack in the photo from 1920? Also, the tell-tale that the hotel was built on an old reservat, or something like that (sorry, it was a long time since I last saw it)?
Watching it this time I was struck by how much is about writer's block.
Indeed. That's kind of creepy, because it's one aspect of Jack's character I can really identify with. This whole romanticised idea about "if I could just get away somewhere, away from people and other disturbances, and just have endless time to write in solitude, then it would work." Actually, that does work for some writers, but the only ones it seems to work for are those who are severly trained in writing as a disciplined job, those who have already got their writing routine set in stone, and who are disciplined and determined enough to pull it off. If someone who is not (heh, like me, and obviously Jack), I think that sceneario works in the exact opposite way, the endless time becomes a hinder, because you no longer have any kind of deadlines to beat, no limited amount of time in which you must write, if you're going to get it down, and also, you get no outside influences or impulses, which in itself can kill the creativity.
Wendy asks if Jack's got any ideas--so Jack hasn't come here to finish a novel or work on something he's started, and whatever project he claimed to be outlining at the interview appears to have gone up in smoke.
This doesn't really matter, but the "got any ideas" question could just as well be "got any ideas of how you will continue from where you are now?", can't it? He could be stuck someplace in his story. However, it's more interesting to interpret it your way, that he's making up the story of what goes on in the hotel, only living it out, rather than getting it down on paper. :-)
Certainly we know that the ghosts as they appear are not the way they were in life. Grady wasn't a butler, he was the caretaker. I was surprised when use of the handy freeze frame revealed that the Grady girls, when chopped up, are shown wearing the same Alice-in-Wonderland dresses they wear as ghosts. The girls were murdered in 1970, but are now dressed, as are all the other ghosts, for a party in the 1920s.
Hmm, in the light of this, maybe I can answer my own question? That Jack is there, right amongst all the ghosts in the 1920 picture, indicates that nopw he, like them, is trapped in his own imagination? He has become one of his own characters? Interesting...
no subject
One thing I wonder, if you've spent so much time analysing it, what do you make of the "you've always been here", and the picture of Jack in the photo from 1920? Also, the tell-tale that the hotel was built on an old reservat, or something like that (sorry, it was a long time since I last saw it)?
Watching it this time I was struck by how much is about writer's block.
Indeed. That's kind of creepy, because it's one aspect of Jack's character I can really identify with. This whole romanticised idea about "if I could just get away somewhere, away from people and other disturbances, and just have endless time to write in solitude, then it would work." Actually, that does work for some writers, but the only ones it seems to work for are those who are severly trained in writing as a disciplined job, those who have already got their writing routine set in stone, and who are disciplined and determined enough to pull it off. If someone who is not (heh, like me, and obviously Jack), I think that sceneario works in the exact opposite way, the endless time becomes a hinder, because you no longer have any kind of deadlines to beat, no limited amount of time in which you must write, if you're going to get it down, and also, you get no outside influences or impulses, which in itself can kill the creativity.
Wendy asks if Jack's got any ideas--so Jack hasn't come here to finish a novel or work on something he's started, and whatever project he claimed to be outlining at the interview appears to have gone up in smoke.
This doesn't really matter, but the "got any ideas" question could just as well be "got any ideas of how you will continue from where you are now?", can't it? He could be stuck someplace in his story. However, it's more interesting to interpret it your way, that he's making up the story of what goes on in the hotel, only living it out, rather than getting it down on paper. :-)
Certainly we know that the ghosts as they appear are not the way they were in life. Grady wasn't a butler, he was the caretaker. I was surprised when use of the handy freeze frame revealed that the Grady girls, when chopped up, are shown wearing the same Alice-in-Wonderland dresses they wear as ghosts. The girls were murdered in 1970, but are now dressed, as are all the other ghosts, for a party in the 1920s.
Hmm, in the light of this, maybe I can answer my own question? That Jack is there, right amongst all the ghosts in the 1920 picture, indicates that nopw he, like them, is trapped in his own imagination? He has become one of his own characters? Interesting...