The Horror of Writer's Block--aka The Shining

[sistermagpie]

Happy October! October is my favorite month, not only because it contains my favorite day of the year, Halloween, but that's part of it. Maybe that's why I was inordinately interested and pleased two weeks ago when my mother revealed I was born a month early. I knew I had been medically induced early due to this RH-negative thing. My mother had once mentioned talking to a woman who did astrological charts and she asked her about my being induced because I guess for her she'd always thought my sign should be Libra--which is interesting since I've never read a single horoscope in my entire life that was ever remotely accurate for me. The astrologer said whatever day I was born was the day I was "meant" to be born so it didn't matter, but this seems to have been something that stuck in my mother's head (maybe she just wanted all her kids to be Libras). Anyway, so I always knew I was induced early but I always assumed it was, like, days early, not a whole month. So although I've got no problem with my real birthday, I sort of like the idea that my "phantom birthday" is in October.

It being October, slippyslope had mentioned doing a sort of theme month for those of us who love horror movies and just don't get to talk about them enough. I've done posts here and there where I talked about some I liked, but I love the idea of a special month for October. I can't promise any regular horror movie or horror-anything posts, but as it happens I finally picked up the DVD to The Shining and was watching it this weekend. It spurred a lot of thoughts, which I will now spit out here.



I haven't seen this movie for a while, though I've talked about it a lot with a guy at work who really likes it. Watching the DVD took me back to when I first saw it, which was when I was a kid and it was on cable. My friend Julie and I used to have these long discussions I'd forgotten where we'd talk about possible readings of it. I remembered them suddenly when I got to what was, for us, a key scene. See, we used to talk about whether you could interpret the movie as being about madness, not ghosts. Think The Innocents, if you know that movie, where there could be ghosts, or the governess could be crazy, or it could be a little of both.

The important moment Julie and I spoke of was the moment when Grady (a ghost) unlocks the freezer door--thus proving that Grady was real, real enough to affect the physical world, since there was no other way for Jack to get out of the freezer and run amuck. (A ghost also tries to strangle Danny and leaves bruises, but we don't see that onscreen, so it might have been done by Jack-Jack himself claims it was done by Danny himself.)

So definitely the movie isn't all about hallucinations, but what is it about? Watching it this time I was struck by how much is about writer's block. It's seriously the theme of the whole movie (as opposed to the book-I think they both exist independently and hold up as two different things). Jack is a writer. That's why he wants to be at the Overlook--he wants the isolation to write. Just him and his imagination. Another ghost house movie, The Changeling, has George C. Scott rent a big scary house for the same reason, because he wants a big place where he can "lock [myself] away and write [music]." (Artists are the only people who believably seek out haunted houses to live in in movies!) There's a big difference between these two writers--George C. Scott's character actually writes. He's a successful composer. In The Shining, we're told Jack Torrance is a writer (that is, he says he is) but we don't know what he writes. In the book we hear about stories Book!Jack has written and sold while working as a teacher. We have no idea what genre Movie!Jack writes in, or whether he's ever sold or finished a thing.

A month into his stay at the hotel, Jack says he's happier at the Overlook than he's ever been, but he obviously can not write there. The first conversation we have about this is when Wendy wakes Jack up with breakfast at 11:30AM. Not exactly the sign of an early riser able to discipline himself when he doesn't have to. Not that I'm knocking Jack for sleeping in-I love to sleep myself and some writers write late at night--you make your own hours. But the fact that it's brought up seems to indicate Jack's not keeping track of the time, not that he's got a nocturnal schedule. (Wendy says maybe he's been “staying up too late” and Jack agrees, so he doesn't seem to be staying up too late writing.) When Wendy suggests a walk he says, "I suppose I ought to try to do some writing first," indicating he is slacking off.

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. Maybe he was hoping that once locked away he'd come up with an idea and write it. Jack responds to Wendy's asking if he's got any ideas with what is the definition of writer's block: "Lots of ideas. No good ones." Wendy chirpily says, "Something will come. It's just a matter of settling back into the habit of writing every day." Jack responds, "That's all it is," in a slightly mocking tone, as if Wendy the philistine would think that's all there is to writing, but Wendy isn't really wrong here. It's not *just* settling into the habit of writing every day but that's a big part of it.

When we actually see Jack during his writing time he's bouncing a ball around or wandering around the lobby--a pretty classic sign of somebody driven a little crazy by writer's block. Eventually Jack does settle into that "writing every day" habit--unfortunately he's just writing the same sentence over and over, and that sentence, ironically, is about not doing his work. (Btw, props to Kubrick's secretary who the DVD reveals as the typist of all those all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy's. Secretaries rule!) Jack never writes a thing.

So does that make Jack not a writer? I don't think so, because while he's not actually writing, the movie is kind of a working metaphor for writing in general. That's where I get back to Julie's and my old idea about the ghosts being a projection of Jack's imagination. In the beginning of the movie it's only Danny who sees ghosts, and he himself sees different ghosts than Jack does. Danny sees the Grady girls. While the Grady girl ghosts seem pleased at the prospect of having a new playmate in Danny, we learn from their father's ghost that the real girls "didn't care for the Overlook at first. One of them actually stole a pack of matches and tried to burn it down." The girls were once in the same position as Danny and their ghosts are separate from the on-going adult party with which Jack interacts. Wendy, significantly, sees no ghosts at all until the very end when, imo, Jack has given them enough reality to be seen by someone who doesn't shine. Not only is Wendy not psychic; she lacks the imagination one finds in a child or a writer.

Danny, being a child, naturally uses his imagination. In his very first scene we're introduced to his imaginary friend, Tony. Danny describes Tony as "a little boy who lives in my mouth" and goes "to my stomach" if someone else tries to see him. His mother knows her son well enough to appeal to Tony when talking about something Danny's uncomfortable talking about himself. Danny's doctor rather oddly asks Danny if Tony ever "asks him to do things,” like she's checking to make sure he's not schizophrenic and hearing voices. She connects Danny's imagination with madness.

Tony is an odd character to figure out. In the book Tony is someone Danny glimpses in the distance when he's in a trance, and ultimately he identifies him as an older version of himself. In the movie it's tempting to see Tony as some sort of spirit--I remember for a while that was a popular rumor, that Tony was some kid who died in a car accident Danny witnessed or something like that. But I think Movie!Tony, like Book!Tony, is a creation of Danny's imagination, a way of keeping himself company, having a friend, and making sense of visions he doesn't yet understand. While it seems scarier at first to think Danny really does "go away" (perhaps to fetch Dick) for a while in the movie and leave Tony alone inhabiting his body, I think Danny simply withdraws from the scary situation and only communicates with his mother through the character of Tony for a while. Certainly when Danny seems to be overhearing his parents' conversations about him, and seeing his father's own scary encounters, he appears to be reacting as Danny, not Tony. Danny is scared, Tony is calm. Eventually Danny returns to himself, finally understanding the message he's been giving himself via Tony about REDRUM.

What does that have to do with Jack? It connects, I swear. See, one of the things that made Julie and I think about Jack simply being mad is his response to the ghosts. The first ghost Jack sees is Lloyd, the bartender. He goes into the ballroom, muttering angrily about Wendy, and sits at the bar. He rubs his hands on his face. Then he drops his hands, grins and says, "Hi Lloyd. It's a little slow tonight, isn't it?" and laughs. Then we, the audience, see Lloyd, the bartender, for the first time, when he answers Jack. Lloyd's knowing Jack isn't strange at all, since the ghosts are trying to draw him into the hotel, but why does Jack know Lloyd? He's not reacting like someone who's never seen a ghost before, who thought he was alone in the hotel. When Wendy runs in Lloyd disappears and Jack isn't surprised by that either. He does a similarly great job of denying anything strange happened in room 237 after he made out with a corpse there. Ironically, on current TV shows Lloyd-like scenes are common; characters will interact with ghosts and we're supposed to know the ghosts are projections of themselves (6FU being the most obvious example of this).

I think there's a connection between Danny's imaginary friend (with whom Jack never interacts) and these ghosts of Jack's. Danny is first described as not having anyone to play with; at the Overlook Jack also has nobody to play with. (Wendy doesn't ever play.) Danny rejects the Grady ghosts and sticks with Tony, his own imaginary creation-he is saved; Jack's ghosts replace any fictional character he might have created in his writing. Characters, for writers, are very much like imaginary friends. The writer creates a person, a back story, a personality. They interact with it or have other characters interact with it. It seems “real” on some level and if they're good the character becomes real for others. If Jack were to create an imaginary friend he might very well be Lloyd, a friendly bartender, but Lloyd has an agenda of his own. Jack says he's "the kind of man who likes to know who's buying his drinks" when Lloyd tells him his money's no good at the hotel, but Lloyd says this doesn't concern him-Lloyd is not fully Jack's imaginary creation so while he may serve Jack he takes his orders from somewhere else, unlike Tony who is fully under Danny's control. Also unlike Tony, Jack's imaginary friends do tell him to “do things.”

Think of Jack's interactions with the ghost of Delbert Grady in this light. Delbert is the father of two little girls he chopped up and stacked "neatly" in one of the rooms in the West Wing--presumably room 237. Jack hears the story of Delbert at his interview. He says his wife will love to hear about the Gradys because she is a confirmed lover of “ghost stories and horror movies.” Jack claims he has "no good ideas" for his writing, but he was given at least one good idea at his interview--the story of Delbert Grady. That story begins to dominate his life at the hotel. Grady, as a ghost, is a butler--an English one, at that. His children are English too. We never hear of Grady's being English at the interview. He certainly could have been, but it's a strange little detail. You can't help but wonder how this recently-arrived English family (as the children's accents suggest) wound up taking a job getting snowed into the mountains of Colorado. Although the two girl ghosts being English seems to suggest the family really was, I can't help but wonder if Grady did not become English the moment he was described to Jack as having stacked the bodies of his dismembered family "neatly" in one of the rooms. Grady stacked the bodies neatly...now he's a fastidious butler in white gloves and tails saying, “terribly sorry, sir!” and cleaning spills off a jacket. I could believe Jack took the one personal detail about Grady he knew and built his entire character around it. If Danny and Jack are linked psychically, it's possible that Danny picked up on that detail from Jack--he doesn't hear the girls speak until their last encounter (though that is still before Jack's meeting with their father). If Jack's imagination is powering the ghosts, the Grady girls might naturally conform to his idea of them, the daughters of a stereotypical English butler.

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. And his name wasn't Delbert, it was Charles. 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. It just really underscores that this is fiction--the Grady's have been assigned roles in the story of the hotel (or Jack's story of the hotel) that do not have to fit who they were in real life. Given that the hotel seems to be covered in photographs from the 1920s it's not surprising that's the time period chosen for the story--that was its heyday. Jack himself finally appears in a tuxedo of 1921, not his corduroy jacket of 1979.

The climax of the movie begins when Wendy finally gets a look at Jack's "novel," all the same sentence written over and over (and a cliché at that!). Jack obviously has been writing a lot, just not anything worthwhile. Sometimes I almost think his typing *is* creating an imaginary world, only it appears in the hotel itself rather than on the page. There is one long shot while Jack is supposed to be working where he appears to be just staring into the middle distance, as if he's lost in a daydream. Jack may have been thinking about the idea he got at his interview about Delbert Grady, the tidy psycho-killer. But he looks passive, perhaps allowing the hotel to feed things to him. His gaze is vacant, not focused like someone figuring out their own story. Jack does not write a story based on the Grady murders, he acts one out. Wow. Jack's not only a lazy writer. He's kind of a plagiarist. :-)

Comments

[oneminutemovies.livejournal.com]

The first time I read the book, I thought the most frightening thing was the ambiguity about whether there was something supernatural going on or whether Jack's alcoholism was driving him insane. Once it's been established what's going on, it's still really scary, and Jack's weakness is definitely a tool that the hotel uses against him and his family, but I was about as spooked by some of the flashbacks in the book of Jack's split-personality behavior when he was drinking, when there were no ghosts involved at all.

[megstuff.livejournal.com]

...Jack has given them enough reality to be seen by someone who doesn't shine.

...But he looks passive, perhaps allowing the hotel to feed things to him

It's this two-way dynamic between the hotel & Jack that makes The Shining really almost uncomfortably frightening for me. I mean, movie about some people in a big scary haunted hotel? OK. Movie about some people being trapped somewhere with a crazy guy? OK. Most of the time, watching a horror movie is liking hearing a ghost story - they're cautionary tales, but as the viewer/hearer you don't really have to identify with characters.

Something about the Shining breaks down that barrier for me, maybe because this is what's scary in real life: not ghosts or axe murderers but the possibility that there are things that can be dangerous to you--things that other people might never see--because of what's inside your own head.

And thus The Shining is one of those great films that I skip at every opportunity.

[shusu.livejournal.com]

Ironically, on current TV shows Lloyd-like scenes are common

What was that one show set in Maine, I think it was a doctor who talked to her dead mother a lot? I think that really started it.

Danny rejects the Grady ghosts and sticks with Tony, his own imaginary creation-he is saved; Jack's ghosts replace any fictional character he might have created in his writing. Characters, for writers, are very much like imaginary friends.

This is why I love Milagro, late of The X-Files, so very, very much. The writer expects his characters to do all the work, to essentially make his life worth living. He doesn't expect them to bite back.

Personally I find it discomforting to ignore or disrespect the power imbalance between character and writer. I've kept myself company with voices as far back as I can remember, and as much as I torture them, I always try to imagine that they'll bite back, that they'll have feelings about my forcing them into a narrative mold. It's not that I entirely believe their reality, but I don't want to be the kind of writer who doesn't believe in them.

I do notice that certain kinds of stories sap me in different ways. They're creative but they're not entirely worthwhile and/or coincide with low points in my life.


a creation of Danny's imagination, a way of keeping himself company, having a friend, and making sense of visions he doesn't yet understand... Jack took the one personal detail about Grady he knew and built his entire character around it. ... all the same sentence written over and over (and a cliché at that!) ... But he looks passive, perhaps allowing the hotel to feed things to him. His gaze is vacant, not focused like someone figuring out their own story.


Sister M, Sister M, fandom is the hotel. *runs and hides!*

Exactly!!

[ex-leianora730.livejournal.com]

It's Jack's passivity that makes this movie so scary, and it's also the thing that gets him killed. Danny sees the situation, gets scared, and then refuses to stay scared only. He does something about it, and that something starts by him telling his parents about the woman in room 217 (not 237).

The two-way interaction only makes things worse, because it underscores the insidiousness of one's emagination and the strength such a gift should be, especially to small children who need a refuge from something so devastating and frightening. Danny's withdrawal from himself is another way he takes control of his mind, of his sense of self, if you will. He refuses to go mad under the constant barrage of shocking images and happenings. Jack, on the other hand, almost seems to welcome it. It's his excuse. It's his way out, if you will. He can tell anyone. I didn't know what I was doing. I went mad because of the ghosts. Instead of actively trying to fend off the madness, he invites it in to play, so to speak. But that's always been Jack's way, hasn't it? I mean, he broke Danny's arm and only had excuses and apologies to offer in response to Wendy's outraged question, "How could you do this?"

Like in Bag of Bones, the writer's imagination comes under fire, and is his ultimate weakness. The writer in Bag, however, sees and understands the parallels between his inability to write, and his passivity, and changes it. Jack does not. Jack was the very first King character whom I actively disliked from page one. It was a very subtle dislike in the beginning, and I think King meant for it to be, but as the book went on, I grew more and more frustrated by his equivocation and passive agressive behavior. Hell, even his friend Al, the man whom we only hear about in the movie, but meet in the book, changes his behavior for the better. Jack expresses thinly disguised contempt for him at worst, and admiration for and a wish to be like him at best.

[bookshop.livejournal.com]

Think The Innocents, if you know that movie, where there could be ghosts, or the governess could be crazy, or it could be a little of both.

Tangentially off-topic: one year on Halloween I read The Turn of the Screw aloud to my friend Christianne. It was AWESOME. I love that book so much. I've never seen The Innocents but I'd love to see how they take the subtext (the governess's madness) and incorporate it into film.

[go-back-chief.livejournal.com]

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...

[valis2.livejournal.com]

I took a class about Stanley Kubrick films in college, and wrote a paper about the Shining. What always fascinated me about it was this strange undercurrent about Native Americans, and the thought that the usurping of their land somehow created this strange purgatory. There are a few tiny details that are Native American influenced, though very subtle, and they deal with the usurpers' callousness/indifference to their culture. Strange, and perhaps not what Kubrick had in mind (though he was such an incredibly detail-oriented directory that I can't help but think that it was all on purpose), but it was interesting to write about for that class.

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

I've never read a single horoscope in my entire life that was ever remotely accurate for me.

Heh. You'll beat me up for saying this, but my sister's a Virgoan (although a couple of weeks before yours, at the end of August) and she says the same thing.

Characters, for writers, are very much like imaginary friends.

I've gone a bit off King in recent years, and like Rowling, he needs a good editor; but I like the way he explores writing as horror. Characters killing their authors, authors killing their characters, fans threatening their favourite writers, writers threatening their fans...

Jack himself finally appears in a tuxedo of 1921, not his corduroy jacket of 1979.

I'm so glad chief was apparently a little unclear on this, since it always bugged me!

[ljash.livejournal.com]

Wow what timing. I just saw this a few days ago:
(it's scary. it's horrifying. it's not a real response to your post. it goes directly to the video so if you can't do video or for some other reason it doesn't work, sorry.)

http://www.ps260.com/molly/SHINING%20FINAL.mov

[ackonrad.livejournal.com]

The astrologer said whatever day I was born was the day I was "meant" to be born so it didn't matter, but this seems to have been something that stuck in my mother's head (maybe she just wanted all her kids to be Libras).

So, does that mean that except you, all her kids are Libras? Just curious - you don't have to tell me if you don't want to. It would be funny to turn out that your parents planned their children this way, because I speak from experience. My mother's birthday is in July, and my dad's in December. My birthday is in July, and my sister's in December. However, even though me and my mum are Cancers, my sister was born only two days after Sagittarius expired (is that how you would say it in English) and so my dad and she didn't manage to be the same zodiac sign - he is Sagittarius, and she is Capricorn. Anyway, we were talking about zodiac signs some years ago and my dad mentioned how disappointed he'd been when my sister had been born an entire week later than she should've been, and therefore, despite being born in December, she isn't Sagittarius. It turned out that my parents actually planned both of us to be born in their months and zodiac sings. As in your case, however, things don't always turn out the way you plan them.

[dotsomething.livejournal.com]

Great commentary, I'll be looking at this movie a whole different way the next time I see it. It's one of those films I seem to keep getting drawn back to, although it's not actually one of my top favorites. I think you may be right about Jack.

In general I love haunted house movies and Haunting of Hill House is such a fabulous book. Totally fascinating. Have you read Hell House by Richard Matheson? I'm wondering how much of that you could attribute to one character's madness. Seems like Hill House has evidence it's all "real" and Hell House even more so (they even have a scientific machine).

There's also Stephen King's Rose Red, which was oodles of fun and did what movies and books should do with all haunted house stories: ultimately, the house itself is the star of the show. The Overlook Hotel is probably the ultimate haunted house star.

[star-tourmaline.livejournal.com]

Just coming out of lurking to say that I too am a Virgo who should be a Libra - due date 2 October and have been told by astrologers that I show up as a Libra.

And the strange thing? My birthday is the same day as yours - 11th September.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

This is so great -- I loved both the movie and the book, but I don't remember the details well enough to do your argument proper justice. But this made me think about a couple of things:

How rigorously does the movie leave the "reality" of the ghosts ambiguous? You mention the unlocking of the freezer, and I can't really think of a "natural" explanation for that though I guess one might be possible. Could Danny have done it? Was he separated from his mother at this point at all? I think there's also a scene where a ball rolls down the hall by itself toward Danny -- the girls are trying to attract his attention. I suppose that could be Jack, strolling the corridors and playing a creepy game with his son. But IIRC, there's very little else that couldn't be explained as a hallucination. The business with the photo at the end could just be movie!cheesiness. I think your point about the way the 70's caretaker is incorporated into Jack's 20's fantasy is a brilliant argument that most if not all of this is happening in Jack's head. .

Your point about the ghosts as a metaphor for writer's block also sent me off spinning on a tangent thinking about Jack. Because it's not like he's an established writer having a bad spell -- at best, he's sold a couple of stories, as pretty much a hobby. IIRC the book may be clearer on this than the movie, but he's pretty much a failure, isn't he -- hasn't he gotten fired from his last job because of his temper, as well as hurting Danny? So he's much closer than Wendy, who's a bit of a sentimentalist, to visualizing the collapse of his whole world, his whole family. He's already in a dangerous place in his head, full of dread and visions of disaster, even before the hotel starts to work on him.

I picture the whole prospect of this caretaking adventure as kind of a desperate fantasy on his part, to use his writing hobby to turn his life around. And when he actually gets the caretaker job, it's like a dog catching a car after chasing it - what the hell does he do now? There's this mixture of exhiliration, of all boundaries coming down and all things being possible, and sort of an "oh, shit" sense that this is it, he'd better live up to what he fantasized about. The pressure, combined with the sense of collapsing boundaries, must be very disorienting. So no wonder he loses track of the line separating sanity and reality.

You make an interesting point about the visions and ghosts having their own agenda, their own autonomy, and therefore not being purely Jack's creation. But their "agenda" seems to be about perpetuating the fantasy, about protecting it from interference by people with a stronger commitment to reality -- whether it's Wendy, who can be shocked out of her acquiescent haze by fears for her son, or the Scatman Crothers character, who senses what's up with the hotel and is actively hostile to it. So I wonder if this point really does take things entirely out of Jack's head; the sense of a separate agenda could be a blocking mechanism that cuts Jack off from some feelings he's not willing to examine.

Not to say, of course, the hotel isn't a catalyst. It clearly is that, and maybe even an active agent. But when it comes to horror, I think the more ambiguous the spooks are, the better. And The Shining walks that line nicely.