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

[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...

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

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?

Hee--yes, there's a throwaway line that it's built on an Indian Burial Ground maybe according to the manager-I don't think that's true in the book. I think there's a big involved theory online that suggests that the whole movie is supposed to be about the genocide of Native Americans, as the hotel decorations are also Native designs. Personally I think it's just a little throwaway idea that could or could not be significant--maybe it wasn't even really a burial ground but just a place the Indians respected because bad things already happened there. But building anything on an Indian Burial ground is just shorthand in America for the house being haunted, so I like that inclusion. (I love that South Park where Kyle buys his fish at the Ancient Indian Burial Ground Pet Shop--I wonder exactly when that whole idea got started. Did pioneers tell stories about people building log cabins on Indian Burial Grounds and them being haunted?)

As for the picture at the end, I definitely don't think it's that Jack was reincarnated or anything like that. I read it sort of like in The Haunting of Hill House when the house seems to be telling Eleanor to "come home" and stay there. Jack feels at home at the Overlook because he's vulnerable to it, and in the end he's absorbed into it as if he's "always been here." I assume the same thing happened to Grady, who now seems to have a place there in the past. Perhaps Lloyd was some Mafia guy who got whacked there and now he's the bartender. It could have been a silly ending but I think it really works because of the way the hotel works.

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.

Hee! Yes--it's such the classic fantasy "if I had time, I would write a lot." But of course very few writers have the luxury of being able to devote their whole day to writing. The mostly learn by just making themselves write around their job and family. The one thing you need as a freelancer is self-discipline.

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.

I hadn't thought of that but you're right--she could be asking about how he's going to solve some problem. It's just that you'd think we'd know something about it that way. Also it's hard to imagine Jack really telling Wendy about a problem he was having. It's funny because again, in The Changeling there's a similar thing where he's taken a job doing a series of lectures in theory at a university, too, and his friend says, "Have you done any writing?" And he says something like, "Still working on that third movement. Same old problem. Well, maybe the lectures will help..." He's totally the opposite of Jack.

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...

That's sort of the way I see it. He's been absorbed into the hotel, anyway--maybe he's been given a totally new character. I kind of like wondering who that character is, given the picture. He seems to be a guest at the party, and he's right in the front, so maybe he's a sort of cruel, heavy-drinking party guy or something.

Btw, have you seen this? (http://www.ps260.com/molly/SHINING%20FINAL.mov) It's the first-place winner in a contest where you take a known movie and cut a new and very different trailer for it. It's hilarious, but takes a while to download.

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

You didn't say that it was on AN INDIAN BURIAL GROUND! NO, YOU DIDN'T!
...Well, that's not my recollection!
*hangs up* He said he mentioned it five or six times.

Sorry, couldn't resist that one.
And the Spooooky Fish! Surrounded by Barbara Streisand Terror-vision!
I quite liked the Indian Burial Ground in this context because it reminds me of Pet Semetary, which I love (book and film, despite the latter's cheesiness.)

I love that trailer, do you happen to have the link to any others in the contest? (Also seeing in the kid in the context of a family film makes him remind me of that awful child in 'Liar, Liar', bizarrely.)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

That's the only link I was sent, unfortunately, so I haven't seen any other ones.

I love the Indian Burial Ground South Park. "He says he mentioned it 5 or 6 times." LOL! And "I took the bodies out, peed on them and then buried them again upsidedown." WHY DID YOU DO THAT? "I don't know. I was drunk."

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

Dark Water the original, I'm guessing?

If someone who is not (heh, like me, and obviously Jack), I think that scenario 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

Yeah, I'm the same. I need pressure to get anything done. Left to my own devices, I won't do much.

[go-back-chief.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I haven't seen the American one (I've heard it's not that good?).

Left to my own devices, I won't do much.

Me neither. Internetinternetinternet.