The Shining and Dropping the Mask
We all are Jack Torrance.
When you think of The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s classic novel, you probably don’t think about twists1. The film is many things—terrifying, mannered, possibly an elaborate apology for white supremacy—but twisty it is not, right? You come in expecting elevator doors spewing blood into the lobby, and by the end of the film that’s pretty much what you get2. It’s maybe a little surprising that the body count in this film is just two, one of whom is the antagonist, but that hardly counts as a twist3.
And yet there is a twist in The Shining. A subtle, beautiful twist. And it’s a master class in, well, everything.
All Work
Stanley Kubrick’s approach to adapting King’s novel is famous: He basically used it as a launching point and told a very different story. The basics are the same—troubled father brings his wife and son to a remote hotel where he’s taken work as a winter caretaker, proceeds to go insane/fall under the influence of the hotel or an evil presence residing there4, decides to get a little murdery while his psychic son grows increasingly terrified—but King was irritated with Kubrick for a reason.
In King’s novel, the Overlook Hotel is 100 percent genuinely haunted. It’s bursting with evil spirit. Jack Torrance is 100 percent genuinely an alcoholic. King, an alcoholic himself, told a story where a man’s addiction is what makes him vulnerable to the malevolent spirit surrounding him. Kubrick made a movie about insanity and how it often masks itself. That’s the twist: The Shining isn’t about a man who goes crazy. Jack Torrance doesn’t go crazy. Jack Torrance is 100 percent insane from the first frame of the film5.
Most descriptions of the film use phrases like “descent into madness” or “slow unraveling” in reference to Jack, because that’s how we’re trained to think about mental illness: You start off healthy and “normal,” then you become gradually less normal until you’re chasing your family around with an ax6. And that’s more or less how King handles it in the novel—Torrance is a damaged, haunted man, but he’s trying to hold his shit together.
But in Kubrick’s adaptation, there are many subtle clues that Jack is already lost. Much of this is open to interpretation, of course, but when you consider the weird, mannered performance Nicholson gives it makes the most sense. Jack Torrance arrives at the Overlook for his job interview and everything about him is a bit off. His reactions are wrong—when Mr. Ullman tells him about the murdery history of the hotel, Jack just stares flatly at him until he realizes he’s supposed to react—and then his reaction is one of elaborate good humor, insisting his wife will “love” the story of a caretaker who snapped due to the isolation and murdered his family. When his wife asks if he got the job on the phone, he says “Right” with a complete lack of inflection7.
His appearance is wrong: His hair is messy, his clothes don’t fit well8. If this is a man on an important job interview, he certainly doesn’t look like it. This is a man working hard to appear normal. This is a man who’s lost his ability to react normally, who is acting. We can only guess how long Jack’s been pretending to be normal, but my guess is it’s been a while9.
The details are wrong. When Ullman first finds Jack waiting in the lobby, Jack is sitting and reading a magazine. When he gets up, it’s revealed in a brief shot that he’s been reading a copy of Playgirl, a magazine aimed at women (and, unofficially, gay men) that featured nude male models. Putting aside the weirdness of coming across a copy of Playgirl in the lobby of a hotel, the fact that Jack casually reads it without any hint of discomfort, embarrassment, or awareness hints that he’s not really reading it. It’s a prop. While Kubrick probably chose Playgirl because of the extra layer of sexual taboo, especially in 1980 America, the note would be the same if Jack was reading Playboy instead: Even today, people don’t just casually thumb through racy magazines in public, and certainly not when waiting on a job interview. Jack is trying to behave as he imagines normal people behave, but it isn’t meaningful to him.
That’s one reason Kubrick stages this initial scene in a hotel teeming with activity and people. Jack is constrained here. He knows he’s in “society” and being observed. He knows he has to play by rules. As the population of the Overlook drops to precisely three—Jack, his wife Wendy, and his son Danny—so does any pressure Jack feels to behave.
No Play
This is important because it reminds us of several crucial lessons about telling a good story—and serving up good twists. You might not think of Jack Torrance’s character arc in The Shining as a twist—but it accomplishes exactly what a good twist is supposed to do: It recontextualizes the story. It alters your perception of what’s happened. Once you realize that Jack has been absolutely bonkers long before taking the job as the caretaker for an isolated hotel, everything the man does in the film starts to make more sense, and his end becomes an inevitability instead of a tragedy10.
Jack’s subtly crazy presence also serves to “other” him. At the beginning of the story, the audience theoretically has no idea who the antagonist will be (in reality, most people are pretty familiar with the story when they watch the film for the first time—and we’re all pretty trained to suspect the man/father character in any tense psychological story anyway), but we’re instantly put off by Jack’s behavior and presence—his slightly too-slow responses, his blindness to specific detail, his too-eager-to-please demeanor. If this man showed up at your front door, you wouldn’t take the chain off. We’re told to be suspicious of Jack even before we learn about his drinking, his possible abuse of his son, and his later attempts to chop his family up into small pieces11.
All stories seek tension, that uncertainty about where things are going. Some stories choose to play with the possibility that a villain like Jack Torrance has a chance for redemption, gaining tension from the question of whether or not he cracks and breaks bad. The Shining chooses instead to gain that tension by subtly informing us that Jack broke bad a long time ago, and now the only question is when he’ll show his real face, and how bad it will get once he does. That’s why the entire film is suffused with dread. It’s not the (slightly hokey) rivers of blood pouring from the elevators, or even the impossible architecture and geography of the setting (though that certainly helps). The dread comes from our instinctive knowledge from the first time we see him that Jack Torrance is wrong.
This works better than most narratives where a character goes crazy, because most narratives do start with a relatively sane person and then take you down a steady decline until they’re stark raving mad. No matter how well you handle that transformation, it’s always a little jarring (and sometimes jarring is the point) because you’ve got a condensed narrative. Jack’s decline in The Shining feels smoother and more naturalistic not just because we all suspect Jack Nicholson is also insane, but because the character is actually never presented to us as “normal” at all.
The ultimate lesson is one of subtlety. Whether or not you caught onto Jack’s insanity right away, or are just now thinking about the possibility, Kubrick and Nicholson don’t put it in your face. It’s buried. Not everything has to be obvious and spelled-out. Most of us know that, but it’s difficult to apply it to something fundamental like Jack’s sanity in terms of the story The Shining is telling.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go ask my agent if anyone’s ever published a novelty book that’s just all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy on 300 pages, because I could write that in six months, easy.
Next week: Cruel Summer and the Stretch
What you should think of is how Kubrick had a character talking to his own finger in a strange froggy voice and we all just kind of accept it.
Also: A bonus unwanted shot of dog costume fellatio.
Not a twist, per se, but certainly a shocking surprise is the decor of Scat Man Carruthers’s apartment in this film. I mean … it’s something:
Not sure what the big deal is. I get drunk and fall under an evil influence every other day.
Most probably so is Jack Nicholson, but that’s another essay entirely.
Coincidentally, this describes me on any typical Saturday.
To quote Olivia Rodrigo: Like a damn sociopath.
I realize the danger of a man like myself, for whom clothes are a mystery and fashion an undiscovered country, whose pants are always too long and whose shirts always appear to have been tailored for a gorilla — but not an Earth gorilla — discussing someone else’s sartorial choices. And nevertheless, I persist.
Again, also true for Jack Nicholson, though we can make an argument that he’s been pretending to be normal since 1968.
The real question is why his family puts up with his obvious Future Serial Killer act. I mean, watch the first scene with the whole Torrance family and tell me this is … normal behavior. You might as well have some guy stand up Mystery Science Theater-style and start shouting YOUR HUSBAND IS A SERIAL KILLER!
Is there any greater show of sheer exuberance than Nicholson’s famous “Heeerrreee’s Johnny!” scene? That’s a man who has finally thrown off his chains and decided to live a life of freedom, even if that life only lasts the next fifteen minutes or so.
Are you telling me you never wrote a three-line a GOTO loop in BASIC on a Radio Shack TRS-80 you bought at a yard sale in 1982? Because you hook that bad boy to a dot matrix printer and hit PrtScn and your bestseller is done in six MINUTES.