What about Jack? Another perspective on family relationships in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining
1995; Salisbury University; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoIn the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting. -Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses If anyone back in 1980 wanted to see a modern dysfunctional household being demolished by violence, they could watch Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, a screen adaptation of Stephen King's 1977 best-selling novel. This horror story of a family in crisis ends with Jack Torranee, an insane husband, first terrorizing his wife and next murdering the man who had come tp save their five-year-old son, Danny. Then, calling himself the Big Bad Wolf, the beastly, limping father madly pursues the boy through the snow-covered maze of the Overlook Hotel. Cleverly, however, Danny retraces his steps, and not only escapes from his axe-wielding father, but also succeeds in ending Jack's reign of terror over the Torrance household. The shot most of us remember is that of the deranged, grinning Jack hunched over in the snow, frozen to death. For more than a decade, the fate of the Torrance family has been blamed on Jack's insanity and the evil forces at the Overlook Hotel. This essay reexamines those sentiments. My hypothesis is that The Shining's reception is skewed by a contemporary critical desire to make Jack Torrance-the white, American, middle-class father-the scapegoat for the sins of a patriarchal society. While the surface facts (e.g., Jack's drunken rages, his deranged pursuit of Wendy and Danny with an axe, and the murder of Hallorann) find him guilty as charged, I argue that a closer reading of the evidence produces a different verdict on Jack's behavior, and that there are mitigating circumstances for his diabolical role in the disintegration of his family. More attention must be given to his condition prior to the attacks on his relations and murder of the hotel chef. In short, this essay asks why-when so many critics often associate the terms fantasies, victimization, and exploitation with this film-does Jack get left out in the cold? In taking this tack, I want to be clear that I am not excusing wife bashing, child abuse, or homicide. Nor is this exercise part of a backlash against current interpretive criticism revolted by the predicament of women and children in a patriarchal society. My quarrel is not with stated academic judgments, but with the omission of any serious empathy with Jack's predicament. Debates over other issues, like Kubrick's signature, his revolutionary use of the Steadicam, the chess parallels, the significance of an African-American being killed in the film but not in the novel, or the meaning of the shining, I leave to others. My desire is to do what Anthony Magistrale perceptively claims both Kubrick and King do: offer insights the deathless struggle to define what it means to be and to contemplate the psychological terrors that spare no one when a household breaks apart (vii-viii). That a revisionist approach is necessary would not surprise Kubrick, who is acutely aware of just how long the public takes to understand and to appreciate his works.2 None of his twelve films has ever opened to widespread critical and commercial success.3 Whether it is his painstaking emphasis on non-narrative techniques, his novel exploration of popular film genres, or his refusal to be pigeonholed, Kubrick remains an enigma to most audiences. Consequently, his works are often misunderstood, with observers berating him for lacking a consistent style, a failure to get his ironic messages across, an obsession with detached narratives, and a mean-spirited attitude about human nature. These by-now predictable charges greeted his 1980 screen adaptation of The Shining,4 James Hala's survey of the movie's reception showed that popular reviewers loved journals defended it, and intellectual magazines disliked it intensely (203). …
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