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Ask anyone what they remember of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror film, The Shining, and you will most likely hear an account of Jack Nicholson's character axing his way through the bathroom door, inserting his head in the opening and growling, "Here's Johnny!" That image of the father gone violently mad has become emblematic of the film, much as the image of the blood-soaked prom queen has defined Brian de Raima's Carrie (1976). Video releases of The Shining invariably feature patriarch Jack Torrance in some state of insanity, usually with his head through the bathroom door, staring at his unseen wife. Academic essays also show an obsession with the image of Jack's madness.1 Even when Jack is not the primary focus of a given article, as in Christopher Hoile's piece, "The Uncanny and the Fairy Tale in Kubrick's The Shining," he still retains his icon status. The decision to cast a star with such a dominant and manic persona as Jack Nicholson only adds to our tendency to focus on him as the source of horror. Kubrick may be making a commentary on a wide range of topics, but it seems that The Shining is ultimately a movie about a male monster.
Thinking about The Shining in terms of Jack Torrance's threat to the family could certainly lead us to believe that the film is fairly progressive in its ideology. As Robin Wood observes in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, American culture tends to repress that which may be a threat to "the interests of alienated labor and the patriarchal family" (71). Such threats include, among others, women and female sexuality, any sexuality that is not normatively heterosexual, ethnic (usually nonwhite) subcultures, foreigners, alternative ideologies, the proletariat, and children. The horror film often depicts such marginalized groups and ideas as monstrous, as occurs with the queer make-up artist Pete Drummond in How to Make a Monster or the terrible pubescent girl Regan in The Exorcist. However, The Shining presents us with a white patriarch who is convinced that he must discipline his family by killing and dismembering them with an axe.
The film's apparent demonization of Jack is so overwhelming, in fact, that critic Frank Manchel feels compelled to defend the villain-protagonist: "By failing to scrutinize...