Content area
Full Text
In 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...