"A Month Later," "Tuesday," "Saturday," "Wednesday," "Monday," "4pm": Jack’s descent into madness is managed rapidly, in a series of intertitles that telescope time and tighten the screw. In the first of these sequences, which are very similarly structured, Danny explores the Overlook in constant motion, gliding through hostile territory on his tricycle in slow loops. In contrast, Jack is rendered progressively immobile. First, he is still asleep at 11.30 in the morning and already on the other side of the looking glass. Kubrick films him in reverse within the constricting frame of the mirror (entirely so in the more rigorous UK cut of the scene), fending off Wendy’s grating jollity about his writer’s block with a set of sarcastic gestures and responses that barely maintain their civility. As Wendy and Danny set off at a run through the maze, Jack’s typewriter is abandoned on a blank page and he furiously hurls a ball at the Diné mural above the fireplace. Bored, he looms over the model of the maze, conjuring a tiny wife and child at its heart, a startling trick shot created by shooting the centre of the maze from a high overhead rostrum camera and then matting the shot into the maze model. He is already tempted to regard himself as the master of his domain, his overlook the apparent perspective of power, an early identification with the forces of the hotel.
In "Tuesday," the second sequence, Danny glides through the mazy patterns of the second floor, stops by Room 237, tries the locked door, gets a single flash of the Grady girls and moves concertedly away. Jack is seated at his desk, motionless but hyperactive at the typewriter, his inspiration the cuttings book open at his right hand. He is stricken at Wendy’s gauche interruption. The rage that has been suppressed from the beginning starts to show itself, to Wendy’s stilled dismay at his command: "Why don’t you start right now and get the f**k out of here." In the following scene, as Wendy and Danny frolic through the heavy snow, Jack stands immobile as a black monolith, his features utterly frozen, a man entirely hollowed out, catatonic. That high-pitched sound associated with the shining creeps into the soundtrack, and although we see nothing supernatural, I wonder if it isn’t the sound of Jack’s empty vessel being filled with the venom of the Overlook’s history.
In Danny’s third, broken loop on his pedal car, the Grady sisters stop him in his tracks and begin to whisper their promises to play for ever and ever. Now the sisters are intercut with their slaughtered bodies, axed down in the corridor but not yet neatly stacked in one of the rooms. They have played their hand, though, those twins. They are like the welcoming party. We never see them again. We see nothing of Jack, because by the next sequence, "Monday," he is caught in the classic signs of a debilitating depressive state. From oversleeping, he has become insomniac, trapped in a half-life between sleeping and waking, perched on the edge of the bed, stuck between resting or rising. As Danny enters the family quarters, he is caught between two Jacks, his father splintered between bed and mirror. The tender scene of father and son captures this doubleness: Jack’s expression of love for Danny is undergirded with violent menace. The emptied Jack echoes the Grady girls – "I wish we could stay here for ever and ever and ever" – clear evidence that he is fatally caught up in the matrix of the shining that stirs through the hotel.
In this middle portion of "The Shining," the film empties Jack out; we have no access to his interior state. It is the opposite of the novel, which works to fill in his back-story, his childhood memories of his father’s violent abuse, his brother’s death in Vietnam, the oblivion of alcohol of the last few years, the pangs of his addiction. He works on the building; the organising metaphor of the novel is not the maze, but the wasps’ nest, found in the roof, neutralised, but which comes to life again, and which figures the labyrinthine malignity of the hotel itself. King’s Jack Torrance is a published writer of a dozen or so stories, seeking to finish a play. We have no evidence that Kubrick’s Jack Torrance has ever written anything. He is only waiting for something to occupy him, a blank slate on which the hotel can begin to write its own script.
READ MORE: What Stanley Kubrick got wrong about “The Shining”
This section of "The Shining" is a remarkable portrait of the depressive state: excessive sleep, turning into tormenting insomnia, withdrawal, blockage, devitalisation and eventually near catatonia – a becoming of what Christine Ross calls the depressed "subject without others." Another writer on depression has talked about the depressive state in art depicted as a cold world, "the world in abeyance, in withdrawal," "the vitalist world fallen into inert matter, the animist world deserted by its presiding spirits" (Fox, 2009). The snowstorm, cutting the hotel off from all external communication, is the objective correlative of Jack’s post-apocalyptic depressive world.
In passing, we should note the slightly alarming self-portrait of Kubrick that is suggested in this sequence. The typewriter on the desk is Kubrick’s own, and we can see the director furiously typing away on a smaller portable, incorporating the last changes to the daily script, in the documentary on the making of "The Shining" that his daughter Vivian directed in 1980. Kubrick had a habit of throwing baseballs hard at the wall in the early days of scriptwriting, Vincent LoBrutto reports, frustrations that Jack Nicholson could also channel from his scripting years in the 1960s. Of course, the temptation is to read the retreat to the Overlook as a repetition of Kubrick’s own progressive withdrawal into creative seclusion in the backwoods. And doesn’t the endless repetition (with modulation) of the same line in Jack’s writing recall the exasperation many felt with Kubrick’s insistence on multiple, virtually identical takes?
But if this section of "The Shining" is about disconnection and withdrawal, it is only a passage in a film that formally and thematically is about occult communication and the weird connectedness that comes with telepathic transmission. When Jack gazes down on the model of the maze, magically fusing it with the original outside, we have an inkling of how Kubrick will link form and content to construct what could be called telepathic cinema . By this, I mean the radical sense in which fluid transpositions actually dissolve the singular point of view for a sense of mobile and shared subjectivity. This ambition reaches its fruition in the scenes around the events inside Room 237, the enigmatic core of the whole film.
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