The Sum of All Fears

The Shining and Every Woman's Worst Nightmare

The Shining is a horror film masterpiece. On its face, it’s a story about a haunted hotel, but the most terrifying thing that takes place in the movie isn’t supernatural at all.

The setup is that of a classic ghost story.  Jack Torrance takes a job as the winter caretaker of a resort hotel in the Rockies.  During the off-season, due to its remote location high in the mountains, the roads are impassible and anyone remaining in the hotel is effectively stranded.  Jack brings along his wife and their young son.  Jack is particularly excited because he intends to use these six months to work on a new writing project.  Did I mention that the last guy who had the caretaker job butchered his family with an axe?

As the story unfolds and the tension builds, we see that in addition to the strains of isolation, there are malevolent ghosts in the hotel that make life increasingly difficult for the family.  Jack starts to go insane and in that state is persuaded quite convincingly by the ghost hotel staff to murder his wife and son.      

The story is largely experienced through the giant eyes of Wendy, Jack’s wife.  She is both a caring mother and a supportive wife.  She defends Jack’s sketchy past.  We learn that Jack used to be a schoolteacher in Vermont, but due to an alcohol-induced mishap, he injured his son, Danny, which apparently caused the family to flee that entire half of the country.  Jack refers to his former teaching gig as simply a way to make ends meet, but regards himself as being a writer, a career path which Wendy wholeheartedly supports.  She also supports his decision to take the job as a caretaker, even though it seems as if she is the only one doing any caretaking.  She, not he, is the one that checks on the boiler, operates the radio, and makes sure the family is fed, this even though it was Jack who interviewed with the hotel management, not her.  It is unclear what the hotel management saw in Jack when they hired him.  It appears as if his most important qualification was his willingness to drive across the mountains to attend the interview.    

So, if Wendy is doing Jack’s job, what is Jack doing?    

Jack alternates between sleeping, typing on his typewriter, and being a dick.  To that end, he lays claim to the biggest and best room in the hotel—the glorious two-story, art-adorned lobby—for himself, and snaps at anyone who disturbs him, even though he’s literally sitting in the place that you have to go through to get anywhere else in the hotel.  Later, he picks up an axe and tries to kill everyone, which sets up an intense and horrifying final act.  But before that sinister turn, he really wasn’t offering very much.

The buildup to Jack wielding the axe is creepy and incremental, and when it finally happens, it’s an explosion of terror that yields some of the most memorable scenes in film history. 

But for Wendy, being chased by Jack and his axe at the end is scary, and she is no doubt motivated to protect Danny from his would-be murderer father, but the reality is that her moment of existential terror has already happened.  And it didn’t involve a violent Jack or any ghost whatsoever. 

In fact, Wendy’s terror is so intense and demoralizing precisely because it is the very thing that all wives secretly dread. 

Here’s the moment.  As Jack starts to lose his bearings and becomes increasingly belligerent, Wendy—God bless her—goes looking for him. She’s worried about him.  She enters Jack’s “workspace” and does not find Jack, but does stumble upon his typewriter and manuscript.  You know, the writing project he’s been working on every day for months.  She takes a gander. 

See beholds the work product, the manifestation of everything Jack has been doing these past few months as he was type, type, typing away and growling at anyone who disturbed his process.  It’s hundreds of pages, but it’s not what anyone would have reasonably expected.  Instead, it turns out he was typing the same sentence over and over a million times.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

And there it was.  The horror, the horror.  Not the recognition that her husband was losing his mind.  Nope. That would have been fine if he was cranking out meaningful work.  Wendy was already an expert in rationalizing Jack’s failings.  Nope.  The realization that every woman dreads is this:

That what her man does for a living is complete and utter bullshit.

From the beginning of recorded history, men have ruled the world.  Deserving or undeserving, it is the men that have largely been responsible for constructing and operating the apparatuses of civilization, the political and economic systems, government institutions, social mores, ethical constructs, and all the theorizing, storytelling and mythmaking that underlie these conventions.  For most of that history, women have operated in the background, but the deference to the rules and structures devised by men has waned over time.  The male monopoly has been busted piece by piece.     

Wendy really doesn’t ask for much.  Any reasonable person would agree that she deserved exactly zero of Jack’s abuse, verbal or otherwise.  She just wants Jack to be a provider and to be less of a dick, but she has already shown that she will accept him being a dick as long as he provides.  There is one scenario, however, that she could not countenance: that Jack is a complete waste.  But at the one hour 41-minute mark, she learns that’s exactly what he is: a total fraud.

This revelation does not come out of the blue, but harkens back to an earlier scene, which takes place at the onset of Jack’s psychological descent.  In the middle of the day, Wendy hears someone screaming from the other side of the hotel.  She runs into the lobby to find Jack at his “workstation.”  He cries that he just had a horrible dream.  Jack recounts the dream:

Jack: I had the most terrible nightmare I ever had. It was the most horrible dream I ever had.

Wendy: It’s okay now, really.

Jack: I dreamed that I… killed you and Danny.  But I didn’t just kill you. [crying]  I cut you up into little pieces.  Oh…My God.  [crying]  I must be losing my mind.

Wendy: Everything’s going to be all right.  Come on, let’s get up off the floor. 

Most people in the audience hear the details of that dream and are unnerved.  Alas, Jack is already being prodded by the dark forces of the hotel to envision murdering his family.  This is textbook horror foreshadowing, even if squarely on the nose. 

This was no doubt a horrifying moment for Wendy, but for entirely different reasons.  What she was wondering was why Jack was sleeping at his desk in the middle of the day when he was supposed to be working.

One last point to consider.  If a wife’s biggest fear is finding out what she always suspected—that her husband’s work is complete and utter bullshit—care to guess what a husband’s biggest fear is?

You guessed it: your wife finding out that what you do is complete and utter bullshit.  

In fact, it’s such an untenable thought, that when revealed, you, like Jack Torrance, really might not have any other choice but to start trying to kill everyone with an axe.    

Shelly Duvall RIP (1949-2024)