movies

Latest fan thoughts about The Shining I've heard recently:

• Jack is regularly glancing into the camera throughout the film (see YT Video on it) ... too often to be an accident.
  • I forget what theory the YT video puts up for this, but my immediate interpretation linked it to the repeated use of mirrors to depict Jack and his reflection, including the famous "breaking the 180 degree line" scene in the red toilet ... I think there's just a basic idea in the film that the "horror" of the hotel is in all of us waiting to come out ... and so jack looks at us because the film is a mirror of what's inside us as the hotel was a mirror to jack of what was inside him.
• There are two "Jacks", one the "writer" and the other that's in the story he's writing (See YT Video). The horror stuff, apparently, turns out to be the "written" jack, not the writer.
  • Less sure about this, as it probably just comes down to a continuity error, where even if Kubrick new about it, was happy with it for the editorial effect of selecting the particular scenes in their particular sequence.
  • Still ... it'd be interesting to see how this lines up with the camera glances from the first point above!

Additionally, a pretty accepted idea AFAICT is that Jack is a child and domestic abuser before going to the hotel. Many of us may have seen the shorter "European cut" (myself included), but the longer "US Cut" includes a scene that makes it explicit that Jack had hit Danny before (see comparisons here). Also, it's pretty easy to frame the film as a pretty cutting metaphor about domestic abuse (beyond the fact that Jack is literally trying to kill his family) ... the way that Wendy is taking care of everything like a stereotypical house wife while being trapped in a grand expensive hotel that has literally deathly cold outside barring her escape.