Blog #3 - And You Thought Your Family Had Problems

In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the viewer witnesses the deterioration of a humble, middle-class, white family as a result of the threat, and the very existence, of the patriarchy and the societal pressures it puts on men.  As Vivian Sobchack explained, the repressed is no longer “an excessive will to power and knowledge as well as unbridled sexual desire” but rather “patriarchal hatred, fear, and self-loathing (152).” In the film, gender roles are clearly established and, as seen in most of the horror films we’ve watched thus far, the female is victimized by a male antagonist.

Jack struggles to maintain his role as the male dominant of the family and attempts to reassert his role in a hostile manner. We must first assess the reason Jack feels threatened in his role as the patriarch of the family. As Sobchack discusses in her essay, rage is induced in the father if he fails to achieve the economic and political benefits of patriarchal power, which is threatened as “the patriarchy is challenged, as more and more families no longer conform in structure, membership, and behavior of the standards set by bourgeois mythology.”

We can interpret Jack as feeling emasculated because he has not achieved much in his life as a man. He does not have a successful, “masculine” career (engineer, doctor, businessman, etc) and has resorted to taking up a job as a hotel caretaker not only to support his middle-class family but to focus on his writing. Even in his writing, he hasn’t achieved much. The solitude of the hotel in the unforgiving winter does not offer Jack inspiration but rather hinders his ability to write. The isolation is not only represented through the hotel, which becomes disconnected from the rest of the world once the phone lines go down, but through his family. Wendy and Danny are seen happily running through the maze hand-in-hand, with Jack left alone in the hotel with an aggravatingly have case of writer’s block.

He leers over the miniature model of the maze with an unpleasant gaze as if to maintain dominance, and in this case, omnipotence, over his wife and son. The tracking shot is constantly following Wendy and Danny in the maze from the rear like a beast hunting its prey.

With nothing to distract him from his thoughts, Jack grows frustrated with himself and his failure as a writer (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”) He therefore relieves himself of this frustration, if only for a moment, by verbally attacking his wife. He continues to emotionally detach himself from his family. He undermines his wife by brushing off her speculations of someone breaking into the hotel and scoffing at, then begrudgingly adhering to, her pleas to confront the supposed intruder. Interactions between Jack and Danny are also uncomfortable and unnerving. The prolonged silence between the two plays out the scene in a way that makes the viewer fear for Danny’s safety. Jack’s disheveled appearance gives the impression that he is mentally and emotionally unstable and his unfit to care for his son given the fact that he has hurt Danny while under the influence before.

Wendy and her role as the feminine mother plays a key part in the climax of the film. This film abandons the un-feminist idea that women must adopt masculine character traits in order to save themselves and their loved ones from the masculine monster. She first displays resistance by wielding a baseball bat against her husband. A break in the status quo is evident here. Although she has the upper-hand with her weapon, Jack still intimidates, overpowers, and undermines her, constantly mocking her fear and desperation to take Danny to a hospital. She is unable to attack him, constantly walking backwards and missing his head with each swing. She eventually renders him unconscious but he later regains his strength and viciously attacks his family. Wendy, wielding a knife this time, is traumatized and unable to kill and “castrate” her monstrous husband (reestablishing the typical gender roles seen in film of the male antagonist and victimized female). Danny is able to outsmart his father by running and hiding from him in the maze. Wendy and Danny manage to escape, leaving Jack to die in the harsh winter cold. Wendy does not abandon her role as a mother. She is still depicted as weak and emotionally traumatized but she is a strong female character in the respect that she desperately prioritizes her son’s life and safety over her own. This film firmly establishes the interaction between the monstrous male, and protagonist female, and the status quo the monstrous male tries so desperately to maintain.

Works Cited

• Vivian Sobchack. “Bringing it All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange.” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Barry Keith Grant, Ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.