Here Comes the Sunken Place, Part 3: The Shame of Being Watched

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One more thing on that; a personal thought. In Room 237, one of the speakers talks about something he calls the “cloud of witness”, a bible reference (Hebrews 12:1), saying that The Shining‘s intro, with the skittery voices sailing over Jack’s Beetle as he drives to the hotel, speaks to this concept on some Faustian level. During my own reflections on the film, that phrase put into my head the phrase “the shame of being watched”. Early Jack is bashful at having to take this crummy job, using the excuse of his noble artistic ambitions to salve his ego. He oversells his glee to fit in with these happily employed men.

…while sitting in the shadow of the photo that will hang above photo
Jack at the end. Jack is even being watched by his destiny.

Hotel Jack, quickly drunk on loneliness, banishes Wendy from coming in and interrupting him while he’s doing his oh so important work. But his exaggerated expression here only lasts for a moment. He hasn’t gone full cartoon yet.

The next time Wendy does come in is in response to Jack’s screams, which leads to her waking him from a murder dream, and the first instance of him seeing Wendy see him is one of abject terror. His shame at being witnessed for the failed writer and future murderer that he is fills him with surpassing horror. But, again, he hasn’t gone full cartoon.

That moment comes when, in the pit of complete social isolation, Jack only has a mirror to reach out to, in which he creates a separate character, to assuage his shame.

I could pull from a dozen moments to show just how uniquely corny Jack becomes during his talk with Lloyd. The important thing to note is that when Wendy arrives to send him to 237, we see that he is truly alone. This conversation is only as real as a shine.

It’s in this mirror-relationship that he takes the drink that kills the old Jack (as I cover in the Julius Caesar analysis). But the drink wasn’t a literal murder, just a murder of a part of Jack determined to hold his life together. When he enters 237, part of the impulse seems to be a genuine desire to defend his family (or possibly to prove to Wendy he didn’t really harm Danny–but she’s already seemingly convinced of Danny’s account), but he quickly abandons this impulse in favour of deeper betrayal of his old life’s commitments.

Still, 237, like his murder dream, shocks Jack back into reality momentarily, this time, with the help of a mirror, performing the opposite trick as the Gold Room. Can Jack ever trust a mirror again?

After a final attempt to lie his way back to equilibrium (too ashamed to admit the truth of 237 to Wendy), Jack eventually retreats again to Lloyd, looking for another shot of Looney Tunes-esque scene chewing. I think this is why some people have guessed that the ghosts aren’t real whatsoever, and that they’re all in Jack’s head. They’re not all in his head literally; they’re the result of the hotel’s ability to shine (Grady freeing Jack from the pantry seals this into fact). But some part of Jack’s psyche thinks he’s truly alone, because otherwise why would he feel so comfortable behaving so cartoonishly? He knows thanks to 237 that this is wrong, but he’s suppressing that memory to get back into this sense of freedom. He wants to dance again like no one’s watching (in fact, dance is just what he does after leaving Lloyd, as one Kubrick follows him with a camera, and another watches him from inside the scene).

But part of why Jack feels so free is the sense that the ghosts aren’t real, aren’t watching him, can’t possibly be there. When Grady crashes the advocaat drinks into him a moment later several ghosts look over, including Vivian Kubrick to the left, and the 237 ghost, deep in the distance here. The shame has returned (why would Jack do this to himself in his own fantasy…?), and now Grady will take Jack into impossible seclusion to rectify the matter (in case you haven’t read my section on absurdities, or watched Room 237, the Gold Room bathroom can’t possibly exist as shown). These embarrassments are piling up, and the feeling is increasingly public.

When Jack learns that Grady is Grady, the cartoonishness begins to creep back. Grady can’t possibly be Grady, some part of Jack realizes, so maybe this is all some fantasy, after all. Oh joy.

Grady then persuades Jack of the reality of a complete absurdity, that the two of them are eternal beings gloriously entwined with the hotel’s grandeur. This is like absurdity overload for Jack, and something pretty incredible happens: for the first time, Jack is both cartoonish, and yet somehow completely natural. As if goofy, zany inhumanity was his default setting. The hotel has broken him completely. He’s now a creature devoid of the ability to tell solitude from company. And the hotel used his shame of being watched to get him here.

The next time he sees Wendy he no longer cares that she’s witnessed his work. And his old, normal, civil way of addressing her is gone, and will stay gone. But so is his shame.

He’s cured!