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ROUND ONE: 1 ⎔ 2 ⎔ 3 ⎔ 4 ⎔ 5 ⎔ 6 ⎔ 7 ⎔ 8 ⎔ 9
ROUND TWO: 1 ⎔ 2 ⎔ 3 ⎔ 4 ⎔ 5 ⎔ 6 ⎔ 7 ⎔ 8 ⎔ 9
- The sweet tambourine kicks in right as Commoners Crown by Steeleye Span appears, that being the other, most clearly visible and decipherable album cover in the movie.
- Actually, with this racing theme in mind, doesn’t Hallorann’s shirt look like one of those checked flags they use to signal the winners?
- Room 237 appears 55 seconds into this half, and at that point in the “Quick” half, we just cut between the third and fourth shot of the movie. Meaning, we had exactly enough time for shots 2 and 3 to play out. At the same moment as the 7th shot from the beginning of the movie starts (2:34), the 237 ghost has just fully exposed herself (73:05). I won’t make a habit of pointing out things that specific, I just thought that was a cool bit of business. The time between the end of the 3rd and the start of the 7th shot is the same as the time between the appearance of 237 and the appearance of the nude ghost.
- Incidentally, this means that the mirror action going from Jack professing that his breaking Danny’s arm was an accident and “could’ve happened to anyone”, right up to him asking Wendy what room the crazy woman is in.
- Danny’s shaking shine face goes perfectly with the tambourine.
- The whirligig sounds that went with the moment of Jack Nicholson’s name flashing across his Beetle in the opening here signal the appearance of Jack onscreen, interrupting Wendy’s interruption.
- Okay, so I finally decided (after getting about a quarter of the way through this analysis on mostly memory), to make what I’m calling the Twice-Folded Shining, to make it easier to see how these four quarters interact, and as you’ll see below, it’s quite the visual chaos. But it reveals some things I wasn’t considering. Like how Danny Lloyd’s name scrolls by in the Quick half while the lesson key is going by in the Dead half. I’ve red-boxed the lesson key so you know what I’m talking about. What’s more, we’ve got the F21 photo key in the shot too, where it remains the entire time the lesson key is passing, though the two never touch, which seems apt to me.
- Another cool Twice-Folded thing: the second 237 ghost steps outside the bath is the second Jack first entires the hotel.
- The gap in the tambourine shaking that started when Quick-half Jack and Ullman were first meeting is here perfectly isolating Jack’s reaction to Lloyd’s last line of dialogue, which was “Women! Can’t live with em, can’t live without em.” Which means this tambourine gap features Jack saying, “Words of wisdom, Lloyd, words of wisdom.” Why that strikes me as fabulous: the first gap was separating the Jack who had never spoken to or touched Stuart Ullman from the Jack who had, and was now in his grasp. The way Jack’s speech about abusing Danny works is that it cuts Lloyd out of the rest of the scene, dialogue-wise. So this tambourine gap is like the bridge between Jack’s confessional tale of self-pity, and his more insinuational banter with Lloyd about the “ol’ spermbank upstairs”.
- And for what it’s worth, forward Jack is here closing the gap between his earlier position, stuck at the door, and his new position as the nude ghost’s conquest.
- There’s a few cool cymbal crashes with the ghost runs her hands over him, but closer inspection reveals that her hands are floating over the surface of Jack until this moment when the final crash happens and her hands run into his hair. The music that follows features a new series of organ sounds.
- Incidentally, this is the same moment as when the Quick-half was showing the black Monza outside the Boulder apartment, and backward Jack here has just finished making the death face he makes following his first drink. The Quick and the Dead.
- Nothing too interesting going on here musically, but it’s at this moment in Q (that’s my new nickname for the Quick-half: Q) that Wendy introduces the idea of Tony, asking what Tony thinks about the Overlook. So, just as the audience learns about Danny’s alter ego, Jack is learning that the hotel has an alter ego.
- Also, Danny had just finished saying how there’s “no one to play with around here”, and here Jack’s trying to resolve a similar problem on both sides of the mirrorform.
- In one of the funniest moments ever, the switch into the porno groove of Hey Man happens right on the cut to (technically the second cut to) the creeping corpse lady. In all her glory.
- But this works on a thematic level too, since Bill Watson in Q has just shaken Jack’s hand, and one of my theories about Watson is that he represents the hotel’s good half, so, though he doesn’t react to Jack with the horror Jack shows 237 ghost, perhaps that’s only because he’s powerful enough to hide his true feelings. Jack is drunk on ghost booze here, so he’s not quite so mentally fortified.
- Also, his dialogue here is “Say Lloyd, seems I’m temporally light.” And Watson means “son of light” in a sense.
- Oh, and it’s only seconds into Hey Man that Jack says “One buh one”, which I might’ve liked to see right on the line between songs, but the album makes this out to be one track, so I like to think it still counts.
- “Hey, dig/This man’s world of speed/Hooked like jungle weed” Hallorann appears on the first bit of singing. And he’s got a statue of a tiger behind him. Like from a jungle.
- “But it’s a gamble/It’s walking the line/But if he gets home, well/A lot he could find” On “walking the line” Hallorann starts pacing the floor of his apartment in a line out from the bar to the window and back to the bar. He’ll do this three times over his next three scenes. And on “A lot he could find” he stops next to his copy of Car and Driver, with its cover feature on the Zephyr. Remember, Zephyrus is the Greek “west wind”, and here we’re hearing East Wind.
- Twice-Folded: as Quick Jack is saying “Do you mind if I ask why you do that?” Dead Jack is saying “I’m awfully glad you asked me that, Lloyd.” And Dead Jack is moving backwards in this moment, so these two “ask” “that” phrases are moving in opposite directions.
- “But tell me now/Are you really really real?” This line ends right as Lloyd is appearing to Jack for the first time. He and Hallorann are about to vanish in a second as the action continues in both directions. Also, ignore the red box in the following graphic, I’m trying to reuse as many images as I can from other analyses to save on website space.
- “Hey man/What’s your game?/A wreath, a medal/Or a chain?” As we hear this, Wendy crosses the apartment to answer Jack at the door, revealing Jacob Philipp Hackert’s painting of Mt. Vesuvius. Vesuvius can be translated as “son of Ves”, meaning Hercules. And Romans thought that Hercules’ spirit, or his “genius” as they called it, infused the mountain with his essence. Hercules is also considered the founder of the Olympics, and there’s a tonne of Olympics references coded into the film.
- Jack is also yukkin’ it up here about how it’s a “little slow tonight” in the bar. And to be sure the Dead half if The Rum and the Red is much “slower” than the Quick half.
- Speaking of Q, it was at this moment that Danny was waiting to see if his trick would work on murder Jack, right before the action cut to the bloodfall on “chain”. So the bloodfall, with its association to Death appears for the last time while Jack is here invoking the Lloyd ghost. And on that note (not to confuse the matter, but), this is also the first appearance of the Franklyn Cattermole painting, and I’ve got an enormous theory about the fact that this painting may be the Eye of Sauron for the hotel’s dark heart. So, to have it appearing in tandem with Death in Q…that’s what I call mighty fine synchronicity.
- “Hey man/Now what’s your game?/A wreath, a medal/And a chain?” As we hear “Hey man” Wendy is seeing Jack’s head pop through the door, and backward Jack’s face is disappearing behind his hands. And on “what’s your game?” Jack starts lying about not seeing anything in room 237. Backward Jack, meanwhile is offering up his “goddamn soul” for just a glass of beer. In Q, Jack is saying how the hotel “certainly” has “plenty of [seclusion]”.
- My next thought is a little complex, so I’ll try to put it simply, and hopefully you follow. Remember how there were three shots of Ullman during the interview where the Ullman’s Eyes photos are cropped out? That sequence lasts 52 seconds, and in the Dead half this passage starts with Jack closing the door to Danny’s room, and ends with him telling the lie about how Danny probably “did it to himself”, meaning his neck bruises. So, while Ullman was guarding his eyes to see if Jack was the right man for the minotaur/family-killer position, Jack is here guarding Danny’s ears against his lies about his own 237 experience. Of course, we’ll find out almost as soon as Jack’s lies are over with that Danny’s shining in on this whole scene. And the other cool thing is: what was backward Jack doing right before this sequence started? Covering his own eyes.
- And not that the situations are anything alike, but I love how Jack’s duplicity doesn’t work on Wendy whatsoever. Her maternal instinct is too severe, whereas Jack’s paternal instinct was suffocated by his urge to come off as worthy of this incredible opportunity, which he’d already been granted.
- All of Ullman’s guarded questions about whether Jack felt he could handle isolation would be matching with this sequence of him storming alone through the lonesome gold room. But he ends on “How about your wife and son? How do you think they’ll handle it?” to which Jack replies, “They’ll love it.” And in this moment Wendy is having the reaction that will seal the brokenness of the bond (to be oxymoronic) between them and him by denying Jack’s ludicrous assertion.
- Also, this passage paired with the backward action in Q of Wendy passing through the Famine portal, which goes nicely with Jack finding the big room full of no booze.
- Twice-Folded: As Quick Ullman is saying “second thoughts” in the line “It’s the sort of thing that’s been known to give people second thoughts about the job”, Quick Danny is running his second set of escapes in that pattern sequence. But also, Ullman is introducing the Grady story, and as he does so, backward Dead Jack is being faded in on, with this cro magnon look of prehistoric stupidity, as he’s trying to register Wendy’s accusations about bruises on Danny’s neck. Forward Dead Jack, who’s gotten quite a bit wilier than backward Dead Jack, is saying his lies about how Danny probably bruised himself. So, as Quick Jack is learning about the man he’s become in the mirrorform, Dead Jack is demonstrating the two sides of what it takes to become Grady: you have to be dumb enough to be manipulated this way, and you have to be wily enough to be frustrated when your lame attempt at covering your tracks doesn’t work.
- (This next analysis will re-cover that last point, but in greater detail) The following guitar solo segment, which perfectly contained the Grady story in Q, along with Wendy’s experience of dead Hallorann and the Grady ghost, here perfectly encapsulates the time that it takes for Jack to lay out his big lie, saying Danny’s neck bruises are not “that different from the episode he had” before they came to the hotel, as well as Wendy’s refutation leading right through Jack’s confusion about leaving the hotel, leading to him exploding in anger. His anger falls on the other side of this period. The backward action is the whole sequence of Wendy discovering Danny’s neck bruises and blaming Jack for them, and running out. I love how this conveys the way that War (which the Grady portal stands for) isn’t just about aggression, but about the way that communications break down, often because the side more prone to aggression wants to assert something about reality that the other side doesn’t agree with, even if that’s simply how Country A deserves to own more territory than Country B, including lands Country B previously felt belonged to them.
- In terms of Jack and Grady as individuals, their aggressions were provoked by their families expressing a desire to leave the Overlook. Grady’s daughter (if we can believe Grady ghost) tried to burn the building down, and here Wendy is simply suggesting they leave the hotel to get Danny a doctor.
- But there’s a micro-moment within this sequence that’s really cool. Grady ghost appears the 7 seconds in Q, and in Dead these would equal the two shots below. So, as Grady ghost is saying “Isn’t it?” in “Great party, isn’t it?” Jack is saying “would it?” in “It wouldn’t be that different from the episode he had before we came up here, would it?” And remember, the incident he had before they came up here mirrored over the Conquest sequence of Wendy witnessing the worst extent of her actions. So, in a (mirrorform) way, by invoking Danny’s “episode”, he’s bringing to mind Wendy’s worst failures. Grady ghost is the evocation of Jack’s worst failures.
- But I also like how Wendy first seeing Grady ghost from afar pairs with the start of the shot of Danny shining in on Jack having just completed his lies to Wendy. It’s like Danny saw the Grady-ness of his father in this moment, and a moment later…
- …Tony shows him REDRUM for the first time at the same moment as a second after cutting away from Wendy seeing Hallorann’s corpse. Meaning that Danny’s stare here pairs almost perfectly with Wendy’s entire experience of Hallorann’s corpse (it’s off by a second).
- Incidentally, Ullman’s dialogue in the REDRUM moment is, “I mean, from what I’d been told” and he goes on to say “he seemed like a completely normal individual.” But I like that “from what I’d been told”. Who told him? Was it someone like Tony? Was it the hotel’s dark heart?
- Also, Danny’s second vision of the bloodfall occurs at the end here, which means it would pair with Wendy fleeing the War portal in Q, which means we now have a visual bloodfall connected to three of the Four Horsemen portals.
- “Well, this man’s world of speed/Hooked, oh, like a jungle weed” You might recall that the first time we hear this lyric in Q was paired with Jack howling in defeat in the heart of the maze. Here, he’s barking frothily at Wendy about his chance to finally “accomplish something” in similar fashion.
- Also, consider the Apollo 11 on Danny’s shirt. That’s a speedy vehicle. But also, Danny’s playing with a Formula 1 race car when he gets hooked into entering room 237. You might quibble with my theory about what room 237 means, but the fact remains that Danny could not shake his intrigue about that room. Did it really trick him into entering? Or did curiousity almost kill this cat?
- “But if you get home, well/A lot you can find/Burning wheels/In the streets” Right here Jack’s barking about “shovelling out driveways, working at a car wash” in Boulder to illustrate the shame he’d feel in returning to where they came from. To home. In the next sequence Jack will be standing in a room with a song playing called Home. I guess because Jack already is home.
- Also, the last time Danny was in this room, he was burning his wheels in these streets, though he was flowing in the opposite direction.
- “Hey why/You do what you do?/Oh, maybe there’s a challenge somewhere/In store for you” Again, going with the “moon mission” theme of room 237, this line seems to speak to this image of Jack freaking out over being told he can’t just “accomplish” his great literary dreams, while Danny feels the pain of what his 237 dreams lead to.
- “A wreath, a medal/Could even be a chain?” This plays while Jack first crosses paths with the three paintings I think are meant to represent the real Grady wife and daughters, and keeps going till Jack’s passing the Makah Returning In Their War Canoes painting, and whatever’s in the righthand image. But the Grady family paintings have the gold-silver-bronze sort of arrangement, which feels apt.
- Twice-folded: Q Jack is saying, “horror film” in the line “And, uh, as far as my wife is concerned…I’m sure she’ll be absolutely fascinated when I tell her about it…she’s a, uh…confirmed ghost story and horror film addict.” Note how AY Jackson’s Red Maple is right on his eyes here. Putting aside the fact that backward Dead Wendy is probably not so fascinated by backward Dead Jack’s dream about murdering her and Danny, this painting disappears behind her after she lays eyes on the corpse of Hallorann. Something that only happens…in horror films.
- Right as the switch into the One By One (Reprise) happens the wall rug I call the mazerug appears in the shot, and in Q, this moment was right as Danny ran for the maze. Note too how the mazerug has two half diamonds vertically, three half diamonds horizontally, and seven full diamonds in the middle. 237. The first part of One By One contained almost Jack’s entire 237 experience, transitioning into the porno music only as he was being chased out the door.
- Twice-folded: Actually, I might as well point out how, when the shot reverses, we’re seeing the escape key go by in Q, and the place where the F21 key will be, in Dead. Remember earlier when the lesson key and the F21 key were onscreen at the same time, and in almost these exact positions from one another?
- Oh man, the lesson key bit was for 5 seconds, from 73 seconds in to 78 seconds in, and the period in which the escape key and the F21 key overlap is also 5 seconds, from 630 seconds to 635 seconds (10:30-10:35).
- Right as this track’s fading to silence, Jack passes Maligne Lake, Jasper Park, a painting that resembles the first shot in the movie. Need I point out that One By One is what we first hear when we see that first shot in Q?
- Also the very next shot in the start of Hallorann’s second distress call. So in the Dead half, Hallorann was at the starting point of One By One, the lyrics of Hey Man, and now again at the start of track 2: Black Flame.
Click here to continue to Round 2: Track Two: Black Flame
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OTHER MAIN PAGES FOR SHINING ANALYSIS
THE MIRRORFORM ⎔ THE BEATLES ⎔ THE RUM AND THE RED
BACKGROUND ART ⎔ OVERLOOK PHOTOGRAPHS ⎔ GOLDEN SPIRALS
PHI GRIDS ⎔ PATTERNS ⎔ VIOLENCE AND INDIGENA ⎔ ABSURDITIES
THE STORY ROOM ⎔ ANIMAL SYMBOLS ⎔ THE ANNOTATED SHINING
EYE SCREAM 