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REDRUM ROAD – ROUND THREE – SKIP TO A PAGE
COME TOGETHER ⎔ SOMETHING ⎔ MAXWELL’S SILVER HAMMER ⎔ OH! DARLING ⎔ OCTOPUS’S GARDEN ⎔ I WANT YOU ⎔ HERE COMES THE SUN ⎔ BECAUSE ⎔ YOU NEVER GIVE ME YOUR MONEY ⎔ SUN KING ⎔ MEAN MR. MUSTARD ⎔ POLYTHENE PAM ⎔ SHE CAME IN THROUGH THE BATHROOM WINDOW ⎔ GOLDEN SLUMBERS ⎔ CARRY THAT WEIGHT ⎔ THE END
ROUND ONE START ⎔ ROUND TWO START ⎔ SPECIAL: STORY ROOM
- “She came in through the bathroom window” – The whole intro, Danny’s doing the backwards dance, and the timing goes well enough with his unintentional jig. But it’s also worth noting that Danny’s backward walk might be based on Jack’s backward walk, which started in the 237 bathroom. Which is windowless.
- There’s also the matter of Ullman’s impossible window, which I’m not really sure how to connect to this song, but it is a major player in this sequence.
- “Protected by a silver spoon” – Jack and Ullman’s tea cups are in the frame, both with silver spoons on the side of Ullman.
- But it also occurs to me that silver spoons shine, and Danny’s shining is what’s saving his life here.
- “Didn’t anybody tell her? Didn’t anybody see?” – The first line happens before the jump, and the next while Danny’s covering his tracks. As previously noted, this moment is the same as in round 1, when Wendy and Danny are passing this exact spot during the maze walk. Of course, we know who told Danny how to survive, and we know that he saw.
- Also, on “see” the shot cuts to Wendy about to see the last of her own trials: the bloodfall. So, Wendy helped Danny see one of his lessons, and Danny helped Wendy, perhaps by having foreseen the bloodfall, and knowing to be ready for the ensuing events.
- “She said she’d always been a dancer/She worked at 15 clubs a day” – The bloodfall creeps out at the start of this line (which I just find cute). And Ullman is about to get more into the many tasks required of the caretaker.
- Round 1, remember, was Wendy unscrewing the fruit cocktail, which, in the mirrorform, makes it look like she’s opening the top of Tony/Danny’s head, at breakfast. Round 2 is backward Danny walking backward away from zombie Jack’s bed while the Jack-Grady convo keeps breaking the 180-degree rule. But sadly there isn’t a head-based overlay quite on the level of the can-opener-head or bloodfall-head here.
- “Well I knew what I could not say” – Danny can’t say that he’s hiding nearby, and Ullman can’t say that perhaps the real reason the hotel doesn’t stay open in the winters is so that it can continue to function as a Jack/Grady conveyor belt. Round 2 backward Danny can’t say that he doesn’t want to approach his father, while Grady can’t say that he’s a murderous ghost. Round 1 backward Wendy can’t say that she doesn’t want to go murder Jack, or that she’s afraid Jack might come here and do something bad to them.
- “She could steal, but she could not rob” – This seemingly trivial bit of semantics leads us to one of the film’s most intriguing questions for Shining obsessives: is Danny’s involvement in Jack’s death murder, manslaughter, or none of the above? It seems to me that it’s sort of both and neither of the killing options, like a taijitu. He sets a trap for Jack, but the express purpose of the trap is confusion, not murder. The confusion leads to death, so Danny’s trap worked like a murder cage. In the sense that a company designs a car that explodes, killing everyone inside, they’re not intentionally murdering their customers, they just happen to manufacture so-called “death traps”. That’s sort of like what Danny’s doing to Jack. But we only say that because of Danny’s evident intelligence, his rudimentary genius. If he was a deer escaping a grizzly bear, and jumped over a river that the bear got caught in and swept away by, we would just say he was lucky, and leave it at that.
- To further that point a bit, the word “steal” happens on the first image below, the word “rob” on the second. Since the photo Jack photo is hanging beside Jack on “steal” it seems to speak to the fact that the hotel stole Jack’s soul, but it didn’t kill him. “Robbing” would’ve been killing him, but it was the cold that did that.
- I may’ve pointed this out already, but this is another cool bit, where in round 1 Danny is doing the 237 trike ride, which is the 3rd lesson, and here he’s in-between the 2nd and 3rd escape, the 2nd escape correlating to the 3rd lesson. Danny also happens to be triking past 237 for the first time on this line, and here Jack is getting stumped by Danny’s dead end. 237 is where Jack does his backward walk.
- “Didn’t anybody tell her/Didn’t anybody see?” – The first line plays over Jack finding the end of Danny’s trail, and the second over Jack’s glancing confusion. So Jack doesn’t have a Tony, and isn’t a shiner. Nobody told him, and nobody saw. The Overlook could tell him that Danny has a very great talent, but not what it was really capable of.
- Also, again, Ullman’s impossible window appears all throughout this song.
Click here to continue on to Redrum Road: Golden Slumbers – Round 3
MAIN PAGE ⎔ SECTION PAGE ⎔ SITE MAP ⎔ GLOSSARY
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 