Sun King – Round 1

In the chilled out intro, we get our first view of the bloodfall in a while, through the mirror world, and it’s all red tinted, and furniture is floating around, like in a dream. Incidentally, forward Jack is dreaming during this, as Wendy brings in breakfast. There’s a surreal quality to this, the serenity of this arrangement, with Wendy being so amendable and supportive and Jack just fucking around and getting angry. Maybe that’s a good metaphor for a Sun King.

When you see this REDRUM moment, it just feels like punctuation. It happens alongside this sweet little lick on the guitar that finishes that part of the intro, and it’s really yummy.

But then! On the first “Aaaaahhhhhhh…here come the sun king” we see mirror Danny reacting to his vision of the bloodfall, and his realization that his father is gearing up to kill his mother. On “Here come the sun king” he’s looking through the mirror, so to speak, at mirror Jack (Forward Jack appearing in a mirror), who he realizes is going to go insanely evil. Jack sticks out his tongue at himself in the mirror just as he’ll stick it out at Wendy at the end of their slow chase around the Colorado lounge, which is ongoing.
Also, this song is like a funhouse mirror version of Here Comes the Sun, as if Lennon and McCartney heard how great that track was, and felt they had to top it (or twin it?). During that song was when we the mirrorformists last saw Danny getting a big shine, that time from Hallorann, asking if Danny wanted some…eye scream.
I’ve debated at length about the nature of gods in The Shining. It seems like references to them are all over the place. Sun King is almost a short hand for “god” since most mythologies associate a their main god with the sun. Danny wears a sweater in a bit that says Apollo 11. Apollo was the Greco-Roman god of the sun. So there’s an interesting kind of inversion going on there, depending on how you look at it. If Danny’s more the “sun” than Jack, is he above Jack, the patriarch? What’s more powerful? The sun, or the sun king?
Also, I never noticed how Wendy’s head gives Danny Groucho eyebrows here.

“Everybody’s laughing/Everybody’s happy” Mirror Jack is smirking idiotically about his All Work pages. At the end of that line, forward Jack gives Wendy the ol’ “Yep, that’s all it is” line about his writing, and his inspiration.

At the beginning of the nonsense Romance language part we cut to Wendy admitting sheepishly that she thought the Overlook was kinda scary (her performance here gives a look of like, “Okay, Beatles. That’s nice that you think you’re so hilarious.”). Also, mirror Jack is just appearing, and he’s being very obviously coy, in a way that is about equally bad at masking his real thoughts. Wendy has just been reading his nonsense verse, which is like the nonsense verse on the track. Oh, and the lyrics include the phrase “mi amore” twice in the same spot of the first two lines, and they’re discussing Jack’s love of the hotel.
The other neat thing about that is that the English part of this song played over Jack with his backward T-shirt, and the nonsense Romance will play over the remainder, which all features the English showing forwards.

I probably shouldn’t look too hard into the nonsense verse, but “que canite”, heard here, is a play on “cake and eat it”. As in, Jack wants to have five months of responsibility-free life in seclusion to work on his great novel, but he doesn’t care to actually do the work he was hired to do. And what he did create was a whole pile of nonsense. Also, you know, he’s eating bacon and eggs here. Eggs over easy were Paul McCartney’s favourite snack, and these are sunny side up. Not too different.
It’s also neat that the nonsense Romance language contains a buried English phrase, just as this scene contains a French phrase, which has basically become an English one.