by AA Milne
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OVERLOOK LITERATURE – SKIP TO A PAGE
BURDA MODEN ⎔ GLAMOUR ⎔ HAMLET ⎔ HOTEL & MOTEL RED BOOK ⎔ JEEVES ⎔ THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH ⎔ PETER PAN ⎔ PHONEBOOKS ⎔ PLAYGIRL ⎔ SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ⎔ TRAVEL ⎔ TRAVEL HOLIDAY MAGAZINE ⎔ WHITE MAN’S BURDEN ⎔ WINNIE-THE-POOH
APPEARANCE
39:16-39:27; 99:30-101:18
IDENTITY
Seen up the hall from Bugs Bunny, here, Winnie gets two visual occurrences, and a bit of a name drop in the line, “Your husband introduced you as Winnifred. Now, are you a Winnie, or a Freddy?” If that seems like a stretch, consider that Winnie seems highly correlated to Wendy.
SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE
As I’ll discuss in greater detail elsewhere, rabbits are associated to shiners, and Bugs here appears on the spot where Hallorann will get axed later. The black bear seems to be correlated to Ullman/The Overlook, so having Bugs be on top of Hallorann’s future corpse, and to have Winnie up the hall, and the black bear (or is it a golliwog?) on the side of Ullman’s office brings to mind the moment of Wendy witnessing Hallorann’s corpse.
Later, Wendy will grab a baseball bat next to a Winnie doll…
…and later she’ll get stuck in the bathroom window (on a very blustery day), just like Pooh gets stuck in Rabbit’s hole, after eating all of Rabbit’s honey (was it Rabbit’s fault for leaving Pooh bear alone there?). And Wendy is saved from her stuck position by the arrival of Hallorann, just as Pooh is projected out of Rabbit’s hole by a charging Rabbit.
Also, when Wendy sees the BJ bear, it does possess a certain Winnie-esque tonality in the face and nose, while the eyelids look like Shelley Duvall’s, and the mouth looks like a predator.
Milne was also a friend of JM Barrie, whose work we’ll cover in a bit. And you might recall that the band of the album next to Hallorann’s bed made an album that referenced Milne’s work.
The two shots of the Winnie doll go for 10 seconds (Jack throwing the ball) and 107 seconds (Wendy grabbing the bat). When Wendy’s seeing the masked Pooh bear person (my theory is that it’s meant to be a reflection of Wendy herself) the room behind her is room 107, and if you put those numbers together you get 117, a number highly associated with the Tower of Babel, and another rich subtext of the film.
One last thing: this is probably coincidence, but Pooh bear is mentioned in King’s novel (pg. 193), and AA Milne’s name famously contains that “AA”, as in the more commonly used short form for Alcoholics Anonymous. I doubt this was the top-of-mind reason for invoking Milne’s creation, but I don’t know, I thought it was worth noting.
Next literary reference: Phonebooks
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 