Shine On
Jack’s son Danny can “shine,” that is, he can read others’ minds, see premonitions of the future, remnants of the distant past. This ability represents another glimpse at a Kubrickian psychological hell, as Danny is cursed with something that forces him to experience the dark unconscious of someone such as Jack. Danny’s ability also seems to be an exacerbating factor in his father’s mental decline. When Jack converses with Grady in the bathroom, Grady suggests that Jack kill Wendy and Danny for the same reason that he killed his own family: his wife and children were interfering with his “duties,” and so he “corrected” them.
Danny, to Jack, poses the same threat, for when Danny shines, he sees Jack’s unconscious and thus has the potential to stop its fantasies. It is as though he were interrupting or disturbing the unconscious dream that Jack is acting out in the hotel; and the “duties” that Danny is interrupting--which are the same “moral and ethical principles” that Jack reprimands Wendy for compromising--are really nothing more than repressed Freudian wishes: to complete some literary masterpiece that will presumably bring him money and fame, to break free of the father archetype by engaging in sexual promiscuity (e.g., the woman in room 237), and, ultimately, to kill Wendy and Danny, who bind him to the life he never wanted. Jack, therefore, must “correct” the situation: he must never allow anyone to interfere with his existence within the Overlook. Such interference would require that Jack “wake up” from the primal pleasures that the hotel has afforded him--for instance, his chance to relapse into alcoholism and his opportunity to affirm his masculinity.
Read more:
Representing the Unconscious in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining
The Cinematic Unconscious
Mirrors of the Soul
All Work and No Play
Shine On
Suggested Reading
About the Author