King’s Nightmare

The horror of addiction in Stephen King’s The Shining

It’s about time Stephen King showed up on this site. His work has been central to my appreciation for good horror, and his memoir On Writing remains in my top books list for several reasons. He’s no stranger to the role that horror plays in our lives, and this familiarity with real horror allows him to create literature that doesn’t just scare us out of our seats, but rather resurrects the deepest fears within us and explores them through stories often containing supernatural sources of horror to reflect the ones we know in a new, monstrous way. The concept of a monster originally meant something other than what we imagine as familiar to our human realm. By its nature as something other, it arouses fear and a sense of disconnection from the greater whole of our existence. Stephen King’s monsters tread the line between humanity and the supernatural, often passing as something we’d accept in our world without question before we realize the inexplicable, often sinister side to them. In many of his works, the monster aspect of the horror draws inspiration from the lived horror of addiction, something King knows well from his own time in active addiction and in the lifelong journey of recovery that can follow that imprisonment. 

His fourth novel, The Shining, has been recognized as a story personal to the author’s own life and is perhaps one of the more well-known of his books, due in part to Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film of the same name and the King’s 2013 book sequel Doctor Sleep. The Shining follows the Torrance family and their experience moving into the Overlook Hotel for the winter. Jack Torrance has taken a job as caretaker of the hotel in its offseason, and his wife, Wendy, and their young son, Danny, relocate with him. We learn that Jack struggles with alcoholism, which has caused major strife in both his personal and professional life. Over the course of his time at the Overlook, a force even more powerful than his addiction takes hold of him, and we see the sinister unraveling of his grasp on reality and his ability to connect with his wife and son. We learn that Danny has an intuition of sorts and can connect with people or places telepathically. Danny can read others’ thoughts and feelings, and he also sees visions of past happenings and future possibilities. These sensory experiences become increasingly dark in the Overlook, which has a notable influence on the minds of both Danny and his father. 

In the confines of the hotel, Danny’s gift grants him the ability to witness the horrors of the building’s former residents who continue to haunt the place of their deaths. He also uses this gift to communicate with the Overlook’s chef, Dick Hallorann, who shares this ability and calls it the shining. Dick Hallorann recognizes the shine in Danny and, having witnessed some of the hotel’s terrible surprises first hand, warns Danny of the things he might encounter during his time there. However, Dick thinks that the unwelcome ghosts of the hotel are nothing more than pictures in a book, and his warning in no way prepares Danny for the horrors to come or for the effect the hotel has on Jack Torrance, who becomes increasingly more of a stranger than Danny’s father. 

We see this unraveling of a man and its effect on his wife and child with heartbreaking proximity. King’s book gives us the tragedy of a good man whose internal demons manifest into a beast beyond his control in the isolated existence of the hotel. We experience the struggle of a woman whose love for her husband conflicts with her need to protect herself and her son, and we see Danny’s efforts to understand his abilities and to use his insights to find a way out of the near death sentence into which he and his parents have entered. Jack Torrance is very like King was for a time: a teacher/writer whose drinking makes it difficult for him to keep a steady job and threatens his family life. He’s a guy we want to see succeed because we can see the goodness in him. We can see that he loves his family and wants to do better for them and for himself. Though he has selfish tendencies; he’s largely acting with his family’s interests in mind. 

When Stanley Kubrick made the film adaptation, he made it his own. While he stays true to the plot of its source material, he takes liberties with the characters. His stark presentation of the Overlook and its residents strips the film of this human proximity we feel in the book, but it does lend a certain detachment and otherness conducive to the monstrosity present in the story. In the movie, Jack Nicholson’s Jack is unhinged and selfish from the start. He accepts the job for his own interests and takes the family as unwitting hostages in the trajectory of his life. If Jack is a selfish monster, his wife and son are victims without much say in this drastic life change. Wendy is shrill and frantic, and Danny is a brooding kid who looks either shocked or in a stupor much of the time. Jack’s expressed love for them often comes across as forced and obligatory, as if his role as husband and father is one he unhappily drags behind him.  If we look at it objectively -  as a movie, it’s a good movie. As an adaptation, it misses the mark. It may have the same basic storyline, but characters are the heart of this novel, and without staying true to the characters King brought to life in his book, the movie doesn’t tell the same story. 

I’ve been thinking about these two media - book and film - as two persons, or two versions of a person, giving an account of what happened. It’s the same way we can somehow be a self both divided and the same while in addiction. The addict self and our true self operate from entirely different hearts but share the same identity, which to many observers looks one and the same. I’m going to analyze both here for that reason. I think that the book gives us a story told by the true self, which makes sense given its closeness to the author’s own life. We meet characters whom we truly care about and want to see overcome their challenges. We can see the love present in their family, the effort to do well and the pain caused by outside forces, including alcoholism. There is warmth and goodness underlying the evil that creeps into their lives, and we see the humanity in their circumstances. On the other hand, Kubrick’s film offers a detached retelling of the same events with an entirely changed cast. His version gives us the perspective of the addict self, and there is not enough good to balance out the evil. He creates an unsettling depiction of a disconnected family further distancing themselves from the world and from each other. We see the addict self and the casualties of that addiction from an impersonal, outsider perspective. This version allows us to see a sequence of events without the same emotional attachment we’d have if they were happening to people we knew intimately. Stripped of the hope and redemption present in the book, the movie throws us into the intensifying spiral of chaos, destruction and tragedy into which Jack has plunged his family. 

The Overlook Hotel functions as a fitting vessel of horror and as a representation of addiction. The sordid details of its history, which Jack digs up in the public library in Sidewinder, the nearest town, reflect the ugly existence we live in addiction. Even when we put that life in our past, it remains to haunt us and holds the potential to harm our work in addiction if we give life to it. When Jack looks into the hotel’s history, he does so out of curiosity, but also out of resentment. He still bears the deep shame of his own actions and the consequences of his drinking, and he resents the way that Mr. Ullman, the manager, surfaces his past during his interview for the job. When he later discovers the scandalous history of Ullman’s beloved Overlook, he feels he has some vindication for his own shameful past. He gives weight to the Overlook’s past because he can’t move on from his own past. In this way, the Overlook consumes him mentally, and it continues to absorb his thinking as he continues on in his role as caretaker. In the same way, our own messy pasts can consume us when we’re unable to forgive ourselves, make amends for past wrongs or turn around the heavy baggage of resentments and fears that we carry with us into recovery. Jack’s discovery of the Overlook’s past also makes the hotel a kindred sort of spirit to his tortured self. If we put the Overlook in a lineup including Wendy and Danny, Jack may find himself to have more in common with the haunted hotel than with his own wife and kid because he still bears the emotional baggage of his addiction and suffers from the acute sense of detachment that unresolved resentments and guilt have caused between him and his family. Though the Overlook is soulless and scary, Jack subconsciously finds himself drawn to its traumatic saga. 

Even its identity as a hotel functions well in its role as the representation of addiction. This particular building hosts the arrivals and departures of so many people who use it as a form of escape from their day to day lives. It serves as a unifier in some ways, housing all these different lives in its stagnant rooms, and it keeps the unfortunate ones who never leave alive. In much the same way, addiction pulls in people from every part of the world, not discriminating by age, class or looks. It keeps people for varying lengths of time, imprisoning the most unfortunate of them forever. It mimics a home in many ways, but it’s not a home, not even for those who view it with a sort of possessive kind of care for it. The kind of people who stay in the Overlook seek to buy this kind of home-replacement comfort; its remote location means it’s not a place people use as lodging for an otherwise purposed trip. The Overlook is a destination, an exit from reality. 

Kubrick’s film aptly presents this sense of detachment in its portrayal of the hotel. He makes heavy use of longshots in displaying the hotel, both from an outside perspective and when the Torrance family initially tours their new residence. The longshot effectively emphasizes the looming nature of the Overlook as well as its isolation from outside society. We see the hotel set in the stark landscape of the Colorado mountains, a cold and lonely existence that reflects the numbness and isolation of addiction. The inside shots reflect the vast emptiness of the rooms which dwarf the characters who occupy them. From the Torrance family’s distant comments on the space, we hear the wonder in their voices at this grand interior, but they don’t have our perspective of them being enveloped and overwhelmed by the massive size and overbearing emptiness of the rooms. The majority of the frame in these shots is the unoccupied space of the hotel rather than the humans present in it, suggesting the power dynamic in which the hotel holds the upper hand. The humans are there, but they’re insignificant parts of a much greater picture. 

This visual reflects how small our lives can become in active addiction. The further in we go, the more detached we become from the people in our lives both emotionally and physically. We isolate so that we live an existence much like that of the Torrances in the Overlook - a doable drive from Sidewinder, but even that is impossible on a day when the snow really comes down. Our circle of friends and priorities becomes so small, fitting only what can coexist with the center of it: the substance whose survival dictates how we operate and what we value. And on the really bad days - the snowstorm days - our circle dwindles down to nothing but our substance. It’s a lonely, small life, and many of us who progress far enough in the cycle of addiction can begin to see that most of our frame is empty.

We watch the Torrance family become isolated in this way: first by the physical distance of the hotel from society and then from each other by the forces alive within the hotel. When the Torrances arrive at the Overlook, it’s bustling with the flurry of guests checking out and staff preparing to leave for the winter. Over the course of the day, their company slowly trickles away to none and they’re left alone in their strange new residence. Dick Hallorann is one of the last to leave. He recognizes the shining in Danny and has a private talk with the boy before his own departure. Before driving away, he looks back at the boy returning to the building and notes that it looks as though the Overlook had “swallowed him up.” I love that choice of words that implies that the hotel has consumed the family in every sense of the word. It has not only devoured them, taking over their lives and making those lives part of its own terrible existence, but it also begins to occupy their minds in an all-consuming manner. It preys mainly on Jack and Danny and makes Wendy a victim in the way our loved ones suffer when we’re in the claws of addiction. All of them suffer, and all of them experience the unique pain of isolation even in each other’s company because of the hotel’s hold on their thoughts and feelings. Jack and Danny function as foils to each other, sharing the same family dynamic in that they are both the sons of alcoholic fathers. They share a close bond in the book that is absent from the movie. In the book, we see how similar they are and that they really love each other despite the forces that pull them apart. The hotel has an effect on both of them, but we see it manifest in different ways. Both of them see ghosts, but Jack lacks Danny’s shining, so the ghosts have a different kind of relationship with the father and his son. 

It would make sense to explore the concept of shining here before moving any further in this analysis. This shining, as Dick calls it, is the quality that makes Danny special and a little different from other people. Before he meets Dick, Danny believes that his ability is something he alone possesses. He calls it “Tony”, a significant name since it’s not only his grandfather’s name but his own middle name. In naming the sense that allows him to access the feelings and thoughts of other people and to see visions of things that have either happened or will happen, Danny turns his gift into something that keeps him company. When Dick recognizes his shine, the chef communicates a bit with him using it before speaking with him privately. Dick explains that he and his grandmother used to have whole conversations without ever opening their mouths. This practice is the shining at its best: connection between people. Danny’s shining not only allows him to connect with others who have the shining - Dick in this case; it also gives him insight into the unspoken lives of the people and places around him. He perceives the hidden thoughts and feelings of others, which lets him develop deeper connections with them if he uses these insights in a productive way. He can bypass the fear that often keeps people from sharing what they want to say, and he can also connect with people across great distances, which he does with Dick at a time when he and his family are in great danger. 

The darker side of the shining is that it grants Danny access to the painful past of people and places, which often causes him to withhold his gift and disconnect from those close to him. He can see the ghosts who linger in the Overlook as prisoners trapped forever in the place where they died, and the images he encounters are terrifying. But even though Danny experiences these horrors, he balks at telling his parents his fears because at first he sees his mother and father loving each other in a way that is so different from when his father was actively drinking. Though his parents never even spoke the word “divorce” aloud to each other, Danny sensed the unspoken threat of it for some time when Jack’s drinking was particularly bad, especially after he broke Danny’s arm. So when he sees his parents’ relationship mending in this new environment, he hesitates to say anything that would risk losing that regained love between them. Danny’s struggle reflects the struggle that many go through when dealing with a loved one in active addiction. Those who have a secure sense of connection may hold onto the hope that this love and connection will be enough to help someone find their way out of the maze of addiction. Sometimes it does work. But when the person in addiction doesn’t have a strong enough sense of connection, real connection, to meet that love from their side, it’s just not enough. You need connection on both sides in the same way you need puzzle pieces or magnets to each pull their own weight in achieving a fitting result. Jack’s shine, if he ever had one at all - and I think he does - has been dulled by his addiction. I think his ability to connect to the hotel’s forces is evidence of his glimmer of shining, but the hotel’s form of shining is very different from the pure one we see in Danny. 

The shining contains everything that comes with connection, the bond we cultivate with ourselves, others and God as well as the raw feelings that come flooding into our minds and bodies when we’ve eliminated the numbing solution of alcohol. Danny’s ability to see the hotel’s horrors reflects our new ability to fully experience feelings in sobriety. Not all the feelings are pretty, but they’re evidence of connection with self and with others because they are our bodies’ ways of communicating with our minds. Whereas alcohol gives us a means of temporarily silencing these uncomfortable feelings - with the added side effect of numbing the good as well - the connection we find in recovery can give us the direction we need to navigate these feelings rather than trying to escape them. Danny’s shining gives him access to connection, but it also lets him see the true horror of his father’s reality and the fate that awaits anyone who mistakes the hotel for home. Danny’s survival depends on his ability to use the connection aspect of his shining to separate himself from the hotel’s clutches, not by denying the experiences his shining gives him but by understanding them and finding strength and insight from them. Our recovery is no different.

The Overlook seems to have the shining in much the same way we feel that alcohol can enhance our ability to connect with others. It’s not the good form of connection that Danny and Dick possess; rather, it’s an illusion of connection. The hotel’s capacity to produce visuals and resurrect past horrors offers something to Jack, but it’s like the false connection we experience while drinking or using. We might feel a sense of camaraderie with others or feel that we’ve shed the feelings that hold us back when we’re sober, but this sort of freedom from feeling and bonding are delusional experiences of connection grounded in something more attuned to disconnection. We’re not our true selves when we drink, so we can’t truly connect, love or understand when we’re under the influence. We drown in feelings we don’t even understand. When the hotel preys on Jack, he doesn’t want to admit his fears at first. He doesn’t want to believe that the place he’s been tasked with caring for is a hostile environment to his family. 

The movie and the book present Jack’s acceptance of his position as caretaker of the Overlook in very different ways. In the book, Jack gets the job as a favor from a friend who has also made the decision to get sober. It’s an opportunity that he tries to make the best of; he has his family’s interests in mind, and he sees it as an opportunity to reset and work on the writing he feels is his true profession. At fourteen months sober and still lacking a solution to take the place of what drinking was for him, Jack is placed in the caretaker role of the physical embodiment of addiction. He takes it because he has to, not because he wants to. That’s how a lot of us initially begin to treat our addiction: a responsibility we’ve been forced into as a consequence of our failure to manage our lives. Sobriety alone is not a solution.  Alcohol was a solution to something, a faulty one at that, and sobriety is the elimination of that deceitful solution to make room for a greater one. But we have to admit powerlessness and believe in a higher power in order to find and engage that new solution. Managing our addiction successfully should entail finding a new solution for the issues that led us to turn to alcohol despite the intensifying consequences. Unfortunately, Jack remains solutionless as he undertakes management of his addiction and the Overlook. Without a solution and without the connection of the shining, he struggles with the forces of the Overlook even in sobriety. We see him fall into old habits characteristic of his time in active addiction such as wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, withholding information from his family and calling up Mr. Ullman with no good reason other than to bad mouth the Overlook and vindicate his own sense of shame. This last action he recognizes as something he would have done while drinking and can see no rational sense in having done. He regrets it right away and is even baffled at himself for having acted on that impulse. The other actions seem to arise from a sense of fear and his need to handle things on his own without admitting a need for help. 

When we lapse in practicing our solution - that is, when we fail to trust in our higher power and do the work of recovery when difficulties arise - we can find ourselves slipping back into old habits even without turning to a drink. We face problems without a solution, so we behave and feel as we did in addiction: miserable and alone, convinced that we need to just get through these issues on our own. The solution that the program of recovery offers is so extensive, but it’s also so simple. It involves trust in God and in others, cleaning up our part in things, helping others and connecting with the others in our lives and with our higher power. Though none of these practices promises to eliminate all uncomfortable feelings or dispel fear, each of these or all of these can bear us through any hardship we face and help us to grow because of it, not in spite of it. 

I’ve had my share of inconvenient feelings in recovery, and I don’t do so well in the immediate aftermath of their onslaught. I don’t drink, but I try to escape the feelings in other ways. At a comedy night of all places, I found myself in an intense conversation with Coach (the guy who started the recovery-based running club I’m in) about meditation. He told me a way to get started is to repeatedly ask myself what I’m feeling in my body and let myself feel it without trying to leave, to do this in the moment rather than pushing the feelings away for later or never attention. This is part of the solution, the real one. Trying to run away is what I did in active addiction via alcohol, so I’m new to the practice of sitting with self when I don’t want to. I’m also beginning to see that trying to avoid feeling is something I do when I don’t actively engage my true solution. Not drinking is great, but it’s not enough. It’s not a solution. The solution is there, but it doesn’t work if I don’t get honest with myself and do my best to participate in the plan I trust that God has for my life.

Jack’s spiral into madness as he slips into the clutches of the Overlook demonstrates the tragedy of a solutionless modus vivendi. It’s significant that he arrives there with his family - not alone - but ultimately turns to the forces of the hotel as his source of connection rather than to Wendy and Danny. We see this shift in alliance from family to hotel happen “gradually and then suddenly,” as Hemingway once famously penned it. He arrives with a great feeling of love for his family and guilt over the events of his past. But there is one point, about three weeks into his time at the hotel, when he’s alone at work on the shingles about three weeks into his time at the hotel, and his mind demonstrates the strong hold addiction still has on him. Though he’s been careful to look out for wasp nests up to this point, the beauty of his environment and the peace he has begun to feel in this new space have caused his watchfulness to lapse, and he doesn’t realize the proximity of the nest until he feels the sharp, surprising sting of a wasp on his hand. The pain snaps his mind from peace to pain, and he thinks of the sequence of unfortunate past events that he views as the worst moments of his life in drinking. As he reflects on the damage done by these small insects, the immense pain that results from a lapse in judgment or failure to see clearly, his conviction of his own blamelessness solidifies, and he sees his litany of wrongs as circumstances involving “Jack Torrance in the passive mode. He had not done things, things had been done to him.” Jack sees himself as a victim; he fails to see his part because he sees the suffering, the pain in his past life and fixates on that. He cannot believe that he caused his own pain, and his inability to recognize his role in things suggests that he can’t let go of the resentments that drive his misery. We see that he wants to choose love over this stewing resentment, but the creeping hold of his pride finds more comfort in the solution he knew in addiction. He gradually, then suddenly finds himself completely detached from the two persons he loves most in the world. 

We see that progression in the book, but the film version shows us a man fully in the hands of the Overlook from the beginning. In the film, Jack welcomes the Overlook as exactly the situation he wants, regardless of his family’s desires - it’s a place that offers the distance and isolation he seems to crave and that he says feels like home from the minute he walks in. Though we see Jack’s love for Wendy and Danny in the book, the film presents him as detached and apathetic. The film gives us a reunion of two like minds coming together at last: Jack and the Overlook, both isolated, cold and cruel, together at last. He’s mad from the start and collapses into complete insanity by the end when he’s chasing his son through the hedge maze with an ax. He dies in the maze, symbolically lost in the chaos of his mind, and the film closes on a photograph that pictures Jack at the center of the very first Overlook July 4th ball, suggesting that he was there just as long as the Overlook and its ghosts have been there. Jack easily accepts that the Overlook wants him, is on his side and even cares about him, because he and the hotel share a history of trauma, tragedy and scandal. The hotel, like addiction, takes Jack as he is and lets him feel that he belongs, even if he can’t see the harm in that kind of belonging. 

Though Wendy and Danny survive the Overlook, they don’t escape unscathed. When one of the hotel’s ghosts - the woman in room 217 - harms Danny, Wendy concludes that Jack must have done it. Danny has wandered up to the room despite Dick’s warnings to avoid that particular place; he takes some assurance in Dick’s statement that the ghosts are like pictures in a book. They can’t harm him. If we take the hotel’s ghosts to be extensions of the addiction that the Overlook embodies, we can see how this functions on a deeper level. Our addiction directly harms us and doesn’t have to harm the people in our lives, but it can. When the people in our lives see us become strangers in addiction, they experience loss, fear and all kinds of horrible feelings. Before his encounter with the woman in 217, this is how Danny experiences the horrors of the hotel and their impact on his father. But the woman becomes more than just a picture; she tries to strangle Danny, and in this way demonstrates the real, physical pain that our addiction can inflict on more than just ourselves. Jack has inflicted that pain on his family before with his own hands. He’s haunted by the memory of the time he used too much force in dealing with his young son and broke Danny’s arm by pulling him up too hard after his son had messed with his writing pages. Jack’s love for his son and his wife, who seriously contemplates leaving him after this incident, incentivizes the serious effort he makes to get and stay sober in the aftermath of that accident. Sometimes the pain we cause is like this form of injury: physical and undeniable in its presence. Other times, the pain takes an emotional form, inflicted through words or actions or the lack thereof. Either way, the guilt and constant reminder of what we’ve done can weigh on us even more heavily than any personal pains we suffer from our addiction, and if we don’t do the work to forgive ourselves and make amends for past wrongs, we risk falling back into the same cycle. 

When Wendy sees the brutal bruising on her son’s neck, her assumption of Jack’s part is the only story that makes sense to her. Given the circumstances, she can’t accept any other truth, but it’s still an assumption that hurts her husband, who has been struggling through sobriety with all the shame that lingers and intensifies without a solution. The indignity of being falsely accused even after fighting through the misery of a solutionless sobriety, now combined with that shame and guilt he feels for having hurt his son and betrayed his wife’s trust in the past, proves to be too much for Jack, whose desire for a drink has increased severely over the course of his time at the Overlook. It drives him to the bar, which he knows will be empty; but the act of letting himself visit the bar with the need to have his craving fulfilled marks his surrender to his former solution. He has given up the willingness to have a life without alcohol. 

In early sobriety we may encounter similar experiences when we haven’t yet regained the trust of the people whose support and belief we need the most. They may suspect us of drinking or question the legitimacy of what we’re doing or not doing. Since we’re still plagued by shame and the need for validation, that lack of trust can harm us if we let it take up residency in our minds. The logic in his mind tells him that Wendy’s persistent belief in his capacity to hurt his son because of his drinking - no matter the reality - justifies him giving into his urge to drink. If she doesn’t accept the truth, then why should he uphold the truth? That’s the dilemma many of us can face in recovery if we’ve broken the trust of people in our lives and especially if we hold the acceptance and approval of others as a main motivator in our sobriety. If we’ve acted a certain way for years, even decades, we can’t expect the people in our lives to suddenly regain trust in us after a few days or months of sobriety. In some cases, it can even take years. The beginning of recovery can be especially hard partly because we still haven’t regained a lot of the trust that our addiction lost us. It can seem easier and even saner to just return to drinking if no one in our lives believes that we’re not actually drinking, especially when our lack of a new solution keeps us imprisoned in the same mindset and practices that characterized our drinking selves. Jack doesn’t have a new solution, so Wendy’s suspicion that he’s not only been drinking but has hurt his son again pushes him over the edge of what he can handle. He feels the shame of his past multiplied with the indignation of his unrewarded efforts, and the combination of evil feelings sends him reeling to the closest place he can come to drinking: an empty bar. 

Jack is powerless against the feelings this incident ignites, so he turns to alcohol, at least in his mind. The bar scene reflects the reality of spiritual and emotional relapse, which can be just as and even more dangerous than a physical relapse. No alcohol remains in the hotel. That fact has been made clear in the book, and is at least suggested in the movie. And knowing that on some level, Jack still makes his way to the empty bar. Here, he has a supernatural encounter with the hotel bartender, who serves him drinks on the house and treats him as an esteemed regular. The bartender welcomes Jack in a way he’s not feeling welcomed by his own family. It’s a delusion, but it’s close enough to the sense of belonging he needs. On one level, we can understand that the alcohol Jack consumes isn’t real. It’s part of the hotel’s ghostly conjuring. But on another level, the alcohol is as real to Jack as it needs to be. Because it’s real to him, it’s real. He has given into his alcoholism by welcoming and partaking in the drinks offered by the hotel, and in this way he chooses alcohol as his solution. It’s a form of slipping that doesn’t start with the actual consumption of alcohol but is just as dangerous as the physical relapse since his mind and spirit have embraced their old solution.

When Jack visits the bar, he crosses the Rubicon back into addiction and surrenders his true self to the whims of the hotel. It’s the end of his alliance with his family and the beginning of his deliberate efforts to harm them. He even hears the voice of his father instructing him to kill them. When Wendy finds Jack at the bar, he brutally attacks her, but she succeeds in knocking him unconscious. She and Danny drag him to the pantry and lock him inside, knowing he’ll at least have a warm place with sufficient food when he comes back to consciousness. Wendy recognizes that this man who seems bent on killing her or at least hurting her severely isn’t the man she loves. She knows that the real Jack would never intentionally hurt her or Danny, but it doesn’t make the harm done or the threat of more damage any less real, so she locks him up to protect herself and her son. After doing so, she tells her son that Jack didn’t mean to hurt her. She explains that it was the hotel that has gotten a hold of him. When we’re in active addiction, our loved ones often can recognize that our actions aren’t characteristic of our true selves, but even that understanding can’t erase the pain we cause. 

The Shining is as much about how we can lose ourselves while sober as it is about losing ourselves in addiction. Even without picking up a drink, we can slip into the dangerous mindset that keeps our addiction alive and real. We can’t rely on sober time alone to give us recovery; recovery is earned, and it’s earned through honest, painstaking work. We have to examine the ugly characteristics we hid under the umbrella defect of addiction and understand that the misery of addiction isn’t the alcohol; the alcohol is the poisonous solution that exacerbates our greatest flaws. Management of our addiction entails dealing with those flaws with a new solution. Jack’s main responsibility as caretaker involves regularly checking the boiler pressure to ensure that it doesn’t blow over. The task reflects a personal responsibility as well: the need to look at his own addiction and work on the character defects he continues to present, particularly the ones that manifest as anger and violence. Like the boiler, if Jack doesn’t regularly address the feelings that distort into rage, he risks the destructive consequences of that anger being directed at and harming his family. Though Jack maintains this duty consistently at first, when he begins to slip into the influence of the hotel’s forces, he doesn’t check the boiler as regularly as he originally intended, even finding the pressure to have crept dangerously above the recommended level at one point. When Jack fully submerges into insanity, he forgets the boiler completely, and the ensuing explosion destroys him and the hotel as Danny, Wendy and Dick barely escape with their lives. Even after the explosion, they still have to survive the hedge animals, a predatory, lurking evil. These are the unexpected horrors that threaten to snag us and claw us into the vicious cycle from which we’ve tried to escape. The hedge animals hold their posts outside the Overlook, just as these other forces function as extensions of our addiction even if separate from the substance itself. These forces are anything that threatens to catch our addictive tendencies: pride, codependency, shame, vanity, anger, etc. They may look harmless since we can dabble in them without picking up a drink, but they threaten to drag us back to the same place, back to the Overlook that wants to be our forever home. In this way, the hotel and its hedge minions continue to prey on people who have that connection lacking in them. Jack desperately lacks and needs the connection that he hasn’t been able to find elsewhere, and so he is a prime target for the hotel’s devising. 

Danny, on the other hand, does have a solution in the shining, but his fear keeps him from using it to its full capacity. He maintains hope that his father’s love for him and his mother is enough to save them all from the hotel, but he finally faces the hard truth that his father might be beyond saving. At this point he calls Dick, who hears the boy’s shining all the way from Florida. Dick arrives, and his role in the film is just disappointing. Kubrick really dropped the ball on that. The narrative that King gives this man is nothing short of the heroism displayed by Liam Neeson in the Taken movies. It seems that every force of nature has gone against Dick on his journey from Florida to the Overlook, but he makes it through sheer force of will and the fortuitous help of strangers who share a bit of his shine. At one point, after the boiler has exploded, Dick feels the hotel infiltrating his mind as he holds a roque mallet - the same weapon Jack wielded against his family - but is able to reject the thought and turn his focus to rescuing the remaining Torrances rather than harming them.His success is a testament to the power of connection, and though he can’t stop Jack on his murderous rampage, he does offer the support Wendy and Danny need in their final battle against the evil forces of the hotel.  

In the film, Dick is a mere distraction. So he helps in that way. Wendy would likely be toast without the chef’s arrival. Jack has her cornered in the bathroom and is breaking down doors with his infamous “Here’s Johnny!” gusto when the sound of Dick’s arrival causes him to shift gears and leave her unaxed. After taking care of Dick’s intrusion, he proceeds to the maze, to which Danny has fled. Kubruck improvised the maze because King’s supernatural hedge animals proved too daunting a feature for him to capture convincingly in film with the resources at hand in 1980. Though hedge animals would have been awesome, the maze serves a purpose too. The visual of father and son running through the snow filled passages represents the danger that both of them face. The maze presents the chaos of addiction as well as the reality of transgenerational trauma that plays a role in it. While Jack wanders to his demise, having given himself up completely to his own addiction, Danny races to avoid the same fate as his father. The boy finds a way out, and his great feat here isn’t so much that he can solve the maze but that he can separate himself from his father. Though the struggle isn’t highlighted well, Danny makes the choice to leave his father to his own fate, and in doing so is able to free himself from death in the chaos of addiction. He breaks the cycle that could have held him hostage as well by leaving his father. Jack, who has lost his way long before entering the labyrinth of the hedges, has no hope of making it out without someone to guide him. Because he has cut his connection with his family and has fully surrendered his will to his addiction, he never leaves the maze. He freezes to death in the snow, a victim to the addiction he never truly escaped. The final shot that Kubrick’s film closes on is a zoom in of a photograph in the Overlook. As the lens narrows in on the central figure in the group shot, we see Jack’s wide grin as he poses with the other ghosts of the hotel in a picture from the 1921 Fourth of July party. The picture suggests that he was always there, and he was, because his story is the same as that of any unfortunate soul caught in the all-consuming addiction that the hotel embodies. 

The movie alone isn’t enough to understand the shining. It gives us a view of addiction in all its power from a detached perspective that strips the Torrance family of their humanity and places them as doomed victims of their new residence. Jack, mad from the start, becomes more monster than man, and his wife and son barely get away. Though they escape, they drive off into darkness and cold, bearing with them the numbing shock of the nightmare that will never truly leave them. If we read the book, we can see that the shining isn’t the horror. The shining is the antidote to the horror, the means of accessing the connection that is the only sure way out of the monsters alive in the hotel. Though the book ends tragically, it also ends with hope, because we have seen Wendy’s capacity to distinguish between Jack and his addiction and Danny’s ability to use his shining to seek help and risk losing his father. They have made choices to separate themselves from addiction and from Jack rather than surviving by chance. The shining is the force that brings help in the form of Dick Hallorann and keeps him from turning on them in the final moments before they leave the evil behind them. The book also gives us a story beyond the hotel, a final scene in which we can imagine how all their lives will carry on. We can see the solution present in their lives, and though we see the lingering damage of their experience, we can also see that it no longer haunts them but informs them of how to move forward.