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Just sneaky Kubrick hiding clues in Jack's manuscript. From Rob Ager's full Shining analysis at https://www.collativelearning.com/

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#filmanalysis #filmmaking #moviescenes

When I wrote my original analysis of The Shining back in 2008, the one that basically spawned the industry of Shining film studies that have come since, I took the time to fully read every page of Jack’s manuscript that we see on screen. I had a suspicion that Kubrick might have snuck a few significant details in there. As Wendy pours over these pages the spelling and grammar of the writer starts to fall apart. on the second to last page I found that the repeating sentence All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, at four points on the same page, becomes All work and no play makes Jack adult boy. This is too specific to be an accident, especially being that T occurs as the second part of a double consonant L, but the T is several keys away from the L. This sentence is a direct clue that we are seeing multiple generations of Mr Torrance throughout the film. Whenever we see him working, as in typing, this is the current generation of Jack writing about his forefathers. And his chastising of Wendy here is in his own head btw. It’s part of his writing process. she approaches and he tears the paper out the typewriter, but when she leaves the paper is still there because he never tore it out in the first place. He is imagining the very scene he is writing about.

These past generation of Mr Torrance, the ones he’s writing about, they are the murderous ones who like to PLAY as in kill. Show come and play with us. That’s why we see one version of Mr Torrance in a 1920’s photo and another in a past generation party. Other multi-generational clues include Mr Grady having different first names, in one scene he is called Charles grady and in another is called Delbert grady. The film is jumping back and forth on a generational timeline. And it seems that the typing version of Mr Torrance is actually young Danny Torrance all grown up and writing about how he rebelled against his forefathers and their generational cycle of bad husband bad father madness. Hence, all work and no play makes jack adult boy. The boy being Danny. As Jack says, “maybe it was about Danny, maybe it was about him”. And you know how Danny’s gruff voice is used to depict his imaginary friend Tony. Well at some points he doesn’t do the finger wagging, and instead just uses the voice in imitation of his own father’s voice. Such as chanting the word murder backwards as redrum in the build up as Jack himself is on his way to attack his wife and son with an axe. Jack is fetching an axe and making sure it’s sharp, while Danny picks up a knife and makes sure it’s sharp. Jack is getting closer and closer to the apartment and working up his killer instinct, while Danny’s chanting of “redrum” gets faster and louder. Danny even manages to anticipate what is about to happen by writing “redrum” on the bathroom door because this is where the murder will take place.

There’s lots of father son role-swapping stuff going on in this film and this applies to past generations too. This isn’t modern day Jack, this is a time jump back to an earlier generation Jack. As Halloran says, “sometimes we see things that haven’t happened yet, sometimes we see things that happened a long time ago”. And that’s exactly what’s going on with the generational time jumps in the how the movie is structured.

There are some other things going on with this manuscript btw, but I’ll let you explore that for yourself by showing all 16 pages of text that we see in the film, I’ll show that at the end of the video. Have a look and see what you can find. And no I’m not talking about the word ALL supposedly referring to Apollo 11 as cited in the moon landing theory of the film, which isn’t my theory. Those letters look like that because Jack is using the Courier font universally used in film scripts. In fact some of the pages of Jack’s manuscript are specifically formatted as one would format a film script. Kubrick goes meta once again.