The Shining

Identification in Horror

Carol J. Clover’s book Men, Women, and Chainsaws is most concerned with the critical analysis of sex in the horror film. While young male viewers represent the majority of horror film audiences, their identification practices in horror allow them to identify with both the perpetrator (often male) and the victim (often female). As Clover explains, “...the force of the experience, in horror, comes from “knowing” both sides of the story” (12). Clover introduces the female victim-hero, who the male audience will at first root for their victimization, but ultimately they identify with her and revel in her success as the hero (4). As Clover explains, the horror film is primarily oriented around identification with the victim, contrary to previous literature. This “raises questions about film theory’s conventional assumption that the cinematic apparatus is organized around the experience of a mastering voyeuristic gaze” (9). As Clover continues, the horror film “engage[s with] repressed fears and desires and [reenacts] the residual conflict surrounding those feelings” (11). Horror allows for unique viewing practices that allow the spectator to disavow their own identity temporarily to engage with their repressed fears and desires through an oscillating lens of perpetrator and victim, male and female. In The Shining, audiences oscillate from Jack’s hallucinations and delusions to Wendy’s perspective as she is victimized by Jack to Danny’s perspective as he also is victimized by Jack, the spirits trapped within the hotel, and as he speaks with his imaginary friend Tony. The audience is permitted into the world of all of the prominent figures within the film, seeing from their perspective, and thus the identification with the characters is informed by the different perspectives permitted by the apparatus.

One and Two Sex Theories

Clover discusses the one and two sex theories, which inform both the sex of the characters and the world that they inhabit. The two sex model states that men and women are essentially opposites. The one sex model, however suggests that men and women are one and the same--a vagina is merely an inversion of a penis (13). It is from the one sex model that the concepts of “penis envy, phallic women, and anal menstruation/intercourse/birth” are all derived from one sex thinking (14). As Clover describes of a boy being beaten, his “identifications are so fluid that the question of whether it is in male or female form that he imagines himself being “loved” by his father is, for all practical purposes, moot” (15). In essence, the boy is able to oscillate between a conception of both a male and female form of himself to understand which side his father prefers. This oscillation is important to understand in the case of Danny Torrence who, as Wendy explains to the psychologist who visits their home, was injured by Jack in a drunken “accident,” after which Tony, Danny’s imaginary friend emerged. As Clover iterates, “women begin to look a lot like men (slasher films), men are pressured to become like women (possession films), and some people are impossible to tell apart” (15). Tony can be read as a possessive spirit, inhabiting Danny’s body, as he takes over Danny, writing REDRUM on the wall of the hotel, and in another scene says to Wendy “Danny isn’t here Mrs. Torrence.” Thus, by being possessed, Danny is oscillating into a female state, what Freud described as “slidingness,” by representing the one-sex model in a two-sex world. The one-sex model derived from the world of horror, and the two-sex world being the status quo.

The Terrible Place

The Shining gives an excellent exemplification of the terrible place in the Overlook Hotel--a remote estate built on cursed land, far away from any civilization, snowed in, with only a two-way radio for communication. As Clover explains, “the terrible place [is] most often a house or tunnel, in which victims sooner or later find themselves is a venerable element of horror” (30). The terrible place can more specifically be relocated to the bathroom in which Wendy locks herself to hide from Jack. In the terrible place, the victim experiences “dawning understanding, as they survey the visible evidence, of the human crimes and perversions that have transpired here” (31). This revelation moment occurs as Wendy sees that Jack has been writing the same sentence over and over again “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” As Clover explains, what once seemed to be a safe place with walls to keep evil out quickly becomes the same walls that hold the victim inside (31). Clover continues by describing the iconic moment in post-1974 slashers that is exemplified in one of the most memorable scenes from The Shining--the moment when the victim locks themselves inside of a small space to hide, and the killer hacks into the room. Importantly, this action is “inevitably seen from the victim’s point of view; we stare at the door (wall, car, roof) and watch the surface open to first the tip and then the shaft of the weapon” (31). In The Shining, it is impossible to forget Jack’s axe breaking the bathroom door as Wendy screams next to the blade. From her perspective, we see Jack peak his head through the axe hole in the door and exclaim “HERE’S JOHNNY!” Jack’s weapon choice is also quintessential to the slasher genre, as a gun would never do the trick. Slasher perpetrators like to be up close and personal, taking the victim’s life with their own hands.

The Final Girl(s)

While we’ve already discussed the final girl in our analysis of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I would assert that both Wendy and Danny Torrance are the final girl in The Shining. Danny is permitted to be the final girl on account of his exemplification of the one-sex theory, as described above, and the fact that “sex, in this universe proceeds from gender, not the other way around,” thus the nature of Danny’s possession (along with the dissociative psychological effects he presumably experienced during his previous abuse) allows him to be, for our purposes, a girl (13). Danny is just as much of his father’s victim as Wendy. We see both Wendy’s point of view as Jack slashes through the door, and Danny’s point of view as he runs through the hedge maze. Clover proposes the formula “point of view = identification,” meaning that in both of these instances the viewer is identifying with the female/feminized victim (45). Most importantly, we have the “active, investigating gaze” of the final girl, which complicates theories of spectatorship, with the male gaze being the only active gaze (48). Both Danny and Wendy not only look at Jack, but investigate a way to escape the atrocities that Jack is about to commit. I would thus assert that Wendy and Danny are our “female victim-hero” (4). Perhaps Danny even more so than Wendy, because Danny’s gaze is the most informed. Danny sees the twins in the hallway, Danny sees the old woman in room 237, and Danny even foresees the future. Danny is the most seeing character in the entire film and his gaze, like that of the final girl, is the most active.