Respond to these rapid questions in our The Shining quiz and we will tell you which The Shining character you are. Play it now.
The chilling and terrifying “The Shining” by Stanley Kubrick forces us to make a choice: Who is the trustworthy observer? Whose version of events can we believe? The characters in the initial scene of a job interview seem trustworthy enough, despite the dialogue’s formality, which is reminiscent of the banter on the space station in “2001.” Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a guy who intends to spend the winter alone and isolated with his wife and son, is introduced to us. He’ll be in charge of looking after the snow-covered Overlook Hotel. Jack assures his employer, Mr. Ullman, that he won’t commit the same crime as a previous caregiver who killed his wife and two daughters before killing himself. And when I inform my wife about it, I have no doubt that she will be utterly fascinated. She is an admitted junkie of scary movies and paranormal stories.
Do individuals actually discuss tragedies in this manner? Will his partner be utterly mesmerized? Does he ever discuss it with her? The large hotel is being prepared for the winter when Jack, his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their son Danny (Danny Lloyd) move in. The cook, Dick Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), gives them a tour, emphasizing the food storage locker. (“You folks can eat up here a whole year and never have the same menu twice”). Once they are by themselves, a ritual starts: While Wendy and Danny create a depiction of daily life that includes breakfast cereal, toys, and a lot of TV, Jack rests at a typewriter in the great hall and types nonstop. There is no indication that the three work as a close-knit household.
Danny: Is he trustworthy? He has a fictional friend called Tony who has a lower voice range than Danny. . a. a. a…………………………………….. Dick is informed by Danny that Tony does not want him to talk about such matters. Who is Tony? A young child who resides in my lips.
Tony appears to be Danny’s conduit for psychic information, including a horrifying vision of blood dripping from the hotel elevators’ closed doors. Danny also witnesses two young girls, both of whom appear oddly old despite the fact that we know the murdered children’s ages varied by two years. If Danny is a trustworthy witness, he is seeing visions of his own that might not match what is truly occurring in the hotel.
The only remaining character is Wendy, who for the majority of the film exudes the same frank dullness that Shelley Duvall also portrayed in Altman’s “3 Women.” She is Danny’s friend and playmate, and she attempts to cheer Jack up until he abruptly and crudely tells her to stop interfering with his work. She learns the truth about that job much later, in one of the film’s shocking revelations. She proves her dependability then, and again toward the end when she locks Jack in the food storage after he becomes aggressive.
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But a deleted sequence from “The Shining” (1980) paints a curious picture of Wendy’s dependability. Near the conclusion of the movie, on a chilly night, Jack pursues Danny through the hotel’s outdoor labyrinth. When his son manages to flee, Jack, who had already been struck by a baseball bat, stumbles, drops to the ground, and the next day is discovered deceased with a hideous grin on his face. He is gazing up at us from beneath lowered brows, a perspective Kubrick frequently employs in his films. The deletion, as recounted by critic Tim Dirks, is as follows: “Shortly after the movie’s debut, a two-minute explanatory epilogue was deleted. The setting was a hospital, and Wendy was speaking with the hotel manager when she learned that the body of her spouse had not been found.
Since Dick Hallorann informed the forest guards that there was major trouble at the hotel, it was only natural that if Jack did indeed freeze to death in the labyrinth, his body would be discovered as soon as possible. What occurred if Jack’s corpse was not discovered? Is it new or old? Was it subsumed into the past, and if so, how does that explain Jack’s appearance in the concluding image of the 1921 hotel partygoers? Was Jack’s violent pursuit of his wife and child wholly a figment of Wendy’s, Danny’s, or their imaginations?
Dick Hallorann is the only observer who consistently seems reliable, but his value wanes shortly after his return to the hotel in the middle of the winter. We are left with the following closed-room mystery: Three individuals experience various stages of madness or psychic terror in a hotel surrounded by snow, and none of them can be trusted to provide an unbiased account of what transpires. The mysterious open-endedness of Kubrick’s film is what makes it so oddly unsettling.
The Shining Quiz
Yes, it is feasible to comprehend some hallucination scenes. There is always a reflection nearby when Jack believes he is seeing other people; he might be conversing with himself. Danny might be reliving the tragedy when he sees the young females and the rivers of blood. Even though Wendy’s perception of what occurs may be distorted by psychic input from her son, who was severely scarred by his father’s brutality a few years earlier, she may be right when she believes her spouse has gone insane. However, what if there isn’t a corpse at the end?
Also, you will find out which character are you in this The Shining quiz.
It was smart of Kubrick to cut that postscript. Too many rugs were pulled out from under the narrative as a result. At some point, we have to accept that the three Torrance family members were, in fact, staying at the hotel that winter, regardless of what they perceive or what they experience.
Readers of Stephen King’s original book claim that Kubrick discarded many story points and modified the remaining ones to suit his purposes. The two girls, the former caretaker, and a bartender are ghosts in the tale Kubrick is telling, but it isn’t a “ghost story” because the ghosts might not actually be there besides appearing to Jack or Danny in dreams.
The film is not about spirits, but rather about madness and the energies that it unleashes in a remote setting that is designed to amplify them. Even though Jack, an alcoholic and child abuser, has allegedly abstained from alcohol for five months, he is far from a “recovering alcoholic.” He becomes as inebriated as if he were actually drinking when he imagines drinking with the fictional bartender, and the alcohol brings out all of his alcoholic problems, including an erotic vision that develops into a nightmare. We believe Hallorann when he claims that Danny has psychic abilities, but it’s obvious that Danny is not their master as he conflates his fears of another Jack attack with his father’s madness and the tale of the murdered girls. Wendy might also experience some of this psychic output because she is afraid of her angry husband. Reality is lost for everyone at once. Yes, there are incidents that support our belief, including Jack’s manuscript, his lock-up in the food storage room, his escape, and the infamous “Here’s Johnny!” as he hacks open the door. However, there is no way to know with any certainty what occurs, how it happens, or even why it really happens within the confines of the movie.
About the quiz
In a movie where the performers themselves are trembling with unease, Kubrick conveys this uncertainty. Kubrick is renowned for using the same shot of Scatman Crothers 160 times. Was that “perfectionism,” or was it a mind trick to make the performers believe they were stranded in the hotel with their director, another madman? Did Kubrick anticipate that their shock would seep into their performances?
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“Working with Kubrick, how was it?” Duvall was questioned ten years after the event by me.
It was almost intolerable, she said. “Jack Nicholson’s character had to constantly be crazy and angry due to the torturous labor he underwent day in and day out. And for the past nine months straight, five or six days a week, my character had to weep nonstop for the entire day, twelve hours a day. I stayed there for a year and a half. After all that work, hardly anyone even criticized my performance in it, even to acknowledge it, it seemed like. All of the Kubrick-related evaluations made it seem like I wasn’t there.
as if she were absent.
Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory,” “Dr. Strangelove,” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” are included in Ebert’s Great Movies collection on rogerebert.com.
For more personality quizzes check this: Raiders Of The Lost Ark Quiz.
