If you’ve seen The Shining, I hope this post gives you an interesting perspective about the movie, and perhaps, entice you to rewatch it again with the following ideas in mind.
If you haven’t seen the film yet, I recommend taking the time to watch it and reflect on it yourself. It takes some thought to really grasp its nuance, and if that’s something you enjoy, you might appreciate experiencing the movie first then coming back to read my interpretation.
Or you might find it helpful to read this post first. It’ll give you a better understanding of the key themes and hidden messages, which I believe would enhance your viewing experience (spoilers ahead!).
Key message
So what is the key message that Kubrick wanted to tell? I believe that Kubrick wanted the viewer to gain an appreciation of the duality of human nature. You are capable of good, but you are also capable of evil.
Kubrick made a very specific choice about the main character of the film, Jack Torrance. In Stephen King’s book, Jack Torrance is a tragic figure. A family man that is corrupted and controlled by the evil of the hotel.
Jack has darkness within him and is struggling with his own sanity, but it is clear that without the hotel’s influence he was not going to harm his family.
In Kubrick’s adaptation, this struggle doesn’t really exist. Jack is malevolent from the get-go. When asked if his wife and son will be okay living in isolation, he says they’ll be fine dismissively. When warned about the fever cabin and his predecessor that murdered his own family, Jack is unfazed.
And finally, in case you had any sympathy for the character, you learn early-on that Jack had once injured his son, Danny, in a fit of rage.
The hotel clearly influenced Jack in attacking his family but you get the feeling that even without the hotel’s presence, isolating Jack with his family for six-months is probably not a great idea.
Stephen King’s book hints at the evil in mankind, whereas Kubrick’s film lays it bare by establishing clarity from the very beginning that Jack is not a good man.
Jack & You
You are meant to identify with Jack. You spend scenes alone with him, you start with Jack, and you end with Jack. He gets most of the screen time, and his need drives the entire plot. His need for isolation so he can write, is what brought them to the hotel.
Seeing aspects of yourself in Jack, means Kubrick wants you to learn something about your nature. Part of it is to acknowledge that we have impulses which if you leave unchecked, fester into an evil force. But there’s more to it than that…
The film can be interpreted as an inverted fairy tale. This interpretation frames the film not as a traditional story of moral lessons, where the protagonist learns and grows, but rather as a cautionary tale, told from the perspective of a villain, Jack Torrance.
In classic fairy tales, the main character usually learns a lesson by overcoming challenges, often represented by hostile forces like wolves or witches. The example given in the fairy tale, "The Three Little Pigs", is a clear illustration of this, where the pigs learn the importance of hard work and preparation to avoid being eaten by the wolf.
In The Shining, however, the roles are inverted. Jack Torrance, the antagonist, becomes the central figure, akin to the "big bad wolf". The film even includes a direct reference to this when Jack mimics the wolf by saying, "Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in”.
The Shining teaches us lessons through the lens of a cautionary tale. Instead of offering a roadmap for positive behaviour, it reveals the dangers of succumbing to one's darker instincts, as Jack does.
The story becomes a warning of what can happen if you allow the darker, destructive parts of the psyche to take control.
This shift in perspective — from identifying with the hero, to witnessing the villain's descent—offers a unique view of the classic fairy tale structure (at the time this movie was released).
The hotel is the catalyst
The hotel did not possess Jack or drive him to act in conflict with this nature. Instead, the haunted hotel acted like a catalyst. Taking the evil that is already in Jack’s heart and amplifying it.
In an interview shortly after its release, Kubrick said that the conventions of realistic fiction and drama can impose serious limitations on a story. For example, if you play by the rules and respect the preparation and pace required to establish realism, it takes much longer to make a point than it does, say, in fantasy if you want to make a point about the evil within, what it takes to unlock it and what happens when it’s unleashed.
The realistic depiction of a man turning against his family takes a long time. You’d have to watch a lengthy subtle transformation. However, in a work of fantasy like The Shining, you get to see Jack hunting his family with an axe in the span of two hours.
The supernatural power of the hotel allowed Kubrick to accelerate the theme and amplify it emotionally, rather than wait for Jack’s psyche to collapse over a prolonged period of time.
In the hotel, at the mercy of its powerful evil, he is quickly ready to fulfil his dark role. This may seem like a cop-out since Kubrick is skipping the question of what drives us to evil by making Jack pretty much evil from the start, but that’s because Kubrick is saying that we already have evil inside of us. The question is, do we succumb to it?
In the film, we learn that Jack once dislocated his son’s shoulder. As Wendy tells it, Jack had been working late that day and Danny had messed up all his papers. He’d also been drinking which likely contributed to him yanking a little too hard when he pulled Danny up by his arm.
If you were to find your hard work ruined or disorganised after long hours, you’d naturally be angry. Again, the question is, how should you react?
The movie shows a relatively similar scene, where Wendy checks on Jack after leaving him alone to work all day. Jack yells at her for interrupting his process and demands that she does not enter the room again.
This is something we can all relate to. However, most of us can take a deep breath and disconnect from the work for a moment to respond with similar politeness. But Jack is the cautionary tale, who shows what happens when you give into the evil impulses inherent within us.
The movie also encapsulates this in a single phrase ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’.
The movie wants to explore the evil inside all of us, and focuses on something most viewers can relate to, the pressure of work. The feeling that the needs of your family are at odds with it — although Jack takes things a lot further than hopefully any of you reading this!
Lessons
It might seem like there aren’t any lessons to take away from this film since I’ve made the point that Jack was already evil from the start. But if you look closely, you can see that an important shift happens just before the halfway mark of the movie.
Prior to that shift, Jack is not physically violent towards his family, or at least not intentionally. When Danny sneaks into his room, Jack assures him that he loves him and would never hurt him.
Just a few scenes later, Wendy finds Jack deeply upset and unsettled after waking from nightmares where he had killed her and Danny. At this point in the movie, Jack still finds the idea of actually hurting his family physically disturbing. Then the shift happens…
1. Beware of your poison
The forbidden fruit. The thing which is tempting but taking it has severe consequences. Like the literal poison apple eaten by Snow White, which renders her comatose.
In The Shining, after Jack's nightmare, he heads to the Gold Room and wishes for his forbidden fruit — bourbon. While talking to the bartender, Lloyd, he still defends his actions with Danny, saying how it was an accident and how she'll never let him forget it.
Wendy tells the doctor that Jack hasn’t had a drink since he hurt Danny. However, Jack says to Lloyd, “five miserable months on the wagon”. Later we learn that the incident with Danny was “three goddamn years ago”, implying he was secretly drinking for years.
The shift happens after the drink. His bonding with Lloyd is interrupted by Wendy's arrival, telling Jack that a crazy woman tried to strangle Danny. He investigates room 237, where Danny was supposedly strangled, and finds a woman in the bathtub.
After hearing what happened to Danny and earlier seeing the wounds himself, Jack has all the evidence to know that this woman hurt his child, but his only thought is to give in to temptation and fall for lust. He betrays the loyalty of his wife and completely tosses aside any concern for Danny.
Then she shows her true form and laughs at Jack while he runs in shame and terror. In the next scene, Jack lies to Wendy, saying he didn't find anything in the room. He lies by telling her that Danny must have choked himself. It’s perhaps Jack’s way of covering for the hotel, keeping the malevolent force a secret as a thank you for the drink it so kindly offered him.
The next time we see Jack, he's heading back to the ballroom and has his run-in with the previous caretaker, who tells Jack how he “corrected” his wife and children, then suggests Jack do the same.
Clearly, he takes the caretaker’s advice to heart because after this scene, he becomes outwardly menacing to his family, saying things like
"I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just gone bash your brains in. I'm gonna bash 'em right the f*ck in!”.
So is the lesson to avoid alcohol? I don’t think so. Jack is actually fairly self-aware when it comes to the darkness within him. That’s why he reduced his alcohol consumption and drank in secret.
Jack knew there was a villain inside him and knew that drinking like he used to lets it out. That may not be true for everyone, so the lesson is to know what that thing is for you.
If there is evil inside all of us, it might seem easy to just choose not to embrace it. If harmful impulses arise from those dark corners of your mind, just don't give in to them. But The Shining tells us not only to be aware of the dark corners and impulses but to also be aware of the things that make us vulnerable to them.
In Jack's case, it's a combination of work pressure, sleep deprivation, and perhaps most of all, drinking. If you don't take care of yourself, the evil inside grows beyond your control, and the impulses become impossible to suppress.
(I also believe that Kubrick intentionally chose number 237 => 2 +3 +7 = 12 representing the twelve emotions under discrete emotion theory — interest, joy, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, self-hostility, fear, shame, shyness and guilt. This could be Kubrick’s way of telling you to be mindful of which emotion(s) might consume you, if you let it.)
2. The hypocrisy of appearances
Early in the film, the hotel manager tells Jack and Wendy that the hotel was built on an Indian burial ground while fighting off attacks from local tribes. The place was born of human-committed atrocities, and the repeated image of the elevator hall flooding with blood reminds us of it.
The hotel is not some external evil invading our world—it was built by humans and cursed by the blood they spilled. As the cook explains, sometimes when things happen, they can leave a trace behind, like the smell of burnt toast.
But toast doesn't burn itself, and a hotel doesn't become evil on its own. It's done by people.
The manager also tells the Torrances that presidents and movie stars have stayed at the hotel, and when Jack visits the Gold Room once more, it's full of well-dressed representatives of high society. Even the most successful of us, dressed in the ruse of royalty, are only burying their evil.
The former caretaker of the hotel casually uses the racial profanities in his conversation with Jack. Native American decorations are used throughout the hotel, a cruel echo to those they silenced.
The men talk of "correcting" their family members—a polite way of saying slaughtering them with an axe. Like the men and women of the Gold Room, the ultimate sin of homicide is dressed in a nice suit or dress and called “correcting”.
Understanding this metaphor also clarifies the ending of this movie. At the bar, Lloyd casually talks to Jack as though he knows him, and Jack tells Lloyd that he's always liked him.
In the bathroom, Grady tells Jack that he has always been the caretaker here, and finally, the idea that Jack has always been at the hotel is captured in a single image.
The film ends with a close-up of a photo showing Jack at a party there in 1921. In that photo, we become aware of an evil reincarnation cycle, which is actually the phrase Kubrick used when describing this in a phone interview: "Well, it was supposed to suggest a kind of evil reincarnation cycle".
If the hotel acts as the metaphorical nexus of humanity's evil and we identify with Jack as the protagonist of a fairy tale, this photo becomes a symbol for our eternal place in the cycle of violence.
It is a memorable image that reminds us that we all have a place at the Overlook Hotel. We all have something inside us which, if left unchecked, if fed with vice, and if allowed out, will destroy us and possibly those around us.
3. ‘All work and no play’ led to Jack’s downfall
The hotel also serves as a metaphor for society, not just human evil. Inside the hotel is a model maze, representing society’s concept of ‘the ideal life’, while the real maze outside symbolises the true journey of a meaningful life.
Jack never steps outside the hotel until the end of the movie — he only observes the model maze.
In contrast, Danny and Wendy venture outside, playing in the real maze and exploring life beyond society’s confines, something that Jack is unable to do. He is caught in society’s maze, like a rat. He becomes obsessed with work, neglecting the richness of life.
In the end, Jack freezes to death in the real maze, unable to find his way out despite having studied the model maze. He dies because he never took the time to bond with this son, to explore the maze outside, eventually freezing to death, making him a dull and lifeless man, ‘makes Jack a dull boy’.
This illustrates how society’s ‘ideal life’ is an illusion that fails to bring true fulfilment. Instead, it drains Jack of his humanity, leaving him bitter, angry, cold and dull. The key lesson? Learn to think for yourself.
Final takeaway
If I were to tell you a single takeaway from The Shining, it would be an appreciation and acceptance of the duality of man. To not blindly see yourself as good and externalise all evil.
Kubrick once said, “I think that man's capacity for violence is an evolutionary hangover which no longer serves a useful purpose, but it's there all the same”.
Stephen King blamed the hotel for Jack’s evil actions. Kubrick disagreed with this.
Kubrick made it clear that if you kill someone in cold blood, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
Other interpretations
There are numerous, wildly different interpretations of The Shining, and like any great story, what you take from it will depend on how you personally relate to it.
For example, you may identify more with Danny than Jack. Perhaps you recall times as a child where your parents fought, and they didn't realise how aware of it you were. We often think we can hide anger, conflict, or tension from children, but like Danny's shining ability, we do not realise that in many ways, they are more sensitive to these things than we are.
Maybe you relate more to Wendy. She ultimately outwits and defeats Jack. Even the ghosts of the hotel tell Jack they underestimated her, "Your wife appears to be stronger than we imagined, Mr. Torrance!”.
A word on horror movies
I’m a big believer that realistic portrayals of violence are unlikely to incite real-world violence than the ‘fun violence’ seen in James Bond films or Tom & Jerry cartoons, where characters take a hit, bounce back instantly, and move on to the next thing.
In the words of Kubrick, “that kind of violence, might cause emulation. It's like when young men are fed nonsense about the glory of war—they might have gone off to war with expectations that didn't turn out to be true. Whereas if they'd been exposed to brutal, violent war films, they might have realised what was in store for them”.
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