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Analysis of The Shining – Saturday
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6 responses to “Analysis of The Shining – Saturday”
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The girls do look VERY much like twins, but the one on the right is slightly smaller than the one on the left, and their facial features are different, I think they may be 8 and 10, and likely are the Grady girls, although Kubrick (in his genius) leaves this ambiguous. The axe by their bodies in Danny’s horrible vision may be the giveaway of their identity..I could be taking it too literally, but I think in this case Kubrick means us to know that these in fact are the Grady girls who were murdered in 1970. The bodies, while badly maimed, are not “cut up into bits”, so based on Danny’s vision, one suspects if they are Charles Grady’s girls, Charles had killed them in a rage and walked off somewhere, only to return later to hack them up more, and actually place or “stack” them where the police found them. Danny’s vision of the murdered girls is indeed a very interesting snapshot in time of the past events at the Overlook.
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One more comment on this topic…One thing has always nagged at me about the Grady murders at the Overlook. I wonder if Charles was egged on by the same evil presence as Jack, in the form of the earlier entity Delbert, and succumbed to those pressures, murdering his family. Then, after Grady had killed himself, it was during the winter season, so how were the bodies found? I wonder if there was some inkling of trouble, and forest rangers from Sidewinder came to investigate, finding the gruesome scene…Or, if their bodies were simply allowed to decompose for the rest of the winter? An interesting thought. We can safely assume that all four bodies WERE found though, based on Ullman’s account of the events…He says the girls and Grady’s wife were “stacked neatly in one of the rooms of the West Wing” and says Grady put two barrels of a shotgun in his mouth, so we assume that forest rangers or police were able to find Grady’s body too and clearly discern manner of death! Again, what I find so compelling about Kubrick’s version of the Shining is how we can speculate and fill in the delicious gaps of the Overlook’s history!
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That’s right, they’re not twins. The audience, I think, is supposed to perceive them initially as twins, but we’re also given the information the girls who were killed were 8 and 10, so it’s one of those Kubrick puzzle pieces and effectively exacerbates a kind of cognitive dissonance in the viewer. We know also that, as the girls were 8 and 10, these two are too close in size to be two years apart, so we’re left uncertain as to what is going on. We do, at least know they both represent the murders, whether they are identical representations or something more complex. Its the sense of something more complex that makes the story more interesting than a simple ghost story. And leads to endless speculation, yes!
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Here’s a question I would like explained, I wonder exactly what is the extent of the amount of deaths/murders that have occurred at the Overlook? We only know of the 1970 Grady incident, but we feel sure there have been many more. For one, the Indian burial ground the Hotel was built on. So in that sense, the Hotel was “born bad” as Shirley Jackson once said about certain structures. At the very end, as Wendy is running frantically through the hotel looking for Danny, she enters the lobby area and sees what appear to be cobwebs and many skeletons in lifelike poses. Is this the hotel shining how many have died there? Also, of course, whatever is in room 237. Something no doubt happened there, if not more than once. Very interesting to speculate on what the actual total death tally at the Overlook is at the time the Torrances stay there!
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From Wikipedia:
The flag of the state of Colorado consists of three horizontal stripes of equal width; the top and bottom stripes are blue, and the middle stripe white. On top of these stripes sits a circular red “C”, filled with a golden disk. The blue is meant to represent the skies, the gold is said to either stand for the sunshine enjoyed by the state or the gold mined traditionally in the state of Colorado, the white represents the snowcapped mountains and the red represents the red colored earth (from Spanish colorado, meaning “redâ€).
I do think this suggests the “golden” element in the story (see Ager’s Gold room vids for that) as well as the blood-drenched earth. It’s worth noting the golden disk as well. Check out the wikipedia entry for the colorado flag, their previous version’s been more candid about american political establishment.
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The whole incident about the Grady girls and the previous caretaker murdering his family fascinates me in this film, because it plants seeds for us, and provides context for the horror that is to come. In the beginning when Ullman (who by the way seems suspiciously cheerful to me) talks about the murder in 1970, he does specifically state that Charles Grady was his predecessor, and came up with his wife and two little girls, about 8 and 10. He says Grady must have run amuck at some point during the winter and killed his family with an axe, stacking their bodies neatly in one of the rooms of the west wing, then blowing his brains out. Is this inferred to be the dreaded room 237 perhaps? In Danny’s vision of the girls dead, he sees their hacked bodies in the blue and cream staff part of the hotel. This suggests that Grady killed the two girls there, and perhaps moved their bodies elsewhere? Also, why does Danny not see a vision of Grady’s wife, since she supposedly suffered the same fate as the daughters? Is it because the daughter ghosts are Danny’s age? As I stated in the “Wednesday” portion about room 237, I don’t believe the woman seen in room 237 is Grady’s wife at all, but a manifestation of the hotel itself, the core if you will.
When Jack sees Delbert Grady in the mens room in the Ballroom, Delbert tells him he has a wife and two daughters. He says one daughter tried to burn the hotel down with matches. But he says he “corrected” them which clearly means murder. So, was the basically a presence living at the hotel that was Delbert Grady in the 1920s who had a wife and two daughters, which possessed Charles Grady in 1970, causing him to murder his family like Delbert did before? This is all ambiguous.
Another thing, I am a bit of a forensic nut, I enjoy reading about interesting crimes and such. Regarding the 1970 incident at the hotel, which Ullman tells Jack about, since the hotel is closed for 7 months, during the winter, how did the hotel run itself for that long in 1970? If Charles Grady killed his wife and daughters and then himself, how did the hotel not burn down from the boiler not being tended? Perhaps it is meant that the forest rangers were somehow alerted to trouble and came to investigate, so the bodies didn’t lay there very long. Just wondering, because even in the dead of winter, if the Gradys’ bodies had laid there for very long, there wouldn’t have been much left. Also I wonder if Halloran knew of the 1970 incident, and if that’s why he’s so worried after he shines the room 237 incident.
And I wonder who looked after the hotel during the winters from 1970 until the film’s timeline?
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