The Clenched Fist of Jack Torrance :
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Danny has fled back outside after Dick's death. In pursuit, hampered by his limp, Jack makes his way to the far entrance/exit of The Overlook, both hands always wielding his axe, as has been the case since we first saw him with it, the exception being when he reached in through the hole in the caretaker's apartment door with his left hand and grasped for the doorknob. Here we see him in the entryway.
During Wendy's excursion to check on the disabled Snowcat, the snow so blocked the doors she was barely able to open even one of them.
When Dick enters the lodge, we see the door is ajar in about the same position.
However, the doors stand wide open in waiting for Jack, and perhaps they had for Danny as well when he escaped to the outside a second time, but Kubrick chose not to show Danny exiting so we don't know. Of what we can be confident is little Danny could not have opened both doors wide if neither Wendy nor Dick were able. But never mind this, I'm instead concerned with another oddity.
There follow a few shots of Jack scanning the dark outside the Overlook for Danny, and Danny hiding behind the Snowcat. Jack releases his right hand from the axe to cut on the outside lamps and we see the entrance to the maze has moved 90 degrees. I have explained this movement in the A Month Later section.
Danny abandons the Snowcat to make a run for the maze. Jack follows, and as we can see he has both hands on the axe again. By my reckoning this is shot 600. Kubrick cuts away before Jack passes the Snowcat. This is the last moment before the cut.
In shot 601 Danny is seen running up the hill to the maze and entering it.
Shot 602 picks up Jack passing the Snowcat. With Danny having entered the maze, Jack has released his right hand from the axe and now instead clutches his jacket shut with it.
Now, this appears to be entirely natural. It's damn cold out there in the snowbound mountains, right? Why give Jack clutching shut that jacket a second thought?
Because Jack, from now on, never releases his right clenched fist from his jacket. His hand remains clenched shut, holding the jacket, from the moment Danny entered the maze. How many days or weeks of shooting did that entail with Jack stumbling through the maze with that fist clenched?
Kubrick cuts back to Danny running through the maze and falling (shot 603), then Jack following him. Cut to Wendy in the scene in which she finds Dick dead and encounters the "great party" man. Cut back to Danny in the maze and Jack pursuing with that right clenched fist. Then back to Wendy running down a now dark Gold Room hall toward the lobby where she will look at it from an opposite perspective, 180 degrees reversed from her previous view, Dick is gone and she sees instead skeletons in the chairs. Cut back to Danny having reached the center of the maze, retracing his steps and concealing himself, as Jack pursues still clutching his jacket. Return to Wendy now in the red hall and coming upon the bloody elevators (the doors of which are reversed once the blood starts flowing). Back now to Jack having reached the center of the maze
Jack passes over Danny and Danny flees back toward the maze's entrance. We see Wendy outside the hotel running toward the Snowcat. Cut back to Danny falling in the maze (645). Suddenly he's at the entrance (647). Wendy helps hims into the Snowcat.
As if to point out how Jack is determined not to unclench that right fist, towards the end of this scene, Danny escaping with his mother in the Snowcat, Kubrick has Jack fall on his right side (650). He takes a full out tumble on his right side and he never removes his hand from his jacket, never unclenching his fist.
When Danny fell, he used both hands and helped himself up with both hands. This is as it should be. When you fall, you are automatically going to reach out in order to try to protect yourself.
The automatic, natural thing for Jack to have done, as he began to fall to his right, would have been to release his coat and reach out with his right hand and attempt to thwart the fall by grabbing the hedge, or brace himself with his right hand as he fell into the snowbank. But Jack doesn't do that. The actor, Jack, doesn't do that, which means he has been instructed to keep that right hand always closed and holding his jacket. He had to fight the natural impulse to use that hand to protect himself from falling.
Even as Jack struggles to stand after the fall, he doesn't release his jacket. The natural thing to do would have been for him to use his right hand to help push himself back upright. But, no, the actor, Jack Nicholson, had to have been instructed to not unclench that fist, to keep a hold on the jacket. Trust me on this. The actor had to have been instructed to fight his natural impulse to put out his hand to protect himself as he fell. That Jack continues to clutch his jacket shut with that fist is absolutely intentional.
Jack finally seats himself in the snow against a hedge wall and still his hand is clenched, holding his jacket.
The next shot of Jack has him in a different position from the previous, he is clearly seated away from the hedge wall, but I'm not concerned with that detail at the moment. He is frozen as still as, well, frozen as still as his figure would forever remain in a photo. We can tell he no longer is holding shut his jacket. So, what of that right hand which Kubrick wanted clenched shut from the moment Danny entered the maze?
This below shot of Jack from "The Overlook Hotel Tumblr" reveals that even in the production shot Jack's right fist is still shown clenched tight, resting atop the snow.
The holding the jacket shut has been, in a way, an excuse for Jack keeping that right hand closed fast. The holding the jacket shut against the cold was not the important thing. It was not why Jack's hand was clenched shut. Had he continued to hold his axe with that right hand as well as with his left, we would not have noted eventually that something had changed, seemingly in connection with Danny having entered the maze. Seeing Jack here in the snow, frozen, no longer holding his jacket shut, but that right hand still clenched tight, seals that Jack's clenched fist hadn't anything to do with having to hold shut his jacket shut. It's just that as long as he was holding his jacket shut with that clenched fist our attention was not immediately drawn to that clenched fist as peculiar, we thought his fist clenched over the jacket, holding it shut, was in response to the cold. Not so.
Now, the question is why must Jack keep his fist clenched shut? The little slip of paper he is revealed to be holding in his right hand in the ball room photo at the end of the film is the reason. He has it. This paper. He has not released it. That is what he had his hand clenched fast about, perhaps not literally, but symbolically at least. This paper was in that fist, or whatever that clenched fist represented, and he now displays it for us, what he had been holding as he chased Danny through the maze. The paper hasn't manifested out of nowhere at film's end, Jack had the paper in hand, at least in effect, from the moment Danny entered the maze.
If one thinks back to the one previous entering of the maze in the film, when Danny was playing with his mother, they were racing one another. Wendy had encouraged Danny with the threat that whoever lost would have to keep America clean. Danny made it to the maze first. A clear foreshadowing of Danny racing his father to the maze is had in that scene, though we feel that Wendy has allowed Danny to win. Jack's hand clenching (at least symbolically) that paper from the moment Danny enters the maze, is perhaps Jack having to keep America clean as the caretaker, holding some bit of litter in his hand for the photo to see at film's end? He's done his job? He's kept things clean?
Does the little slip of paper Jack holds, by virtue of cleanliness, link with the white handkerchief Bill takes out of his dresser when he is looking for his wallet at the beginning of Eyes Wide Shut. He puts the white handkerchief in his inner right jacket pocket, then finding his black wallet he puts that in his inner left jacket pocket. That handkerchief helps set up for the audience his later meeting with the two models, one of whom reminds Bill that he had come to her aid during a photo shoot in which she had gotten half of Fifth Avenue in her eye. He had loaned her his handkerchief, and as to that she makes the odd remark that she recollects the handkerchief was "clean". For this, being a person who works too hard and misses much (just as all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy), Bill is invited to the "end of the rainbow". That handkerchief again finds a parallel in the white napkin upon which Nick later writes the password "fidelio". Fidelity. As for the black wallet, Bill continually pulls it out to represent himself as being "who" he is, showing his ID, when he is trying to get something from someone.
But that seems a rather lame punch line for the mystery of Jack and the revelation of the palmed piece of paper. And though I do think the two events tie together, I don't believe that's what this literally means. If we look to other films of Kubrick we find parallels.
Back in shot 401, in the Wednesday section, Jack had clenched his fist around the three relays he removed from the two-way radio, completely cutting them off. In 2001 HAL had reported that the communication Alpha Echo 35 unit was going bad. Bowman replaced it and he and Frank found it was all right, that HAL had seemingly made an error. Frank was in the process of duplicating Bowman's space walk, to put the unit back in, when HAL killed him, and then HAL took over the ship and disabled one function after another.
I'm going to go all the way back to Fear and Desire to explore Kubrick's use of the Shakespearean mousetrap, which is a play within a play that speaks not to the general audience but instead a select few who may see themselves in the lines, and the writer hopes to judge afterward by their behavior if what was written was true. An example of this is in Barry Lyndon when Bullingdon has Byron parade in his shoes, which sets off Barry. In Fear and Desire, in response to their wrecking behind enemy lines, Corby draws a peculiar map. All he needed to do was draw a line representing a boundary and another line bisecting it representing a river, and say, "Here we are, on the wrong side, on enemy territory, there is a river over there and we're going to ride a raft out of here." Instead, drawing the map, he talks of how they can cleverly use this reconditioned mouse trap as a springboard to get out of there. A dog immediately appears, an enemy dog, and he throws a stone to get rid of it, like playing fetch. The dog isn't supposed to bring it back, only give chase, and it does. Later, in order to get their weapons they kill several men who are eating. One of the dead, eyes open, has a hand clenched around some potato.
Sidney, the next day, kills a captive girl. Eyes open in death, we have some shots of her combined with reverse shots. We then have a shot of the girl's open hand. There is something held within it, though we had seen her hands were empty before. After trying to escape and being shot, she holds something in her hand that should remind us of whatever it is that Jack holds in his right hand. This has everything to do with the stone Corby threw after drawing the mouse trap.
The morphing stone (the dog was named Proteus after a polymorph) is "caught" in the hands of these dead individuals. What has happened in each case has been a lack of communication. One can't necessarily communicate with a dog. The soldiers don't speak with the enemy soldiers, and the enemy soldiers say nothing when attacked. The woman appears to not know the language of the soldiers who capture her and doesn't speak. Problems of communication. One is reminded of how Dave and Frank, in 2001, make an excuse that transmission may be faulty in a pod, they enter the pod, turn off the ability for HAL to overhear their conversation, and talk about cutting off HAL's higher functions, but HAL understands this by lip-reading and flips out. Which I think was the purpose of HAL's saying the AE-35 was going bad, to see what they would do.
Problems of communication have been associated with the incidents concerning the clenched hand previously, and Jack had disabled the Overlook's radio.
In seeming death, these individuals can't communicate, and yet Jack taunts us from 1921 with this piece of paper that he reveals in the palm of his hand.
Approx 1905 words or 4 single-spaced pages. A 14 minute read at 130 wpm.
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