All Work, No Play
When Jack Torrance comes to consciousness in the freezer at the haunted Overlook Hotel, he is pissed. I mean like crazed, I’m-about-to-go-murder-my-family crazy. He escapes the freezer, then his evil hijinks ensue (hacks through the bathroom door with an axe, screams “Here’s Johnny!”) all building to the literally chilling climax of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film The Shining.
Kubrick’s choice of Jack Nicholson to play Jack Torrance was probably the film’s best attribute. Watching Nicholson limp through the snowed in hotel hunting his family will forever be etched in my mind. Stephen King’s “The Shining,” on which the film is based, is not as ax-murdery as Kubrick’s interpretation, but the bottom line is same: Dad went nuts.
I happened to catch the second half of the movie the other day, and even though I was just as terrified as when I saw it the first time at too tender of an age, I had a little sympathy for Jack. The man had slipped. He’d reverted back to drinking and his loved ones became the target of his rage. With the help of the hotel’s ghosts, of course, he’d let the evil take hold.
But this wasn’t King’s intent when he wrote the book. While he wanted to demonstrate that Jack Torrance had demons he’d been fighting his whole life, King meant to assure readers that demons can also be exorcised. Jack Torrance from the book meets his death, but only after confronting his psychosis, unlike Nicholson’s Torrance who pretty much stays crazy even after he’s dead.
As dads, we get pushed to the edge all the time, and miraculously we come back to the light. We slay our evils one moment at a time. Somehow we’re able to find balance; somehow we keep ourselves from being dull boys. We don’t indulge those evil thoughts. God know we shouldn’t be too sharp lest we go around chopping up doors.
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Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” (Warner Bros.)