The Problems of Identification in The Shining

Identification when it comes to this film is an interesting question to ponder. As we’ve discussed throughout the term in relation to Clover’s works, sites of identification for the spectator are given an unorthodox treatment by horror films, and especially slasher films. The Shining plays off of this as the final girl, Wendy, is someone the audience can identify with by the time she starts fighting back against Jack, and creates the double identification in the male spectator. I wonder how the heterosexual, white cis male would react to Jack upon seeing this film for the first time. In a movie that is at least partially a forefather to more contemporary TV shows and movies and about white male dissatisfaction taken to extreme measures (American Beauty, Breaking Bad etc.), I wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of viewers in 1980 found something sympathetic in Jack’s mental collapse and psychotic breakdown. I’m not saying that I identify with him or what he represents, but seeing as how audiences tend to root for terrible white men (we’ve seen this attitude persist most recently in Tiger King and the Internet’s reaction to it), I wonder if there are Jack-defenders out there. Because it is easier to defend destructive masculinity as long as it’s familiar, and The Shining does a great job making the familiar monstrous.

The Shining plays off of many tropes we’ve covered thus far in the course: there is a knowing child, a final girl, a terrible family etc., but does it offer anything new or useful beyond what I’ve outlined above. I struggle to think that it actually does. Technically it’s very impressive and there is a layer of prestige to this movie that puts it in dialogue with the more “trashy” films that it shares a genre with. Celebration of this film and Stanley Kubrick as a director still feeds into the same idea that it’s not really the victims that audiences are drawn to and identify with, it is the villains who are oh-so-compelling, and are the real reasons why people revisit these films and shows year after year. The fact that Kubrick was allegedly Jack Torrence-like in his treatment of Shelley Duvall, which is now widely known and has only added to the allure of this film, makes the act of viewing The Shining and enjoying it for the technical feat that it is especially problematic. It is hard to say what all of this gives us in terms of meaningful insights or analysis, and just how valuable this “prestige” horror film really is when compared to the other, “lower” films we’ve watched this term.