Misdirected III

“Redrum!”
 - Danny Torrance’s “imaginary friend,” Tony, as the boy is having a panic attack in The Shining (1980) [1] 

What better way to help navigate this maze-like portion of our current seminar dealing with fetish objects, dispossession and acting-out than this story of obsession, repression (and return of the repressed,) and murder? 

The film opens with a funereal Bartok piece punctuated with haunting Native American music and a shot of an island, on a mirror-like lake, rushing towards us. Then we get breathtaking overhead shots of the Rockies with a yellow VW “Bug” winding through them [2]. After the credits, we see the car parked in front of the enormous and isolated Colorado Overlook hotel, and watch the driver, (and would-be novelist,) Jack, enter and ask to see the manager to interview for a position as winter caretaker. We can use the “object” of Jack’s mission to gear up for Lacan’s next class, where he proposes to tell us 

… a certain number of things about what I have taught you to designate as the object o, this object o towards which the aphorism that I put forward the last time about anxiety orients us, namely that it is not without an object.

This is why the object o comes this year into the centre of our remarks. And if effectively it is inscribed in the frame of this anxiety that I took as a title, it is precisely for the reason that it is essentially from this angle that it is possible to speak about it, which means again that anxiety is its only subjective expression. [3]

Jack meets the manager, Stuart Ullman, before we cut to Jack’s wife and son, Wendy and Danny, in their Boulder apartment. The boy asks his mother if she really wants to live in the hotel for the winter, and Wendy replies that it will be fun. Tony - manifested by wiggling Danny’s finger and speaking through Danny in a squeaky voice - says that he doesn’t want to go, and when Mrs. Torrance asks why, says, “I just don’t.” Tony’s reserve can point us to Lacan’s question whether 

{…the object of desire is “out in front” He brings up problems with the word “cause” as an epistemological term, saying that, without comprehending the object o, our understanding of this word leaves out a dimension, the omission of which renders a theory of a subject’s knowledge inadequate.} [4] 

 In the next scene we find that Ullman has already decided to give Jack the position. He then tells him something “that’s been known to give a few people second thoughts” – in 1970 former winter caretaker Charles Grady had killed his wife and both daughters with an axe, then shot himself. Jack assures Ullman that the story will simply fascinate his wife, and that his family will love their stay. We then see Danny at the bathroom sink talking to Tony while looking in the mirror. Tony, his voice now sounding much older than it had when we “met” him, tells Danny that Jack has the job right before Jack calls Wendy with the news. Danny asks why Tony doesn’t want to go and, after pleading, then demanding an answer, gets a vision of twin girls holding hands and of blood pouring from the hotel’s red, art-deco elevators and splashing up onto the camera lens, eventually covering the screen. We can use the attainment of Jack’s goal and “Tony’s” reaction to elaborate on, and position, this object, 

the object o, this object which is not to be situated in anything whatsoever which is analogous to the intentionality of an noeme, which is not in the intentionality of desire, this object ought to be conceived by us as the cause of desire, and, to take up my metaphor of a little while ago, the object is behind desire. [5 (scholarly citations removed)]

We hear a doctor asking Danny to hold his eyes still, then see her leaning over him in his bedroom. When she asks various questions about his blackout, Danny tells her that he had been talking to Tony when it happened. On further questioning, Danny says that Tony is a “little boy that lives in my mouth” and that he hides in his stomach so others can’t see him. The Doctor and Wendy leave the room, and we learn a little about the family’s history – that Tony had appeared when Jack had dislocated his son’s shoulder when Danny was in nursery school about three years previously and that Jack has not had anything to drink in the past five months, an abstinence that Wendy attributes to the “accident.” We then cut to the VW taking the family to the hotel, and to its passengers discussing the historical snowbound Donner party. The bug can drive home the “topological function” of the object that Lacan reminds us of from his earlier lecture, a function that is 

 …tangible in Freud’s formulations {and can help us remember his earlier discussion of the paradox of the object’s location, a need to} resolve this impasse … the notion of an outside before a certain intériorisation, of the outside which is situated here, o, before the subject at the locus of the Other, grasps himself in x in this specular form which introduces for him the distinction between the me and the not-me. [6 (scholarly citations removed)]

In the next scene, Jack is in the lobby reading Playgirl magazine when Ullman approaches him and asks if his luggage has been brought in, and Ullman’s assistant, Watson, heaves a sigh as Jack points to the enormous pile of bags he has brought. We watch Ullman, Watson, Jack, and Wendy emerge from an elevator [7] into the “Colorado Lounge,” where Ullman discusses “All the best people” who have visited the Overlook. We cut to Danny in the Game-room playing darts, then see the twin girls from his vision enter, stare at him, and leave. We then return to Ullman showing Danny’s parents their quarters, quarters which Jack describes as “homey.” Jack’s choice of words and his reading material will bookmark Lacan’s description of the meaning of “fetish”: 

In order to image it, it is not by chance that I will make use of the fetish as such, where there is unveiled this dimension of the object as cause of desire. Because it is not the slipper, or the breast, nor whatever it may be in which you incarnate the fetish that is desired; but the fetish as cause of desire which hooks onto whatever it can, onto someone who is not absolutely necessarily the one who is wearing the slipper; the slipper can be in her surroundings; it is not even necessary that she should have the breast: the breast can be in the head. [8]

Ullman continues to guide Jack and Wendy through the Overlook, showing them its hedge maze and discussing the Hotel’s history - that it had been built in 1907 on an Indian burial ground and that its builders “had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it.” He then shows them the Overlook’s winter vehicle (the “snowcat,”) and The Gold Ballroom. He introduces them to the African-American head chef, Dick Halloran, before his secretary enters with Danny. Jack asks his son if he is “tired of bombing the universe,” and they all chuckle when Danny replies, “Yeah.” I’ll let this answer deliver the impact of Lacan’s discourse as he 

{… elaborates on the two perspectives of the Fetish before putting it, the “o,” at the level of the unconscious where you say, “I.” Noting that being seen as the object is intolerable, he introduces the concepts of masochism and sadism. Pointing to his graphic schema, he says,} we have here the side of 0, of the Other, and here that of let us say, of the subject S, of this still unconstituted I of this subject precisely to be questioned, to be revised within our experience, of which we only know that it cannot, in any case, coincide with the traditional formula of the subject, namely the degree of exhaustion there can be in every relationship with the object. [9]

At Ullman’s request, Halloran brings Wendy and Danny to show Mrs. Torrance the kitchen. Dick itemizes the contents of both its storerooms – one holding frozen foods and one canned and dry goods. During his itemization the chef, standing next to a can of Calumet baking powder (which displays the profile of a Native-American chief [10],) turns his head to look at Danny, and seems to telepathically ask if he wants Ice cream. As Halloran leads them out, commenting on the regulating property of the last item on his list, Ullman enters with Watson and Jack. The manager asks if he can take Wendy to show her the basement, and Dick says that he was just about to get Danny some ice cream. The storerooms can embody Lacan’s comment on the super-ego,

 …this place with all the contents, if you wish, that it can have and which are numerable. {He reminds us that he had said that desire and the law are the same thing, that they} have a common object. It is not enough then in this case to give oneself the consolation that they are, with respect to one another, like the two sides of the wall, or like the front and the back. [11]

As Ullman leads his new caretaking couple toward the basement, Wendy marvels at all the activity taking place. When the manager replies that, by five o’clock, the family will “never know anybody was ever here,” Wendy replies, “Just like a ghost ship, huh?” Meanwhile, Halloran, haven given Danny his treat, talks to him about the covert understanding between them, which he calls, “shining.” Danny brings up Tony, and Dick asks if he had told him anything about the Overlook. Danny says that he might have, then asks him about “Room 237” and if he is afraid of the hotel, and a rack of knives behind them suddenly comes into focus. 

{Lacan brings up the Oedipus myth, then claims that} the central effect of this identity which conjoins the desire of the father and the law, is the castration complex in so far as when the law is born by this moulting, this mysterious mutation of the desire of the father after he had been killed, the consequence is, just as much in the history of analytic thought as in everything that we can conceive of as the most certain liaison, is in any case the castration complex. [12 (scholarly citations removed)]

We jump a month ahead, where uncanny shots of Wendy, pushing a cart with Jack’s breakfast from the kitchen to their quarters, are intercut with ones of Danny [13], riding through the hotel on his Big Wheel. In the bedroom we see Jack’s sleeping body reflected in the vanity mirror. He awakens to Wendy’s “Good Morning” and the eggs she prepared – “just the way you like ‘em, sunny side up.” She asks if he wants to walk outside with her, and he says that he should try to work on his project first. When she asks him if he has had any ideas yet, he answers, “Lots of ideas, no good ones.” At Wendy’s attempt to encourage him, “It's just a matter of settling back into the habit of writing every day,” Jack shoots her a resentful glance, then smiles sarcastically - “Yeah … that’s all it is.” We can let Jack’s frustration give us a sense of what Lacan lists as his third point of the day, that 

{… the manifestation of object o as a lack is structural to it, is a} final irreducible reserve of libido… what subsists as body which in part, for us hides from us as I might say its own will… {He illustrates this structural aspect through the story of Little Dora, a patient of Freud’s who had made “courtly” demonstrations to a woman of “suspect reputation,” thereby drawing from her father an “irritated glance.”} [14]

Jack relaxes when Wendy changes the subject to the Hotel. He tells of a sense of déjà vu he had at his interview – “almost as though I knew what was going to be around every corner.” We then cut to Jack’s idle typewriter set up in the Colorado Lounge, then the camera pans up to reveal him throwing a yellow ball against a wall painting of Native Americans. We fade to Wendy and Danny racing, Danny claiming victory as they reach the hedge maze entrance with the declaration, “You'll have to keep America clean!” [15] As the two explore the labyrinth, we cut back to Jack, tired of his game, wandering toward a model of the maze. He smiles faintly as he stands over it, and we get an overhead shot of tiny figures moving in its center, then cut to Danny and Wendy. Over this model we’ll look at the psychoanalyst’s introduction to 

{… the topics of “acting out” and “passage l’acte,” Lacan illustrates the latter concept with Dora’s response subsequent to her father’s reaction and her “lady’s” rejection of her affections - Dora had killed herself, throwing herself out of a high window. Lacan notes} her absolute identification to this o, to which she is reduced. Confrontation with this desire of the father upon which all her behaviour is constructed, with this law which is presentified in the look of the father, it is through this that she feels herself identified and at the same moment, rejected, ejected off the stage. [16] 

After an intertitle that reads, “Tuesday,” we see Wendy preparing lunch while listening to a TV news story of a woman who had disappeared during a hunting trip with her husband. The anchors discuss a coming snowstorm before we cut to Danny riding his Big Wheel down a corridor. We hear ominous music as he turns his head and stops in front of Room 237. He slowly gets up and tries the door, and we catch another glimpse of the twins. Finding the door locked, Danny returns to his tricycle and rides away, though looking back several times. We cut to Jack from behind, seeming to creep up on him as he is typing, then get a closeup of him, framed by the elevator doors, from the front, then another back view as we see Wendy approach him from the opposite side of the large room. After she greets him and comes around to his side of the table, he tears the paper out of the typewriter. She asks about his work, and he suspiciously glares at her, answering curtly. When he sarcastically rejects her effort at small talk about the storm, she gently tells him not to “be so grouchy.” He denies he is being grouchy, while oozing hostility, and Wendy backs off, offering to, later on, bring him some sandwiches. Jack then lashes out, snarling obscenities and making a “new rule” banishing her from the Lounge whenever he is there (essentially, anytime he isn’t in bed.) At this ejection we’ll turn back to Lacan, as he

{says that the passage l’acte can only be realized by a “letting fall.” He hints at the direction he will go in his next class by comparing this passage to mourning “…the object that we are mourning for was, without us knowing it, the one which had become, that we had made the support for our castration” He then returns to the subject of Dora with Freud’s account of an obstacle with her case, an obstacle which caused Freud to “drop” her as a patient. Freud compares the impediment to what happens in hypnosis, and Lacan describes hypnosis in terms of his own carafe/stopper metaphor: “The only thing that one does not see in hypnosis, is precisely the stopper of the carafe itself, nor the look of the hypnotizer which is the cause of hypnosis.” Locating the resulting disbelief of the analysand as central to Freud’s problem, Lacan claims that Dora had promoted the phallus as such “to the place of o.” Lacan bases his claim on Freud’s having ended his text dealing with} the distinction between constitutional elements and historical elements in the determination of homosexuality, and the isolation, this being as such the proper field of analysis, of the object, the object choice (Objektwahl) distinguishing it as such, as including the mechanisms which are original, everything turns effectively around this relationship between the subject and o. [17, Scholarly citations removed)]

On “Thursday,” we see an enormous accumulation of snow as it continues to fall and hear Wendy say, “I know you’ve got some” as she and Danny playfully throw snowballs at each other. Inside, we hear more ominous music as the camera slowly moves in on the still, wolfish visage of Jack, staring as if at prey. We then get an overhead shot of him on “Saturday” typing, surrounded by elevators, before cutting to Wendy trying to use the now dead phones. Going into Ullman’s office, she uses the radio to reach “KDK1,” the ranger station. The ranger tells her that the phone lines are down and are likely to stay down until spring, and he advises her to leave the radio on all the time. We cut to Danny, riding his Big Wheel through the kitchen and some corridors before stopping short – the two Grady girls stand at the end of the hall, greeting him in unison and telling him to play with them. As they repeat the invitation, we cut to their bodies lying behind an axe, the girls, walls and axe covered in blood, - shots of this scene alternating with increasingly close-up shots of the staring girls as they say “forever…and ever…and ever.” Danny covers his eyes, and when he uncovers them, the girls are gone. Danny tells Tony he is scared, and his friend reminds him of what Halloran had said – the images were unreal, “like pictures in a book.” This scene can bring us to 

the place where the real hurries onto this stage of the Other where man as subject has to constitute himself, to take his place as the one who carries the word, but who can only carry it in a structure which however truly it is established is a structure of fiction. [18]

After a “Monday” intertitle, we see a TV screen showing the movie, Summer of ’42 and hear the leading lady asking the protagonist how she can repay him. The camera pulls out to show the heavy snow still falling outside the window, then pulls further back to show Danny and Wendy watching the movie. Danny turns and asks his mother if he can go to his room and get his fire engine. Wendy tries to dissuade him, saying that his father is trying to sleep, but finally consents on condition that he not make a sound. We fade to Danny trying to tip-toe in. We then hear eerie music as he stops, and the camera pans to Jack sitting on the bed in his bathrobe and “long johns.” We then see Jack and his reflection in the vanity mirror, his jeans lying on the chair in front of it. Looking emotionally deadened, he calls Danny over and sits him on his lap, holding him and caressing his neck and hair, saying he wants him to have a good time. When Danny asks if he likes the hotel Jack replies, with a vaguely menacing grin, that he wishes they could stay there “for ever and ever and ever.” The grin disappears when Danny asks, “You wouldn't ever hurt Mummy and me, would you?” and Jack asks if his mother had said that he would hurt him. After being reassured twice that she hadn’t, a smile returns, and he professes his love for his son. “I'd never do anything to hurt you, never... You know that, don't you, huh?” With the mirroring and doubling in this scene, we’ll reflect on Lacan’s next question,

… whether anxiety is not so absolute a mode of communication between the subject and the Other that to tell the truth one could ask oneself whether anxiety is not properly speaking what is common to the subject and to the Other. [19] 

The next intertitle says, “Wednesday,” and Kubrick shows us Danny in a homemade-looking “Apollo 11” sweater playing next to some elevators with toy cars and trucks (but no fire engines,) using the rug pattern to designate roads. He makes motor sounds and hooks one truck to the back of another, when a yellow ball rolls toward him. Calling “Mom,” he walks toward where the ball came from and notices that a door is ajar – the door to Room 237. As he enters we fade to Wendy working in the boiler room. She hears Jack howling and runs to the Lounge. As she helps him up from the floor Jack, sobbing, tells her his nightmare – He had cut her and Danny up into pieces. While she tries to comfort him, Danny walks in with a stunned bearing, a torn collar and red finger marks around his neck. She screams at Jack “You son of a bitch! … How could you?!” Then we cut to Jack walking down the corridor to The Gold Room, gesticulating wildly. Sitting at the bar, he moans that he’d sell his soul for a beer, and suddenly, Lloyd, a spectral bartender, appears. Jack orders a bourbon and complains about his “white man’s burden” and about his wife, calling her a “bitch” protesting that he would never hurt Danny, “I love the little son of a bitch.” We’ll pause on this repeated epithet to read another part of Lacan’s “tale,” where we learn that 

…no discourse about anxiety can fail to recognise that we have to deal with the phenomenon of anxiety in certain animals. [20]

Jack soon admits that he had, three years before, hurt Danny, but immediately rationalizes and downplays the incident. Wendy then enters the room carrying a baseball bat and crying hysterically that Danny had told her that a “crazy woman” in one of the rooms had tried to strangle him. After asking her if she is out of her mind, Jack asks, “Which room?” We cut to a Miami television news show and the camera pulls back to reveal Halloran watching from his bed as the anchor contrasts the Florida heatwave with the Rocky Mountain snowstorm. As the camera zooms closer to his face, we hear a heartbeat and see Dick start to shake, his mouth opening and his eyes widening. We cut to Room 237, then to Danny in bed, drooling and also shaking. We see Jack enter the aforementioned room (walking past a strange rug pattern [21], and print of a fox) then the bathroom. His fearful face relaxes to a smile as a beautiful young woman comes out of tub and slinks towards him, and they embrace. We then see him start as he catches sight of himself in the mirror – holding an old woman’s corpse, patches of her skin decayed, revealing rotted flesh beneath. We switch back and forth between Danny in bed and Jack backing out of the room as the spectre pursues him, laughing. He backs through the door, locks it, and continues down the hallway, still backing up as he turns the corner out of view. I’ll use this gory scene to cover the next passage, where Lacan returns to his comparison between the passage l’acte and mourning: 

The object of identification, o, to underline by a reference point, in the salient points even of Freud’s work, is the identification which is essentially at the source of mourning, for example. This o, object of identification, is also o as love object only in so far as it, this o, is what makes of the lover, to use a medieval and traditional term, what tears away this lover metaphorically, to make of him, in proposing himself as lovable, eromenon, by making of him eron the subject of a lack, therefore that through which he constitutes himself properly in love, what gives him, as I might say, the instrument of love, namely – we find it again – that one loves, that one is a lover with what one does not have. [22] 

We fade to Halloran trying to call The Overlook and getting an automatic message, “Your call cannot be completed as dialed…” We then cut to Wendy answering Jack’s knock. As he enters, he says that he found nothing, then he shuts Danny’s door. Wendy asks who could have made the bruises, and he answers that Danny probably made them himself. We see Danny lying in bed looking terrified and hear Wendy reply that, however they were made, Danny has to get out. We get a quick shot of the word “Redrum” scrawled on a door before we see Jack registering Wendy’s proposition, then we get another vision of blood coming from the elevators, and Jack loses his temper, ranting about Wendy wanting to leave when he is finally “into his work.” We can spot Jack’s egotism in Lacan’s mirror diagram on the next page, 

{…specifically a diagram of a flower and its reflection in a mirror* to discuss} the most profound meaning to be given to the term autoerotism - that one lacks self. {He locates this meaning in the schizophrenic’s} phantasy of the fragmented body and cites then-current research} which connoted one of their traits by remarking strictly and nothing more in the articulation of the mother of the schizophrenic what her child was when he was in her belly: nothing more than a diversely convenient or embarrassing body, namely the subjectification of o as pure real. [23]

Jack storms out, shooting a murderous glance towards the camera (positioned where Danny’s door is,) before leaving. Wendy puts her head in her hands and cries before we cut to Jack knocking pitchers and other items off the kitchen shelves. He walks the corridors, turns a corner and stops, puzzled. From his point of view we see the hall, strewn with balloons [24]. We then cut to Halloran calling the Denver forest service, asking the ranger if he can reach the Torrances to see that they are all right. Using the automated message and Halloran’s difficulty, we’ll recall how 

{…Lacan uses this diagram to show the encounter between the subject, where it emerges as “i(o)” and the multiplicity of o-objects. A multiplicity used as} the symbol of something, … which ought to be rediscovered in the structure of the cortex the foundation for a certain relationship between man and the image of his body and different objects which can be constituted from this body are or not caught, grasped at the moment when i(o) has the opportunity of constituting itself… {Lacan uses this image to explain the state of a “self” before the mirror stage (or of a schizophrenic) and the phenomena of depersonalization and subjectivity:} 

The notion of distance, here almost tangible, in the necessity that I have always marked, precisely of the relation between this distance and the existence of the mirror, which gives to the subject this distancing from himself that the dimension of the Other is designed to offer to him, but this does not enable us to conclude either that any bringing closer can give us the solution to any of the difficulties that are generated by the necessity of this distance. [25 (Scholarly citations removed)]

Jack enters The Gold Room, from which we hear 1920’s-style music. The host greets him as “Mr. Torrance,” and Lloyd gives him “the hair on the dog that bit him,” without accepting payment or, even when Jack asks, telling him who’s buying. A waiter spills a drink on him and brings him to the white and red gentlemen’s room to clean his jacket. When the waiter tells Jack his name, Delbert Grady, our protagonist asks if he had seen him before. When Grady says that he hadn’t, Jack looks skeptically at Grady’s reflection in the mirror. 

{Lacan notes that} phenomenologically, depersonalisation begins with the non-recognition of the specular image. {but warns his students of the insufficiency of saying that this non-recognition is sufficient to explain anxiety. He reminds us of a movement that he described near the beginning of his series - the movement* of a child looking from his own image in a mirror to his mother’s face, which Lacan connects to the formation of the big other and suggests that with the aforementioned non-recognition,} another relationship is established of which he is too captive for this movement to be possible; here the purely dual relationship dispossesses – this feeling of the relationship of dispossession marked by clinicians in psychosis – dispossesses the subject of this relationship to the big Other. [26]

Jack tells Grady that he recognizes him from the newspapers as a man who had chopped his wife and daughters “up into little bits,” and shot his own “brains out.” Our point of view is reversed before Grady answers that he has “no recollection of that at all.” After Jack insists that Grady was the Overlook’s caretaker, the point of view switches back, and Grady answers, “I'm sorry to differ with you, Sir, but you are the caretaker. You have always been the caretaker, I should know, Sir. I've always been here.” Jack laughs uncomfortably, and Grady informs him that his son is trying to bring “an outside party” (“a nigger cook”) into “this situation.” When told that Danny has a great talent that he is now using against Jack’s will, Torrance grits his teeth about his son’s “willfulness.” Grady agrees, and when Jack says, conspiratorially, that Danny’s mother “interferes,” Grady, telling Jack of how he had needed to “Correct” his family, suggests that Jack do the same. Jack’s description of Grady’s story can give us a rough-hewn impression of Lacan’s idea as he 

{…emphasizes that the dispossession, or “cut,” described above is not that between an embryo and the mother before he returns to the subject of “acting-out,” pointing to the essential relationship between o and 0. He tells us that an “o” can be for the subject “the most inconvenient super-ego,” and he designates a type of mother, one who is tempted to let her beloved child drop, “expecting something or other miraculous from this sort of catastrophe,” as “phallic.”} [27]

We cut to Wendy planning to leave, then hear Danny shouting the word quoted at the top of this entry. She tries to wake him, and Tony answers, “Danny’s not here Mrs. Torrance.” To her further attempts, he says the frightening words that Danny “can’t wake up” and finally that he has “gone away.” Wendy pulls her son to her, crying in desperation, before we dissolve to Jack walking past some elevators. He hears the ranger’s voice over the radio. Entering Ullman’s office, he removes some components, and the radio goes silent. Contrasting Wendy’s desperation and Jack’s action can highlight the two parts of Dora’s story:

{…the “passage l’acte” of her suicide and her “scandalous” homosexual adventure, which adventure Lacan designates as “acting out.” He interprets her lesbian relationship as expressing} a desire whose essence, … is to be, to show oneself, … as other, and while showing herself as other to still designate herself {like a “servant knight,” as one who can sacrifice for his Lady what he has, his “phallus.”* He defines “acting out” as} the demonstration, the no doubt veiled showing, but which is only veiled for us as subject, in so far as it speaks, in so far as it could be true, not veiled in itself, on the contrary visible to the maximum degree, and because of that, for that very reason invisible in a certain register. [28]

Halloran again calls the ranger, who says that he couldn’t contact the Torrances. We see the intertitle “8 a.m.,” then Halloran on a plane and a stewardess telling him that they will be arriving at 8:20. We dissolve to a long shot of Jack typing, then to one of the plane landing. Halloran calls garage owner Larry Durkin for a snowcat, telling his friend that he has to check on the “unreliable assholes” taking care of the Overlook. On his way to Durkin’s, Dick passes an accident involving a truck and red “bug.” We can use this accident to break down our next passage, where,

{…combining the terms “showing” and “desire,” Lacan reminds us of the formula that desire} is not articulatable even though it is articulated…articulated objectively since this object that I am designating here, is what I called the last time the object as its cause…* Showing its cause, it is this remainder, it is its collapse, it is what falls into the affair that is the essential of what is shown. Between the subject here, which is I might say "othered" (autrifie) in its fictional structure, and the non-authentifiable Other, never completely, what emerges is this remainder o, it is the pound of flesh, ($ in 0)…** {Lacan uses this judgment of Shylock to emphasize this feature of acting out, an impossibility, however many borrowings we make to “plug the holes of desire and of melancholy.” [29]

Danny and his mother are in front of the television, a Roadrunner cartoon playing, when Wendy tells her son to stay in the rooms while she talks to his father. “Tony” replies, “Yes, Mrs. Torrance,” and Wendy leaves, taking the bat with her. In the Lounge, she calls Jack’s name and walks to his writing table. She comes upon the “manuscript,” that he had been typing for over a month, which consists of a thick stack of pages, all of which are covered with the same sentence – “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” These pages can help us cypher Lacan’s instruction that we

{need to interpret acting out as opposed to symptom. [30]

As Wendy desperately flips through the document, Jack appears. While he slowly approaches his terrified wife, we cut to Danny, then to his vision showing the pool of blood so high, furniture is floating in front of elevators, before Jack menacingly ridicules his wife for suggesting that they should bring Danny to see a doctor and accuses her of having no idea what a “moral and ethical principal is.” As Wendy backs up the stairs, pursued by Jack, she finally tells him, “Don’t hurt me!” to which he replies that he won’t - “I’m just gonna bash your brains in.” This scene can prod us to remember Lacan’s reference to

{a Phyllis Greenacre article, “General problems of acting-out,” in which the author lists three ways to deal with the problem, the first two of which are Interpretation, which has little effect, and prohibition, which Greenacre describes as difficult, despite the many} things obviously … done to avoid acting-out in the session. [31]

As they near the top, Jack tries to grab the bat, and Wendy hits first his hand, then his head, knocking him downstairs. We then see him with blood running from the top of his head toward his temple as Wendy drags him into the dry-goods storeroom and locks the door. Jack rouses and tries to wheedle her into letting him out, saying that she hurt his head “real bad” and that he needs a doctor. After she says she and Danny will get down the mountain, then will bring back a doctor, Jack chuckles, taunting her that she isn’t going anywhere. He tells her to check out the snowcat and radio, then he pounds on the doors, laughing and ranting, “Go-Check-It-Out!” We’ll use Jack’s chant to summon the third way of dealing with acting out,

reinforcing the ego… the really manic terminal crisis that [psychoanalyst Michael Balint] describes for us as being that of the end of an analysis characterised in this way, and which represents the insurrection of the o which has remained absolutely untouched. [32]

After grabbing a large carving knife, Wendy runs outside, leaving the front door open. She reaches the garage to find that the snowcat’s distributor cap has been removed and damaged, then we get an intertitle saying, “4 p.m.” We see Jack in the storeroom being awakened by Grady’s knock. When Jack answers, Grady chides him for not having taken care of the “business” they had discussed, “I and others have come to believe that your heart is not in this.” Jack smiles, asking for just one more chance to prove himself, and we hear the latch lift. The ghostly manipulation can illustrate Lacan’s retelling of

{Freud’s experience with a patient who had} lied to him in a dream {- Freud nevertheless believed that the} unconscious still deserves trust. The discourse of the dream, [Freud] tells us, is not the same thing as the unconscious; it is constructed by a desire coming from the unconscious, but he admits at the same time that it is this desire that is expressed, to the point of formulating it: it must be then that the desire comes from something, and coming from the unconscious, and it is this desire which is expressed through lies. [33]

We see the Snowcat approaching and a closeup of Halloran’s worried face in profile, a profile resembling the aforementioned can of baking powder, then we cut to Danny in the Torrances’ quarters, again (but softly) repeating the word, “Redrum.” He picks up a knife and, looking at his sleeping mother, rubs his thumb along its edge. Walking back to the vanity, he picks up a lipstick and writes the word on the door at the opposite side of the room. As his voice rises to a shout, Wendy wakes up and takes the knife, telling him to stop, then sees the reflection of what he had written - spelling “Murder.” This turnaround can reveal something in

{Lacan’s comment that} Freud lets things drop in the face of this seizing up of the whole machine; he does not interest himself precisely in what makes it seize up, namely the waste scraps, the little remainder, what has brought everything to a halt and what is here that comes into question. … the structure of fiction at the origin of the truth… {Recalling the “paradox of Epimenides,” on the assertion, “I am lying” Lacan connects the paradox to Freud’s famous question, “What does a woman want?” then, denying that he is saying that "woman as such is a liar,” claims nevertheless} that femininity conceals itself and that there is something of that angle there. [34]

Wendy turns at a sound to her right, and we cut to the hall outside – to Jack hitting the door with an axe. Wendy takes Danny into the bathroom, opens the window, and has him slide down a semi-conical mound that the wind and snow had formed against the building. Having made a gap in the door, Jack looks through it, saying, “Wendy? I’m home.” He continues to “tease” them as she tries to get out the window, and, unable to, she finally tells Danny to run and hide. Jack, realizing that she must have locked herself in the bathroom, starts to hack at that door, pretending to be the Big Bad Wolf. He cuts a hole in the door, peers through that gap and puts his hand through it to turn the knob, and Wendy gashes his hand with the knife. Suddenly they both hear the snowcat approach. Jack turns, and we notice that there are now two holes in the door. We’ll peer through these gaps at the passage from Lacan’s next class, where he

{Reminds us that anxiety is not without an object, but that the object is inaccessible along the same path as others. Lacan says this is the reason} you see me, along one path, always coming back to these paradoxes of logic which are designed to suggest to you the paths, the ways in, by which there is regulated, there is imposed on us the certain style by which we are able for our part to succeed with this parapraxis: not to miss the lack … introducing my discourse today by something which of course is only an apologue, and on which you cannot base yourself on any analogy properly speaking in order to find in it what might be the support for situating this lack, but which nevertheless is useful in order to reopen in a way this dimension which in a way every discourse, every discourse of analytic literature itself, gives you, in the intervals, I would say, of the one in which here from week to week, I catch up with you, necessarily to rediscover the hinge of something which might close in our experience, and, by whatever gap it intends to designate this lack, would find in it something that this discourse could fill. [35 (Scholarly citations removed)]

We cut to Danny running down a hallway and hiding in a cupboard, then to an axe-holding Jack walking by meat-cutters. Meanwhile, Wendy, trying to get out to find Danny and having trouble opening the door, slashes at the handle with her knife in sheer frustration. We then see Halloran entering through the still-open Hotel doorway. Jack, passing the elevators, hears him calling and asking if anyone is there. After Jack surveys the Lounge and looks past the model of the labyrinth, we cut to Halloran turning into the lobby. As he walks toward the reception area Jack screams, coming into view around a pillar, and drives the axe into Halloran’s chest. We can let these twists and turns return us to Lacan, where he reminds us

{… that there is no lack in the real until the symbolic introduces one. In fact, Lacan asserts that lack is the} fundamental relationship for the constitution of any logic and in such a way that one can say that the history of logic is that of its success in masking it, which means that it appears to be akin to a sort of vast parapraxis, if we give to this term its positive sense. (He again brings up the topology metaphor and the cross-cap and says that} the function of the hole is not univocal. And this indeed is how you must understand that there is always introduced along this path of thinking that we describe in different forms as metaphorical in different forms, but always indeed being referred to something, this planification, this implication of the very simple plane as constituting fundamentally the intuitive support of the surface. {Like the object, the function of the hole is diversified, however, in a crosscap,} whatever cut you draw on the surface … we will not have apparently this diversity… [36]

From his hiding place, Danny screams, and Jack straightens, grinning. Approaching the kitchen entrance, he sees Danny leave the pantry and limps after him. We see Wendy, searching for Danny upstairs, turn toward an open door through which she sees a man in brown Doctor Dentons (with the flap open) and a “dog” (bear? [37]) mask. Both the costumed man, whose face had been in the lap of a tuxedoed man, and his partner straighten and look back at her. This strange pair can incarnate our next quote:

Every turn of our experience rests on the fact that the relationship to the Other, in so far as it is that in which there is situated every possibility of symbolisation and the locus of discourse, is connected with a structural flaw, and that we are obliged – this is the further step – to conceive that we are touching here on what makes possible this relationship to the Other, namely this point from which it emerges that there is signifier (du siqnifiant), is the one which in a way cannot be signified… But if you do not symbolise the penis as the essential element to have or not to have, she will know nothing of this privation. Lack for its part is symbolic. [38]

Jack pursues his son outside, and Danny runs into the hedge maze. We then cut to Wendy rounding a corner and finding Dick Halloran’s corpse. She turns, framed by an elevator, and screams – a tuxedoed, balding man with blood running from the top of his head down his face holds up a glass and smiles at her, saying, “Great party, isn’t it?” These wounds can open us to Lacan’s designation of castration as

… symbolic, namely it refers to a certain phenomenon of lack, and at the level of this symbolisation, namely, in the relationship to the Other, in so far as the subject has to constitute himself in the analytic discourse. [39]

We see Jack tracking Danny through the maze, yelling, “Danny! I'm coming! … I’m right behind ya!” then cut to Wendy running towards the Gold Room – finding there a frozen “party” of formally clad skeletons with bottles of champagne. Wendy’s discovery of the other face of “all the best people” can reveal further meaning in

{Lacan’s “fable” of} the insect who moves along the surface of the Moebius strip – I have now I think spoken enough about it for you to know immediately what I mean – this insect can believe that at every moment, if this insect has the representation of what a surface is, there is a face, the one always on the reverse side of the one on which he is moving, that he has not explored. [40]

Danny, meanwhile, begins to step back into the footprints he had made, then drops down and crawls backwards behind a bush, sweeping the signs of this movement away as he goes. Wendy, still searching through the Hotel’s corridors, looks down a hall to see the vision that her son had seen three times before – a tide of blood issuing out of the elevators. With these scenes we can catch the sweep of Lacan’s vision in his claim that

The spot of blood, intellectual or not, whether it is the one that Lady Macbeth exhausts herself with or what Lautréamont designates under the term “intellectual”, is impossible to efface because it is the nature of the signifier precisely to strive to efface a trace. And the more one tries to efface it, to rediscover the trace, the more the trace insists as signifier. [41]

We see Danny still hiding behind the bush as his father approaches the spot where his son’s tracks end. Jack looks around, smiling slyly, turns a corner and continues his search. Danny slowly comes from behind his hiding place and runs, following the trail he and his father had made. As Jack keeps looking, Wendy leaves the house and Danny exits the labyrinth. They spot each other, embrace, and leave in Halloran’s snowcat, winding down the mountain that their yellow Bug had ascended little more than a month ago. Overhearing them, Jack howls as he stumbles around the maze until, exhausted and freezing, he drops into a seated position in the snow. We see him in the daylight, frozen in the same position, then cut to the entrance to the Gold room. We track in on photos on the far wall until we close in on one of guests at a ball. In the center foreground is Jack, and as we get a closeup of his face, we hear a song that had been playing right before he had discovered the permanence of his caretaking position. The camera tilts down until we see the inscription at the bottom of the photo – “Overlook Hotel July 4th Ball 1921.” I’ll let the conclusion of this part of our analysis reverberate Jack’s ambiguous end:

Is there not some paradox here which requires things to be formulated differently, namely that the defence is not against anxiety, but against that of which anxiety is the signal and that what is involved is not defence against anxiety, but against a certain lack, except for the fact that we know that there are different structures, definable as such, of this lack, that the lack of the single edge, which is that of the relationship with the narcissistic image, is not the same as that of the double edge which I am speaking to you about, and which is referred to the least extreme cut and to the one which concerns the o as such, in so far as it appears, as it manifests itself, that it is with it, that we have, that we can, that we ought to be dealing, at a certain level of the handling of the transference. [42]

I’ll end this post with a recent article on how “all the best people” deal with their sense of lack.

1. Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson (screenplay) Stephen King (novel.) The Shining. (1980.) in: http://www.gianlucalazzarin.com. (Undated.)
2. You can find a recent interesting observation about this drive here. (November 23, 2014.)
3. Jacques Lacan. “Anxiety.” from The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X. (1962-63.) in: springhero.wordpress.com. (Nov. 28 – Dec 18, 2010. [Page 54])
4. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [55]
5. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [55]
6. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [56]
7. Elevators will figure prominently in the more anxiety-inducing scenes – Jack’s chair for writing will be directly ahead of one set, and to the side of another of them.
8. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [56]
9. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [57]
10. The Kubrick Corner has an excellent essay, “Imperfect Symmetries,” discussing aspects such as the similarities of the two profiles. It also covers the significance of numerous other details of the film, such as what other brand names we see in the storeroom, for instance, "Golden Ray" and "Tek Sun," suggest. in: kubrickfilms.tripod.com. (Undated.)
11. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [58]
12. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [59]
13. You can find a good analysis of the uncanny sense that Kubrick creates in his filming of the near-vacant hotel here.
Mike Mariani. “Freudian Trip: Why We Still Can't Get 'The Shining' Out of Our Heads” in: www.popmatters.com. (January 27, 2014.)
14. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [59-61]
15. See item 52 of “Imperfect Symmetries” in: kubrickfilms.tripod.com referenced above.
16. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [62]
17. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [62-63]
18. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [64]
19. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [64]
20. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [65]
21. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [65]
22. Jeff Bertrand: {Graphic Design & Illustration.} “Room 237 Carpet.” in: http://jeffbertrand.net © 2015.
23. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [66] *See also http://esource.dbs.ie/bitstream/handle/10788/160/Book-10-Anxiety.pdf for the diagram. in: http://www.lacaninireland.com. “Anxiety -Revised 10-05-2012.”
24. On the left side of the hall, across from the elevators, we see a balloon and its surrounding streamers which resembles a cracked skull in a pool of blood.
25. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [66]
26. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [67 (*and link to earlier Searching post re mirror stage.)]
27. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [67-68]
28. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [68-69 (*See also last Searching entry on this term.)]
29. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [69 (*I have transposed some quotes, here and elsewhere, for clarity.)
**See also “Anxiety -Revised 10-05-2012.” for the diagram referenced above.
30. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [70]
31. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [70-71]
32. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [71]
33-34. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [72]
35. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [73]
36. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [73-74]
37. The script says “dog,” but some have sensed its resemblance to other animals. The article linked above has an interesting analysis of this scene and other aspects of the movie. Rob Ager. "MAZES, MIRRORS, DECEPTION AND DENIAL: CHAPTER SIXTEEN DANNY’S ORDEAL" in: http://www.collativelearning.com/ (2008)
38-39. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [75]
40-41. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [76]
42. Lacan. “Anxiety.” [77]
43. Richard Spillett, Martin Robinson, Stephanie Linning for MailOnline, and Daniel Bates For Mailonline In New York. in: http://www.dailymail.co.uk. (January 2-3, 2015.)