GET HER, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Shelley Duvall (The Shining, 1977, 1980)

THE SHINING (book - 1977, movie - 1980)

The Torrance family winters at the beautiful, isolated, historic Overlook Hotel. In thanks to this once-in-a-lifetime honor, they blow it up and let it burn to the ground.*

Shelley Duvall should never have been cast as Wendy Torrance. There. I said it.

Sad, pleather loneliness. For want of a
dust jacket, the kingdom was lost.

I've said it many times. Over many years. And in many ears, both piqued and bored. Why should anyone care who plays Wendy when Crazy Train Jack Torrance is played by Wild Child Jack Nicholson and he's the "main guy," anyway. The character of Wendy Torrance is simply a tool, a device, a whining obstacle. And the survival of little Danny Torrance is all that really matters, in the end...the sweet baby child with the enormous supernatural gift who must somehow stand and face his beloved, sick, frustrated, failure of a father, weakened by untreated alcohol addiction and compromised by malevolent forces in the hotel whose only interest is adding one special, psychic boy to their cast of misfit, murderous party guests, the white hot fuel to their ethereal existence. Wendy's just some puling ninny flailing a bat as she's backed up the stairs by a mean mouthed dull boy who calls her darling (light of my life) in one breath, then threatens to bash her brains in at the next.

Except she's not. At all.

I believe this started as a glossy yellow
stamping, but it very well might've been
yellow matte, gold matte, who knows.
The years have taken their toll.

That was Kubrick's vision for his classic movie version of The Shining; a vision that departed quite critically from King's novel in many ways, both minor and major. I could pick apart every last one of them (hedge animals vs. hedge maze, explosive fire vs. freezing in the snow, the fate of Hallorann, the downplay of the history and supernatural elements of the hotel) but the one decision I could never respect was turning struggling, depressed, hopeful, imperfect, protective, and strong mother Wendy Torrance into the lilting, mealy-mouthed, placating, weak, helpless sad sack who just happened to get lucky with the swing of a bat.

The Shining was the first Big Person novel I ever read. I consumed it like anniversary cake over a few breathless, hot August days at the end of a summer packed with crushing transitions. For the previous two years, I'd attended a miracle of modern education, a place so completely different from the usual public school routine, it was literally a dream come true for someone like me. Isely Alternative was a primary school for gifted students grades 4-6. The classes were mixed, and much of the work was completed on each student's own self-managed time via contracts due every week. There were focused sessions for math, music, and other subjects (lost in memory), but otherwise it was a fairly easygoing learning environment with non-traditional classrooms and a motley crew of crunchy, artistic, wild, and winsome teachers piloting the ship. Each class environment was primed for free thinking, with lounge-y lofts, bric-a-brac study tables instead of uniform rows of individual desks, beverages for sale by the office and a canteen out of Mr. D's classroom window during recess. We could listen to our Walkman (if we had one), eat a big pickle, read sci fi graphic novels from the fun bins by the windows, and even converse if it was low and respectful of others. The time was ours to learn and grow. There were no grades. No As, Bs, and Cs on report cards--we were just expected to complete the work and concentrate on areas for improvement.

As shameful as it is to admit it, with maybe one brief
reprieve, this book spent the entirety of my alcohol
abuse stage being kicked around the floor, jacketless
and severely devalued. It should be no surprise at all
that I could barely keep up with a simple
Entertainment Weekly subscription, let alone tackle
whole books during this period of time.

Unfortunately for me, my primary area for improvement was completing contracts at all. I had all the time in the world for the things I enjoyed (reading, writing, music, art), but struggled with pretty much all the rest of it. I even got a Talking To by the principal in front of my whole class--humiliating--and was excluded from Track and Field day--liberating, but still humiliating. It was one thing to get to rewrite all the dialogue for my character in our traveling performance troupe (the original script was written in the groovy language of the 60s/70s and needed updating to the totally gnarly 80s), but Math? Science? History? Ech. Not remotely fun, even to the groove of Hall and Oates' H2O boppin through the headphones. Fer. Sher.

I didn't get kicked out (thank goodness, and Mrs. Terrill) and made it all the way to the end, when on the last day, during the last half hour of school, all the kids were allowed to go out into the halls and say one last goodbye to each other. Let me tell you something: This was a Scene. Every year, without fail, a Major, Whole Scene. Imagine all these little kids in their Jordache jeans, Lacoste shirts (then known as Izods), rainbow heart shoestrings in their hair, the boys all briny and yodeling, the girls bawling like it was END of EVERYTHING. Imagine the little faces, boys embarrassed shuffling, tracks of black mascara running down the babyfat cheeks of those so-grown sixth grade girls, red little noses, hugging as though Death itself was waiting outside those double doors and not the usual fleet of buses that would take us safely home, just like any other day. It was wrenching to be in, and the very pinnacle of preadolescent ends of innocence, so endearing and bittersweet.

Gnarled, but still all in one piece. I cannot overemphasize how amazing this
is. The binding has stood the test of time (and my kicky foot, so so sorry).

Of course for the sixth graders it was the end of the world, more for some than others. The transition to a new school is challenging for everyone, but graduating from grade school to junior high is a whole other level of trauma. So many seventh graders really are still just kids and are in no way prepared for the hormonal storm broiling on the horizon. If you're not getting harassed into a corner by some friendly fingered Lothario, you're getting shouted into the mud by friends (or foes) that you're a Prude, a Tease, a Baby, etc., and should get on the same sticky Hustler page as everyone else.

I knew the kids at Isely were definitely at different stages of sexual interest and experimentation, and there was certainly a lot of Big Talk out of little lying mouths in the schoolyard during recess or on the rowdy bus home every day, but it was a largely innocent place with starched little problems that were kept civil and in the light, so to speak. I think the biggest controversies my sixth grade year were The Slap Heard Round the Quad (an African American girl had it up to Here and smacked a very entitled white girl who also happened to ride my bus and acted like the Queen of the Scene which she was not) and Let's Play the Choking Game and Try to Die (popular boys who tried it at school of all places and of course got caught so that we were all subjected grave talks about it afterward because the adults were hyperpissed). That was it. Things were cliquish, sure, but I don't remember fistfights or hair pulling in the halls. And I was never touched without consent. No awkward come ons, either, let alone verbal assaults. I think I held my sixth grade boyfriend's hand once, for like three minutes. Ooo la la. Scandale!

Rough cut sexiness does get a bit mushy over time
and use. Still looks pretty good, though.

So, transitions. I cried my eyes out on the last day of school at beautiful, idyllic Isely, got on the bus and went home to our modest neighborhood on the east side of town. A couple of weeks later, at my birthday dinner at Chi Chi's no less, I was told that my mother was about to be laid off from her job. Not long after that, we learned that my best friend and closest confidant would be going to Venezuela on an extended stay with her mother, three months max (it was ten, but who is counting? and she only came back to visit, so more like 2-3 years?). I spent the summer watching my mother sell off some of our irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind furniture, shopping with my friend and her mother for fun clothes for their grand tour, boxing up what was left of our belongings to soon be moved to another part of town, and cleaning this simple, most beloved little home to, most memorably, the premier of a new song called "Drive" by the Cars (now forever imprinted as a terrible, horrible, no good song, at least in my mind, world without end, amen). Even now I can't hear that horrid song without falling into a mean sort of melancholy, where I feel both sad and slightly homicidal. Being a child is a helpless sort of thing is so many ways; your choices are limited your fortunes are completely out of your hands. Adults ask a lot of questions, but they rarely care what you think, especially when it's not what they want (or think they want). King has a keen sense of the helpless fury of teenhood, coming up soon in Christine...but more on that later.

My friend left in July, and in the days beforehand, her mother's family decided to throw an anniversary party for their parents, the lauded maternal grandparents--a kind, wry old gent and the Meanest Grandma on Earth. In the chaos of the party and the packing, all that was left for our last nights of giggling and gossiping and general goofery was a tv and betamax, a mattress on the floor, and a freezer full of cake. We watched Grease 2 and similar cinematic fare from sun up to sun down, lazed about the pool, laughed, tanned, stole cigarettes and smoked them around corners, forever giggling, and ate white cake with white icing until even we could only beg No More. Then she was gone. No internet, no cell phones, not even an address to reach her. It was several months before I got a letter.  Just gone.

Dueling bookplates. The first is my mother's--the true owner; the second
was mine, full-fledged fancy pantsin. Names blurred to protect the
folio foolios.

Soon afterward, my mother and I moved to the little dark house with a tiny fenced yard in an unfamiliar neighborhood. A shadow of unhappiness clung to everything, every day. Once a thin rail of a thing, I started eating to create pleasure. Especially sugar confections. I wandered through the annals of my fledgling teenage obsessions--glossy magazines full of British bands, scrapbooks pasted with lyrics and mementos, things once cherished beyond price--but the bands were all breaking up and the songs on the radio had all changed. The unknown quantity that was middle school was on the immediate horizon, and I felt both excited and fearful at the same time. How it turned out--far worse than I ever imagined--was probably a major cornerstone to the catastrophic thinking I battle to this day.

Half title simplicity.

I spent that summer in a constant state of low dread. Dreading the move, dreading losing my friend, dreading the new school. There was an ever present pit in my stomach...except for those glorious days I spent reading Stephen King's The Shining. It was completely immersive and engaging, fascinating, and intense. It was profoundly disturbing and unblinkingly terrifying. I was wrapped so tight around the plot shifts in that book, I could barely stop to do anything else. I belonged to it, lived in it, felt the cold of the snow, the low terror and cloying claustrophobia of being trapped in a place with monsters, both unknown and piercingly familiar, even beloved. I was wrecked. But good wrecked. Someone else's dread, someone else's horror, somehow soothed my own. I didn't get it then, but I get it in the full 360 degrees now.

But the moment that got me the most, the passage that imprinted on me so hard I can still feel the dent in my bones, is the real showdown between Wendy and Jack Torrance. There's no need to embellish. She didn't reload a shotgun with one arm like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. She didn't strip to her Amazonian battle suit and charge through a field of gunfire like Wonder Woman. But she sure as fuck didn't totter up the stairs bleating "stay away from me" while whimpering and crying and swinging the bat with no real intent at all. No. In the book, he comes for her and they fight. It's horrible. It's violent. It's painful to read and to imagine. Through all of their tenuous hopes for the future, the brittle past, the outrage, the desperation, the shame, and the love--real, devoted love--it all breaks down to this. A brawl on the staircase, blood, bone, a butcher's knife, a roque mallet, sweaty, grunting, growling, screaming.

At the start of it all, Wendy Torrance is a lovely housewife with a five year old son and a troubled, struggling husband. Her son is prone to trances and talks regularly with an imaginary friend named Tony. He knows things he shouldn't know, says things that are beyond his wisdom, and scares her badly. Her boy loves his daddy. She loves her husband. She is committed to the marriage, sees signs of hope, goes where they need to go to make a new start, even if it means being trapped in a hotel up in the American Rockies while swells of snow bunch up against the doors, potentially isolating them from the world for months. She nags, she worries, she dotes. She's as good as a female character gets in the early King works. And you know what else? She argues. She gets angry. She gets in Jack's face, throws a mask from a ghost party that should not be possible but somehow is (bringing the hotel alive in fits and starts in the middle of the night) and screams at him. She doesn't speak in light, baby tones of ever present acquiescence. When things start to get crazy, Wendy states her mind. And when Jack finally comes for her, she fights.

I absolutely adore these first edition ad pages. There's
so much more to come. It is hard to imagine the
depth and wealth of worldbuidling just over the
horizon. I mean...my heart?

That's Wendy Torrance. And it stuck with me. Reading The Shining didn't save me from the ugliness that happened in my personal life over the next two years, but it helped. I was never happy when my mother made her various stands (because so often the showdown happened on shaky ethical ground, e.g. fighting with chattering moviegoers in a theater we snuck into without paying I shit you not) but I did know right from wrong, and I certainly knew that no man (or little greasymouthed middle school boy, for that matter) had a right to touch me without my permission. How many times did I say "no" or "stop" and practice my Karate Kid parrying moves in middle school? Infinity. Infinity times, that's how many. How many times did I wish I could Wendy up, so to speak, and knock some handsy kid's teeth in? Not as many as you'd think. Because I desperately wanted to be liked...and didn't have the advantage of adulthood, driving destiny, completely in control of my Self. Wendy Torrance--and even the brass knuckle that was my mother--was aspirational. In the haze of preteen hormone glaze, I could only hope to someday lift my head and try to do half as well as Wendy Torrance did on that staircase of the Overlook Hotel.

I used to direct all of my vitriol in the wrong direction, but I'm older now, better now, and genuinely sorry that I ever bad mouthed Shelley Duvall. She shouldn't have been cast as Wendy Torrance. But she was only part of the problem. As we all know now, Kubrick verbally herded her into submission, and in an act of truly toxic "method" directing, psychologically and emotionally abused her into the cowed, puling idiot that so much of the world knows as "Jack Nicholson's wife in that horror movie" [1]. It was Kubrick and co-writer Diane Johnson who decided to rewrite King's character into the wet mop so many are familiar with today [2]. You can forgive many of the changes (animated animal hedges would have been impossible in 1979 without looking exceedingly claymation-dorky and probably would have come off more silly than scary no matter how they shot it) but shortchanging the Wendy Torrance character is the truly unforgivable decision. You can argue that shooting a psychological breakdown is more relatable and convincing than allowing the hotel the full force of its supernatural influence. You can say Hallorann had to die so that the stakes would be that much higher (but...no). You can even justify all the joyful hamming that Nicholson brought to the character of Jack Torrance (sellz ticketzzz?). The mood and cinematography are LIT, but bareass truth be told: the only dialog I have ever enjoyed in Kubrick's The Shining has been (and will always be) the scene on the goddamned stairs. It's true. Because I've divorced the two works in my mind. I had to. Every movie made from (or inspired by) a book is just an interpretation in the end. They rarely follow the exact events of the book, and sometimes have almost zero in common with the source material (ask Stephen King how he feels about Lawnmower Man). Sometimes the reinterpretation is successful, sometimes it's just a goddamned shame. In this case, the book and the movie are about a man who takes a job as a winter caretaker for a ritzy mountain hotel and brings his family along for the season. And it goes just awful. The end. Best keep the details separate.

Full title matches half title and that's how
you do it.

I can enjoy the scene on the stairs because I am a sick, sick individual. I also believe that this was the intent of Kubrick all along. Duvall's Wendy Torrance is not sympathetic. Certainly not in modern times, but I'd argue it was a stretch even in the olden days of "the traditional family," e.g. working pop, homemaker mom, 2.5 kiddies in crisp, clean clothes and a dog named Spot. Even if you can stretch your mind around that image, where daddy is the only adult and mommy is a sort of sub adult that obeys her husband and follows his every lead, you still end up yelling at the screen "For God's sake woman, do something, you've got the bat, knock him out, fight for your child, fight for yourself, what are you dooooooing?" To which Duvall swings ever so lightly and says she wants to go to her room and take...a...nap? It's an outrage. And a dirty trick.

I rarely danced as a child and totally flunked out of ballet when I was six, but ask me how much I danced at my eighth grade graduation. All. Night. Long. I had no idea how "over" it was about to be (so many kids dropped out between middle school and high school it should have been newsworthy), but I must have sensed that transitioning out of my nightmare middle school and into the unknown (but at least familiar) high school was going to improve my situation at least...enough. And in that very summer after I left the horror of middle school behind (all play and no work make Jack a sick boy), something incredible happened.

On July 18, 1986, James Cameron's Aliens was released in theaters [3]. My mother and I watched it at the old Twin Lakes cinema (RIP), old standard seating, speakers turned up to eleven. It was electrifying. First, let's just state facts: Aliens is a first-class action movie and a rip roaring horror romp. It is a fantastic film jammed with harrowing plot twists, thrilling slogs through dread and racing shocks of terror, characters you jeer for, cheer for, and will love for frickin evermore, and a  take-no-shit, suffer-no-fools, badass, kickass, knock your ass to the ground and step on your crying little head heroine extraordinaire, Ellen Fucking Ripley. I sat in that theater with my hands clenched to the rests, careening with every turn of fate that woman endured, managed, and just fucking handled. It was galvanizing.

Aside from the credits, another spare copyright page,
direct and to the point.

When my mother and I recently discussed sad Wendy Torrance in Kubrick's The Shining, the subject of believability came directly to the fore. In a novel published in 1977 and a movie released in 1980, would audiences believe that a simple housewife could go toe-to-toe with her roque/ax wielding, completely psychotic husband? Maybe not. I was a kid growing up in a one-parent household. I never saw my mother acquiesce to anyone, let alone some Dull Boy with crazy eyebrows and an over-inflated sense of self worth. But she was an adult during this period, navigated the tempestuous waters of women in the workplace during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and knew firsthand how demoralizing and flat out dehumanizing the experience could be. So maybe Kubrick believed that King's version of Wendy was too much for the average moviegoer. Maybe they wouldn't buy it, or maybe he thought she would be somehow less sympathetic if she fought back in earnest, spoke her mind so readily, and didn't mince around the kitchen heating soup and asking everyone if everything was okay and let's all be nice to each other. Maybe Kubrick himself didn't believe Wendy was a realistic representation of a late 1970s American housewife. Yet a mere six years later, there stood Ellen Ripley, hipshot and exhausted but holding tight to sweet little orphan and survivor Newt in one arm and the Biggest Fucking Gun in the History Guns in the other, quietly considering a literal field of monster eggs, with the biggest, most terrifying xenomorph Queen in the universe hulked, hissing and all teeth bared, above them. With one greasy crack of an egg and and one "Oh Fucking Well" tip of an expression, Ripley laid waste to the future of the Queen's hive with a flamethrower and ran, Newt and Gun still clutched in her arms, for their very lives. A mere six years later.

And I'd argue that there have certainly been Very Assertive Women in media since forever. Scarlett O'Hara (Gone with the Wind, 1939) in that ruby dress with blue eyes shining, just daring anyone to say one goddamned thing as she walks her tricky ass into that party. Could you ever imagine Margo Channing (All About Eve, 1950) being backed up those stairs by smarmy-mouthed, snothead Jack? She would no doubt have given him a very bumpy ride. And it would be remiss not to mention that Ripley herself was fighting sexism and space aliens on screen a year before Kubrick's The Shining debuted [4]. So what gives?

Maybe Kubrick needed more than a haunted hotel, isolation, cabin fever, and a bloviating, mentally unstable dry drunk to justify the murderous conclusion of The Shining. And what's the one thing all miserable married men can relate to? He asks them to imagine being snowed in a freaky hotel with a creepy kid, a burning addiction that thirsts forevermore, and a whimpering, simpering, weak nag of a dreary wife that just...won't...back off. A mewling cunt that dares to read his non-manuscript without permission then pleads her excuses up, up, up the stairs only to tap him on the head with a bat and lock him in a pantry. Well, any man could relate. Any man might not pick up and ax and here's Johnny his way through an apartment while his wife is screaming bloody murder and his son--a baby, a tiny five-year-old child--has what amounts to a seizure in the next room. Any man, whose flaws are badges of honor--the drunken father, the alcoholic chaos, the good times rolling until crashing to a discordant jangle of a wrecked job, frightened and vulnerable family, and a stalled writing career--who is truly not responsible for what life has unleashed upon him. If not for the kid, if not for the boss, if not for circumstances, if not for that godforsaken NAG.

Still one of the best first lines, ever. Also note the last line
included in the picture...need I really say more? 

Think about it. Maybe Kubrick wanted everyone to look at Duvall's Wendy the same way I always have: with contempt. She starts off grating and just gets worse and worse. Once you've got her on the stairs, it is difficult not to see it as high comedy. Sick, but still. I've even yelled "Get her" at the screen, because I wanted her to shut up, too. Stop being...that. And later when he takes an ax to to bathroom door, are her shrieks not a carillon of deliverance? Get. Her.

But he doesn't, neither in the movie nor the book. Hallorann comes to the rescue via snowmobile. In the book, all three make it out alive. In the movie, only Wendy and Danny escape. We cheer when they rumble off, as the croaking shrieks of "Danny, Dannyyyy" get weaker and weaker as Jack flails through the snowy hedge maze, lost. But I was never really cheering for Wendy, except for the fact that she was the tool necessary to get the boy to safety. In King's book, you're cheering for everyone...even Jack at one point. Alas, that aspect of the character would have been too complicated for the "average" American audience to understand (though they seemed to get it just fine from the bestselling book, but whatever)...or maybe it didn't fit into Kubrick's vision, either. So little did.

[All subsequent commentary will be directed to the book only.]
Grade: A
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 8, you legit might die.
Warnings: Casual bigotry, n-word, mean dandies, magical negro, fledgling jive talk, redrum detpmetta.
Artifact: Beaten to hell hardcover, black leather(ette) casing, glossy yellow stamping, no headbands, rough cut, white endpapers, thick cream stock. The jacket was saved separately in a folder for decades but has now gone missing (possibly in that NYC landfill, oh well). Examples of the design can be seen here. I have read this edition into the ground, but the spine adhesive still holds strong, if not a bit wobbly, which is a testament to the quality of the craftsmanship.

*Horace Derwent wrote this intro lol. Medoc says hi.