🎯 Missing the Point
The Internet cheers like spectators at the gladiator games when Wendy "heroically" swings a bat around and then hits her husband in the head with it:
She assesses the situation and assumes power by heroically making the first move.
— Rebecca McCallum, "Sympathising With Wendy", Evolution of Horror, 2019
She goes then to find Jack, sensibly taking along a baseball bat.
— Idyllopus Press, "The Real Horror of The Shining", 2016
Saying this will earn me no new fans, but it must be said for the sake of correct film analysis: Wendy started the armed confrontation. She took a deadly weapon into the area of the hotel she had agreed to stay out of and swung it at her husband, which is felony menacing in the state of Colorado. Cheering for that, or calling it heroic, is a very shallow analysis of the movie, at best.
Any takeaway that celebrates the spectre of violence is acting out in miniature the true horror that Swept Across America, which Stanley Kubrick's satire film exists to characterize: the ancient evil of cultural and sacrificial violence.
Here's what happened. Jack asked for one room to himself:
— When I'm in here, that means I am working. That means don't come in. Now, do you think you can handle that?
— Yeah, fine.
She agreed to stay out of that room. When you are snowed in with someone for months on end, it is reasonable to request a private area where you can dependably focus on your work.
People falsely claim that Jack was not working. Someone actually published the book he wrote! Just because you don't LIKE what he wrote does not mean that writing it was not work, that it was not a manuscript, or that what he wrote somehow makes him inherently evil. What he wrote certainly does not justify violence against his person. At minimum, we can agree to that.
Wendy goes into that room while he's out, carrying a bat, and reads his manuscript. She agreed to stay out of his workspace, then entered it in his absence, armed, and read his private writing without permission. Whatever we think of Jack, that agreement doesn't stop existing because we dislike him. When he walks up behind her, she's standing there with the bat.
— I just… wanted to talk to you.
— What do you want to talk about?
— I can't really remember.
Jack threatens her: "I'm just going to bash your brains in." That's wrong. Threatening someone is not right.
But Wendy is the one holding the bat, while he asks her six times: "Give me the bat." Then she hits him in the head with it. That's assault with a deadly weapon. Period.
The law, as it stood in Colorado in 1980
Menacing was a misdemeanor, and a class 5 felony "if committed by the use of a deadly weapon." A deadly weapon included any "bludgeon… which in the manner it is used or intended to be used is capable of producing death or serious bodily injury." A baseball bat swung at a man's head qualifies.
Why does the deadly weapon make it a felony? The Colorado Supreme Court explained in People v. McPherson (1980): "a deadly weapon will cause a greater degree of fear in the person menaced," and the person menaced "may attempt to escape… or to defend himself by the use of violence." Trying to take the weapon away is exactly the response the law expects from the person it's pointed at. Jack's six demands for the bat are the menaced man's reaction, not evidence against him.
And arming yourself first doesn't make you the defender. In People v. Hawthorne (1976), a shop owner in an argument with a customer went behind the counter, came back with mace and a pistol, and struck the man on the head when the fight broke out. He claimed self-defense. The court upheld his assault conviction.
These writers set themselves one task: to analyse the film. And at that one task they fail, because they decided whose side they were on before they looked. Once you've picked a side, the evidence stops mattering.
She went in armed, so she was "sensible."
This is a laughably myopic pro-war argument. She is literally the armed invader of his declared territory. "Heroically making the first move" is the doctrine of the preemptive strike: arm yourself, walk into the other side's territory, and hit them before they can do what you've decided they were going to do. I am not defending Jack's temper, but the entire event that left her husband permanently maimed and braindead, and nearly killed him, was not forced and could not be characterized as self-defense. Jack is the victim of an actual crime. Taking the bat down there was a premeditated act of aggression. Menacing is illegal for a reason, because it is wrong.
Then there's how they tell it:
When he does make a move to seize it finally, at the top of the stairs, she whacks him on the head and he tumbles down the steps, out of commission.
— Idyllopus Press
Whacks him on the head. And elsewhere in the same essay: "Wendy keeps herself from being injured, whacks Jack, locks him up."
A catastrophic blow to the skull Jack never recovers from, written up as a sound effect. The violence is trivialized, cartoonified, onomatopoeiafied: WHACK! Followed by hilarious comic "tumbling" down a flight of stairs?
We celebrate when Wile E. Coyote is injured. Jack is presented like Wile E. Coyote. So we celebrate when Jack is injured. Cue Merrie Melodies soundtrack: That's all, folks!
The Shining is a film about history, violence, false religion, and credulity. Pretending that it is a feminist critique to begin with is not dealing with the work carefully, especially to the degree that the pro-violence attitudes that Kubrick is actually critiquing enter in service of, and thus undermine, the argument.
The plot of The Shining is not easy to decipher, and audiences superimpose their own preconceived model instead of actually interpreting the film, and thus make themselves the spectators in the gladiator games mentality that the movie exists to lampoon.