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☎️ The Party Line

"Boy, we could really have a good party in this room." Wendy Macabre, ever ready with more cannibalism puns. She cannot get the Donner Party out of her mind. "Great party, isn't it?" "Your son is attempting to bring an outside party into this situation." Let's see: we have party like party time, party like a party to an agreement, a contract, a peace pipe, a political allegiance, a group of settlers, a coven of cannibals.

But this post is about something else:

partyline wendy WENDY radio the Overlook radio wendy->radio KDK-12 to KDK-1 grady GRADY wendy->grady "They're G-R-R-R-eat!" ullman ULLMAN hallorann HALLORANN ullman->hallorann "phoned me last night" rangers the ranger station hallorann->rangers "radio them" larry Larry Durkin's garage hallorann->larry basement the basement camera frames plug the one-up plug a data line basement->plug plug->radio radio->rangers frames radio->rangers KDK-1 to KDK-12 rangers->ullman relay jack JACK grady->jack "an outside party" jack->radio sabotages: the frames go dark legend GOLD Wendy outbound BLUE basement camera outbound PINK Ullman back channel GREEN KDK-1 outbound

Two rules. Rule number one: everything in The Shining has a naturalistic explanation. Rule number two: Occam's razor. Then read the film with the rebus method, where props are words. The result is a different account of the movie. ESP doesn't exist, ghosts don't exist, Kubrick is a joker. The Shining is a whodunit, but parsing it as one requires forsaking the supernatural explanation of the plot.

Ullman's summons

Hallorann tells Larry Durkin plainly: Ullman called him last night. In the novel, Hallorann and Durkin are estranged until Hallorann proves his supernatural gift to Durkin's satisfaction. In the film, they're friends and colleagues, and the shining demonstration is gone. Hallorann has no reason to invent an alibi. There's nothing to cover up. We invented the theory that Hallorann was deceiving Larry to paper over our own misunderstanding of the plot.

The film cuts back and forth between Danny hallucinating and freaking out at the Overlook and Hallorann beginning to panic in Florida. We constructed a narrative in which Danny's distress was causing Hallorann's distress. The film never says so. And when it finally puts words to what's happening, rather than merely showing Hallorann driving through the snow, those words contradict the story we've told ourselves—which we then digest by classifying the statement as a lie and getting progressively farther off the plot.

But how did Ullman know something was wrong?

This is the tricky part. It requires an elaborate theory. But wait—didn't we promise to follow Occam's razor? Shouldn't that rule out elaborate theories?

Occam's razor was rule number two. Rule number one was no supernatural causes. However elaborate the explanation, we're looking for the simplest plausible theory that accounts for what we see. Once supernatural causes are excluded, the communications network is the minimal explanation consistent with the evidence. We work out the minimal configuration of such a triggering network, then look for its evidence in the film itself.

Where shining is insufficient

"We used to have conversations entirely in our heads." This is believable, to the extent that the conversations consisted of emotional states, and two people are in the same room. But the channel of communication is not magical; it's just facial expressions and body language. You can convey a lot of information this way. In Berlin in 1904, a horse called Clever Hans tapped out the answers to sums with his hoof. The psychologist Oskar Pfungst showed that Hans was reading his questioner: the slight lean as the count began, the relief in the face when it reached the right number. When the questioner didn't know the answer, or stood out of sight, Hans was lost. The questioner genuinely believed the horse was doing the mathematics. He was conning himself! But it does not work over long distances, where the physical signal is eliminated.

All we see of Hallorann shining when Danny's message is supposedly being transmitted is literally a moment of panic while he lies in bed. This could have any number of mundane causes, and the editing does not support the case that he is having a psychic experience. The camera cuts to one of the most famous and surreal scenes in the entire movie, the one where Jack apparently goes into room 237 and sees the hag. This scene does not plausibly have a connection to Hallorann in Miami. Based only on the juxtaposition of the jump cut, we supplied a missing narrative link that is not present in the film.

Egg MacGuffin

Wendy is a notoriously bad cook. In the novel she just mixes leftovers and adds noodles. In the film, the cooking we see her do consists of dumping fruit cocktail in a bowl; Danny's PB&Js, breakfast cereal and "chocalate" "milk"; and Jack's eggs sunny side up. But she has another job at the Overlook that we are overlooking.

And something goes wrong early in the plot, before we're even paying attention. We don't know exactly what.

We see Wendy say "I knew it!" which is a line uttered by the protagonist unravelling the mystery in The Door (1930). In that story, the "it" is given. But here what "it" is that Wendy "knew" is never explained! It's a bit annoying, but that's just a film trope as old as Hitchcock. We don't need to know what she is talking about. We need only understand that whatever is happening on screen is relevant to the plot, not extraneous throwaway material. We must make sure we don't leave relevant facts out of our account.

So Wendy knew it. She's frantically messing with the hotel switchboard, and perhaps all she knew was that the lines were down. But then she goes straight into Ullman's office, wasting no time contacting the ranger station to ask about the phones. When the ranger asks if she needs anything, she says no. He then tells her to leave the radio on all winter, and she agrees.

The scene is incredibly bizarre and deserves a separate reading. But sticking to our minimal viable theory, without filling in the details, here are the mechanics:

  1. Wendy cannot get a line out.
  2. She immediately contacts the ranger station to ask if the phone lines are down.
  3. When asked if she needs anything, she says no. (This is a let-down on the first watch, but we become numb to having watched a scene that apparently did not advance the plot.)
  4. The ranger, for some reason, tells her to leave the radio on all the time. She agrees.

Strip out the noise:

  1. Phone lines go down.
  2. Radio is now to be left on all the time.

The phone lines were expected to go down; they go down every winter. For this reason, we wonder why Wendy is panicking, and why she urgently contacts the ranger station but then doesn't need anything. There is a subtext.

Whatever happened on Wednesday is for the most part not relevant to the communications network we are diagramming. It largely serves the same function as the visit to Victor's bathroom with the overdosing prostitute in Eyes Wide Shut, as a sensory overload and misdirection to keep us from thinking about what's happening offscreen. There are two scenes that matter for the minimal theory:

  1. Wendy in the basement
  2. Jack disables the radio

Hallorann gets increasingly more worried until he finally commits to cancelling his vacation and going back to the Overlook. And Jack killing the radio—the one the ranger said to leave on—is the final trigger resulting in Hallorann's urgent flight the next morning. Reading that fairly we can see:

  1. Hallorann cannot receive any detailed information psychically. He resorts to physical communications, calling the ranger station by telephone, and relying on the rangers' radio.
  2. He finally gives up and goes back only after Jack completely disables the radio.

Like Clever Hans, Hallorann doesn't need a message. The signal is the moment an expected signal stops.

The network

We don't need a communications network or ESP to explain Hallorann's return. Ullman called him, and he could simply have had a bad feeling and decided to go back. But that explains only his decision, not the evidence surrounding it. The communications network accounts for the radio instructions, the ranger calls, the apparent data line, and the timing of Jack's sabotage. It's a more elaborate theory because it explains more of what Kubrick put on screen. And it incorporates the actual hidden plot of the Overlook—its dark underbelly—which the weak "vibes-only" reading ignores.

The blue line is the expected signal: an outbound transmission over Ullman's radio on another band, carrying camera frames from the basement. We see the plausible data line itself, posing as a power cord, in the background during the Interview. Ullman is monitoring the feed and sees something distressing early on—exactly what, we don't know. At least the younger ranger at the ranger station is in on it, somehow decoding the frames and relaying the information to Ullman—that's the pink line. The overt channels to and from KDK-12 and KDK-1 are the yellow and green lines.

Most problems with caretaking the hotel can wait until spring. But whatever is happening in the dungeon beneath the hotel, which the cameras are monitoring, cannot wait. When the signal stops, its absence becomes the final alarm.

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