Even though Jack does not have access to alcohol, he shows all the symptoms of alcoholism, and his family suffers because of it. When the Overlook Hotel finally convinces Jack to kill Wendy and Jack, it does so by getting him drunk.
Jack has a bourbon on the rocks in his hand, and the waiter spills three flutes of advocaat on his clothes and into his drink, inadvertently creating a beverage that Jack doesn't even drink in the film.
Jack Torrance is a recovering alcoholic, and he thinks about drinking all the time. Alcoholism is strongly linked to dysfunctional families, domestic abuse, and cycles of family violence in the novel. Jack's father was an abusive alcoholic and Jack breaks his own son's arm in a drunken rage.
The family has to care for the hotel for the winter, but they cannot leave the mountainous area. In this isolation every day becomes the same for Jack as his writer's block becomes quotidian. The combination of isolation, monotony, creative frustration, and supernatural forces extract Jack's insanity.
The story presented Jack Torrance as a man who dislikes authority. He moved to an isolated hotel with his wife and his son in Colorado over the winter, hoping to improve and cure his poor writing. As the days passed, he began showed the symptoms of schizophrenia and attempt to kill his family.
At the hotel, Jack begins to display the telltale signs of drinking that Wendy has come to know so well. He constantly wipes his mouth with a napkin and chews Excedrin one after another.
Jack tells Danny to run and remember how much he loves him, before the hotel's power takes over again and forces Jack to bash in his own face with the mallet. Jack had forgotten to dump the boiler, which grows too hot and causes the hotel to explode. Jack is killed, but Danny, Wendy and Hallorann get out just in time.
Moments later, he would improvise the “Here's Johnny!” line, which was a reference to the intro of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Interestingly, Kubrick originally shot the scene with a fake door, but Nicholson – who once trained as a fire marshal – chopped it down too quickly.
The ending of The Shining, particularly the photo of Jack in the 1921 ballroom, suggests that Jack is a reincarnation of a former hotel employee, although this explanation is not explicitly stated in the film.
Once you realize that Jack has been absolutely bonkers long before taking the job as the caretaker for an isolated hotel, everything the man does in the film starts to make more sense, and his end becomes an inevitability instead of a tragedy10. Jack's subtly crazy presence also serves to “other” him.
Jack also exhibits negative symptoms of Schizophrenia, notably avolition, which involves a profound lack of motivation to complete even simple daily tasks. His inability to make progress on his writing, despite having the time and solitude, is a glaring example.
In the 1980 film, Jack (Jack Nicholson) does not get possessed by the hotel and is instead convinced into killing his family. At the end, he chases Danny through the hotel hedge maze. Danny (who'd played in the maze with his mother earlier in the film) recognizes how to escape, leaving Jack to freeze to death.
Jack tries to kill Danny, but his love for his son breaks through long enough that Jack allows him to escape. Moments later, Jack causes the hotel's boiler to explode, destroying the hotel and himself.
After a corpse tries to strangle Danny in the infamous room 217 and Wendy and Jack see the resulting bruise on their son's neck, Wendy accuses Jack of abusing Danny.
Why is Jack in the photo at the end of The Shining?
This scene has been interpreted in many ways, and one of the most popular explanations is that it represents the hotel “absorbing” Jack's soul. Although this makes sense, Kubrick himself has said the photo actually suggests Jack being a reincarnation of an earlier official at the hotel.
Soon, after a winter storm leaves the family snowbound, the supernatural forces inhabiting the hotel influence Jack's sanity, leaving his wife and son in grave danger.
As such, Grady has always been the butler, just as Jack has always been the caretaker insofar as they were both imprisoned in the future by the hotel, and their spirits became anachronistically part of history.
John Daniel Edward "Jack" Torrance is the secondary antagonist of the 1980 psychological horror film The Shining and a minor character in its 2019 supernatural horror sequel Doctor Sleep, both based on the respective Stephen King's 1977 and 2013 novels of the same name.
The film's final shot zooms into an old picture hanging in the hotel's hallway, of guests attending a ball on July 4, 1921. Standing front and center is Jack, smiling right into the camera. Kubrick has explicitly stated that the photograph suggests the reincarnation of Jack, possibly of a guest or staff member.
Summary. The bear scene in The Shining, although strange and out of place, has a disturbing implication of sexual abuse, according to film scholar Rob Ager. The presence of bear symbolism throughout the movie, as well as the connection between Danny and Jack Torrance, suggests a deeper meaning behind the bear scene.
It's not until Grady, the ghost of the former caretaker who axed to death his family, slides open the bolt of the larder door, allowing Jack to escape, that you are left with no other explanation but the supernatural.
Wendy hits Jack on the head with the bat at the top of a flight of stairs, causing him to lose his balance and tumble down the staircase, injuring his ankle in the process. Wendy drags Jack's limp body to the pantry and locks him inside, just as he regains consciousness.
Kubrick gives the viewer a clue when Wendy is experiencing a hallucination using the camera's placement. According to the theory, when the camera is facing the back of the characters, the perspective of the story shifts into Wendy's perception of reality.
