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 showing the symptoms of schizophrenia and attempted to kill his family.
What mental illness does Jack have in The Shining?
There are several types of schizophrenia experienced by Jack Torrance, including schizophrenic simplex, schizophrenic hebephrenic, schizophrenic catatonic and schizophrenic paranoid.
Instead, the movie suggests that Jack's behavior aligns more closely with Schizophrenia, marked by hallucinations, persecutory delusions, avolition, and impaired occupational functioning.
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.
As a result of the incidental physical-abuse at the hands of Jack & the sexual-abuse by Wendy, Danny has developed dissociative-identity-disorder (inventing Tony as his defense-mechanism) & delusional-schizophrenia (thinking he's telepathically communicating w/Halloran & hallucinating the past & the future in his ...
The Shining: Did Jack Torrance have schizophrenia?
Is Jack hallucinating in The Shining?
Over the course of The Shining, Jack becomes more and more untethered, hallucinating long-dead people that he never could have known. Outwardly, this appears to be Jack losing his grip on reality, but it could be proof that he simply doesn't understand his own abilities.
While living at the Overlook, Danny experiences terrifying visions of the various evil spirits that inhabit the place, including a desiccated old woman who tries to choke him. He also experiences visions of the word “redrum” – “murder” spelled backwards.
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.
In the film, Danny walks backwards in his own footprints to mislead Jack, then jumps to a side path and slips out of the maze. Wendy and Danny escape the hotel in Hallorann's Snowcat, while Jack gets lost trying to pick up Danny's tracks, sits down to rest, and freezes to death.
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.
Much like Psycho, The Shining centers around one man, Jack Torrance, and his descent into “madness.” Similarly to Norman, Jack has a troubled past as well as delusions that both play a role in his unraveling.
Jack Torrance in The Shining has many psychopathic features. He is a bully to his wife, a child abuser, and has a history of alcoholism. He has difficulty keeping a job. He shows little love for his family, but he is quite capable of being charming and manipulative when it suits his purposes.
From the very beginning of the novel, Jack expresses symptoms of an individual that has suffered a narcissistic injury. Jack's ego faces several such injuries as the narrative progresses; this chapter analyses how these injuries impact Jack's psyche and how they eventually lead to reactive violence.
The character of Jack illustrates the connection between alcoholism and abuse and simultaneously underscores the potentially devastating effects of isolation on mental health. Most of all, Jack represents the profound connection of family, which King implies can't be easily broken, by supernatural means or otherwise.
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 novel The Shining has the settings of psychological conflicts. In novel Shining the influence of claustrophobia, alcoholism, sleepwalk, mismanagement, temper, frustration, isolation and abusive parental care are the reasons of tragedy.
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.
The camera quickly cuts to the next scene. It is morning, and Jack is dead, frozen in the maze, trapped in the Overlook Hotel forever. The final shot of The Shining is the real kicker as the camera zooms in on a photo hanging in the Overlook Hotel.
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.
It's made very clear from the beginning that he was a drunk and a violent husband and father. He seems to go to the closed down hotel in hopes to get sober, since there's no booze at the hotel when it's closed. However.. We also see how cold he treats his family during the ride up to the hotel.
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.
In the novel, Danny is the Overlook's primary victim, and Jack Torrance is simply used as a conduit to get to Danny. The hotel wants Danny dead so that it can absorb his “shining” ability to add to the Overlook's plethora of dark energies, so it possesses Jack in his vulnerable state to try to kill Danny.
One of the biggest giveaway's that Jack strangled Danny is a shot in which Jack walks down a mustard coloured hallway before switching on the lights of the Gold Room. In the previous scene he was accused by his wife of choking the boy and in this scene his reaction to the presence of mirrors confirms her accusation.
His knack for always being around when a patient dies earns him the nickname Doctor Sleep - Doc, for short. That's ultimately how the shining works - it connects people to the past and the future, kind of like a horror version of the Force.
