Jack becomes obsessed enough with the hotel's sordid past that he wants to write a book about it. He makes a long-distance call to the hotel's manager, Stuart Ullmann, and antagonizes him with this knowledge. Eventually, he goes mad thanks to the influence of the hotel's ghosts and attempts to kill Wendy and Danny.
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 the insanity sinks in he strays from his male roles as provider and attempts to murder his wife and son.
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.
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.
Ager cites Jack's experience in Room 237 as evidence that he's abusing his son. In his theory, he states that, inside the room, Jack is face-to-face with the truth of what he's been doing to Danny after having been in a dissociative state, previously unaware of his own horrific actions.
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 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.
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 novel, Jack gets redemption and burns the Overlook Hotel down; in the 1980 film, Jack doesn't get redemption, he simply freezes to death in the hedge maze while attempting to kill his son Danny, dying as a monster.
Why does Jack stick his tongue out in The Shining?
Jack's sticking his tongue out here at the mirror foreshadows the later scenes of crazy Jack, for this tends to be a tick with crazy Jack, he having a habit of sticking his tongue out in a grotesque manner.
Why does Jack appear in the picture 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.
We identified in previous chapters that Jack strangled Danny in the fatherly love scene and with these new details it would seem that he also sexually abused his son during this event.
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.
What mental illness does Jack have in The Shining?
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.
Both in the book, and the film, Jack is “Possessed” by the evil spirit that resides in the Overlook Hotel. We are never given a specific name or background on the “Entity”, but the follow-up film to The Shining, Doctor Sleep, sheds more light on all the different spirits that haunt the Overlook.
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.
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.
Despite its widespread praise, King famously despised Kubrick's adaptation of his book, so much so that he called it “a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film,” likening it to “a great big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside,” eventually remaking the adaptation himself into a teleplay to finally “correct” ...
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.
Danny even manages to anticipate what is about to happen by writing “redrum” on the bathroom door because this is where the murder will take place. The separation of Danny's alter ego voices into manifestations of Tony and Jack, through the presence / absence of his wagging finger, fits very well throughout the film.
