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“A momentary loss of muscular coordination” (The Shining and abuse)

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Originally posted to Patreon on August 22 2020. The original text has been preserved with minimal corrections and changes added for clarity. A spooky All Hallow’s Eve to all.

Content warnings apply.

Stephen King’s The Shining is vexingly sympathetic to axe-murdering alcoholic Jack Torrance. King’s Jack is a guilt-wracked, weakened man who is ultimately broken and consumed by his alcoholism, violent pugnacity, and the Overlook Hotel. The novel frames Jack’s story as the tragedy of a weak man who loses a battle with his fatal vices. Have a read of this passage where Jack lashes out at Wendy for asking about his well-being:

“Jack, are you alright? You look pale—” He snapped his head away from her fingers. “I am fine!” She recoiled from his hot eyes and tried on a smile that was a size too small. “Well… if you are… I’ll just go and wait in the park with Danny…” She was starting away now, her smile dissolving into a bewildered expression of hurt.
He called to her: “Wendy?” She looked back from the foot of the stairs. “What, Jack?” He got up and went over to her. “I’m sorry, babe. I guess I’m really not all right. That machine… the lens is distorted. I’ve got a really bad headache…”

It’s a logical step from Jack belittling and berating his wife to swinging a croquet mallet at her. King writes Jack as feeling guilty for his failings, as if this somehow redeems him or makes him sympathetic (King has that ever-popular style of writing two-dimensional characters downpat — give them a fatal flaw and a virtue and voila, your book has Dramatic Nuance!). This gets into troubling territory, as King attempts to render Jack a sympathetic villain through his own guilt. And, sure, real abusers can sometimes show remorse. It does not inherently endear them to onlookers nor does it reduce the grossness of a spectacle that consists of “woe is me, a poor abuser struggling with my abusiveness!” It’s hard not to read King’s desperation to treat Jack sympathetically as a craven alibi for toxic masculinity, which pays lip service to the harm caused by abusive men but still manages it to center around their pain.

This gets especially messy when King writes Jack as a misanthrope with a loathing for every person he meets. The opening passage of the book explicitly states that he’s a wholly unpleasant bastard:

Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick. Ullman stood five-five, and when he moved, it was with the prissy speed that seems to be the exclusive domain of all small plump men. The part in his hair was exact, and his dark suit was sober but comforting. I am a man you can bring your problems to, that suit said to the paying customer. To the hired help it spoke more curtly: This had better be good, you.

So much for reading Jack sympathetically. Equally troubling are the lengths to which King has gone emphasizing that Jack is a thinly-veiled cipher for his own alcoholism, as if “but he’s sad that he dislocated his kid’s shoulder!”…

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Get Out of My House

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Get Out of My House

CW: This entire blog post discusses domestic abuse, sexual violence, and severe emotional manipulation at length and in triggering detail.

“The little fucker had thrown my papers all over the floor. All I tried to do was pull him up… a momentary loss of muscular coordination.”
Jack Torrance, The Shining.

***

The woman who raised me had seemingly few qualms about shrieking her disapproval at me several times per day. Usually she accomplished her purpose with words, but sometimes she would punctuate her castigations with a punitive strike of her hand. It was unclear to me what this accomplished beyond making me afraid of my own parent. If that was her purpose, she succeeded impressively.

In the summer of 2015, I learned that there was a familial precedent for my birth-giver’s violent tendencies. For a couple months, I stayed with her parents while she worked abroad. After a minor argument in which I told the family that an extended episode of severe depression would impair my ability to join the family on a daytrip, my grandfather trailed me to my guest bedroom and aggressively pushed me through the door. As I attempted to raise myself from the floor and understand what had just happened, my grandfather stormed into the room, leaned on the floor, and pinned me down with his thumb close enough to my windpipe to be threatening. I recall little of the following altercation, except for when I was called an “evil little shit,” “an unruly child,” and worth reporting to the police. When the cops eventually arrived at the house (a process that entailed my grandfather disconnecting the landline while I barricaded myself in my room as my then-mother pounded on the door and begged me not to call the police), they concurred with my family. I was told later that my ambiguously defined ill behavior was out of line and repeat incidents could call for juvenile detention. The event was left unaddressed.

Months later, my birth-giver pressured me into emailing her father an apology. At that point, I acquiesced to the idea that I was a delinquent whose behavior disrupted and hurt the whole family. It felt like a resolution. I was at peace with my family, insofar as one can maintain a truce with a person who remorselessly assaulted them. The fatuousness of viewing abuse stories as having a clear-cut beginning or ending did not occur to me. I could do nothing but retreat inward and shrink, hoping desperately that I could be small enough to escape from the small-minded capriciousness of the people who should have raised me.

***

The Dreaming sees Kate Bush turning towards an epistemological centering of subconscious and repressed emotions. It calls to the listener, inviting them to unleash their trauma, rage, and fear in torrents of vital and horrible catharsis. Bush reveals that the adolescent optimism of her previous albums, while real and legitimate, masked deep-rooted emotions beyond neophyte positivity and bravado. While those other albums (particularly the doleful Lionheart and sometimes Delphic Never for Ever) contain great darkness themselves, The Dreaming sees Bush unleashing the id, allowing the powerful emotiveness of her work to reveal its full breadth and ability to be furious, wretchedly disconsolate, and full of hurt.…

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The Empire of Vanilla

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Some things I’ve noticed about ‘Spearhead from Space’

There’s a lot of wood in this story.

                             
                                                        

This suggests a contrast, a conflict even, between older forms of production – the appearance of the hospital, and the Seeleys’ cottage, suggest artisanship – and newer industrial technology and mass production, represented by the factory and the evil plastic which creeps out of it.

There are lots of workers in this story.  There’s a Nurse.
There’s Mullins.
Mullins, one of the many wage labourers in this story…
seen here in the act of labouring for his wage.  

There’s a workman in the street, talking to the copper before he investigates the (off-screen) breaking of shop windows (implying the role of the police as protectors of private property and business).  There’s the guard at the front gate of UNIT HQ.  There’s the guide at Madame Tussauds.

There are the workers in the plastics factory.

I don’t know, but I’d guess that these women – together with the male worker
seen earlier in the episode, operating heavy machinery – are actual workers
in the factory where these scenes were filmed.  One of the women is Asian,
which is a pretty big clue that she’s a ‘real person’ rather than an extra.

Some of the workers are ‘fake’.  There are Auton Porters who help kidnap the Doctor.  There’s an Auton secretary at the factory.  Note how the Nestenes still employ a young woman in a short skirt as a secretary, even if she is made of plastic… but then such women are usually treated like mannequins in practice anyway.

These waxen-faced, blank, zombified workers strongly suggest an extreme form of alienation: line hypnosis, a psychological condition where people are lulled into passive, unresponsive fugue states by constant repetition of the same mechanical tasks – found most famously in people who perform extremely simple tasks at conveyor belts.  More broadly, it suggests the deadened, flattened affect of people who find their Fordist jobs dull beyond belief.

Think this is a stretch?  But the story makes a point of commenting upon automation.  The monsters are called Autons.  We see, as noted above, faceless factory workers at their tedious, repetitive, assembly-line jobs.  And General Scobie, the swaggering old reactionary establishment figure par excellence, upon hearing that the plastics factory has become largely automated (which means a load of people have lost their jobs), makes a crack about automation being a splendid idea because “you don’t find machines going on strike!”  In other words, workers should be treated like and behave like machines…. and replacing them with machines is the next best thing.

There is much literal commodification – often of people – in this story.  Ransome is paid off… even his name suggests a payment for a person.  Seeley tries to sell his “thunderball” and nearly gets his wife killed.  Mullins sells the Doctor to the journos.

“I understand you pay for stories?”

But ‘Spearhead’ really harps on about life being commodified… most particularly by its concentration upon production.…

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