Wendy Darling – THE SHINING

It is by no stretch to call THE SHINING is a masterpiece.  Not just my kind of masterpiece, either, which may vary wildly from the standard definition.  The grand status of this film is a widely held opinion.  It is the defining cinematic statement on atmosphere.  Stanley Kubrick gets the lion’s share of the praise, which is valid, given the movie is 100% his vision.  Jack Nicholson is also lauded for his supremely disquieting portrayal of Jack Torrance, again justifiably.  We also think of the weird little kid croaking “Redrum” over and over.  I feel that people tend to overlook (ha ha, Shining pun) Shelley Duvall’s contribution to the movie, though.  This is despite the fact that the terrified face of Wendy Torrance is just as iconic as Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny” pose.  That terror is usually the first and only aspect of her performance that comes up.  With all her shrieking and shivering, Wendy is rarely used as an example in lists of strong female characters.  I don’t think that is a fair assessment.  THE SHINING has at least a semi-annual spot in my October horror line up, so with this viewing I focused entirely on the poor, put upon housewife, and found that Wendy is more than meets the eye.

Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) finds her simple life upended when her emotionally distant, recently sober husband, Jack (Jack Nicholson), hauls her and their spooky ass six-year-old son, Danny (Danny Lloyd) deep into the Colorado mountains to the scenic Overlook Hotel just as the place is shutting down for the winter.  For five months, the family of three will be the sole occupants of the cavernous hotel while Jack looks after the place and works on his great American novel.  Even though her selfish hubby is the only one happy with the arrangement, Wendy puts on a smile and tries to make the most of it.  The Overlook’s grand features like the gilded ballrooms, bold carpet patterns, and the challenging hedge maze soon lose their appeal, and Wendy’s days are filled with tense monotony.  With the increasingly cranky Jack pounding away at his typewriter at all hours, and Danny incessantly tooling around the hallways on his Big Wheel, the only human contact Wendy gets is chatting for a couple of minutes with the local rangers by radio.  Sure, there’s always Tony, the little boy who lives in Danny’s mouth, but who the hell wants to listen to that downer.  To make matters worse, she starts to suspect her no account husband has fallen off the wagon, thanks to his mysterious new pal, Lloyd the Bartender (Joe Turkel). Plus, he might have taken up with that child abusing floozy in Room 237 (Lia Beldam/Billie Gibson).  When she discovers that Jack’s big writing project has all been a sham for him to goof off with his ghost friends, Wendy finally puts her foot—and her bat—down.  Jack winds up in the dog house (or technically, locked in the pantry) until his enabling bar buddy, Grady (Philip Stone), butts in and riles him up into a confrontational mood.  Wendy has had enough of her husband’s bullshit, though, and has made up her mind to take Danny out of this unhealthy environment and leave Jack in the cold.

The biggest takeaway from my Wendy-centric viewing was that I rarely considered the Torrance family before coming to the Overlook Hotel.  There is not a lot of footage, just two scenes of Wendy and Danny in their small Boulder apartment and the one scene of them on the road to the hotel.  These scenes are key to understanding Wendy’s character, however, and why she reacts the way she does.  Her timid deference and forced smiles are classic symptoms of a woman in an abusive marriage.   

There is no indicator Jack lifted a hand to her prior to their winter getaway, but at the very least, he was emotionally abusive.  Nicholson lays on the contempt and condescension as thick as the Colorado snow in every word he speaks to his wife on the way to the hotel.  Obviously, the abuse becomes exponentially worse once the ghosts start driving him mad, but it was present from the start. 

The scene in the apartment where the doctor examines Danny has another classic example of abused spouse behavior.  Wendy bends over backwards to put a spin on the accident that put Danny in the hospital when he was younger.  Oh, no big deal, my drunk husband yanked up our three-year-old son so hard he dislocated his little shoulder.  Just one of those things that happens all the time.  Smile, smile.  She also lies, or at least misleads, about the timing of the accident in relation to when Jack stopped drinking, making it out to be the silver lining when they really weren't connected.  She is trying to convince herself as much as to the doctor.

It is easy to see why Jack takes to the Overlook so quickly.  Jack is the Overlook.  Just like the haunted hotel, he is cold, distant, and unsettling.  Underneath his pleasant-ish façade, dark desires and malicious impulses dwell.  Not much effort was required to nudge old Jack from simmering, resentful father to raving psychopath.  He’s certainly having a lot more fun in life once the safety cap comes off.  Jack is such an easy mark that the ghosts must have been hi-fiving each other when he walked through the door.  Or whatever the 1920s ghost version of a hi-five is.  

I was not exaggerating when I called Wendy Torrance an icon.  She is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with horror, Kubrick, or cinema in general.  No one else looks like Wendy, not even Duvall in real life or in other roles.  One factor is the wardrobe.  Wendy defines mom casual to such a degree she seems to have walked straight out of the women’s apparel section of the 1978 Sears catalogue.  Name one other person who could pull off wearing a bright red long sleeve shirt and stockings under a blue Raggedy Anne dress?  Other than your mom in the '70s. 

Another factor is the actress herself, who does not conform in typical Hollywood model.  Duvall had a very nontraditional beauty and physicality, and those traits were amplified with Wendy.  With her thin face and huge, wide eyes, Wendy is almost birdlike.  She looks like a fragile creature, even before being overtaken by terror.  Once things really go south, Duvall throws herself so deeply into fear that she is practically the physical version of Munch’s The Scream.  I think the only person who tops Duvall’s commitment to hysteria is Marilyn Burns from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.  

The thing is, even though Wendy seems frail and timid, looks can be deceiving.  Both Jack and his misogynist ghost buddies totally underestimate her.  Jack spends too much time savoring her confusion after she discovers his “manuscript” that he gives Wendy the opportunity to clean his clock, even if she is holding the bat all wrong.  Wendy, on the other hand, wastes no time getting her momentarily disabled husband locked away tight.  If it wasn’t for some spectral intervention from Grady, he would be in that pantry until spring.  

A slight aside about the manuscript reveal.  “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is another bit from the movie that has been forever entrenched into pop culture (even Homer Simpson paraphrased it).  The scene is so well known that it almost loses its impact.  When you really think about it, though, that shit is devastating.  Wendy’s perception of Jack suddenly tilts from “grouchy and on edge” to “totally divorced from reality,” and that he has been that way for a long time.  Even if he is only repeating the same sentence over and over, that is months of work at a manual typewriter, especially with all the creative formatting.  Which means Jack was off the deep end almost from the very beginning.   

Additionally, it makes the scene early on where he is being an absolute dick to her when she interrupts his “work” that much worse.  The nerve of that guy.  This motherfucker didn’t lose his train of thought, he was only working with ten words.  All that time she was busy doing his real job of maintaining the hotel for him, he was just slacking off and having drinks at the bar during Ghost Happy Hour!  She should have busted him upside the head right then.

Another aside - I hope my wife doesn’t think this is what I’m doing when I say I´m working on my blog.  

Yes, Wendy does settle in for a nap after she locks up her psycho hubby in pantry prison, but you can’t blame her.  It has been an emotionally draining few hours.  The second Jack starts hacking away at the bedroom door, though, Wendy is back on the clock.  She doesn’t waste time trying to question or reason with a man swinging an axe, she gets Danny (temporarily) out of danger and slices open Jack’s hand when he reaches through the door to unlock it.  Some might say she is saved when Jack is distracted by Dick Hollorann (Scatman Crothers), but I think Wendy had a good chance of taking out the bastard even if he forced his way into the bathroom.  At this point, Wendy had already given Jack a cracked noggin, a bad limp, and a lacerated hand.  The worst injury she’s had is a sore throat from all that screaming.  

Speaking of Dick Hollorann, this poor dude has even worse luck than Wendy.  He should have been safe as houses in his swank Florida bachelor’s pad, but he’s such a decent guy that he can’t ignore Danny’s call for help that comes shining into his dome.  He flies all the way across the country, drives up a mountain in a blizzard, and slowly plows the rest of the way up in a rented Snow-Cat, only to get an axe in the chest as soon as he walks in the hotel.  Thanks Danny, that worked out well.  I’m glad for any screen time I can get, though, because 1) Scatman is always a welcome addition, and 2) he gives the best “what the fuck are you talking about” expressions ever.  

The primary action from that point on is between Jack and Danny, but there’s no down time for Wendy.  The Overlook pulls out all the stops to drive her off the deep end, slapping her with one nightmarish vision after the other.  She even gets hit with an insane bit of furry fellatio, a scene that left me as confused as Wendy the first time I saw it as a clueless preteen.  No judgments now, of course.  However two consenting adults, alive or dead, want to express themselves is fine by me.  In this context, though, it’s still a bit of a shocker.  Despite the decayed partygoers and elevators of blood, Wendy refuses to crack up.  She escapes the hotel, scoops Danny into her arms, and trucks away in Hollorann’s Snow-Cat, leaving Jack lost and alone, destined to become an ice sculpture.  

Incidentally, wouldn’t it be fitting if Ghost Jack gets stuck in a crummy service job for all eternity, like Grady and Lloyd?  Having to wander the hedge maze every day in overalls, forced to keep the bushes tidy.  All three of them hanging out at the bar after hours, just complaining about women.  Losers.

So, while Wendy Torrance may seem to be a weak, hysterical pushover at first glance, when you really dig into it, she kicks all sorts of ass, both physical and ethereal.  I hope Danny appreciates what a great mom he has and make her a really awesome macaroni picture for her next Mother’s Day.  Maybe get Tony to lighten up a little bit around her, too.  I have the feeling that little boy inside her son’s mouth really freaks her out.  In any event, let’s raise a glass to the indomitable Mrs. Torrance, who left her good for nothing husband and a hotel of unspeakable evil in the rearview of a dead man’s Snow-Cat.  Cheers.

C Chaka

A Carton Full of Crazy - THE STUFF

When the troubles of the world start weighing me down, it’s nice to take refuge in the absurd.  For me, absurdity is best consumed in one and a half hour chunks.  Senselessness in real life is depressing, senselessness in movies; pure entertainment.  It’s the only time I enjoy being completely baffled.  There are no right or wrong answers with movies, they are there to interpret as you will.  I find the most absurd movies lead to the wildest, most inventive interpretations.  Pound for pound (or pint for pint), it doesn't get any more absurd than Larry Cohen’s 1985 horror satire, THE STUFF.

The Capsule:

A slack-jawed rube discovers a spring of thick white paste bubbling up from the ground of the quarry where he works.  Like any reasonable person in that situation, he tastes it.  The stuff turns out to be quite yummy, so he takes the next obvious step of collecting it to sell to other hungry goo lovers.  An undetermined time later, the stuff—now cleverly branded as The Stuff—is a nationwide success.  So successful, in fact, that the powerful ice cream cartel hires industrial spy David “Mo” Ruthaford (Michael Moriarty) to steal the secret ingredient.  With the help of ousted cookie king Chocolate Chip Charley (Garrett Morris), guilty marketing head Nicole (Andrea Marcovicci), and child anti-Stuff terrorist Jason (Scott Bloom), Mo uncovers the real secret.  Far from being an innocent, highly addictive desert, The Stuff is really a sentient, mobile life-form that slowly takes over the body and mind of the creature who eats enough of it.  Mo and his band will have to act fast to expose the truth before The Stuff obsessed country literally eats themselves into oblivion.  

This parable of dangerous fads and blind commercialism could only come from the mind of director Larry Cohen.  The ballsy independent filmmaker was the king of the premise.  A monster baby slaughters everyone in the delivery room and escapes into the city!  An ancient, winged dinosaur bites the heads off New Yorkers and roosts in the spire of the Chrysler Building!  A reanimated cop roams the city streets imposing the death penalty for even the slightest infractions!  He sold ideas so catchy and sensational that it didn’t matter that they made no sense whatsoever.  More impressively, Cohen had the skill, vision, and confidence as a renegade director to turn those ridiculous ideas into massively entertaining movies.  He laid it on at full speed, stealing shots wherever he could get away with it, hardly giving the audience a chance to breathe until the credits.  Do you remember those old Roadrunner cartoons where the coyote would run across thin air until the moment he looked down, acknowledged reality, and plummeted to the ground?  That was how Cohen directed movies, except he never looked down.  

THE STUFF is Cohen’s most ludicrous plot by a mile.  Intelligent yogurt seeping up from the earth taking over the country through effective marketing.  Cohen’s nonstop, slam ahead pacing jumps over all the details of how this could have come to pass, with the clear message of “just go with it.”  The thing is, when you think about it, the premise is disturbingly plausible.  Tobacco and alcohol companies still do great business, even though we already know their products are addictive and dangerous.  Effective marketing can popularize even the most worthless product (AXE Body Spray comes to mind).  In the movie, all the members of the FDA who approved The Stuff (and legally protected it’s secret ingredient, just like with Coke!) have died or left the country.  The assumption is they were all taken over by The Stuff, but that might not have even been necessary in real life.  As long as the price was right, a Trump appointed FDA would have passed it in a second.  

Another byproduct of Cohen’s “to hell with the details” style of directing is near the total disregard for names.  In my notes, I referred to Scott Bloom’s character as “the kid” because no one, not even his family, calls him by his name until the last act.  The company that manufactures The Stuff is never named, despite being the focus of the entire film.  I just call it StuffCo.  I extrapolated that the head of StuffCo (Patrick O'Neal) was named Fletcher just because he said he owned some mines, and later there is a partially covered sign that says Fletcher Mine and Quarry (plus, it's in the credits).  Mo and Chocolate Chip Charley are the only people with often repeated names, which is probably just because they are used for reoccurring gags.  Most of the other schlubs in the film are just credited as Postman, Waitress, or That Guy.

It hardly matters, though, because much like his previous Cohen collaboration, Q: The Winged Serpent, Michael Moriarty owns this movie.  I’ll never understand why Moriarty didn’t become a household name.  He brings an offbeat charm to even his lowliest loser role.  Here, he plays Mo Ruthaford as something of a hayseed James Bond, confidently jumping into dangerous situations, thinking on his feet, and disarming people with his unassuming goofball act.  As he says to the ice cream consortium after totally showing them up, “Nobody is as dumb as I appear to be.”

It’s more of a consequence of the rapid-fire script, but Mo seems to have a serious commitment issue.  He never spends more than a few scenes with anyone before coming up with some excuse to part ways.  Immediately after fighting off a pack of StuffCo goons, Mo sends Chocolate Chip Charley off to contact the FBI, even though I’m fairly sure the FBI have telephones.  He saves Jason from his Stuffed up family, only to stick him on a plane to Savanna in the next scene (he escapes the plane before it can take off, though).  I didn’t realize Nicole was going to be a major character because after her flirty introduction to Mo, she disappears without a mention for the next twenty minutes.  Even after everyone bands together at the end, Mo is still telling people to run to the truck, or go set something up.  For such a social guy, he has a real lone wolf complex.  

One grave failing of the movie is not giving Andrea Marcovicci’s character Nicole enough credit for coming up with the world’s best marketing campaign.  She took what amounted to a carton of plain yogurt and turned it into the sexiest, must have product on the market.  The purple, pink, and brown color scheme for the logo is as iconic as it is simple.  You don’t even need the logo to recognize the brand.  A lot of the company vehicles simply had the purple, pink, brown stripe as a designation.  Which is good, since the company doesn’t have a real name.

The role of Nicole is an odd one, flip flopping between traditional and progressive.  She heads a successful business, and she aggressively takes charge of the negotiations when Mo is posing as a high powered businessman in need of a good PR campaign.  The next time we see her though, she is clearly involved in a romantic relationship with Mo, even after he lied to her face.   Throughout the rest of the movie, she plays second fiddle to Mo, but of course, everyone plays second fiddle to Mo.  She does get some good digs in, like when they are trying to con their way into a tour of StuffCo and she introduces him as her “male secretary”.  Plus, her quick thinking saves Mo from suffocating when she uses kerosene to burn the glob of Stuff off his face.  In retrospect, that idea is closer to “recklessly impulsive” than “quick thinking”, but it worked, so she gets the points.

The real treat of the movie is the dead on ‘80s style fake commercials for The Stuff.  Just like real commercials of the time, The Stuff spots are all clean and upbeat, with pretty, smiling people backed up by a catchy score.  Everyone is enjoying the product without ever talking about it.  They seem like a prototype for the Mentos ads of the ’90s. Come to think of it, what exactly is in a Mentos?

The commercials also give the opportunity to sneak in a lot of cameos, like Cohen regular Laurene Landon and Brook Adams (giving an INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS nod).  The nuttiest, most definitively ‘80s commercial features a bickering old couple in a fancy restaurant, who are played by Abe Vigoda and Clara Peller, the Wendy’s “Where’s the beef” lady.  And yes, she does ask “Where’s the Stuff?” 

There is also a random, uncredited cameo by Eric Bogosian as the super pissed supermarket manager who finally tackles Jason after his anti-Stuff rampage.

I tend to get this blob mixed up with THE BLOB (1988), so I’m always surprised by how little blood is in THE STUFF.  In some ways, the creatures’ behavior is completely opposite.  The Blob eats its way through the flesh of its victim, the Stuff takes over from the inside, while leaving the shell intact.      The Blob is a mindless eating machine, the Stuff is clever and insidious.  The deaths in THE STUFF aren’t as spectacularly gruesome as those of THE BLOB, but they are much more fun.  Since the Stuff’s victims (Stuffies) are hollowed out for maximum goo storage, their bodies are more fragile.  Cohen comes up with all sorts of inventive ways to burst them apart like chunky red piñatas filled with melted ice cream.  Additionally, when Stuffies have the urge to purge, their jaws stretch out to unnatural, and sometimes obscene proportions.  It’s like a super unsettling live action Looney Toons cartoon.  

One body is just as good as another to the Stuff, which leads to a great sequence where Mo meets with loose lipped FDA administrator Vickers (Danny Aiello) who is deathly afraid of his “pet” Great Dane.  When Mo leaves, the pooch unplugs the telephone while Vickers is trying to call for help and corners him under a table.  Name me another movie where Danny Aiello desperately negotiates with a dog not to barf up suffocating goo into his face.  That alone makes this movie worth seeing.  Regretfully, the Stuff dog never makes another appearance.  

Things take a strange(r) turn in the final act when Mo suddenly enlists the aid of a renegade militia group lead by Commie hating nutball Colonel Malcolm Grommett Spears (Paul Sorvino, Moriarty’s soon to be Law & Order costar).  It turns out that Spears is also a successful businessman and owner of several large radio stations.  After the largely futile attack on StuffCo’s manufacturing plant, Mo and co. run to the radio station, where Spears reveals to America the truth about their favorite snack.  The craziest part is, America instantly believes him.  Mobs of angry citizens start burning all their cartons of the Stuff and blowing up the McDonald’s style Stuff restaurants.  It's that simple.  In real life, the idea that the country would readily support a sexist, racist, conspiracy theory believing egomaniac who offers no proof to back up his wild claims is totally absurd.  

Oh…right.  I guess there is something more absurd than THE STUFF.

C Chaka