In ‘The Shining’, why is Jack scared of mirrors?
Stephen King is firmly in the minority by not viewing Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining as one of the greatest horror movies ever made, but he’s about the only person qualified to hold that opinion, seeing as he’s the guy who wrote the source material.
For the rest of the population, Kubrick’s masterpiece is an enthralling slow-burning psychological tale dripping with all the subtleties, nuances, symbolism, and thematic underpinnings that defined his legendary directorial career, anchored by an increasingly unhinged Jack Nicholson tour-de-force.
The duality of Jack Torrance is key to understanding what drives him to become a homicidal maniac, and while it may seem an obvious and blatant visual cue on the surface, The Shining nonetheless uses repeated shots featuring mirrors to showcase not only his crumbling state of mind but the character’s hatred of what he’s becoming and the inability of escaping his fate.
Whenever he witnesses or encounters a ghost within the Overlook Hotel, there’s a mirror present. The most obvious is his spine-tingling face-to-face with the woman in room 237 and again when he’s conversing with Philip Stone’s Delbert Gray in the red bathroom. However, when he can’t physically see Grady during their conversation in the pantry, there’s no mirror in shot because they’re only talking to each other through a door, underlining the spectral undertones of the innocuous ornamental decorations.
While that could open the door to theorising Jack is the only person who can see them, and they’re not real, that’s counteracted by Danny seeing the Grady twins, while Shelley Duvall’s Wendy begins to see them towards the end of the narrative. With ‘it’s all in his head’ being ruled out, then, what could the significance of the mirrors be?
When Jack is walking down the corridor of the Overlook, the only time he supposedly ‘randomly’ gesticulates wildly comes when he’s passing directly in front of a mirror. That suggests he’s slowly becoming one with the hotel itself, with the paranormal trappings of the establishment only taking effect when he’s in full view of a mirror. It could also nod towards his inner demons threatening to finally break loose and take over his psyche, creating an internal sense of fear that being anywhere near one could push him past the point of no return were he to dare make eye contact with himself.
Of course, mirrors themselves both figuratively and literally reflect Jack’s mindset. Anyone who looks into a mirror is only seeing a reflection of the real world, inverting reality to a certain extent. Things that are reflective can also shine, tying their recurring usage to not only Danny’s innate gifts, but the inversion of Jack’s personality, the internal struggle taking over from within, and his fear of being overcome by forces he has no means of controlling.
The word redrum is reflected in a mirror, the aforementioned ghoul of room 237 is only seen in her true aged and decaying form in a mirror, the twins are mirror images of each other, Jack is shot via the reflection in the mirror while he’s sleeping one month into the family’s Overlook residency, and when he wakes up not only has the frame been flipped away from the mirror, but he remarks on experiencing a sense of déjà vu.
At large, the use of mirrors within The Shining relative to both how they function in the scene and relate to the characters around them signifies the imbalance between reality and fantasy. Jack slips from the former into the latter, aided by Kubrick’s imagery illustrating at every turn through the use of mirrors that there’s a distinction between the two, but there’s little Jack can do about it when he’s caught in the maw of the Overlook’s entrancing grip.
Even at the very end of The Shining, Jack catches a glimpse of a man who looks exactly like him in a photograph dated from 1921, a literal mirror image of himself trapped between past and present, destined to repeat the cycle for eternity as the hotel’s latest permanent resident.
