“The Shining” Helped Me Acknowledge the Violence in My Marriage

When I watched The Shining for the first time, the movie got stuck right when Jack Nicholson’s character takes an axe to the door of the room where his wife is hiding. “Here’s Johnny,” he’s about to declare, thrusting his face through the half-demolished door. But we got stuck just before that, when the door is still largely intact. The wood is splintering, the axe is poking through, and Shelly Duvall, face wild with fear, is cowering in the corner and clutching a kitchen knife with both hands.

As I was wiping the iridescent disc against my shirt—it was the era of Netflix DVDs, and this one had a stranger’s thumbprint on the back—my husband asked what I thought of the movie so far. Even though the DVD was no longer in the drive, the laptop screen still had the image from the movie on it: the door, the axe, the terrified face. I was scared, the way you get scared when you watch a scary movie. I really couldn’t see a way out of this for Shelly Duvall, and my heart felt tight in my chest, like a giant hand was squeezing the breath out of me. Maybe that was why I didn’t think before answering, with total sincerity, that it reminded me of us.

If you can imagine a marriage in which that was an honest answer, then you can also imagine what a bad idea it was to give it. Luckily, my husband was more surprised and hurt than angry. It might have been the first time I’d come so close to mentioning his violence towards me. We never talked about it, the way we never talked about certain bodily functions or his unwritten dissertation. I can’t really remember what happened next, but I must have walked my comment back successfully, because I know we finished the movie and that the sight of Jack Nicholson’s demonic face, frozen and blue, left me dizzy with relief.  

To be fair, my husband never came after me with an axe, and I never screamed the way Duvall does in that scene. As I discovered when he careened around our apartment armed with smaller, duller bladed objects, I am not good at screaming: I can yell in anger but, when terrified, I make a kind of rusty squeak. The real parallel between us and the Torrances, though, wasn’t Jack’s axe, but the creative ambitions that led him to pick it up in the first place. On this first, electrifying viewing of the film, all I could see was a link between creativity and violence, and all I could hear was what I took to be its central message: stay away from writers. Too late for me; like Wendy Torrance, I had married one.

There are, I can now see, other things in The Shining. It’s a movie about alcoholism and weird hotels and the genocide of America’s Indigenous peoples—to name just a few of the seemingly infinite interpretations out there. But that first time through, it boiled down for me to writing and violence. Typewriter and axe. The film articulated a circuit between creativity—or at least creative ambition—and destruction. This circuit was the defining feature of my life at the time, and far more than anything I had read online about the cycle of violence, the movie told me that what I was going through fit a pattern and was therefore really real. By recruiting the viewer’s sympathies for Wendy while making Jack into a maniacal villain (at least in the movie’s final scenes), it also told me that I was, astonishingly, not the one in the wrong. That this was a revelation tells you the degree to which I had entered into a weird version of reality, one in which my husband’s writing was the center of the world, and anything that impeded it warranted his rage.

We had met soon after college and started graduate school together, but while I was on track to finish a dutiful and exciting-to-no-one-but-me dissertation, he had set his aside to write essays on art and film. For a long time, even as I came to understand writing as an essential part of my husband’s being, I thought of his anger as a wholly separate thing. It felt like something optional and temporary, like an ugly jacket. He was a gifted writer and quickly found some success, but “some success” was never enough. When his writing wasn’t going well, or when an editor passed on his work, I would suffer. He would sit on me, or shove me in the closet, or throw me down on the bed—actually, a second-hand futon held together with tape and dowels—and hover over me with one of our thrift store kitchen knives, glowering. Once he threatened to cut off my head. I think I laughed. It would have taken forever.

About two years before I left, he began to cut off my breathing regularly. Holding the back of my head, he would press my face against some soft surface: the bed, his own chest. Once, he held my head against his chest for so long that I thought I might die. I remember the shift from not being able to see because my eyes were closed to not being able to see because I was losing consciousness: the familiar multi-colored dark behind my eyelids disappeared, and real darkness took its place. After that, if I felt the household weather shifting, I would slip on my shoes, grab my backpack, and be gone before he knew it.

But for a long time, none of it felt real to me: the threatening, the shoving, the knives. It all seemed temporary, false: a bit of bad theater. What felt real—what felt true—was singing private, made-up ditties in the kitchen, or walking for miles to see a green hill covered in yellow poppies, or seeing his work show up in my inbox and stopping my own to tinker with it. In the story I told myself about our future, when the time came—when he was successful enough, lauded enough, published enough—he would set his anger aside, and its unreality would stop casting a shadow over our “real” life. Watching Jack Torrance terrorize Wendy on screen, I saw a different story, one in which the habit of anger became inextricably entwined with writerly ambition and finally replaced it, becoming an end in itself.

If something crystallized in that moment, something was lost, too. It wasn’t just that I loved my husband (and I did). It was that I couldn’t imagine even a single day on earth without him. To take his anger seriously—to acknowledge that it put me in actual, physical danger—meant letting go of a long, shared history. If I had once told myself his fury wasn’t real, by the end, I had trained myself to assign that unreality to everything that had ever been good between us. I had to, to be able to leave.

After I left, he called relentlessly, making endless demands, one of which was that I never write about him. For a decade, I didn’t. In retrospect, the request strikes me as prescient (after all, here we are) but strange. For most of our marriage, I focused on academic work, constructing carefully researched arguments over a satisfyingly blocky foundation of footnotes. I typed all the time, but I didn’t write the way he did: widely, freely, using personal experience as a lens to view the world.

For most of that decade after our divorce, I associated creativity with violence. At its start, I briefly dated someone who worked in a theater. If he expressed the hope that a show would go well or (worse) the fear that it wouldn’t, I would, like clockwork, dream that he was screaming at me or chasing me. In one dream, he tried to skin me. It was a relief when he cheated: when he left, his nightmare double went, too.

After that breakup, in a bar with a friend, I overheard a man droning on and on to a very patient woman about his screenplay. My friend rolled her eyes: men. I rolled mine, too, but inside I was freaking out. Was this lady safe? This guy wanted to write a whole movie. Could she not see how dangerous that made him, how dangerous to her, specifically?

Even scholarly pursuits struck me as suspect, which caused problems; I work in an English department, and my colleagues’ research agendas made me secretly nervous. I trusted myself to handle roadblocks (even when they seemed to darken my whole future) and rejection (even when it made years of work seem suddenly meaningless). But other people, I didn’t trust at all. Basically, if someone was devoted to an activity that involved any amount of hope or anxiety or ego, any kind of soaring hopes or shattering disappointments, I steered clear.

Over the years, this feeling has shifted. Life has forced me into sustained contact with a number of creative individuals, and not one of them has ever chased me around with an axe. Through my job and sheer geographical luck, I’ve ended up with novelists and poets as friends. And, in order to be a friend, I’ve had to suspend my fears. I lived with a playwright for a while, and it turns out you can’t be a good roommate to someone who both writes and makes theater without getting caught up in their hopes and disappointments. Nor can you befriend poets and novelists precisely because they love language the way you do, and then avoid reading what they write. At first, I suppressed reflexive terror when a friend sent me their work, but I welcome it now. A friend’s writing is, after all, a distillation of that friend: a portion of their unique, weird being fixed in language. My partner, a fellow academic, is always absorbed in a project, and I find myself more enthused than alarmed when he shares work with me.

I’ve even started writing more myself. During a recent, precious sabbatical, I started working on a novel instead of a second scholarly book. “What’s going on?” I asked my playwright friend, alarmed. “Why am I doing this?” She said I was possessed by “the imp”—her version of the muse—and that I had better just let it take charge.

The word “imp” made me picture a small green creature with a malevolent, self-delighted expression not all that different from Nicholson’s “here’s Johnny” face. An imp is a mischief-maker. An imp will mess things up. But I took her advice, and I kept writing, and now I’m filled with hope and anxiety and ego, and it sucks. The soaring hopes and shattering disappointments are a daily torment. Still, I haven’t smashed down any doors with an axe.

A few weeks into my imp-induced writing fit, I read an essay by the man who grew the world’s biggest pumpkin. It turns out that for pumpkin-growers, maybe even more than for writers, success is elusive and the possibility of failure ever-present. The author, Travis Gienger, planted just two seeds in order to give his pumpkins the level of care and attention that they needed—a level that limited his social life and drew him away from ordinary pursuits. Both seeds produced vines, and both vines produced giants, but one burst before it was done growing. Imagine the heartbreak, the disappointment. Reading about it, some shadowy, mouse-like part of me cringed with fear: what does a person do—to themselves, to the people around them—when a dream pumpkin splits? But I kept reading, and as I read, I kept rooting for Travis, who was so clearly possessed by his own incredibly specific imp.

The Shining taught me that what was happening to me in my marriage was real: the link between writing and violence I felt in my home existed. But in order to grasp that link, I simplified the story, and that simplification involved telling myself a lie: that creativity is a man with an axe. My friends helped me begin unlearning that lie. It was Travis Gienger’s pumpkins, though, that helped me formulate an antidote, one that told me that our imps—the drives behind our wild pursuits, our impractical dreams—make living in the world possible. For some people, they’re as vital as air or water. That was true of my husband, which wasn’t in itself a bad thing. It’s true of my writer friends, too, and of my partner, who throws his whole being into his work (his imp is rigorous; it keeps long hours). And yet, those pursuits, those dreams, are inevitably risky, difficult, quixotic. You want to grow a huge pumpkin, so you spend less time with your family and friends; you lie awake at night plotting and worrying and strategizing; you protect your vines from frost and hail; and you do all this knowing that it could all be for nothing. Your pumpkin might flourish—it might win—but it also might burst.

Triumph and loss are both part of the process, and you have to be able to absorb both. Plus, you have to cope with the imp. The imp doesn’t care about triumph and loss. It just wants something new to exist.

“You’re breaking my concentration,” Jack snarls in an earlier scene in The Shining, when Wendy suggests, tentatively, that he show her what he’s writing. Then he smacks his forehead, rips a page from the typewriter, and tears it to pieces: miniature acts of violence meant both to frighten his wife, and to illustrate just how disruptive he finds her presence.

The thing is, though, Jack was never writing on that typewriter. He was just typing, banging out the same sentence, over and over, line after line. I don’t think he even had an imp, the bastard. He had ambition, maybe, and he had anger. Those—I’ve finally learned—are not the same thing.