Almost nothing said about Shelley Duvall’s Wendy Torrance in The Shining is the truth. The lies start as soon as she enters the Overlook Hotel and the cook, Dick (Scatman Crothers), calls her son Danny (Danny Lloyd) by his nickname, “Doc”. Dick fibs that Wendy must have said it aloud.
She hasn’t, and in the next scene, Dick tells the boy privately that they’re both psychic. But no one ever clues in Wendy - she just absorbs more lies - and by the end of the movie, she’s endured a literal and metaphorical snow job. The worst offender is, of course, her husband, Jack (Jack Nicholson).
Smarmily deferential to his employers, the alcoholic novelist is cruel to his wife - “the old sperm bank”, he sneers - even before he starts dreaming of chopping her and Danny into pieces. At the Overlook Hotel, he’s the salaried caretaker, but she’s the one doing the work: trying to repair the phone lines, tinkering with the boiler, contacting the forest rangers, drafting the family’s emergency escape plans. In return, Jack blames her for his writer’s block and, using his most fiendishly rational voice, tries to convince her that their bruised and traumatised son must have strangled himself.
Actually, it was a ghost. But to Wendy, The Shining is barely a ghost story at all - she doesn’t even see one until the last 10 minutes of the film. Duvall, who died this week at 75 from diabetes complications, claimed she never even glimpsed the film’s infamous identical twins unti.
