Let’s be clear from the start: Stephen King’s book The Shining and Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining are two completely different animals. All further understanding and appreciation of either incarnation spawns from that fact. Yes, the source material for the film is the book, but it’s just that: source material that Kubrick used to mold into his own unique version of The Overlook Hotel and its occurrences.

The same can be said of The Torrance Family themselves.

Danny Torrance, the young son, can be left out of the deeper analysis based on child actor interpretations and Danny’s mainly reactive role. Thus is the burden of the child in book, film, and life: that of sponge, mirror and interpreter.

Jack and Wendy are the meat. The takes on their characters and relationship are treated completely differently in book and film. For King, this marriage is the lens through which all things in the book are filtered: The Torrance Family vs. The Overlook. For Kubrick, the marriage is background noise in the larger relationship of the film: that of Jack Torrance and his love affair with The Overlook, which is an expansion on Torrance’s love affair with himself.

In the book, Jack Torrance is a genuinely penitent lost soul. His guilt, shame, and commitment to starting over and being a better man is genuine. He is mopey and self-centered but sincere. In the film, Jack Torrance (do I have to say ‘played by Jack Nicholson’?) is, from the first frame, a half-unhinged narcissist saddled with a family that he is obligated to try to repair, and frankly not happy in his current sober state. The Jack from Kubrick and Nicholson is a misunderstood artist who has had enough of all this shit but is going through the motions. He fucked up. Everybody hates him. He’s playing nice and waiting for all of it to crash down, the sooner the better.

Enter Wendy Torrance. To King, Wendy is a tentatively hopeful, tentatively optimistic, grounded mother who wants to give this family a chance. Maybe it’s broken, maybe it’s salvageable, maybe she loves him, maybe he can pull it together and they really can have the life they wanted.

Kubrick’s Wendy is a fly buzzing in Jack’s peripheral vision. Set up to be the cliche nag, the last straw, the line, “Hey, honey!” lays in front of her a minimum of fifty times. In the story of Jack and The Overlook, Wendy is cast as the shrill magic-killer, the simpleminded woman who inadvertently points out every flaw and hen-pecks the brooding Jack ever closer to releasing his full insanity.

I have never met anyone who likes Shelley Duvall in The Shining. The complaints are always the same, and they’re valid: She’s annoying, her voice is high-pitched, she whines, she smiles a lot, paces a lot, interrupts a lot. For years, twenty-plus viewings at a low estimate, I agreed that Shelley Duvall sucked as Wendy.

Last winter while watching The Shining (winter is the only time appropriate to watch it), Wendy sat in her chair during one of the opening scenes, furtively smoking and explaining away her husband’s child abuse and alcoholism, and I saw what I had failed to see before: Shelley Duvall’s calculated take on Wendy Torrance.

One bony hand wrapped around the opposite bony elbow, blinking erratically and knocking ash off her cigarette too often, Shelley Duvall’s voice climbs higher and higher, almost to the point of cracking. Eyes round, smile strained, Wendy Torrance tells a stranger about her husband breaking their small son’s arm, saying, “I don’t believe he ever meant to hurt him.”

Wendy is lying.

It was like watching a different film. Instead of a story about furries, trikes and a man hanging onto his sanity before caving, I saw the nuances created by Shelley Duvall for Wendy Torrance. Hidden beneath scenes of hotel history and Jack’s private battle, is the tiny, private story of the woman who smiles because someone fucking has to.

Shelley Duvall’s Wendy Torrance is a caged animal that is wound too tightly to sound normal but not so tightly she can’t pretend, because what the hell else is she going to do? This Wendy is trapped in a marriage to someone she knows is a monster–a monster that is still her husband, still the father of their son, and somehow only half culpable for his transgressions because of the disease that is alcoholism. Not only is she deprived the luxury of being angry and hating him, Wendy has to handle this man with careful and caring hands–he’s in recovery. He is delicate, and hanging on, and trying. Wendy doesn’t care about the kitchen. Wendy doesn’t want to go for a walk. Wendy doesn’t want to make breakfast, or make conversation. Wendy doesn’t want to spend all fucking winter cooped up with her son and an overly sensitive crazy man that scares her. This is all evident in Duvall anytime she is not being seen by the other characters but is onscreen. The smile fades and the blankness and desperation fall across her face, revealing the natural state of Wendy Torrance.

Playing a woman who is a supporting character in her own life as well as the buzzing fly in Kubrick’s vision, Shelley Duvall is perfect. In every high-pitched and hollow-sounding sentence uttered is the raw nerve that makes up Wendy. She waits patiently for her own breakdown, but alas, in the meantime someone has to play board games with the kid and take lunches to the Dull Boy who cannot be disturbed. Only when Jack finally breaks is Wendy allowed to break, and every scream is a scream that has been building for months.

In less capable hands, Mrs. Jack Torrance might have been a sympathetic, flat casualty. In Duvall’s, she quietly holds her world together while still allowing you to see her through Jack’s eyes, and sort of want to put an axe through her skull.

AMANDA GOWIN