And that’s merely what’s on-screen. Duvall was double-crossed again by the stories behind the film’s production. I’m not just referencing Kubrick’s antics: his well-documented mental and emotional bullying during the 13-month production, a reported 127 takes of the baseball bat scene, the documentary footage (from 1980′s Making the Shining) of Duvall sprawled on the floor attempting to quell an anxiety attack. I’m thinking about how fans of Duvall (and hers were generational, as her weird-girl energy made her a TikTok sensation decades after she left Hollywood) interpreted these facts to mean that Duvall herself was hardly acting, that what we’re seeing in the film is an abused woman, not an actress - a pitiable figure little different than a dancing chicken on a hot metal plate.
This victimisation narrative seems to be a well-intentioned way to champion Duvall while countering the harsh reviews her performance received upon the film’s release. (Variety called her “a simpering, semi-retarded hysteric”.) Her turn as Wendy was nominated for a 1981 Razzie award for worst actress. The organisation voided her nomination in 2022, writing that “Duvall’s performance was impacted by Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of her”. I’m no fan of Kubrick’s tactics - to me, if a film-maker makes an actor do something 127 times, that’s a failure of their own direction - so I’ll simply note that Kubrick’s own Razzie nomination for The Shining still stands (equally undeserved).
Much of our impressions of The Shining set come from that 1980 documentary short, directed by Vivian Kubrick, Stanley’s then-17-year-old daughter. It’s online, and if you want to witness Kubrick the tyrant, he’s in there reacting sarcastically when Duvall shows him that her hair is falling out and ordering his crew to show her no sympathy. In one tense confrontation, he bawls her out for missing a cue.
Look closer, however, and you’ll see that Duvall refuses to cower. She insists that he - not her - bungled that take by prematurely calling cut, and rolls her eyes at his petty chest-thumping. When she questions the timing of a line, Kubrick at first tries to steamroll her and then, in a sign of fragility, changes the boundary lines of their argument (“I honestly don’t think the lines are going to make an awful lot of difference if you get the right attitude”) before suggesting they take their conversation somewhere else, as though self-conscious of being disagreed with on camera.
“He pushed me and it hurt and I resented him for it,” Duvall says at the end of the documentary. Nevertheless, she adds, “I really respect him and really like him, both as a person and as a director. I’m amazed. He’s taught me more than I’ve learned in all the other pictures I’ve done.” She knew who he was and what they’d made. She even knew (and loathed and accepted) Kubrick’s use of an unflattering 18mm lens for the sole purpose of distorting her face to look squished and alien.
Then, and up until she died, Duvall insisted that The Shining was an artistic collaboration, that together, she and Kubrick had forged a unique heroine - a battered-wife character deemed repellent because Duvall channelled fear so profoundly that she was painful to watch. When awful things happen, Kubrick’s screenplay simply reads, “Wendy reacts”. That gulping goldfish terror sprang from Duvall.
“When the film was finished, I told Stanley I’d probably never cry again,” Duvall told the Los Angeles Times before The Shining’s release. “But four days later, when it came time for me to leave, I was weeping all over the place. It had been such an intimate experience working with him. There was such love there.”
Over the years, Duvall’s descriptions of working with Kubrick never changed. She always praised their results - and she always said she wouldn’t do it again. Still, the myth persists that Kubrick triggered Duvall’s mental health issues that became apparent after she retired to Texas, and that he was perhaps the reason she’d quit acting. Never mind that Duvall said with amusement that The Shining and her subsequent levelling-up in star status “really has only affected me in the way that it takes longer to go grocery shopping”. Our images of Wendy’s harrowing ordeal have merged with our images of Duvall herself, much like how Dick describes the psychic residue of the Overlook Hotel: “When something happens, it can leave a trace of itself behind, say like if someone burns toast.”
Duvall maintained her truth. So what’s it going to take to believe her?
Let’s look again at Duvall’s “simpering hysteric” - or as King called her, “one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film. She’s basically just there to scream and be stupid.” Once she accepts that her husband is dangerous, she clobbers him unconscious in two blows, drags his body to the pantry, resists his manipulations to let him out, saves her son by pushing him out the window, stands her ground with a knife, and finally executes the escape plan she’d already hatched, driving to safety in the middle of the night, in the middle of a storm, on a snowcat.
Duvall does not break. The hotel does not win. Ironically, a woman-hating ghost (played by Philip Stone) is the only character who accurately describes the woman we’re watching. “Your wife appears to be stronger than we imagined, Mr Torrance,” he says.
Yes, she was.
