Summary
Danny plays with his toy cars in a hallway of the hotel. Out of nowhere, a pink ball rolls into the middle of his cars. He looks to see who tossed it to him and calls for his mother. Danny rises and finds that Room 237 is unlocked, and the front door is ajar.
Meanwhile, Wendy is turning on one of the industrial boilers when she hears moaning and follows it down the hallway. In the Colorado Room, she finds Jack slumped over his typewriter, seemingly having a nightmare. She wakes him from it, and he says it was the worst dream he's ever had: that he killed her and Danny, chopping them up into pieces. He admits that he believes he's losing his mind.
Suddenly, Wendy notices Danny standing at the other end of the room, and Wendy tells him to go play in his room, but Danny continues walking towards her. She leaves Jack to see what's wrong with Danny and notices bruises on her son's neck. She instantly assumes Jack is responsible and yells at him, storming out with Danny. Jack looks scared, then angry.
Jack stalks through the hotel's halls, gesticulating and muttering angrily. He enters the Gold Room and turns on the lights, approaching the bar. He mutters that he would "give his goddam soul for a glass of beer," and suddenly a bartender, Lloyd, appears. Astonishingly, the bar is fully stocked.
Lloyd serves Jack a glass of Jack Daniels whiskey, while Jack complains about his family dynamic. He calls Wendy "the old sperm bank upstairs" and accuses her of suspecting he harmed Danny. She won't let him forget about the incident in which he injured Danny three years ago, he says, and avows that he "would do anything for...the little son of a bitch," referring to Danny. Even so, he assures Lloyd that it's nothing he can't handle.
Wendy suddenly runs into the Gold Room holding a baseball bat, hysterically crying that Danny told her a crazy woman tried to strangle him. "What room is it?" he asks.
Meanwhile, Dick Hallorann watches news coverage of the Colorado snowstorm on TV at his home in Miami. He seems to have a vision. Simultaneously, Danny lies in bed and seems to have the same vision.
Jack enters Room 237, an extravagantly decorated apartment, and opens the bathroom door. A figure reclines in the bathtub behind the shower curtain. Slowly pulling it aside to stand up, a tall, beautiful woman approaches Jack and puts her arms around his neck. He holds her close and they kiss.
When Jack opens his eyes mid-kiss, however, he sees their reflection in the mirror and realizes he is kissing an old woman with rotting flesh and sores. Still in bed, Danny seems to see all this and drools as if in a trance. Jack staggers away from the woman as she follows him, laughing maniacally. He leaves Room 237 and locks the door.
Analysis
At this point in the film, the line between Jack's reality and his fantasy begins to blur more thoroughly than ever before. Although Jack certainly experiences what can only be a delusion in a previous scene when he watches miniature versions of Wendy and Danny explore the scale model of the hedge maze, in these chapters the fantasy takes over. This begins with Jack's visit to the Gold Room bar, where he finds a fully stocked bar as well as a bartender, despite the fact that the hotel removes all its liquor during the winter months for insurance purposes.
It is in Room 237, of course, that Jack's delusions reach new heights. There, he finds a young, beautiful woman, whom he kisses until he opens his eyes to find that she has turned into an old, ugly woman.
As the film progresses over these chapters, Jack's dialogue also begins to flirt with irony. For example, when Jack enters the Gold Room, he remarks that he would give his "goddam soul for a glass of beer." Ironically, if drinking with Lloyd is effectively Jack's initiation into the supernatural world of the hotel, then this may be just the deal he has made. Likewise, when Jack expresses his sense of déjà vu about the hotel to Wendy, he tells her that felt as if he knew what lay around each corner. This is followed, of course, by Danny's bike rides through the hotel, when which the Grady twins could be lurking around each sharp turn of the corner.
Foreshadowing continues to contribute to the film's pervading sense of dread in these chapters, particularly through Jack's nightmare. Down to the last detail, Jack's nightmare is identical to the murders that Charles Grady committed years before, except that he replaces Charles Grady as the killer. In this way, Kubrick suggests a mysterious link between Jack and Charles Grady—one that could cost Wendy and Danny their lives.
These delusions, nightmares, and fantasies together gesture at a theme that will dominate the second half of the film: the decay of the all-American nuclear family. This is conveyed not only through explicit plot points, such as Jack's tryst with the woman in Room 237 and Danny's mysteriously bruised neck, but also via imagery like Wendy carrying a baseball bat, a symbolic disruption of traditional masculinity.
