This scene is clearly done with rear projection, and in an otherwise flawlessly convincing movie (visually) this stands out as a purposeful conjuring of an older movie technique (with it's 'outdated cliche' MIRROR at the end of the movie). With the exception of this scene Jack is never seen outside the hotel until he is drawn out by Danny to the hedge maze. This 'false' or 'outdated' movie technique reminds us that Jack, and indeed the entire movie, is being filmed in a studio. We have JUST BEEN SHOWN beautifully shot aeriel photography of some of the most dramatic geography on the planet, and now we're supposed to believe a rear projection visual 'scam'. That feeling of a world of 'insideness' will stick to Jack from this moment on. This is what, or more importantly how, Jack sees when he looks at the world.

Danny is the tallest in the car and he is dressed entirely in blue. Jack repeatedly glances at him in the rearview mirror, as if being followed. As will be REVEALED more overtly later, Danny / Tony is the bird following Jack in the initial sequence. Both sequences back to back shows us Danny's bird's eye view of the real world verses Jack's clausterphobic rear projection view of the same terrain. In the larger sense even the pair of Jack and Danny are a simultaneous view of a childhood and adulthood of the same person, Jack's world has become closed in - and what he does see through the windows are visual reproductions made of light.

Being the source of illusions in this movie, the hotel is also a metaphor for the psyche, both for the unconscious and for the repressed past that returns to haunt the present. Jack's descent into madness is a descent into his own unconscious, a scene of guilt and repressed impulses. The previous caretaker's murder of his family can be interpreted as a figure for Jack's own past violent desires. And indeed, the historical past is represented as a kind of fate that determines the present just as personal history lies under present behavior.

The occult narrative figures the theme that beneath the platitudinous patina of liberal civility lurks a murderous and vile human nature. The theme of primitive fate appears in the shining as the occult past which determines jack's behavior, and the ironic style of presentation consist of contrasts between a cilvil world that is shown to be empty and a frightening, more powerful world of primitive aggressivity. As Kubrick himself says about the movie, "It's just the story of one man's family quietly going insane together." Jack cites the platitudes of civilized family life - 'Wendy, i'm home' - as he breaks down the door with an axe. In the end, he is represented as a grunting neanderthalic hunting animal, a figure of the conservative vision of human life.

WENDY Boy, we must be really high up. The air feels so different.
JACK Uh...huh.
DANNY Dad?
JACK Yes?
DANNY I'm hungry.
JACK Well you should have eaten your breakfast.
WENDY We'll get something as soon as we get to the hotel, okay?
DANNY Okay, Mom.
WENDY Hey, wasn't it around here that the Donner party got snowbound?
JACK I think that was farther west in the Sierras.
DANNY What was the Donner party?
JACK There were a party of settlers in the covered wagon times. They got snowbound one winter in the mountains. They had to resort to cannabilism in order to stay alive.
DANNY You mean they ate each other up?
JACK They had to, in order to survive.
WENDY Jack...
DANNY Don't worry, Mom. I know all about cannabilism, I saw it on T.V.
JACK See, it's okay. He saw it all on the television.