The actresses who played the Grady daughters, Lisa and Louise Burns, are identical twins; however, the characters in the book and film script are merely sisters, not twins. In the film's dialogue, Mr. Ullman identifies them as "about eight and ten." Nonetheless, they are frequently referred to in discussions about the film as "the Grady twins."[a] Note that the girl on our left is slightly taller than the one on the right.
Twins appear in the mythologies of many cultures around the world. In some they are seen as ominous and in others they are seen as auspicious. Twins in mythology are often cast as two halves of the same whole, sharing a bond deeper than that of ordinary siblings, or otherwise shown as fierce rivals. Twins can represent some "other" aspect of the Self, a doppelgänger or a shadow. One twin may be human and one semi-divine.
Many cultures have mythic or folkloric explanations for how twins are conceived. In Greek mythology, some twins were conceived when a woman slept with both a mortal and a god on the same day. One of her offspring thereafter had godlike qualities, and the other was an ordinary mortal. In several Native American cultures women avoided eating twin fruits like double almonds and bananas because it was thought to increase the likelihood of twins. In other cultures, twins were attributed to superior virility of the father.
Twins can represent the dualistic nature of the universe. In Zoroastrian mythology, the twins Ahriman and Ahura Mazda represent the spirits of evil and good respectively. In a myth of several northeastern Native American tribes, Gluskap, the creator god and cultural hero, has to defeat Malsum, his evil twin, who was the ruler of the demons.
Twins can also be shown as having special powers and deep bonds. In Greek mythology, Castor and Pollux share a bond so strong that when Castor dies, Pollux gives up half of his immortality to be with his brother. This etiologically explains why their constellation, the Dioskouroi or Gemini, is only seen half the year, as the twins split their time between the underworld and Mount Olympus.
In many Native American stories, twins are often partners on adventures such as quests.[b]
From the Dictionary of Symbols: "All cultures and mythologies display a special interest in the phenomenon of twin births. In whatever shape they may be conceived [as identical, or else, as in some way fundamentally different], they are expressions simultaneously of interference from Beyond and of the twofold nature of all beings and of the dualism of their physical and spiritual, diurnal and nocturnal tendencies. This dualism is lightness and darkness, the heavenly and earthly aspects of the cosmos and of the individual. When they symbolize in this way the individual's internal contradictions and the struggle which needs to be waged to overcome them, they acquire the character of sacrifice, the need for self-denial, destruction or submission, the surrender of one part of the Self so that the other may come through victorious...Sometimes, however, it happens that the twins are completely identical, the doubles or copies the one of the other, and in these circumstances they are expressions, no less, of the oneness of a perfectly balanced dualism. They symbolize the inner harmony gained by reducing the manifold to the one. Once dualism is overcome, duality is now no more than apparent, a mirror-image, caused by manifestation. ..."[c]
Since the twins in the movie are not exact copies (as indicated above, one is slightly taller than the other), the implication is that Susan Robertson does not have a perfectly balanced dualism. It is due to this imbalanced dualism, that Susan suffers psychologically from internal contradictions, and from the tension of opposites within herself.
Continuing from the Dictionary of Symbols,
"André Virel regards twin-shaped images, like symmetrical images in general, as
'The inner tension of a permanent situation...The fear of the primitive at the sight of something twinned, is the fear of the outer eye at the sight of its own ambivalence, the fear of objectively encountering similarities and differences, the fear of acquiring individuating self-awareness...the fear of that individuation, the fear of breaking away from collective lack of differentiation.'[d]
"Basically twins symbolize an 'unresolved inner contradiction'[e]."[f]
It is worth emphasizing that the twins symbolize Susan Robertson's unresolved inner contradictions.
Recall that in the initial discussion of finger symbolism in part 7, we noted that the Dactyls (from the Greek for 'fingers') were interchangeable with the Cabiri, a group of chthonic deities. In literary sources, common variants of the Cabiri included a female pair (Axierus and Axiocersa) and twin youths who were frequently confused with Castor and Pollux, who were also worshiped as protectors of sailors.[g]
a. Wikipedia, 'The Shining (film)'. Web, n.d. URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shining_(film).
b. Wikipedia, 'Twins in mythology'. Web, n.d. URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twins_in_mythology.
c. Dictionary of Symbols. Ed. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Trans. John Buchanan-Brown. London: Penguin Group, 1996. pp. 1047-1048.
d. Virel, André. Histoire de notre image. Geneva, 1965. p. 67.
e. Ibid., p. 67.
f. Dictionary of Symbols, p. 1048.
g. Wikipedia, 'Cabeiri'. Web, n.d. URL = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabeiri.
