Do the main narrative theories work in relation to The Shinning ?

We applied the theories and ideas of four narratives theorists to do The Shinning. Propp was a Russian critic who explored the underlying structures of folk tales and proposed a set of universal character and narrative functions which he thought were the basis for all stories. His ideas are an uneasy fit with The Shinning. Propp identified the characters of a movie as being:

1. The villain — struggles against the hero.
2. The dispatcher —character who makes the lack known and sends the hero off.
3. The (magical) helper — helps the hero in the quest.
4. The princess or prize — the hero deserves her throughout the story but is unable to marry her because of an unfair evil, usually because of the villain. the hero's journey is often ended when he marries the princess, thereby beating the villain.
5. Her father — gives the task to the hero, identifies the false hero, marries the hero, often sought for during the narrative. Propp noted that functionally, the princess and the father can not be clearly distinguished.
6. The donor —prepares the hero or gives the hero some magical object.
7. The hero or victim/seeker hero — reacts to the donor, weds the princess.
8. The False Hero - takes credit for the hero’s actions or tries to marry the princess

Only some of these roles apply to the characters in the shinning. And the roles that do apply are confused and not solid character roles for example, The hero in The Shinning could be seen as Wendy as she takes it into her own power to trap Jack in a storage room and try to save her boy, but also Danny could be seen as the hero as he can see the future and warns his mother of the terror in room 237. Tzvetan Todorov believes that there is an equilibrium to every story. An equilibrium is where the story starts out normally showing normality in a village etc. Then there is a disequilibrium; something to break the equilibrium, resulting in a new equilibrium. This can be applied to The Shinning as The Beginning starts of as a a normal job opportunity then normality is disrupted by jack becoming crazy and possessed, then the new equilibrium is Wendy and Danny getting away living on their own. Claude Levi-Strauss thought that the theory of binary opposition can be applied to movie stories. Binary oppositions can be seen in The Shinning, for example:

• Past - present
• Cause - Effect
• Good - Evil
• Natural - Supernatural
• Normal - Abnormal
• Community - Isolation
• Sanity - Madness

Bordwell and Thompson in their book 'Film Art: The Introduction' defined narrative as "a chain of events in a cause-effect relationship, occurring in time and space". It defines where things take place, when they take pace and why they take place. In the Shinning time is a big object to think about as time is confused and muddled so the audience have a misunderstanding of what is going on. In the movie, days and months are shown but they aren't in a continuous manner. As the black screens come up with days of the week on the days start to skip for example it goes from Saturday to Tuesday.