Through Jack Torrance's frictionless interaction with the phantom bartender Lloyd in Kubrick's The Shining, this essay shows how the act of reaching out for human connection produces the conditions under which simulation of human relationship can become acceptable as a substitute for human relationships. Jack’s ability to sustain an interaction that contains no resistance, contradiction, or independent subjectivity demonstrates how human connection, once it must be actively pursued, is has already been transformed into something performative and self-contained.
Read alongside Jack London's The Apostate and Honda's commercial Today is Pretty Great!, this moment reveals how modern and postmodern conditions do not simply obstruct connection, but reorganize it into forms that can be simulated, sustained, and ultimately commodified. The act of reaching out produces the conditions under which simulation becomes acceptable as connection, and connection can be reified and sold back to us.
To start historically, Johnny, the child laborer at the center of Jack London's "The Apostate,” doesn’t end his story having connected with people. Rather, he just disappears. Having spent his entire conscious life having had to feed himself into industrial machines, turning himself into a machine in the process, he has lost even the ability to reach out for human connection. London even describes his exit as erasure rather than freedom - he has been so thoroughly processed by industrial labour that there is no longer much of a ‘self’ left from which connection could even be made.
London emphasizes this erasure in the moment Johnny leaves home, noting that he departs without farewell or recognition, simply walking away from both family and workplace. The absence of any parting exchange, no acknowledgment, no attempt at deeper communication marks his incapacity to even initiate that reaching out.
And Johnny doesn’t reach out because reaching out requires an interior to reach out from, to connect with. And for him, through all his young life, the factory has taken that. This, then, is London’s diagnosis of industrial capitalism - that it doesn’t just alienate workers from one another, their friends, or families, but it removes even that interiority from themselves that human connection requires. Community is something barely legible to Johnny, let alone something he could reach out for. Human connection has been eroded so deeply for him that it has become something he can hardly know to even attempt to reach out to at all. His capacity for human connection, something that was once a natural condition of human life, to simply being in connection with others, has become systematically extracted from him. Even in the twentieth century his grinding isolation is an unsolved and often preyed upon problem. If London shows a world in which connection becomes impossible, the next phase is one in which it becomes simulated.
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining stages the next phase of the problem London identifies: rather than the absence of interiority, the fragmentation of this inner self. Where Johnny cannot reach out at all, Jack Torrance retains just enough sense of self to feel the absence of human connection - and to attempt to remedy it. However, what remains available to him and what he finds outside of his family is merely the easy simulation of human connection. The film shifts the problem from impossibility to distortion: the possibility connection has not disappeared, but it has become something that must be actively pursued, performed, and, crucially, is misrecognized.
Jack Torrance is a more Postmodern man. He performs and has performed what he believes a coherent self should look like - most notably the identity of “the writer,” a role already mediated by cultural expectation and fantasy. What he retains is enough interiority to register the absence of connection acutely, but not enough to sustain it in practice. This is what makes the encounter with Lloyd so diagnostically precise. When Jack arrives at the Gold Room bar he is in visible distress: isolated despite the presence of his family, aware - if only dimly - of his own failure as husband and father and worse, as a writer. What he seeks is connection and understanding.
And Lloyd appears to provide exactly that, or rather, the form of it. The interaction is frictionless. Lloyd listens without resistance, friction, or complaint, affirms Jack's troubles without complicating them, and never introduces needs or contradictions of his own. The exchange feels effortless because it is entirely structured around Jack’s desires. Crucially, this is only possible because Lloyd does not exist as an independent subject - he is no more real than an AI Chatbot. A real person, possessing interiority, would necessarily interrupt this performance - through disagreement, misrecognition, or competing emotional needs. What Jack experiences instead is a closed circuit: his own projections returned to him in the shape of social interaction.
The result is not human connection. But it is a simulation that, for Jack, is more tolerable than the real thing, than his real family. Faced with the demands of actual relationships - embodied most immediately by his family - Jack turns toward an interaction that requires nothing of him beyond the continuation of his presence. There is no real human connection, as that has been entirely replaced by a successful substitution of human connection. Jack reached out for human connection - and found instead a perfect simulacra of it, sold back to him so cheaply that even his money was 'no good here'. Although he talks, although he performs acts of human connection - he remains entirely alone.
Fredric Jameson’s reading of The Shining clarifies what makes this substitution possible. For Jameson, the film’s horror is inseparable from its historicism, the postmodern tendency to inhabit stylized versions of the past that appear more coherent and livable than the present. The Overlook Hotel’s 1920's aesthetic does not simply evoke history; it offers Jack a ready-made social world, one that feels structured, populated, and meaningful in ways Jack’s present life does not.
The Gold Room party represents the culmination of this process. Here, Jack no longer merely encounters an isolated figure like Lloyd, but enters a fully realized social field - complete, responsive, and entirely artificial. Crucially, this world requires no negotiation with other subjects. Its inhabitants, like Lloyd, are projections that sustain the illusion of mutual recognition while eliminating the possibility of friction. What Jack achieves, then, is not human connection but incorporation him into a system that perfectly simulates that connection.
As Jack becomes increasingly absorbed into this environment, the past begins to function as a simulation that is more more real, more desirable to him than reality itself: it is a a space in which the forms of community persist without the demands of real social relation, made entirely for him, and yet trapping him in perpetual isolation. It is the shallow surface, the reflection, the performance of community, with nothing of the substance.
In this context, reaching out no longer appears as a meaningful attempt to overcome isolation, but instead becomes the mechanism through which the simulation of human connection is accessed. Jack’s desire for connection does not lead him toward other people, but toward increasingly immersive structures that simulate the appearance of social life. The more he reaches, the more completely he is absorbed into environments where connection is already preformatted and guaranteed - precisely because it is isn't real.
And what Stanley Kubrick renders as psychological collapse, the market recognizes as opportunity. Honda’s Today is Pretty Great! does not sell a vehicle so much as it sells access to a feeling: that feeling of belonging within a shared human world. The advertisement assembles a sequence of affectively charged moments - laughter, casual intimacy, spontaneous recognition between strangers - that collectively simulate the texture of lived connection. And although these scenes are no more real than the Gold Room Party that so absorbed Jack's attention in The Shining, these scenes are likewise presented as immediate and natural, encouraging the viewer to experience them as glimpses of an attainable social reality.
This dynamic becomes especially clear in the sequence where the commercial presents global crises - war, environmental destruction - in a muted, sepia-toned palette before abruptly cutting to brightly colored scenes of everyday joy, such as individuals laughing, embracing, or casually interacting. The visual coding distances the negative events as if they belong safely to the difficult and complicated past, while the positive moments appear easy, immediate and accessible. The effect is to aestheticize this crisis and their difficulties, allowing the viewer to move past them effortlessly and easily into the curated, welcoming, artificial present the advertisement constructs.
Crucially, however, the viewer remains external to these moments, as Jack remains largely external to the Gold Room party. The commercial positions its audience as observers of connection rather than participants in it, separated by the very screen through which the scenes are delivered. And here Honda inserts itself into this separation, as the brand has become the mediating structure through which the viewer is invited to imaginatively enter the world being depicted - not by altering their social conditions or connecting with real people with real difficulties, but by aligning themselves with the product, the brand, the effortlessly alive artificial people.
This mechanism only functions because the sense of human connection it addresses is already in place. The advertisement does not painstakingly generate the desire for human connection; it presupposes that desire for human connection is a market gap that can be filled by its product. What it offers is not even the restoration of that human connection, but a controlled, repeatable, perfect and perfectly effortless approximation of it. In this sense, the simulation that appears in The Shining as an individual psychological retreat into a party is here formalized and scaled: the structure of the Lloyd scene is reproduced as a market logic expanded to an entire city, people, history, and world. Rather than alcohol and killing your family, all you have to do buy is a Honda car, and be granted access.
The result is a shift from symptom to system. Where Jack’s encounter with Lloyd emerges from his very personal human isolation, Honda’s commercial operationalizes the same dynamic, packaging the experience of simulated connection as something that can be reliably and easily and even joyfully accessed. Reaching out for human connection, in this context, is no longer a desperate or even conscious act - it is a presumed need that can be readily anticipated, guided, and monetized. The performance of connection has become not just a substitute for the real, but a commodity in its own right, sold as more real than real. If you just buy our product, you too can have access.
The progression from Jack London to Stanley Kubrick to Honda outlines a single trajectory in the transformation of human connection under modernity and postmodernity. London identifies the mechanism: that industrial capitalism extracts the interiority from which human connection becomes possible. Kubrick depicts the aftermath: individuals with just enough selfhood remaining to feel the absence of this human connection, that reaches toward simulations of it because simulation is what remains available. Honda reveals the market response: human connection is a market gap, the simulation of human connection can be standardized, packaged, and sold to back to the very people who most feel the need for it.
In each case, the act of reaching out for personal human connection - the deliberate effort to overcome distance - doesn't actually result in attaining this human connection, but instead marks only its absence. What appears as an attempt to reconnect is, in fact, the condition under which simulation of it becomes acceptable as a substitute. When Jack raises his glass to Lloyd and Lloyd returns the gesture, the exchange is perfectly performed, but there is no one on the other side. This artificial performative human connection is the same structure that is later scaled, monetized, a market gap of desire for human connection that can be easily, so the Honda commercial asserts, filled by products. Connection no longer presents itself as something immediate or ambient, but as something mediated, performed, and increasingly commodified. The result is not the restoration of genuine human relation, but the normalization of the simulation of it - and, gradually, the inability to distinguish between the two.
Works Cited
Honda. "Today is Pretty Great!" YouTube, 16 Jan. 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFBxyNJaFCw. Accessed 14 Apr. 2026.
Jameson, Fredric. "Historicism in The Shining." Signatures of the Visible, Routledge, 1990, pp. 82–98.
London, Jack. "The Apostate: A Child Labor Parable." American Literature, americanliterature.com/author/jack-london/short-story/the-apostate.
The Shining. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, Warner Bros., 1980.