Wendy’s Trail of Awareness

Related to “Wendy needing to see and not seeing” and Denial, comes Wendy’s Trail of Awareness. This is what I refer to as the sequence of scenes in which Wendy comes to see “the truth”.

Part I:

In No.4, we meet Wendy as she’s reading The Catcher in The Rye: a book about a teenager losing his innocence as he makes his way into adulthood.

In No.40, Wendy and Danny watch Summer of 42 which again deals with a teenager losing his innocence- this time in an inappropriate sexual relationship with a war widow.

Both of these insertions of media speak to Wendy’s inevitable path that “wakes her up”; to Jack, what he’s capable of, and the environment she’s been living in.

Part II:

Seeing Jack’s manuscript, finding the sabotaged snowcat. Her getting woken up by Jack axing down the door, shoving Danny out the bathroom window, submitting to her fate and realizing that indecision is absolutely its own decision.

It continues: while Wendy is looking for Danny, she comes upon a scene in one of the rooms where a grown adult in a bear costume is performing fellatio on a man in a tuxedo.

Making her way through Jack’s path taken in No.51, she sees Halloran’s dead body, an action Jack has taken a few scenes earlier.

The ghost asking her about the Great Party, the skeletons she comes upon after taking Halloran’s path to his own death, all to lead her to another hallway where she witnesses a torrential amount of blood exiting the Elevator.

While the blood is gushing out of the Elevator, Jack is actively trying to kill Danny within the center of the hedge maze.

These scenes are cycled and interwoven with Jack and Danny’s maze sequences, so it’s challenging to keep track of what is happening, but Wendy is absolutely getting the symbolic “catch up” to the goings on with her husband and son.