“Mr. Roboto”

“Mr. Roboto,” a song by Styx, recurs as a musical cue in Dan Torrance’s account of drinking and memory. First shared with Deenie during a night in Wilmington, it later reaches him over the radio and helps set off one of his relapses, joining an intimate recollection to the pattern of compulsion that follows him.

The Wilmington Memory

After Dan and Deenie use cocaine, they ride back to her place in a taxi. Deenie is already snorting more from the back of her hand, and the two try to sing “Mr. Roboto.” The song belongs to a scene rendered through disordered, sensory recollection: Dan pieces together what happened, including their return to Deenie’s home and the details of the night.

A Cue for Drinking

After Wilmington, Dan no longer drinks every day. He can go a week, sometimes two, without anything stronger than diet soda, but thirst and craving persist until a night or weekend when something sets him off. The triggers vary: an advertisement, women drinking outside a café, or a song on the radio. Once, that song is “Mr. Roboto,” sung by Styx. When he drinks, he gets drunk; in the broader aftermath of these episodes, he thinks of Deenie, the child in the Braves T-shirt, the seventy dollars, and the blanket he stole and left in a storm drain.

Repetition and Association

The song’s two appearances connect a shared moment with Deenie to the later, solitary mechanism of relapse. In Wilmington, Dan and Deenie sing together; later, hearing the song can prompt him to drink. Its return does not undo the first scene or explain every detail of his subsequent drinking, but it makes music one of the ordinary cues through which the past presses into his present.