There is a conventional wisdom about Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. It is built on other conventional wisdoms about the works of Kubrick and King.
It is this: The film is not as good as the novel. The film is too cold. It leaves out the best parts of the book. Kubrick doesn’t “get” horror movies. It’s not ranked as one of his best works.
(Go online and do a search for discussions of book versus movie and you find unanimous agreement that King’s book is better than Kubrick’s movie.)
Back in the 1980, when the film was originally released, I had a slightly different reaction. I loved the book. I loved the movie. I thought of them as two separate beasts. It seemed silly to compare them; they seemed equally good, in very different ways.
I just rewatched The Shining and then pulled out my tattered paperback copy of the book and skim-read through the thing. I was surprised. The conventional wisdom wasn’t watching up with my own experience.
The big knock on the movie is the casting, especially Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance. The argument is that Nicholson has played so many crazies that it’s typecasting; supposedly, Nicholson’s performance starts so manic that there’s no place to go.
Stephen King originally made no secret of the fact that he disliked the movie. Then, as part of getting rights back to make a new version for television in 1996, King had to promise to stop criticizing it. More recently, as he has been on the publicity tour for Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, King has again complained about how the movie got his book wrong.
But one of King’s critiques is that his Jack Torrance is a nice guy at heart, that what happens to him is a tragedy. But Jack Torrance, from the first line of the novel, does not seem like a nice person: “Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick.”
The Jack of the novel is not only an alcoholic, he has enormous issues of anger and violence. He almost kills two school kids back in Maine, long before he gets to the Overlook Hotel. He constantly blames his problems on other people. He can be self-loathing and maudlin.
King has made it clear in interviews that Jack is based on himself, both consciously (the anger) and subconsciously (the alcoholism, which King only dealt with later in his life). In the early scenes, before the Torrances have moved into the hotel, Nicholson’s performance seems perfectly fine.
It is true that Kubrick deliberately went for very broad acting. On The Shining, he notoriously went for multiple takes, on occasion, more than one hundred takes for some scenes. In John Baxter’s biography of Kubrick, Gordon Stainforth, one of The Shining‘s editors, discusses the multiple takes and the performances they got:
The impression I got is that Stanley tended to go for the most eccentric and rather over-the-top ones. There were plenty of times when Stanley and I were viewing the stuff where my private choice of the best performance — or sometimes he would ask me — wasn’t in, while the most eccentric was.
So, you can dislike the casting and performances of Nicholson, Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd, but they seem to create the effect that Kubrick was going for. (The whole thing is rather operatic in its scope.)
The movie is indeed clinical and brutal, as are pretty much all of Kubrick’s movies. It leaves out King’s messages of love; whether this is good or bad seems subjective. Can we fault a horror movie for being harsh?
(One can also look to Frost: “Some say the world will end in fire / Some say in ice. / From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire. / But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate / To say that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice.”)
One of the things I like about Kubrick’s version is its sparseness (An odd thing to say about a movie that’s almost two-and-a-half hours). Re-reading the book, I kept finding things that seemed unnecessary.
Frequently, a character has a thought. (And then another thought parenthetically comes to mind.) There are numerous references to Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (unmask! unmask!) and to REDRUM. It’s perfectly logical for the novel to have a whole chapter on a scrapbook which tells the history of the Overlook Hotel. But there’s something to be said for just getting on with the story.
The sparseness works for me because one can imagine that events from the book happen, but just aren’t shown in the movie. For example, the aforementioned scrapbook does appear in the movie, visible on Jack’s desk. One of the visions that Wendy sees is someone in a bear suit and a man in a tux. There is no other context supplied, but it’s straight out of the book (only there it is a dog suit). So, if you’ve read the book, you can fill in some of the blank spots in the movie.
Anyway, the experience was a bit of a surprise to me: my estimation of the film rose and mine for the novel lowered. I’m sure if I revisited them again in a few years, they might switch again.
FOOTNOTE: Stephen King tells the story of Kubrick calling him up at home and suggesting that stories of the supernatural are optimistic, because they posit that an afterlife exists. King asks, “What about hell?” A pause, and then Kubrick answers, “I don’t believe in hell.”
King seems to think that this shows hypocrisy, that Kubrick chose to believe in the existence of Heaven, but not of Hell. In fact, Kubrick didn’t seem to be particularly religious at all, but did seem to have an abstract interest in spirituality. I can totally see a Kubrick philosophy wherein a force beyond our comprehension is viewed by humans as God-like, but that extending that belief to a punishment system that includes the Devil and Hell, might be taking it too far.
At any rate, I like that Kubrick’s version allows for the possibility that the “ghosts” are simply a product of imagination and craziness, except for the incident where Jack is let out of the pantry by something. I also like that The Shining is so dense and Kubrick is purportedly so detailed-obsessed, that multiple theories have sprung up about about its supposed meaning and we get analyses like this and this.
