It’s odd that two works you love can be thrust into conflict with each other. But hey, that’s a lot of the discourse that circulates online – fans of one film feel compelled to oppose those of another; liking or disliking a work of fiction mysteriously causing people to hate you to the core of their beings – and for some stupid reason, we all feel compelled to have an opinion about everything (I write on my blog). We live in strange times. Usually, I find these conflicts fruitless and frustrating (as I’ve written about before), but every once in a blue moon, there is an interesting discussion to be had. Case in point – Stephen King reportedly hated The Shining – not his own book, of course, but Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation thereof. In a clash of two creators, both of whom have put out really valuable work (both these two pieces and in their careers writ large), I think it’s fascinating to look at the differences of approach and see where each is coming from – to look at both pieces on their own terms, appreciating what they each offer, while still considering how and why they differ.
And so that’s what we’re going to do today – look at King’s 1977 novel and Kubrick’s 1980 film. Both are, in my opinion, great works of horror, and they share many surface similarities of plot, location, and character, but in some ways they couldn’t be more different. There are many reasons for this, but the claim I’d like to make is that their essential difference is in the point of reader/viewer identification – though both works shift viewpoint between Jack, Wendy, Danny, and Dick, I think Jack is the main lens through which one views the book, while his son, Danny, serves this function for the film, and this makes an essential difference.
The Novel – The Shining (1977)
It came first, so we’ll start with the book. Jack and Wendy Torrance have relocated to Colorado with Danny, their young son, after Jack lost his teaching job back east for assaulting a student. In flashbacks, we learn of Jack’s longstanding problems with drinking and anger management, but also about the physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his alcoholic father, as well as the emotional abuse Wendy received from her mother. Spending time behind both of their eyes, we feel how scared, and how conflicted, both of them are about the potential danger Jack poses to his wife and son, how neither wants to become their respective, problematic parent. At the start of the story, Jack’s been dry for a while (after drunkenly breaking Danny’s arm in a moment of impatience), and he is doing his best to hold it together, repair their relationships, and rebuild trust with Wendy and Danny. It is obvious that he does love them and lives in fear of failing and/or hurting them, but the anger and the resentment is still always there, roiling under the surface. Having shown some promise as a young author, he is trying to finish a play which is inspired by his experiences as a teacher, but is having trouble sorting it out, haunted by the insecurity that he may not be able to fulfill his early literary promise.
And then there is Danny – a very aware, very mature young child, who also happens to have psychic abilities – sometimes privy to knowledge he shouldn’t have, catching echoes of the future or the past, reading thoughts, or just knowing things. He loves his parents, but he also sees them more clearly than they would probably like – aware of when his father is thinking about “the bad thing” (drinking), knowing when his mother is scared or angry at Jack. These abilities warn him not to go when his parents plan to spend a winter taking care of The Overlook Hotel – a beautiful remote mountain resort, but sadly that’s not his choice to make. Of course, the hotel is haunted. Or if not haunted exactly, it is clearly a very bad place – malicious and aware, filled with the residual traces of countless murders and crimes that have taken place there, hungry to consume this young family, particularly Danny, who with his power, would make a real tasty morsel.
Thus, the lion share of the story consists of Jack being seduced by the hotel, plied with drink (which doesn’t really exist – but is no less addictive), and most importantly given his insecurities, a sense of belonging and importance – he could be “management material” – in order to turn against his wife and son and ultimately kill them, feeding the bad place, as we know a previous caretaker had done to his wife and daughters some years back.
Along the way, there’s a bunch of genuinely scary stuff. As with an early scene in It, King captures that sense of having to go down into the dark basement to get some batteries, only to scare the hell out of yourself for no reason and go running back up the stairs to the relative safety of the afternoon light. You know there was nothing down there, and you feel silly, but that makes it no less terrifying. There’s an awful scene with a wasp nest (I’m allergic so yikes!), topiary animals and fire hoses seem to spring to malicious life, a creeping unseen presence hunts after Danny in the playground, and a dead woman comes for both him and his father in the iconic Room 217.
But while we spend a great deal of time with both Danny and Wendy (not to mention Dick Hallorann, the cook who shares a sliver of Danny’s abilities and makes a heroic journey to come save the day), this is clearly Jack’s book through and through. It is his emotional struggle with his own past, with his experience of idolizing and fearing his own alcoholic father, of pitying and despising his also abused mother who failed to protect him, of struggling with his own resentment, his own self-doubt, his compulsion to dull his fears and frustrations with anything that will do the job.
He is seduced by the hotel – it plays at respecting him, at being the good bartender – listening without judgement as he voices his hidden frustration and anger towards his family. The hotel will give him what he wants – even offering up its own deeply sordid history as a fascinating new writing project which could bring him the literary acclaim he so craves – respect to prove that he is not just a flash in the pan drunk, now doomed to menial labor and a lifetime of growing smaller. It will also serve him all the martinis he likes, loosening his tongue, wearing down what resistance he still has until he’s finally willing to act on his darkest, most shameful impulses and serve his family up to the hotel’s gaping maw.
While material with the other characters is enjoyable and effective, it is the time we spend with Jack that feels most personal and emotionally grounded. Maybe this is a bit of projection, knowing something of King’s biography, but it really doesn’t feel like a stretch to suppose that this author, writing his third novel after some early success and still feeling a need to prove himself, who has said that around this time, he’d been drinking a case of beer a day and worried about the welfare of his wife and son, might have identified most strongly with the character of Jack – investing more of himself in his struggles and crafting a story that in addition to being scary, is ultimately a terrifying and moving tragedy – the story of Jack failing, giving into his worst self – and doing what he always feared he might – becoming his own father, and much worse. It feels deeply autobiographical – it feels meaningful. It feels. It is a book with feeling, about a father who loves his family but still tries to destroy them.
The Film – The Shining (1980)
Stanley Kubrick’s film is very simply, a totally different beast. Whereas the book is warm and emotional, the film is icy cold and alienating. Whereas the book serves up scary sequences in a traditional horror sense, the film removes almost all of them and really doesn’t look or feel like any kind of standard ‘haunted house’ flick. And whereas the book delivers emotional and psychological horror in addition to its scares, the film elides psychology, back story, and much of the context, resulting in a masterpiece of atmospheric horror in an almost Lovecraftian “cosmic” sense – there is an overwhelming impression of sanity-rending wrongness – both weirdly fascinating (like some dangerous, beautiful insect) and deeply unsettling.
So let’s look at King’s criticisms: “The movie has no heart; there’s no center to the picture,” he said. “I wrote the book as a tragedy, and if it was a tragedy, it was because all the people loved each other … here, it seems there’s no tragedy because there’s nothing to be lost.” As best as I can tell, this is the essence of his objections – he wrote a book that was all heart – and that heart was his, bared, fully rooted in his own personal fears, experiences, and doubts. We spend time behind the eyes, with the thoughts and intentions, of all of his characters. We know what Wendy is thinking – her calculations as she decides whether or not to stick it out with the potentially dangerous man that she loves. We see Danny’s view of his parents and even in the final moments, he and his father are allowed one loving interaction before it all comes crashing down. I can sympathize with King taking personally Kubrick’s excision of this deeply personal, heartfelt material (but to be fair, I also remember reading King propagating the old chestnut of writerly advice – “you have to murder your darlings” – but I guess it really chafes when someone else does it).
Kubrick’s film comes from a different, much colder, more inhuman space. The stunning opening helicopter shots, as the credits role, show Jack’s VW as a miniscule, insignificant object, utterly dwarfed by the surrounding mountainous landscapes, and this sense of scale, of human smallness and powerless carries through the film. Once odd, menacing things start happening at the hotel, we have no context for them – neither we nor the Torrences understand what is going on or why. Compare this with the book where between Jack’s research into the hotel’s history and the stories Dick Halloran tells Danny, we get a sense of the historical episode that is recurring whenever a character experiences something weird. The film gives up none of that, keeping many of those details but explaining none of them and thus crafting an overwhelming experience of the uncanny (which I’ve heard in German translates roughly as “un-homely” which I think is fitting – the hotel is a house – in every way it looks like a place to live and be comfortable, but it is not a “home”). Everything is somehow alien; things seeming more or less ‘normal’ but are clearly not, and the what, how, and why of it all are forever beyond our meager human capacity for comprehension.
In the book, Dick Halloran makes his long, heroic journey and really helps save Wendy and Danny. In the film, like some dark cosmic joke, he makes the same heroic journey only to find himself on the end of Jack’s axe within moments of entering the hotel. The universe does not love us and nothing and nobody is coming to help – we are on our own and it’s only getting colder.
King fairly complained that the characters lack an arc, but that is natural in something so unconcerned with character – and does every film need to be? They do have an experience, and it is an enveloping and disturbing one that we share with them, but it is more like an encounter with nature – or something beyond nature: cold, hostile, unapproachable, and cruel – than it is like a ‘story’ in a traditional sense.
Reportedly King also hated Jack Nicholson’s performance: “When we first see Jack Nicholson, he’s in the office of Mr. Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know, then, he’s crazy as a shit house rat. All he does is get crazier.” And he’s not really wrong, but I feel this is a choice rather than a failing (Kubrick was famously obsessive about every little detail in his films – it’s hard to imagine anything being an accident). And this brings me back to my main theory of where the works diverge. If Jack is the key to the novel, Danny is the key to the film.
Danny is a very young child, maybe 4 years old, growing up in the shadow of an alcoholic, rage filled, deeply resentful father, basically just a sad loser and angry about it. (Has this version of Jack ever actually written anything (we never hear about it)? Will he? Why did he lose his teaching job? Could he recover any sense of self or is he doomed to be a small, violent man forever blaming the world, and especially his family, for his own failings?) Danny’s father has hurt him at least once and very easily could again. Danny’s browbeaten mother has not been physically abused yet as far as we know, but has obviously suffered emotional trauma in this relationship, and while she does her best to protect Danny, she’s already been reduced to such a state that she is generally ineffectual in this regard (though I must disagree with King that she is misogynistically presented as weak – in fact, I’d say she does the most – The book’s Wendy was pretty tough from the beginning, but seeing Shelly Duvall’s mousy Wendy grow from this small, broken, nervous woman into someone who fights back is, for me, more moving – and her newfound strength is all the more inspiring for how hard it is for her to claim – also, she’s been doing Jack’s damn job the whole time while he sits around going crazy – she is more than she seems).
Especially with his psychically heightened sensitivity, Danny witnesses so much more than he is ready for – and while the book makes this kind of intellectual (hearing verbal thoughts, understanding things he shouldn’t be able to understand), the film doesn’t give us such details, and we can only assume a more emotional, spiritually impressionistic experience, leading at one point to a kind of self-defense catatonia. In fact, his awareness of the emotional threat in his family unit, without being able to really understand it, is a fair parallel for our uncanny experience of the film as a whole.
Danny loves his father, but lives in terror of this mercurial, angry, sad man – and while he sees and hears and feels so much more than he should ever have to, he doesn’t understand what he’s experiencing or why his father is so angry, so dangerous. And that is the film in a nutshell – we get the generalized terror but we don’t get the understanding. We see Jack as Danny sees him – a mystery, a sword hanging by a thread ready to snap at any moment. He isn’t the sympathetic tragic figure of the novel, but rather a force of threatening nature that can’t really be communicated with – that can perhaps be escaped, but which can never really be placated. Jack is basically crazy from the beginning, but he hasn’t quite broken yet and the bad vibes of the bad place of the Overlook Hotel, along with simply being locked in with the wife and child he so resents just pushes him over the edge to which he’d already been dangerously close.
Our experience of the film as a whole parallels Danny’s relationship with his dad – we can’t really understand what is going on, but while we are drawn to keep watching, the film itself looks back at us with a sense of cold menace, as if, like Jack, like the hotel, it sees us as small irritants to crush. It is, from the first frame, a beautiful, fascinating film that you don’t want to look away from – just as Danny does love his father and wants to be close to him, to be loved by him – but both the film and the father represent truly ineffable threats. We are enraptured, but never shake the feeling of being cruelly appraised by the object of our fascination. It is all beautiful, but we are lost in its maze (like the hedge maze that doesn’t even feature in the book), just as Danny is engulfed by the hypnotic carpet.
King’s Shining is a moving, tragic, terrifying horror story about a family in what is essentially a haunted house. Kubrick’s is a unique film, so unlike most horror cinema (or any other genre as well) with its singular style and cinematic vocabulary, and yet truly horrific in a cold, Lovecraftian way, and like in Lovecraft’s writing, there is little character or narrative really. When thinking of my favorite horror films, this doesn’t always make the list, and yet every time I sit down to watch it, it blows me away again, beguiling me, enfolding me in its icy inhumanity, baffling me with things I’m not meant to understand, but which, for all that, never feel arbitrary – everything resonates, feeling horrifically real, but just beyond my ability to wrap my head around.
King wrote an excellent, scary, sad horror novel and Kubrick made an amazing, truly horrific horror film. And they could not be more different. I understand why King hated the adaptation – I can see how he could take it personally, but I think this is a case where outside of his personal, well-justified reaction, we need not choose sides, setting our house against itself – life is hard enough as it is. I’m glad to have them both. I’m grateful to both artists for their contributions. I hope that’s ok with you…
