The Shining
Directed & Produced by Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson
Based on The Shining by Stephen King 447 pp, Doubleday 1977
Starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd
Contains spoilers since I discuss the differences in how the two versions end. But the movie is over 40 years old, and the book forty-three. Go read and/or watch it. Both versions are well worth it.
I’ve always been puzzled over Stephen King’s attitude toward the Stanley Kubrick movie. He famously hated the movie version of his book, but also considers it one of the greatest horror movies ever made. The Guardian had a write up on the movie a couple of months ago, on the 40th anniversary of the film’s release, mentioned King’s attitude, and on a whim, I rewatched the movie.
It had been a few years. I saw the initial theatrical release, and then, about ten years later, a Bowdlerized version of it on TV which was about as satisfying as non-alcoholic gin.
It is a great movie, arguably one of Kubrick’s best. It has some of the most totemic scenes in the history of film: Danny pedaling his tricycle furiously through the seemingly endless halls of the Overlook, the creepy twins, the blood gushing from the elevator, the woman in the tub, “All work and no play…”, “Here’s Johnny!” and Jack’s frozen corpse in the labyrinth. The repeating theme of running blindly through endless corridors adds to the masterful rise of slow dread the viewer feels watching the movie. There were flaws, some of which I’ll discuss below, but King is right: it’s one of the greatest horror movies ever made. And that’s still true forty years after it came out.
So then I reread the book, largely lost to the mists of memory in the 42 years since I read it. I honestly didn’t remember quite how it ended and so it was almost a new reading experience.
The book was one of young King’s greatest, a marvel of complex and deeply-layered plotting jammed into a compact (for King) 447 pages. His gift of extraordinary characterizations came to the fore in this book, along with his ability to plausibly describe the inner turmoil and confusion of ordinary people being eased into extraordinary circumstances. Some of early King’s books tended to fizzle over the final fifty pages, but not this one. King is about the only extant author where you can talk about his “25 greatest novels” with a straight face, and The Shining has to be in the top five.
…and I came to understand King’s oddly ambivalent attitude toward the movie. Yes, it’s a great movie, albeit with flaws. Many of the same settings and plot elements are there. The characters share the same names for the most part. But the Stanley Kubrick film is NOT the Stephen King novel, and mistreats it badly in places.
There were elements in the movie I didn’t like on the latest viewing. A minor one was the utterly confusing topography of the Overlook in which the basement was sometimes several storeys above the Grand Foyer. I really hated Shelley Duvall as Wendy. She was reduced to Olive Oyl with a butcher knife she didn’t know how to use, great on looking scared, cringing, and shrieking and not much else. Wendy was ineffectual and annoying in the movie.
Dick Hallorann, played by the inestimable Scatman Crothers, received cringeworthy treatment in the movie. Even after forty years, I vaguely remembered the character playing a major role in saving Wendy and “Doc” during the death throes of Jack and the Overlook. And I knew he survived in the book because he shows up in the sequel, Doctor Sleep. In the movie, he’s built up to be an important character in the first two hours, only to show up and be immediately redshirted (quite literally) by Jack, who buries a fire axe in his chest as he’s walking in the front door of the Overlook. Bye bye, Dick, and why the hell were you even in the movie in the first place? I don’t know if Kubrick wanted to display the vicious danger that Jack had become, or he just didn’t like Hallorann, but it was a waste of a great character.
Of course, even in a movie that runs nearly two and a half hours, you cannot possibly show the motivations and thoughts of the characters, especially since King relies heavily on inner monologues and memories for all his characters, including five-year-old Danny. But where the book shows four intelligent, aware people being pulled into the fantastical hellscape of an insane building, the movie shows a much more superficial version, in which Jack surrenders to madness with barely a fight, and the other two just squeak and run away a lot. In the book, even near the end where Jack has beaten Dick and Wendy senseless with a roque mallet and is crawling the hallways with his bloody instrument, looking to apply a little loving discipline to his son, there are flashes of Jack still there, still fighting the thing he has become.
Oddly enough, movie version Danny is the only one that shows any resourcefulness or even willfulness, back-tracking his snow prints in the labyrinth which causes Jack to become confused and lost in the endless rows of hedge and eventually freeze to death. In the book, he’s rescued by Dick, but saves them in the end by ‘knowing’ the huge boiler in the basement of the Overlook is about to blow.
I’m not privy to the workings of the mind of Stephen King (I would be a lot richer right now if I was), but if I had written The Shining, I would have looked at the movie and gone, “What the hell did you to to my characters? You’ve turned them into cattle in a slaughterhouse! Wendy was resourceful and brave! Dick was wise and courageous! Jack really wanted to be a good man and a great writer!”
I have a satisfactory answer, if self-devised, to a literary conundrum that had always mildly puzzled me. But more importantly, I got to revisit a great, if flawed movie, and an even greater book.
Revisit both. You won’t be sorry.
