I can remember bragging to my mom, when I was probably thirteen, about how many adult-level books I had read:
Pet Sematary,
The Eyes of the Dragon,
The Talisman,
Thinner,
The Stand,
‘Salem’s Lot.
She was impressed, but felt somehow compelled to be sure I was aware that there was literature outside of Stephen King. I assured her I was, and she insisted that was all she wanted to do, and that she in no way meant to influence what I read.
Yeah, right: I picked up something else, maybe
The Hobbit, and didn’t read King again for sixteen years.
In the meantime, though, I grew enormously fond of a movie called
The Shining, which of course is Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of King’s 1977 novel. In 1997, probably seven years into my King drought,
The Shining was made into an ABC miniseries, which is apparently King’s preferred method of transferring his books onto the screen.
It and
The Langoliers were done the same way, and maybe others, too. The lengthy miniseries format doubtlessly allows for more faithful-to-the-book renditions, of which King is doubtlessly a fan.
I watched a little bit of
The Shining (1997) and couldn’t get into it. My dad told me that King didn’t like Kubrick’s version (!) and that this one would be closer to the book. I’m not sure whether that rumor about King’s opinion is true. But being currently infatuated with Kubrick (
Barry Lyndon and
Dr. Strangelove are still easily in my top-five, all-time), and still relegating King to that dustbin of writers I enjoyed in adolescence but had of course since grown out of, I decided I would rather spend the night in the Overlook Hotel than watch any more of this pile-of-shit miniseries.
Another effect of the whole affair was that I resolved to go back and read the novel and compare it to the 1980 movie. I would make it clear that Kubrick was a better filmmaker than King was an author, and achieve my final revenge against the guy who had entertained me so thoroughly every night for probably two years of my life. After my
Amadeus-Homer’s Enemy exposition, there was no popular fiction commentary I looked forward to with greater pleasure.
So let that serve as the full-disclosure motivation (argh) for the following. I still haven’t seen the 1997 miniseries, so I will refer to “both” versions, meaning the novel and the 1980 movie. This post is filled to the brim with spoiler content.
The Shining, either version, is the story of Jack Torrance, an aspiring writer, who gets a job as the winter caretaker of a remote Colorado hotel called the Overlook. He and his wife (Wendy) and son (Danny) are to spend more than six months locked up together, alone. Jack is a recovering alcoholic who had broken his infant son’s arm in a fit of drunken rage a couple of years before. Danny now has psychic visions, which are often related to him by his putatively imaginary friend, Tony. After the Torrances arrive in the Overlook but before the staff deserts the place, Danny is befriended by Dick Hallorann, who is both the Overlook’s cook and a fellow psychic. Danny and Dick can talk to each other without opening their mouths. Dick calls their collective mental powers the shining. Danny confides in Dick that he is horrified of the Overlook, and although Dick tries to comfort Danny with his response, he admits that evil may indeed lurk there. The reader/viewer gets the impression that these two psychics are incapable of hiding much from each other.
The rest of the story chronicles Jack’s progressive descent into madness, his attempt to kill his family, and Danny’s psychic shout-out to Dick, who gets the message all the way from Florida and goes to save Danny and Wendy from Jack.
That basically wraps up what the two versions have in common; the differences are striking.
The hedges around the Overlook play a large part in both versions. In the book, the important hedges are carved into a topiary. The bushes are carved into a lion, a rabbit, and a dog (and possibly others I have forgotten about, but those are the ones most mentioned). These bush-animals come to life and menace the characters at various times.
The important hedges in the movie are cut into a hedge maze, which Danny explores with Wendy as Jack broods inside the hotel. Later, when Jack chases Danny with an axe, Danny leads Jack into the maze and gets him lost; Jack freezes to death in the snow, ending the movie. (Incidentally, the map of the hedge maze, studied by Jack, and the maze itself, as seen in a bird’s-eye-view shot, are quite different. This difference and the helicopter shadow and blades visible in the opening scenic shots are the only two gaffes I have caught. They are forgivable, but I really expect better from Kubrick.)
Jack’s demise in the book is of course different, there being no maze for him to get lost in. In both versions, it is Jack’s job to run the boiler and heat the hotel. In the book it is emphasized that the pressure in the boiler creeps, and that the boiler is decrepit. Mr. Watson, the open-season boiler watcher, unmentioned in the movie, warns Jack to vent the pressure multiple times per day or the boiler will explode and likely destroy the hotel and all its residents. In the book Jack gets so wrapped up with the idea of killing his family that he forgets about the boiler. Danny saves himself by reminding Jack about the boiler as Jack has Danny cornered on the top floor and is about to murder him.
In both versions Jack obsesses about his job as the hotel’s caretaker and sees his family’s concern for his sanity and their safety as an obstacle to his properly performing his duties. So the only thing more important than killing Danny, as he is about to kill Danny, is protecting the Overlook. Upon being reminded of the boiler, Jack runs downstairs to vent it, but he is too late and dies in the explosion that destroys the Overlook as well.
As is the case when any novel is put on film, much detail is omitted. Most of that left out of
The Shining includes tales of the Torrances’ lives before the Overlook job. Jack’s father was abusive, but Jack still loved him. Wendy’s mother insisted Wendy and Jack were terrible parents and was abusive in more of the verbal-emotional sense, so (importantly) Wendy viewed her as a non-alternative to staying with Jack. Jack had been a teacher but had been fired for being a drunk and attacking a student. It was Jack’s old drinking buddy and that-school regent, “Uncle Al” Shockley, who got Jack the job at the Overlook, and was optimistic about getting him reinstated at the school. Jack’s weapon of choice was not an axe but a roque hammer, which was part of the Overlook’s roque court equipment, which sport, roque, is similar to croquet, which comparison was doubtlessly too complicated, and which hammer was too easily replaced by a fire-safety axe, to be included in the film. There was an incident with a cursed wasps’ nest in the book, one of many events that led Wendy to suspect Jack of abuse/neglect while the Overlook itself was really to blame. (Many other such events, including the bruises on Danny inflicted by a ghost in a haunted room, were included in the movie. This ghost’s past, however, was detailed in the book, as was much of the troubled, murder-involving past of the Overlook, which was mostly skimmed over, at best, in the movie. Also, the haunted room wherein the ghost attacked Danny was numbered 217 in the book and 237 in the movie. According to Wikipedia, this room change happened at the filmed-hotel owner’s request, presumably because there actually was a Room 217 in the hotel. Also again, while Danny is forbidden to enter the room in both versions, the book describes his instinct that there is something within that will help his parents’ situation, and therefore implies the hotel’s evil hypnosis over Danny, because his transgression both physically hurts him and drives his parents further into disharmony. The movie viewer supposes Danny enters the haunted, forbidden room out of classic childish intrigue and naughtiness.)
At the same time all this detail is left out by Kubrick, two of the more memorable happenings of the film were not in the book: the blood spilling from the elevator, and the pages and pages of type-written “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” in the absence of any progress on the project (play, in the book) Jack had been working on. The elevator was featured in the book, first as a rickety old thing that (imagine this) made Wendy nervous, then as a spontaneously-operating device filled with confetti and party masks left by ancient, festive hotel guests. Jack’s writing plays only a tangential role in the book, although on his path to madness his attitude towards it progresses from optimistic to writer’s-blockish and subordinate to a book-idea about the Overlook he is inspired to write by a scrapbook of its history he finds in the basement, which scrapbook also serves to fill in the gory details of the Overlook’s past.
The overarching effect of the de-Kingening Kubrickization that the story underwent between 1977 and 1980, which I have briefly described above, is a shift of much of the antagonism from the Overlook to Jack Torrance himself, and a transformation of this antagonism from otherworldly evil to psychopathic humanity. King’s hedges are haunted and attack the Torrances (and Hallorann, with much more success) with magical teeth and muscles. Kubrick’s hedges are simply confusing. Kubrick’s Jack dies suffering from cabin fever as his son outsmarts him in his rage. King refers to Jack not as “Jack” in his final scene but as “it,” emphasizing that the thing trying to kill Danny is more a puppet of the Overlook than his loving father. His possessed body ready to bring the roque hammer down on Danny’s head, Jack momentarily regains enough control to tell Danny to run, and to remember how much he (Jack) loves him (Danny). King’s Overlook nearly possesses Dick Hallorann, tempting him to take up the roque hammer against Danny and Wendy after Jack is dead. King’s Overlook can spontaneously generate wasps, animate topiary bushes, and make creepy fire hoses jump off walls. Only one event in the movie is explainable only by the magical wickedness of the Overlook (as opposed to some hallucination or other scientifically-justifiable phenomenon): the release of Jack from the locked pantry by the ghost of Delbert Grady, the last caretaker to correct his anti-Overlook family. (This unlocking is there in the book as well.)
The Shining (1977) is a fairy tale about a haunted house;
The Shining (1980) is a story about an unstable father snapping under just the right conditions. King’s novel kept me up, bleary-eyed, into the night; I haven’t finished a 450-page book in so short a time in many tries. In sixteen years I had forgotten his unique ability to hold the reader transfixed. Kubrick’s movie, though, is a timeless chiller, a classic Jack Nicholson performance, and a thought-provoking look into insanity. In an old rant of mine I discussed how important it is to see Hitler as crazy as opposed to evil, and Jack Torrance is no different.
King’s Jack is a complex character; make no mistake. He is a drunk who broke his son’s arm and can’t keep a job; he is a devoted father who gave up drinking and works tirelessly. As I said in another rant, I like that complexity. King describes how Jack likes that complexity for his own characters. Jack feels it is important for the author to tell the story of a child murderer who is let out of the sanitarium because of budget cuts and goes around murdering more children with detachment and neutrality, and “let the reader lay blame.” But King was not describing his own philosophy but that of his fictional character. King lays blame himself – directly on the Overlook. Jack Torrance, if he existed, may have been proud of the way he was depicted by Kubrick.
