What Stanley Kubrick got wrong about “The Shining”
Stephen King has always disliked Stanley Kubrick's film of "The Shining," and he has a point
It’s no secret that Stephen King dislikes Stanley Kubrick’s film
adaptation of his 1977 novel, “The Shining,” but now that King is
publishing a sequel, “Doctor Sleep,”
he’s being asked once again to explain why. “I felt that it was very
cold, very, ‘We’re looking at these people, but they’re like ants in an
anthill, aren’t they doing interesting things, these little insects,’”
is what King said recently when a BBC interviewer asked him about the
film. He also described Kubrick’s characterization of Wendy Torrance,
played by Shelley Duvall, as “one of the most misogynistic characters
ever put on film. She’s basically just there to scream and be stupid.
And that’s not the woman I wrote about.”
Kubrick himself, and the
film version of “The Shining” in particular, is the locus of a certain
kind of obsessive yet strangely inarticulate worship; the faithful tend
to incant the words “genius” and “masterpiece” and “great” over and over
again, as if those terms constituted the workings of an argument rather
than its conclusion. These are people in thrall to the very idea of
greatness, and they cleave ferociously to their idol. Almost as soon as a
clip of King’s interview was released, a haughty but insubstantial
retort came in the form of an article on the website of the British
magazine the New Statesman, “Stephen King still won’t accept Kubrick’s
genius” by Mark Hodge. The title sums up the entirety of Hodge’s
argument. “[Kubrick's] film has usurped the book within pop culture,” he
writes. “That rare achievement is perhaps something which irks King the
most.”
This supposition that King resents Kubrick as a rival
reveals more of the person making it than it does of King himself; few
bestselling authors offer a more modest and unassuming public face than
King. Kubrick buffs also like to point tauntingly at King’s poorly
regarded 1997 miniseries adaptation of “The Shining,” labeling it a
failed attempt to better the master. But by all accounts King is
motivated not by competition but rather by a protective instinct toward
characters who clearly mean a lot to him. Kubrick’s detachment sticks in
his craw. King wants to do right by his own story — his own in more
ways than one, since King has stated that Jack Torrance, the deranged
aspiring writer played by Jack Nicholson in the film, is the most
autobiographical of all his creations.
You
don’t have to dislike Kubrick’s “The Shining” to see King’s point. The
two men represent diametrically opposed approaches to creating narrative
art. One is an aesthete and the other is a humanist. Kubrick was a
consummate and famously meticulous stylist; King’s prose is workmanly
and his novels can have a shambolic bagginess. The great theme of King’s
fiction is the capacity of the average person — especially
working-class or similarly humble men and women — both for evil and for
heroism. Although there’s almost always a battle against a supernatural
antagonist in King’s books, the best of his novels hinge on the
protagonists’ struggles with themselves. In “Doctor Sleep,” it is just
as valiant for Danny Torrance — the psychic child character in “The
Shining,” now grown up — to stay sober as it is for him to challenge the
novel’s Big Bad.
King has always thought Jack Nicholson seems
“too crazy” at the very beginning of Kubrick’s “The Shining.” Everything
that makes Nicholson’s performance iconic — his grinning, campy, manic
nastiness — undermines King’s point, which is that Jack Torrance could
be you. We all love Jack Nicholson, but he’s no Everyman. In
King’s novel, the Overlook Hotel’s seduction of Jack Torrance is rooted
in the nebbishy failed writer’s frustrated desire to be extraordinary,
larger than life. It’s impossible to imagine Jack Nicholson wanting to
be anyone but himself. In Kubrick’s film, Jack’s madness becomes that of
an imperious auteur, convinced of his own importance, running amok and
seeking to wipe out the mere human beings whose inconvenient presence
muddles his vision. That two such different men as King and Kubrick were
able to see themselves in this character indicates what a remarkable
creation Jack Torrance is.
But while everything in Kubrick’s “The
Shining” — especially Nicholson’s suppressed energy — pushes eagerly
toward the spectacular release of Jack’s rampage, in King’s novel the
man’s disintegration is a tragedy. A key difference between the two
versions is the prominence of alcohol, which is more or less incidental
in the film. In King’s novel, booze is the key that unlocks the monster
inside a regular guy, and the beast’s first victim is the regular guy
himself. The most significant thing about any character in King’s
fiction is how he or she responds to such monsters, whether they come
from within or without. That’s surely the chief reason why he detests
Kubrick’s portrayal of Wendy as a gibbering victim; King’s Wendy chooses
to be a heroine.
King is, essentially, a novelist of morality.
The decisions his characters make — whether it’s to confront a pack of
vampires or to break 10 years of sobriety — are what matter to him. But
in Kubrick’s “The Shining,” the characters are largely in the grip of
forces beyond their control. It’s a film in which domestic violence
occurs, while King’s novel is about domestic violence as a
choice certain men make when they refuse to abandon a delusional,
defensive entitlement. As King sees it, Kubrick treats his characters
like “insects” because the director doesn’t really consider them capable
of shaping their own fates. Everything they do is subordinate to an
overweening, irresistible force, which is Kubrick’s highly developed
aesthetic; they are its slaves. In King’s “The Shining,” the monster is
Jack. In Kubrick’s, the monster is Kubrick.
King told the BBC that
he’d met Kubrick just once, during the filming of “The Shining,” and
that he found the director “compulsive.” His distaste is evident, if
unstated. In King’s eyes, Kubrick didn’t just get “The Shining” wrong;
the director — with his domineering ways, his I’m-a-genius stance and
the glassy perfection of his cinematic vision — embodied the very
pathology King’s novel cautions against. Of course, Kubrick, unlike Jack
Torrance, was both brilliant and talented; “The Shining,” in my
opinion, is a terrific film. But I suspect that even if King accepted
the brilliance and the talent (and for all I know he does) they would
not make up for what he feels the movie lacks in humanity. Humanity is
what matters most to him, and all the browbeating of all the fanboys in
the world is not going to change his mind on that. Kubrick can be the
bigger genius; King would rather be the bigger man.
( Original source )
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