The Shining
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The Shining, by Stephen King
No parent is perfect; no child escapes.
We try so hard to be good. Most of us, anyway. We struggle to be kind, to be decent, to never let our anger get the best of us. But the danger is always there—it’s impossible to live a life of complete serenity. One of the painful ironies of our common humanity is that the ones we come the closest to, the ones whose good opinion of us matters the most, are the ones who render us most vulnerable to our worst impulses. The closer you get to a person, the more the mask slips, and if we are successful in our relationships, we are also at risk. We can never be completely safe from the ones we love. Not from them, not from ourselves.
The Shining, Stephen King’s third published novel, deals with the damage parents pass on to their children, and the way that damages echoes as the children become parents in turn. It’s also a terrific ghost story; much like Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House, it uses the central characters’ flaws to augment the spiritual danger around them. But where Haunting has the majority of the damage happening internally, The Shining presents us with a different set of stakes, using supernatural pressures to exploit the cracks in an already shaky family unit.
The story, for those unfamiliar with it: Jack Torrance has been hired on as the new winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel. The hotel, which stands closed from early fall until the spring thaw, rests high in the mountains outside Boulder, Colorado. During the winter, snow closes off the roads surrounding it, leaving anyone inside stranded from the outside world. For the next seven months, Jack, his wife Wendy, and their five year-old son Danny, will be the Overlook’s only guests. Jack will spend his time fixing whatever damage the winter brings. He also has a play he’s working on, and a wounded marriage to salve.
But every hotel has ghosts, and the Overlook’s are more potent than most. Powered by Danny’s psychic abilities (his “shine,” as the hotel’s cook Dick Hallorann calls it), those ghosts will seek to drive the Torrances to their doom. The last caretaker, a man named Grady, murdered his two daughters, his wife and then himself. But Grady was probably a drunk, and Jack has sworn off the stuff. Besides, he would never hurt the people he cares about.
But the snow is falling fast. Jack’s thoughts have gone queer. And when he is riled, oh he has such a temper….
As a horror novel, The Shining is full of great setpieces—the topiary animals and their malevolent games of “Red Light,” the unending masquerade ball with its decadent promises, the horrible inevitability of Room 217. Just as upsetting, and much more relatable, are the psychological horrors. There’s a chilling reality to Jack’s descent, a recognizable progression from self-loathing to hatred to blinding, undiscriminating rage. By the midway point, nearly all of his conversations with Wendy are bitter. If you’ve ever spent time with a couple in a difficult marriage—or if you’ve had the misfortune of being in one yourself—those moments will ring painfully true. There’s nothing particularly exotic about sniping at someone, at loathing every word that comes out of their nagging, bitching lips; and it’s far to easy too understand the fear that comes from dreading every conversation, of trying to placate while knowing that the battles already lost.
And all the while, your son is listening in to everything, understanding more than he should, and being damaged in ways you won’t see until it’s far too late to fix them.
One of the biggest challenges for anyone working on a “haunted house” story is coming up with a plausible reason for the hauntees to stay in the house long enough for the story to play out completely. Paranormal investigators are a possible solution, but at some point, when the chairs are flying and the walls bleeding red, one has to question one’s devotion to Science. King solves this problem neatly by giving the Torrances two undeniable pressures. Once Jack loses his teaching job in a fit of anger, the family’s financial situation becomes increasingly dire, so dire that to pass up the sort of paying job that the caretaker position represents becomes impossible. And when even that pressure pales in comparison to the dangers of the hotel, the weather and Jack himself (under the influence, so to speak) conspire to keep the Torrances at the Overlook.
That Jack is vulnerable to the sort of corruption the hotel specializes in is immediately clear. The very first line of the novel ("Jack Torrance thought, officious little prick.“) sets the tone, and in short order we learn not only that Jack has a drinking problem, but that his drunkenness actually led him to break his child’s arm. He’s since quit drinking, but that hasn’t stopped his tendency towards despair and self-pity—which leads to wanting to drink, which leads to more despair, etc. Abusing his son (the fact that the abuse is largely unintentional—Danny’s arm breaks when a furious Jack yanks him too hard—doesn’t make him feel any better) plays into this cycle, and also into Jack’s own history of abuse; something which the book doesn’t really get into until much later, but makes a good deal of sense when it’s finally revealed.
The Overlook initial machinations are fairly subtle. The first indication that anything is wrong comes when Jack goes up to reshingle the roof, a month or so after his family moves in. He discovers a wasp’s nest and gets stung a few times, nearly going over the side. This prompts a long introspection about how his life is sort of a “wasp’s nest,” and that most of the bad stuff that happened to him isn’t really his fault. (Incidentally, this whole wasp nest metaphor, while initially evocative, gets overplayed; it’s mentioned so often than by the end you expect some sort of giant stinging insect to be at the heart of the Torrance’s woes.)
One of the most important lessons taught in Alcoholics Anonymous is that some things are out of your control. AA attributes this to the presence of a higher power, but really, the most important thing to take from it is a firm understanding of your limitations. You can’t reform your life if you can’t put boundaries on what that means. In this light, Jack’s bout of acceptance is a positive thing. But it gets tricky when you notice how much of the blame he shifts off himself. By the end of the chapter, he’s achieved the queasy peace that comes from thinking you can leave your problems behind without ever really facing them.
When Jack discovers a scrapbook of the Overlook’s history, the hotel’s effects become even more apparent. His old drinking habits return—he wipes his mouth constantly, chews Excedrin, and, worst of all, his resentment at his wife keeps growing more and more pronounced. It’s the sort of progression that anyone with an anger control problem can relate to, with fits of irrational fury and the way every conversation, every mistake, every grating, whining question finds your hands squeezed into fists and your teeth grinding. Ever day sends him further along the downward spiral he’s been riding since October. Increasingly, Jack believes that the world is against him, and that he and the hotel have a bond which no one else is capable of understanding.
Through all of this, Wendy and Danny have been having problems of their own. In counterpoint to her husband, Wendy has her own issues of parental abuse to cope with. But while Jack’s father dealt largely in physical abuse, Wendy grew up in the shadow of her mother’s hateful mind games. Yet another in a long line of overwhelming maternal forces that runs through much of King’s writing (Mrs. White in Carrie, Mrs. Kaspbrak in IT, and Mrs. Cunningham from Chrstine, to name a few), Wendy’s mom is the sort of destructive, hateful person who’s spends her life grading the world with a never-ending supply of red ink.
Now a mother herself, Winnifred is constantly struggling against her past, unsure how many of her own choices are hopelessly tainted by the woman who raised her. It’s no surprise that she’s stuck with Jack as long as she has. The hotel’s spirits never work on her as directly as they do her husband, but they hardly need to. Any path that would begin with her taking Danny and leaving the Overlook and Jack to their mutual damnation would inevitably end up back at her mother’s door. It’s a choice that a few bad dreams and snappish conversations aren’t deadly enough to force her to take.
And then there’s Danny, menaced by dangers he can neither understand nor communicate fully to either parent. Blessed and cursed with extraordinary psychic ability, he is witness to Jack and Wendy’s internal struggles, as well as glimpses of the future from his “imaginary” friend Tony. Danny was sure he was the only person who could do what he does, until he met Dick Hallorann, head cook of the Overlook. On Danny’s first day at the hotel, and Dick’s last, Hallorann pulled the young boy aside and told him a little something about the gift they both share, a talent he calls “shining.”
The hotel, Dick said, can be unfortunate place for folks with a shine to them. After the thousands of guests who’ve stayed there at some point or another, the place is bound to have more than its share of bad memories and pain; these memories occasionally manifest themselves as pictures of the past to people like Danny. But pictures are all they are. If Danny saw something that frightened him, Dick told him all he needed to do was close his eyes and count to ten, and everything would be fine.
Hallorann left Danny with this dubious comfort, plus a promise that, should things get too unpleasant for the boy, all he needs to do is give as loud a mental shout as he can, and Dick would come running. Only, Dick is in Florida now, and that’s a long ways away. The storms keep coming. And Dick was wrong—sometimes, pictures do hurt. Sometimes, so do Daddies, no matter how they might promise otherwise.
As far as set-ups go, there’s a lot to work with here, and for the most part King manages to satisfy the novel’s potential. It’s not perfect, though. The foreshadowing of “that which will be forgotten,” a somewhat important plot point during the story’s climactic confrontation, is mentioned so many times the phrase itself becomes a joke. The pacing gets a bit thick near the climax just when it ought to sing; there’s a lot of intercutting between events at the hotel and outside, and while I understand the necessity of it, it’s still frustrating.
Most damning is King’s reliance on catchphrases as, apparently, the ultimate indicator of evil intentions. While hearing “Where do you want to go today?” for the ten millionth time may drive one to kill, it hardly works as suitable dialogue for a man who’s succumbed at last to the pressures of his own demons. Jack becomes increasingly threatening as the novel progresses, and his bitterness towards his wife is unpleasant and convincingly upsetting. Unfortunately, once things get past a certain point, Jack changes from the lead in an Edward Albee play to a Freddy Kruger clone. His constant exhortations that Wendy and Danny “come and take [their] medicine” are ludicrous in all the wrong ways. He becomes the first in what would be a long line of pointless madmen, and when he does, the story loses much of its intimacy, and the horror becomes “safe” in a thoroughly disappointing fashion.
The only other major reservation with the book (apart from King’s usual stylistic tics) is Danny’s “shine”. In general, psychic children give me hives. Psychic anything is usually a tricky business, since it puts the writer at risk of the worst sort of lazy, muddled plotting—people are always conveniently “sensing” things, and then just as conveniently failing to sense other things, or else being unable to explain what they sense in clear declarative statements. ("There’s a monster. It wants to eat your eyes. Run like fuck.") And of course a child psychic is even worse; nobody’s listening to them even on those rare instances when they do make sense.
Danny’s abilities actually work, though, because his “shine” is the fulcrum on which the entire plot rests. Without him around, the hotel’s ghosts would be largely formless—perhaps responsible for a few bad dreams, but none of the nightmares that the Torrance family suffers through. There’s a rather nice metaphor buried in there under all the supernatural mischief; something about how our children bring out the best and the worst in us, and how the cycle of abuse for Jack Torrance would have ended for him had he not had a son. We are all just as much the product of the poor choices of the ones who raised us as we are their love. And it is only when we try to carry on with our own families that we see how truly deep the damage goes.
All caveats aside, it’s a largely excellent novel, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone.
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The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick
Included in the late nineties VHS release of The Shining (and all subsequent releases) is a brief behind-the-scenes documentary shot by Stanley Kubrick’s wife, Vivian. It’s a fascinating piece, existing long before the glossy, puffed up studio docs one gets today; there’s a charming off-the-cuff feeling to it, with Nicholson at the early height of stardom still not quite the iconic monster he’s become, and Kubrick himself huddled around the edges, two steps away from the crazy guy who mutters in your ear on late train rides home.
Most telling, though, are the moments we get with Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers. Crothers plays Hallorann, and in a brief interview, he expresses his gratitude for the role in a voice that verges on breaking. It’s a disconcertingly personal moment; while Nicholson and Kubrick are out goofing around, Crothers is damn close to bursting into tears. And Duvall is worse. Her smile jitters around the edges, her hand holding a cigarette shakes, and whatever she says, all you really pay attention to are her eyes. They’re wide open, as though she were just recovering from a blow—and already preparing herself for another.
These tremors run through Duvall’s entire performance, as does Crothers somewhat disconcerting sentimentalism. As Nicholson cavorts and grimaces his way into liberating madness, Duvall takes on the harried, shell-shocked expression of serial abuse, living in the moment to moment where every word, every step, every breath is fraught with dangers. Meanwhile, Danny Lloyd (as Duvall and Nicholson’s son) pedals down endless hallways, split between apathy and stark terror, as removed from his parents as they are from each other.
Kubrick was always interested in getting at the alienation that underlies the most intimate of human relationships. Even 2001: a Space Odyssey, arguably his most optimistic film, has a sense of profound awe at the climax of just how little any of us understand about anything—and how the comforts of personal contact are largely illusions we use to distract ourselves from the space around us, rather than a true panacea to loneliness.
Alienation is certainly the name of the game in The Shining. The opening sequence looks down from on high over seemingly endless mountains and rivers, watching a tiny car making its way down the road while the credits roll by in stark white font and the score pounds into our ears. There is so much space out there, between the mountains, along the water; even inside the Overlook itself. Once the winter begins, Jack spends most of his time in a living room the size of a gymnasium—huge windows loom over head, and you wonder what the pressure must be like. Danny’s riding through the corridors. Wendy cooking in the gargantuan kitchen. All that emptiness. All that space.
I remember the year after I graduated college being, for some brief time, utterly obsessed with this film. I’d seen it multiple times, and I knew it scared me—but I just couldn’t get my head around what it all meant, exactly. King’s novel was easy enough to grasp, but the movie was a mystery. What was the point? Nicholson and Duvall’s marriage is a ruin, and his relationship with his son nearly as bad; there was nothing to root for, nobody to invest in, no themes to focus on.
So, like any other enterprising cinesthete with no real social life and web access, I logged in and hit up Google for some answers. (This was pre-Wikipedia. Or at least, it was pre-me-hearing-of-Wikipedia.) By and large it was a wasted hour—did you know there’s Strangelove slash? I sure wish I didn’t!—but I did stumble across one site of interest. The author believed that The Shining was actually a symbolic examination of the tyranny of the white man against the American Indian, women, black folks, and pretty much anybody that ole whitey has a history of keeping down. He referenced the Overlook being built on an Indian burial ground (original to the movie), the Indian designs of the carpets and wall-hangings, even the cans in the pantry with Indian heads on them.
I thought this was the silliest thing I’d read in a long time (Dimitri/Muffley sex notwithstanding), and for years would describe it to friends as a perfect example of the foolishness of overwrought criticism. You can read anything into anything, we’d tell each other. Gosh, aren’t intellectuals funny! And we would laugh and nibble our crutons and speak of Pynchon long into the night.
The joke may have been on us, however. The more I watch The Shining, the more I wonder if that long-forgotten online reviewer wasn’t on to something. Hell, it might even be a major premise of Kubrickian criticism these days—and there’s certainly evidence in the film to back it up. The Indian textile work is hard to argue against, especially considering some of the outfits Duvall wears, and there’s a definite old boys vibe to Nicholson’s interactions with the hotel spirits. (The arrogant disgust in the dead Grady’s voice when he describes Hallorann is hard to forget.) Maybe it is all an allegory of American policy in the West, an examination of the indulgent selfishness that drives so many men to crush and disdain their fellows.
But what of it? I’ve seen the movie half a dozen times at least, and I’ll watch it again soon. It’s not the subtext that brings me back. I have no doubt that, if such subtext is there, I’ll find it eventually; Kubrick is too excellent a filmmaker to half-ass that sort of thing. That isn’t what keeps me watching, though. It’s the shots over Danny’s shoulder as he rides around and around; the twins and their pasty plump faces; the woman in 237 who seduces Jack, only to reveal the horrorshow underneath her illusory charms; the man with the bloody face who tells Duvall, “Great party, isn’t it?” There is a quality of filmmaking at work here that remains a delight to experience no matter how familiar it becomes.
Oh, and it’s remarkably scary, too. Not many jump scares, but just a thudding sense of dread that envelops you from those opening credits to that final, lingering shot.
Much has been made of Nicholson’s work here; I’ve heard it argued that The Shining is the first time he let the mannerisms do as much work as the rest of him. Whether that’s true or not, I think we can safely assume that he and the rest of the cast deliver exactly the performance Kubrick wanted out of them. Which makes Nicholson’s transformation from restrained, distant husband to gleeful lunatic an interesting twist on expectations—while Jack is certainly believable in both aspects, it’s only when he goes over the edge that you really start to enjoy watching them. Much like Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange, there’s the fascinating charisma of psychotic men; only where modern filmmakers chose to give us mad geniuses capable of the most implausibly Goldbergian punchlines, Kubrick is more concerned in showing us a level of evil that we can entirely relate to. How fun it is to hate! we remember. And how tiresome all the conventions that keep us restrained.
In which case, Shelley Duvall’s winces and Danny Lloyd’s blank eyes make sense; we can pity for them, but it’s nearly impossible to root for them. There’s no warm center at the heart of movie, nothing to make you think that, were the Torrances somehow able get away from the Overlook that their lives would be at all improved. You can’t care about the family because there’s no family worth caring about.
There any number of ways that you can interpret the film: the whole Indian thing, a parable about man’s unsteady relationship to the people he’s supposed to protect, maybe something about the unheralded dangers of the hotel caretaker industry. Any of these could make for a pretty good Film Studies paper. But the movie doesn’t need them. It’s just a terrific horror picture by a director who knows exactly what he’s doing. Why he does it only matters when the lights come up and you notice the shadows are darker than they used to be.
COMPARE/CONTRAST:
Stephen King has talked about his dissatisfaction with the original film version of his novel any number of times, but the most telling point he brings up comes in the form of an anecdote. While Kubrick was making his Shining, he would often call King at odd hours to ask him some seemingly random question. Late one night, Kubrick rang and said, without much fanfare, “Do you believe in God?”
“Yes, I do,” King told him.
“I don’t,” Kubrick said, and hung up.
While the story itself is probably unverifiable (it’s on the IMDB trivia page for the movie, but I’ve misplaced the book I first found it in), it serves as a perfect way to approach the novel and its startlingly different adaptation. It would be difficult to find a movie based on a book that plays more havoc with its source material, while at the same time remaining true to the major details. Jack Torrance is still a reformed alcoholic with a history abuse, and he’s still the winter caretaker at the Overlook. His wife is Wendy, his son is Danny, and Danny has some peculiar psychic tendencies. And the Overlook itself is still full to the brim with nasty, mind-screwing ghosts.
But the gulf between King and Kubrick is remarkably vast. Reading the novel and seeing the movie, the connections are apparent—but I can’t imagine someone experiencing only one and somehow managing to successfully anticipate the other.
What we have here is a rarity: an adaptation which, while failing in the strictest sense of the word (translating the original author’s plot and themes into a different medium), stands quite nicely on its own as an equally valid work of art. It’s not exactly new territory for Kubrick. In addition to ignoring the final chapter of Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, he turned the straight-faced nuclear-era thriller Fail Safe into Dr. Strangelove, one of the most bitterly funny dark comedies ever made. A strong enough director to put his stamp on any material he chose to use, Kubrick was always more interested in using the work of others to make his own points—and if those points seemingly directly contradicted the original (as they do here), it certainly never stopped him.
Both novel and film have their first scenes in Stuart Ullman’s office; but where novel-Jack is irritable and humiliated, struggled to hold on to his temper and impress this thoroughly unimpressable man, movie-Jack just grins and passes the whole thing with flying colors. There’s not a hint of tension in the movie version, and movie-Ullman certainly never suggests that Jack might not be appropriate for the caretaker position.
Back home with Wendy and Danny, things are significantly less pleasant. While the novel has both characters somewhat worried for Jack (and Wendy depressed at the current state of their lives), the movie shows Duvall desperately eager to please, and Danny distant and closed-off. When Danny has a fainting spell, brought on by the imaginary friend who lives in his finger, Duvall calls in the doctor; with her son pronounced healthy, Duvall proceeds to tell the doctor, in her forced-smile, everything-is-okay voice about the time Jack broke Danny’s arm.
Clearly, it’s something she’s nervous of mentioning, but we never see movie-Jack expressing the same sort of sentiments. In the novel, it’s made explicit that Wendy seriously considered leaving her husband during his drinking days, especially after the incident with Danny. Only Jack’s remarkable reformation, and her love for their family as a whole, kept them together. In the movie, Duvall seems to be staying with her husband because she’s too frightened to do anything else. I doubt movie-Jack is physically abusive (apart from the arm break) before coming to the Overlook, but Duvall’s tentative neediness speaks to years of mental anguish. The film is probably more realistic in its approach to domestic violence—I’m sure there are more couples in the world like Duvall and Nicholson than the novel’s leads—but Kubrick’s detached approached means there’s already horror enough before the ghosts come out.
While the novel charts Jack’s gradually deteriorating mental state with a sort of tragic inevitability, Nicholson’s transformation seems to be headed in a different direction entirely. He’s been criticized for “starting crazy,” but this isn’t the case—it’s more that he begins the movie as a sort of low key kiss-ass who’s barely able to able to withhold his contempt for his wife, and ends it as screaming manifestation of his own Id.
There’s no question that it’s more difficult to convey an internal conflict on film than it is on the page, but this is something different. In the novel, watching a loving father forced against his will to turn into the man he grew up terrified he would one day become is moving and sad. There’s no equivalent sadness to the film; the transition seems more a revelation of what was there all along. As mentioned before, there’s no family in need of saving. It makes you wonder if there’s anything worth saving anywhere.
Another change requires some spoilage, so consider yourself warned.
In both versions, Dick Hallorann re-enters the narrative around the climax, in response to Danny’s desperate mental call. In the novel, after surviving attacks from the hotel and a drunken, possessed Jack, he helps Wendy and Danny escape while the Overlook burns. There’s a bittersweet (and, admittedly, somewhat pointless) epilogue, we see the remaining Torrances staying with Hallorann while they both recuperate from their injuries.
The movie has Hallorann making the same cross country trip, only instead of wrestling with the topiary animals and getting a roque mallet to the gut, poor Scatman Crothers is axed to death almost immediately after stepping in the hotel’s front doors. It’s nastily funny, like much of the film’s third act; even though his arrival does do some good, by distracting Jack long enough to let Wendy to get free, and providing both her and Danny with a Sno-Cat they can drive to safety in, all everyone remembers is his crumpled body on the lobby floor. It’s perhaps the most explicit contradiction of the source material in the entire movie. King’s Hallorann serves as a moderate deus ex machina; but stripped of his deus-hood by Kubrick, he has no place in the brutal machina that remains.
Oh, and while we’re in the spoiler section–what is up with that ending, anyway? The last shot of the movie is a photograph of a decades gone party during the Overlook’s heydays, and as the camera slowly closes in, we see a shockingly young Jack Nicholson in the front of the festivities, grinning like a loon. What to make of this? The most obvious conclusion is that Jack, after freezing to death in the hedge maze, has been assumed into the hotel’s crew of haunts and spooks. But unlike nearly every other horror film with a “kicker’ ending, there’s not the slightest hint that this is a bad thing. Torrance wasn’t punished for failing to kill his wife and son, nor did he discover that the Overlook wasn’t as welcoming as he initial believed, as would’ve certainly been the case in King’s novel. In fact, the ending seems like a happy one, at least for Jack. Which, again, is rarity. How many ghost stories can you think of where a murderous, hateful collection of spirits is actually the happiest place on earth?
There’s the end of the spoilers.
King has been very public about his disappointment in the first film version of The Shining. He even went so far as to write the teleplay for a disastrous ABC miniseries, trumpeting it as the book’s first “faithful” adaptation. Hopefully he’s mellowed in the years since then, because while it’s easy to understand his frustration, there’s no denying that Stanley Kubrick’s Shining is going to be sticking with us for a long time.
If no parent is perfect, and no child escapes, the reverse is equally true; but in the end, King doesn’t think that’s quite as terrible as it sounds. Redemption is still possible, he believes, even if it sometimes comes at the cost of all we have. But the movie, stripping the novel of its humanistic core, whispers another message entirely, describing a world where redemption is so alien as to be absurd, and that every relationship has too many rooms and too many closed doors. And that behind those doors are parties that we long to join, even if we cannot possibly comprehend them.
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That “237″? Not a typo.