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I recently got to talking with friends who liked The Shining, both Stephen King's novel and Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of it, but who were unaware that King has always loathed the movie, despite its reputation as one of the best horror films ever made. It's hard to imagine that a writer doesn't know his own work better than someone interpreting it, but I think this is one of those rare cases where the writer is just too close to the story to get it. Here are three reasons why I think Kubrick's film better understands the material, and is better overall, than King's novel:

1) In King's version, Jack Torrance is a fundamentally decent man who wouldn't hurt a fly, but who is down on his luck and desperate. The events of his stay in the haunted hotel slowly drive him mad and cause him to attack his wife and 6-year-old son. To King, the horror is that anyone, no matter how decent, can be corrupted.

In Kubrick's version, Torrance is already half-mad when it starts, hence the casting of Jack Nicholson, an actor who has a way of sounding menacing even when he's paying a compliment. Torrance is an alcoholic who has beaten his wife and son in the past, but he has resolved to be a better and sober man. The haunted hotel is merely the nudge that pushes him over the edge into violence again; he gets himself to the brink. To Kubrick, the horror is that real Jack Torrances are all around us, just waiting for their own nudges to lose control, because on a subconscious level, they want to lose control.

I don't fear haunted hotels, for the reason that they do not exist. But I do fear domestic violence and alcoholism, because I grew up with them and the scars remain in my middle age, and I know too well how real and common they are. "Fictional magic thing makes good man go bad" cannot possibly be as scary as "alcoholic abuser finally commits to longtime desire to eradicate his hated wife and child."

2) The Shining was written during that hazy years-long binge that came in the wake of the success of King's first novel Carrie, in which he attempted to serve the surging public demand for more Stephen King books by snorting as much cocaine as possible and writing in a mad frenzy, soothing his pain with copious amounts of alcohol. To this day, he has no recollection of writing Cujo or Firestarter. He has said that it was twenty years after the publication of The Shining, long after his family had helped him get sober, that his wife Tabitha was able to help him see what had eluded him: He was Jack Torrance. The book was his own sublimated anger at his children and at his resentment at having to raise a family just as his career needed him most and at his desperate substance abuse problem. He was always too close (and too drunk) to see it before.

King still hates the movie. As recently as a few years ago, he continued to acknowledge this. And yet, consider a telling quote from that article:

"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," King has said. "All he does is get crazier. In the book, he's a guy who's struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that's a tragedy. In the movie, there's no tragedy because there's no real change."

Really, Steve? Because I would argue that casting the book as a tragedy implies that Torrance has a tragic flaw, a defect of character that causes his downfall, which is clearly present in Kubrick's version but lacking in King's. I would also argue that there IS a change, but it's in wife Wendy and son Danny, who must find the inner strength to resist Torrance and survive. That King thinks of Torrance as the hero of the story shows just how skewed his perspective is.

3) Kubrick probably didn't think of it this way, but his film was better positioned than King's novel to be at an important crossroads in American culture, which enhanced its reputation. After postwar events such as women entering the workforce en masse, second-wave feminism, and the civil rights movement had diminished the white man's preeminence in society and in his own home, here was a story in which a white patriarch consumed with defensive rage is finally taken down by a partnership between a woman, a Black man, and his own son (representing future generations). That it all happens on stolen Native American ground, in a building decorated with appropriated Native American art, is even richer. Although King's novel takes Danny's perspective more often than the film does, the film accurately perceives Torrance as the villain and condemns him for his desire to dominate everyone else, up to and including their very lives, something that the book can't meaningfully do.

Stephen King is a great writer who possesses at least a hundred times more insight into the human psyche than I do. It's weird for me to argue that I understand his own work better than he does in any way whatsoever, particularly since in this case he has been grappling with the reputation of Kubrick's film for four decades now. But enough other people see it my way that I feel confident in my opinion in this case.

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One Reply to All King and No Kubrick Make Jack a Dull Boy

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Logical Operator

The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »