This is the ninth letter in a reading series on books adapted by Stanley Kubrick, while also reading along with a new biography of the filmmaker by Kolker and Abrams called KUBRICK: An Odyssey.
Stephen King: The Shining. New York: Anchor Books, 2012 [1977].
We arrive at this iconic and enigmatic piece of pop art. The Shining is one of the best horror movies at the end of the 70s, but the novel it was based on turned out to be so-so for your host. (That’s why it took so long to read.)
I suppose I’m not much of a Stephen King guy. Many of his short stories are fun, and his novels Pet Semetary and Revival were quite good — and yet when it comes to postwar horror fiction, I sooner go to Jack Ketchum or Graham Masterton.
King is too cozy for me. His books have the voice of a sweet old man telling a yarn by a campfire. Even The Shining feels more like a dark fantasy, indeed, a kind of fairy tale.
This tone comes through in passages from little Danny’s point of view. He’s coping with his telepathic abilities — his shining — as he grapples with words and concepts.
The greatest terror of Danny’s life was DIVORCE, a word that always appeared in his mind as a sign painted in red letters which were covered with hissing, poisonous snakes. In DIVORCE, your parents no longer lived together. They had a tug of war over you in a court (tennis court? badminton court? Danny wasn’t sure which or if it was some other, but Mommy and Daddy had played both tennis and badminton at Stovington, so he assumed it could be either) and you had to go with one of them and you practically never saw the other one, and the one you were with could marry somebody you didn’t even know if the urge came on them. The most terrifying thing about DIVORCE was that he had sensed the word — or concept, or whatever it was that came to him in his understandings — floating around in his own parents’ heads, sometimes diffuse and relatively distant, sometimes as thick and obscuring and frightening as thunderheads.
Sweet, right?
When we arrive at the Overlook Hotel, the head chef Hallorann gives fatherly guidance to Danny, and his lines further reinforce the science fiction as opposed to straight horror atmosphere: “What you got, son, I call it shinin on, the Bible calls it having visions, and there’s scientists that call it precognition. I’ve read up on it, son. I’ve studied on it. They all mean seeing the future. Do you understand that?” “Nobody shines on all the time, except maybe for God up in heaven.” “People who shine can sometimes see things that are gonna happen, and I think sometimes they can see things that did happen. But they’re just like pictures in a book.”
Reading The Shining for the first time after years of familiarity with the movie underscored how well Kubrick and co-writer Diane Johnson captured the conversation between Hallorann and Danny. Scatman Crothers in the film is such a protective presence.
As for Mr. Jack Torrance, the novel is very specific that his troubles are to do with alcoholism: dry lips, chewing Excedrin. He assaulted Danny, and before that one of his students. As he comes under the Overlook’s influence (does it possess Jack, or precipitate something that already existed within him?) the hotel seems to appeal to his frustrations as a writer.
“—kill him. You have to kill him, Jacky, and her, too. Because a real artist must suffer. Because each man kills the thing he loves. Because they’ll always be conspiring against you, trying to hold you back and drag you down. Right this minute that boy of yours is in where he shouldn’t be. Trespassing. That’s what he’s doing. He’s a goddam little pup. Cane him for it, Jacky, cane him within an inch of his life.
The trappings of the Overlook in the book keep the fantasy elements at play: hedge animals, croquet mallets…it’s closer to Alice in Wonderland than the bleak withdrawal into consciousness expressed by the film’s hedge maze. The novel has an interest in exploring childhood that the film doesn’t share.
Another striking difference has to do with the supporting characters like Stuart Ullman the manager. In the movie he’s an affable, dopey guy with a smile pinned on; in the novel he is, to use Jack’s words, an “officious little prick.” And he kind of is: the whole interview scene is testy and charged with resentment.
And later on, as we wind up for the climax, Hallorann has a fuming conversation with the Rocky Mountain park service. “You tried the phone and then you tried the CB and you didn’t get nothing but you don’t think nothing’s wrong … What are you guys doing up there? Sitting on your asses and playing gin rummy?”
Which is to say, The Shining the book is a choleric narrative. Everybody’s angry, as if pressed for a drink. In Kubrick’s version, these same administrative moments (booking flights, scheduling time off from work, calling the national park service) all run smoothly, even insipidly. King’s narration may put us closer to people’s thoughts than Kubrick’s camera, but that also means getting closer to anger.
The juxtaposition between Kubrick’s sterile “administrative space” and the horror inside the Overlook is an interesting juxtaposition.
Around the same time that Kubrick settled on King’s book, he was threatening Britain’s chamber of commerce to leave the country because of the tax burdens on film production — and he also encountered Brian Aldiss’s science fiction story that would be the source of A.I.
Here was an instance in which a bestseller would make a ‘wonderful movie’. While he certainly didn’t consider the novel ‘a serious literary work’, it did offer him a way into the characters and the setting. He was particularly taken with the ‘extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural’ that would allow him to elide both in ways that kept the story moving and involved the viewer in the enigma of whether Jack is simply crazy or, as seems particularly evident in the scene in which Grady frees him from the larder, under the influence of the hotel’s strange powers.
As for casting: who else was it gonna be but Jack Nicholson for the father? “I believe that Jack is one of the best actors in Hollywood,” Kubrick said of him, “perhaps on a par with the greatest stars of the past like Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Cagney.”
Wendy Torrance was a role Shelley Duvall was born to play — just like Olive Oyl. Everything about her was perfect for Wendy just like everything about Jack was perfect for Jack. Kubrick first noticed her in Robert Altman’s Three Women.
To scout an American child actor to play Danny, Kubrick delegated the task to Leon Vitali, the actor who played Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon. Vitali — with the humility of a serious searching artist — abandoned his career and devoted himself to assisting Kubrick and being under his tutelage for the rest of the director’s life.
And what about that carpeting!! The filmmakers created an original, hideous design, but then actually found the iconic horrendous pattern of the film, commercially available.
One more note about Mr. Torrance’s writing project. It’s not specified in the movie, but in the book it happens to be a play called The Little School. It is this play that has put him “in that interesting intellectual Gobi known as the writer’s block.”
In the Overlook, after Danny has already been attacked by one of the ghosts, poor Wendy implores to him, “But I don’t understand you, Jack. Someone is in here with us. And not a very nice someone, either. We have to get down to Sidewinder, not just Danny but all of us. Quickly. And you … you’re sitting there reading your play!”
The wild thing to me is that “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is strictly in the film. It’s like a cross-media pun.
Read Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” (1850), the inspiration for the Overlook’s haunted ballroom.
A note from the Kolker and Abrams on the Oedipal struggle of The Shining:
The original Greek myth begins with his parents abandoning their son, whose ankles are mutilated by his father who pierces and ties them together, hence the name Oedipus — ‘swollen foot’. But where Freud ignored or repressed this incident of paternal abuse, Kubrick includes it, dramatizing Jack’s hostility towards Danny and his mother. And like Oedipus, Danny unwittingly causes the death of his father: attempted infanticide becomes successful patricide. Jack dies in retaliation and, ironically, it is he who is lamed. In the end, Danny is left alone with his mother, whom he kisses on the lips.