The Shining

Even about a week later, I'm still unsure as to just how good The Shining is. I was hoping that reading a little more about the movie, and hopefully figuring a bit more of it out, would help in creating a real, concrete opinion, but instead, I find myself standing in the middle of a disagreement that has probably gone undiscussed in a few decades.

From poking around sources like Imdb and Wikipedia (so the really credible ones), it has come to my attention that a lot of people didn't like The Shining when it first came out. Among those people was Stephen King, who has been quoted as saying that although Kubrick made a film with memorable imagery, it was not a good adaptation of his novel and is the only adaptation of his novels that he could "remember hating."

Now, I haven't actually read more than the first 80 or so pages of the book, so I can't draw any kind of comparison myself, but what I can do is call into question King's ability to be a fair judge of Kubrick's work. One of the criticism that Wikipedia offers up is that "King thought that his novel's important themes, such as the disintegration of the family and the dangers of alcoholism, were ignored. King has admitted he was suffering from alcoholism at the time he wrote the novel, and as such there was an element of autobiography in the story." Assuming these thoughts are accurate, then it doesn't paint a very convincing picture of King as a credible critic of the film. Instead, it seems more that his issues with thematic extraction stem from a personal connection to the issues that he had presented in his novel. Since King was struggling with alcoholism, and admittedly, included this in the book for autobiographical, perhaps even cathartic reasons, he naturally, has a personal connection between the story of The Shining and his own addiction. By choosing to downplay the role of alcohol in his film, Kubrick exorcised King's demons from the story. For King, however, those themes and the story are intricately tied together, making the movie seem like only half of the story. For anyone who hasn't read the book, however, you wouldn't know anything was missing.

King's other major concern seems to be with the nature of the supernatural elements in the Overlook Hotel where the film takes place. King is often quoted as saying

"Parts of the film are chilling, charged with a relentlessly claustrophobic terror, but others fall flat. Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of The Overlook Hotel. So he looked, instead, for evil in the characters and made the film into a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones. That was the basic flaw: because he couldn't believe, he couldn't make the film believable to others. What's basically wrong with Kubrick's version of The Shining is that it's a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little; and that's why, for all its virtuoso effects, it never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should."

Boiled down, King seems to be arguing that the film The Shining isn't scary because Kubrick is reluctant to assign an unquestionable evil to the hotel. Instead, he focuses on Jack's frustrations and weaknesses, and the ease of his corruption. In King's world, the evil is scary because an outside force is able to latch onto the frailties of a man and turn him against his loved ones. In Kubrick's the evil is scary because Jack, beset by mundane annoyances and a fierce dissatisfaction with his life, is already teetering. All he needs is a little push, or even worse, just the permission of some other-worldly apparition, to have an excuse to let go of social pretense so that he can primally, and violently, remove his frustrations altogether.

If anything, I would argue that Kubrick, too, gives too much credence to the supernatural. The ending scene, with Jack's picture visible in a crowd in 1921, which Kubrick explained in an interview as modern Jack being a reincarnation of a previous caretaker, undermines the more human horror. Instead of Jack being a modern man given the opportunity to snap, there's an insinuation that he is somehow meant to be at the hotel, ridding him of any accountability. At that point, he is merely a puppet to the ghosts and spirits of the hotel, rather than a man who makes a choice to be "corrupted" into rejecting his life.

The Shining, as a film, then, is both too ambiguous and not not ambiguous enough. We are certain that some kind of supernatural forces are at work, as evidenced by Danny's shining, but we are still teased with the idea that many of Jack's visions are influenced by madness or self-projections. He is able to slip in and out of conversations with the ghosts at will, usually when facing a mirror, compared to the shock and terror that Danny and Wendy feel when they encounter the violent visions the hotel presents. There's a connection there that we are tempted to sum up to Jack's supposed madness, but that illusion is shattered when the ghosts are able to accurately describe and affect situations outside of Jack's perception and ability (Grady warning Jack that Danny is trying to contact O'Halloran and Grady opening up the pantry door to let Jack out). If that's the case, then we have to admit that the ghosts are real, that the supernatural exists, and that, perhaps, Kubrick was more true to King's ideas than even he realized. There's nothing wrong with leaving questions unanswered (see Inception), but when the ambiguities are so loose that you're left to simply pick the scraps, choosing to believe whatever you want, you end up with a film that is a critical goldmine, but a narrative nightmare.