I have a sentimental attachment to "The Shining." I first came across it on TV on a lazy weekend afternoon when I was 8 years old. Suddenly, I stopped mindlessly changing the channel and froze. The moving image was mundane: a boy slightly younger than me riding around on a tricycle. Yet, something filled me with a dread as unfamiliar as it was total. Then, of course, the twin girls. They might as well have asked me to play with them for ever and ever. I went batshit.
Months went by and I still saw Jack Nicholson’s upturned stare beckoning me when I went to bed. The Shining cast a pall over my little pre-adolescent mind. I was terrified, yet invigorated. I snuck in more and more viewings, much to my beleaguered parents chagrin. What sickened me so much I couldn't get enough?
As I got older, I investigated what pierced me so thoroughly. I learned about Stanley Kubrick and devoured his 12 other movies. I began hastily explaining to people just why it was the pinnacle of film terror. The lighting. The perfectly symmetrical cinematography. The juxtapositions of natural light and sickly fluorescent and golden hues. Music that evoked judgement day. The horrifying puzzle was coming into place and I was going to let the world know.
I learned a few years ago that there is an entire internet subculture dedicated to dissecting "The Shining." I gleefully dove in and found that within the Shining are not only terror and aesthetic pleasure, but the encoded mysteries of the universe. Conspiracy theories abound. Most crazy. Some oddly compelling. All confirm that to the converted, the film feels like some sort of awful oracle.
As one of these converted I was always skeptical of the Stephen King book upon which it was based. King disparaged Kubrick, said he deviated too far from the book. This did not sit well with me. How dare he call one of the great terrors of my life a deviation! Without ever reading the book, I declared King a hack, and praised Kubrick for turning his pulpy penny dreadful into a masterpiece. This was more than a little pretentious. I recently decided to try the book.
From the first page I wanted the movie in my mind, not what I was reading. Everything was wrong. Jack was not the operatically demonic Jack Nicholson, but a basically decent guy with anger and drinking issues: i.e. Stephen King. The opaque dread I so cherished was gone, and in its place was turgid explanation. Where Kubrick suggests, visually aurally, King duly explains…everything. Where the movie was rife with subtext and could provoke wildly divergent interpretations, the book is basically a family melodrama with esp and an evil hotel. Where’s the awful mystery in that?
I think this is one of the most striking examples of a movie adaptation of a book completely transcending it”s source. The movie is not a simple illustration or homage, but a transformation. Kubrick and his team found in a mediocre thriller the rudiments of a masterpiece, one that would beguile and bewilder millions for decades. It demystifies “original sources” for what they are: crude blueprints. As an adapter, if you feel you can better your source, make like Jack and take an ax to it.
