Daddy Wants a Shine Part Two

For those of you too lazy to scroll down, part one can be found here.

When it comes to film, there's few directors that I am in as much awe of as Stanley Kubrick. There's really not much I could say about his genius that hasn't been said elsewhere, but out of all the Kubrick movies I've seen, The Shining is the only one that isn't very good, despite the fact that it's incredibly entertaining.

So how does a guy like Kubrick fail at adapting The Shining, especially when he takes the same approach to adapting the novel that he took with all his other adaptations?

I think, quite simply, it's because Kubrick had no interest in retelling the story and decided to film a straightforward horror movie chock full of cliches. To be clear, I have no qualms with Kubrick's approach. I think it was a fantastic idea to strip out all of the back story. Films are not books, and as such, have to get the point across in a much shorter time than a book does. Likewise, replacing some of the more fantastic elements with practical ones, such as replacing the topiary with the hedge maze.

In the book, the hotel grounds sports a bunch of hedge animals that come to life and chase the characters around. Now, this is one of the aspects of the book that I flat out disliked. Admittedly, I'm not much of horror fan, and things like anthropomorphic shrubs are part of the reason why. They are just silly. I really liked them early on in the book, when they were just haunting the Jack and Danny, but by the end when Halloran is wrestling a lion bush, well, it's silly. Others may not think so, and that's fine. But I think it's a good example of something that "works" in a book, but would look silly in a movie.

Likewise, in the book Jack chases his family around with a Roque mallet as opposed to the Axe Nicholson used in the film. This allows him to be a truly brutal character by severely beating his wife. It also allows for some haunting foreshadowing with Danny's visions of a monster chasing him down a hallway with the steady thunderous thud of the mallet on the wall echoing after him. But let's face it, an axe is much more immediately frightening. And Nicholson nailed the scenes where he chops through the doors. I think it was a good choice.

Also gone is the history of the Overlook Hotel. As I understand it, the hotel is haunted simply because a lot of people died there, thanks to gang dealings, suicides, and so forth. Trauma such as that leaves behind psychic imprints which people with the "Shine" are able to see. Kubrick sidesteps the various gangster murders by instead focusing on the previous caretaker's daughters whom the caretaker murdered before killing himself the previous winter. This is another good choice. It provides a strong visual that's actually more relevant to the characters situation. I was actually a little surprised King didn't focus more on them in the book.

So, strip out the excessive back stories, the silly bushes, etc, and you have a much tighter story. But Kubrick doesn't stop there, he goes further and strips the characters down to their core. Firstly, gone is Jack Torrance's resentment toward authority figures. This is fine, focusing on just the alcoholism gives you more room to drive home the point. Also, Wendy is no longer the resilient woman she was in the book, but rather a meek, victim, typical of horror films. I don't enjoy this. Seeing a strong female character turned into a typical horror movie "woman victim" is a little disappointing. Likewise, Danny's psychic visions are changed from being his inner self explaining what the visions are to an creepy alternate personality. This presents Danny's telepathy in a more horror film context, making him sound possessed instead of oddly intelligent. I don't mind it so much, as it's basically a shorthand to get across the creepiness his parents feel about his telepathy.

So, I stand by the decision to strip out a lot of the excess and keep the key scenes. But in doing so, you lose the narrative of the story. Now all we have is a bunch of disparate scenes without much motivation behind them, and this is where I feel Kubrick failed, because he couldn't provide a strong narrative for the remnants of the story.

What he does instead, is cram in a bunch of horror movie cliches, such as Wendy being a meek victim mentioned earlier. The hotel was built on an Indian burial ground? Really? Is that supposed to be some sort of an explanation? Halloran shows up and gets murdered in a yawningly "shocking" method. And worst of all, the scene where Danny first encounters a ghost and realises that they can hurt him(because his psychic powers are bringing them to "life") is replaced by another typical horror cliche where upon Jack meets the sexy woman(in full frontal) ghost and proceeds to make out with her, only afterwords to realize that she's suddenly turned into a decayed hag woman. Man, I saw that scene already in movies featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

But I think the worst offender is the fact that Kubrick didn't even bother to try to present Jack as a loving father. The complex Jack Torrance of the book, the man who when drunk accidentally broke his son's arm, who went sober out of fear of hurting his loved ones or anyone else for that matter, who submits himself to humiliation and back breaking labor just so he can provide for his family...is completely gone. Jack Torrance in the movie seems to actually hate his family before he even gets to the hotel. It's so off base, I can only assume it was done on purpose, which if that's the case, I can't fathom why. It takes all the punch out of a strong family unit trying to kill each other. Part of it could just be that Nicholson is just a surly character actor, I don't know, but whatever the case, in the movie Jack is an unrepentant asshole.

Finally, we get to the ending, which...is baffling. In the book, the Overlook Hotel wants Danny to die so that his psychic powers will stay with it, thus keeping it and the ghosts a conscious entity. It uses Jack to do this. It manipulates his vices, coerces him to give into his paranoia and ego in an effort to get him to kill his family. In the movie, I don't even know what Kubrick was trying to say. At the end, after Jack dies, the movie zooms in on a photo of the Overlook staff from the 20's, and featured in the front of the group of employees is non other than Jack Torrance, implying(I guess) that Jack is the reincarnated caretaker or that he was absorbed into the hotel somehow defying space and time. I don't know, it doesn't make any sense and is purposely ambiguous. This just reeks of a scatter shot attempt to provide a horror film ending.

Furthermore, there was a scene in the original cut of the film at the end where Ullman states that Jack's body was never found. This is ridiculous, and just further proof that Kubrick was throwing whatever horror cliche's he could think of to get some cheap thrills in place of the story he cut out.

So why do I think this movie was a poor adaptation. Well, I think it was the right decision to strip the story down to it's bare elements, but unfortunately Kubrick didn't seem to be bothered with trying to present the story at all, but rather present some vivid scene's tied together by horror movie cliches. Scene for scene, it looks great and Nicholson is fantastic, but the movie is so gut wrenchingly weak as a whole, I can understand why Stephen King would want to remake the movie, this time in a series of three hour long episodes. So, how does that work out? I'll give my insights in the next blog post.