When it comes to “The Shining”, should we talk about the Stephen King book or the Stanley Kubrick movie? Let’s talk about both, since they are equally, albeit differently, masterful.
We all know the story of “The Shining”: a writer lacking in inspiration accepts a job as caretaker with his wife and their little boy in a huge deserted and isolated hotel and gradually becomes mad to the point of wanting to kill his wife and child. While this brief summary can apply to the book and the movie, the differences between the two are significant.
The novel stems from a short stay by Stephen King and his family at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado. The hotel, which is huge and old – it dates back to 1909 – is due to close for the Winter season the day after Stephen King arrives. The Kings find themselves the only guests and the writer, who spends the night in room 217, dreams that his young son is attacked in the corridors of the hotel by a serpentine fire hose animated by the most evil intentions. The writing of “The Shining” is completed in four months and Stephen King includes the number of room 217, the episode of the evil fire hose, the long corridors, the old building which becomes the Overlook (with multiple meanings, since “overlook” in English means “watching over”, “neglecting” but also “casting a spell”) and above all Winter isolation.
Stephen King puts a lot of himself into his anti-hero Jack Torrance, whether it’s his struggle with alcoholism or his loving relationship with his son.
“The Shining” is published in 1977 and quickly establishes Stephen King as a master of the fantasy genre, despite being only his third novel.
Stanley Kubrick soon seizes this literary success in order to make a film. He quickly rejects the scripted version that Stephen King submits to him to rework to the bone a scenario that is ultimately very different from the original novel, since several elements of the novel are eliminated while others are added.
The reception of the film which is released in 1980 in the US is more than mixed, so much so that Stanley Kubrick deletes the original ending scene – probably lost forever – which sees Wendy and her little boy Danny in the hospital. An American version still coexist today with a shortened European version following the flop of the film in the US. Personally, I prefer the American version, which is slightly – oh, very slightly – more explanatory.
Stephen King would long disown Stanley Kubrick’s film, and even wrote and produced a TV miniseries in 1997 – a forgettable miniseries, if you ask me. Kubrick has an indisputable talent and I love all of his movies, except Lolita.
As the years went by, Stanley Kubrick’s film would become a monument of horror cinema, dissected by cohorts of obsessed moviegoers, pointing out the differences between the novel and the film and analyzing the hidden intentions of Stanley Kubrick – even though he was reluctant to explain his movies to leave everyone their latitude of interpretation.
As we said, the differences between the novel and the film are important.
Where Stephen King depicts a Jack Torrance in distress, tortured between his alcoholism and his violence on the one hand, and his desire to mend his ways and his love for his wife and son on the other hand, Stanley Kubrick paints from the first scenes an unsympathetic anti-hero with little concern for his family, played by a Jack Nicholson who had already flirted with madness in “Flight Over A Cuckoo’s Nest”.
Where Stephen King portrays an intelligent and determined Wendy, Kubrick presents a silly and annoying woman.
The topiary created by Stephen King, whose animals come dangerously to life, is replaced in the movie by an immense hedge maze.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
No boiler or newspaper clippings telling the story of the Overlook hotel in Kubrick’s movie, but instead elevators spilling liters of blood.
And a room 217 which becomes room 237 in the film, without anyone really knowing why.
Where Stephen King describes the progressive psychic sinking of a father gradually possessed by the evil spirits of the Overlook hotel, Kubrick suggests that Jack has always belonged to the hotel and that the possession, which has always existed, will exist forever. In fact, the ending of the film differs significantly from that of the novel.
As we have said, the changes and additions made by Kubrick are still the subject of analysis today by cinephiles as obsessed with the film as Jack is with the Overlook hotel – if I believe the staggering number of articles, blogs and documentaries devoted to the exegesis of the film.
Some want to see in the movie a sexual subtext according to which the little boy Danny is actually sexually abused by his father Jack – coming with interpretations loaded (too loaded, perhaps) with symbolism about a rocket on a sweater, a teddy bear and the potentially evocative pattern of a carpet.
Others see in “The Shining” a coded message from Stanley Kubrick allowing to confess that he had filmed the fake Apollo 11 moon landing (and it comes back to a rocket on a sweater).
Others see in “The Shining” a denunciation of the Holocaust, all based on the brand of Jack Torrence’s typewriter – a German Adler (which is none other than that of Kubrick himself) – and a symbolic recurrence of the number 42 supposed to represent the year during which the final solution was decided, namely 1942.
Finally, others see in the recurrence of native motifs that decorate the Overlook hotel and in the liters of blood spilled by the elevators a subtext relating to the Amerindian genocide – it is indeed quickly explained in the film that the Overlook hotel is built on a Native American cemetery, which is not the case in the novel. And according to the co-writer of “The Shining”, Diane Johnson, the idea is not far-fetched since Kubrick had been largely interested in Native American history and customs, “particularly the cemeteries on which buildings were built. This is why the hotel is cursed: it had desecrated a sacred place.”
Others, in the same vein, see the Overlook hotel as a questionable symbol of American imperialism and capitalism, where the traditional Apache elements that dot the hotel have become the decorative elements of a luxury hotel that only wealthy white families can afford.
Whatever one may say, we will never know with certainty which sub-narratives Kubrick wanted to introduce into his film – and if there were any – because, as we have said, Stanley Kubrick was reluctant to explain his movies. Kubrick’s interviews by Michel Ciment do not give away much additional information and subsequent interviews with Leon Vitali, Kubrick’s long-time collaborator, do not provide any further answers, apart from Leon’s reaction – rolling his eyes and laughing at all these theories, gathered together in a confused and confusing documentary, “Room 237”.
I laugh about it too, to be honest. I smile, to be more exact. I regularly revisit these sometimes lame theories for which I keep a benevolent eye – because I watch the film regularly and I like to be immersed in its universe. If I totally subscribe to the subtext relating to the Native American genocide, those relating to sexual abuse, the fake Apollo 11 moon landing or the Holocaust leave me unmoved.
What has often questioned me is the fact that Stanley Kubrick, who wanted to try the horror genre after “Barry Lyndon”, asked Diane Johnson, a novelist specializing in gothic novels, to co-write the screenplay. At the time, Diane Johnson has no experience as a screenwriter, but she teaches gothic novels at university and she published a novel that Stanley Kubrick wants to adapt, “The Shadow Knows”, which has similarities with Schnitzler’s novel “Traumnovelle” (the latter will be adapted under the name “Eyes Wild Shut”).
Her immense knowledge of the mechanisms of the Gothic novel and the theme of fear make her a great interlocutor for Kubrick who likes “those areas of the story where reason is of little help.” The unconscious is one of these areas.
And the gothic novel, fantastic in essence, is perhaps inhabited by real or imagined ghosts, but these can only exert their malefic power if their prey presents a psychic fault – it is not Daphne du Maurier who will contradict me, if I think of Rebecca for instance.
This is what is happening in the Overlook hotel, whose evil spirits take over the mind of a very disturbed Jack Torrance.
The idea at the center of the film was the possession of the hotel. Jack was a being full of faults, whose egocentrism, deficiencies as a husband and alcoholism made him vulnerable to the black magic of the place. Later, he becomes its victim and prisoner. That is the theme, rather than a realistic analysis of a man’s psychological decline into madness.”
Diane Johnson, co-writer of “Shining”, interview from December 12, 1998
And this Overlook hotel, which is a character in its own right, is terrifying, because it hides, under normal exteriors, all the characteristics of a ghost ship – there is no living soul but it is full of ghosts. Its exteriors are those of the very real Timberland Lodge hotel located in Oregon, but its facade is rebuilt in the English studios of Elstree for the close-ups. The same goes for its interior, which is an strange composite of several very real American hotels photographed from all angles by Kubrick’s team, which explains why Native American decor coexists with Art Deco or Prairie School styles. By relying on reality, disorienting as it is, Stanley Kubrick avoids the clichés of the dark haunted mansion and makes the horror more terrifying, because more relatable.
The horror is also terrifying because it takes place in broad daylight (like the excellent “Midsommar” by Ari Aster) – just think about that first helicopter shot which follows Jack Torrance’s car around a mountain lake: the scene that could have been absolutely innocuous is particularly alarming because of the disturbing music with funereal accents by Hector Berlioz, “Dies Irae, Dream of a Sabbath Night” which accompanies it.
What has also often struck me is the fact that Kubrick, keen on Freudian psychoanalysis, had read Bruno Bettelheim’s book, “Psychoanalysis of Fairy Tales”, shortly before the filming of “The Shining”. We come back to the unconscious.
Born in 1903 in Vienna and died in 1990 in the sad country of suicide, Bettelheim was a psychotherapist affiliated with Freud and contested for his theories and methods on childhood autism. His “Psychoanalysis of Fairy Tales”, published in 1976, is disputed on other grounds, namely accusations of plagiarism of Julius Heuscher’s work, “A Psychiatric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales: their origin, meaning and usefulness” published in 1974.
However, Bettelheim’s book develops the interesting idea that fairy tales are nothing less than initiation stories with a pedagogical virtue: the child who listens to them and who identifies with the young heroes confronted with a thousand perils – whether abusive parents, ogres or dark forests – unconsciously understands that it is necessary to tame one’s fears and passions, to break the fusional bond with the parents or even to kill them symbolically to become more mature, more independent, in a word, adult.
And in fact, fairy tales are never far away in “The Shining”.
The Overlook hotel resembles a haunted castle which is reminiscent of that of “Beauty and the Beast” or that of “Bluebeard” with its forbidden room (here, room 237) and which disorients its occupants in interior labyrinths – the corridors (Stanley Kubrick had voluntarily created a set that makes no architectural sense to confuse the viewer) and exterior labyrinths – the monumental hedge maze.
And since I’m talking about the hedge maze, the footprints that Danny leaves in the snow – and which will ultimately ensure his survival, are reminiscent of the pebbles of “Hop-O’-My-Thumb”.
Jack Torrance, in his murderous madness particularly focused on his own son, inevitably joins all the harmful parental figures who populate fairy tales, be it the murderous stepmother of “Snow White”, parents who abandon their children in “Hop-O’-My-Thumb” or the father who wishes to marry his daughter in “Donkey Skin”. Amelia, the depressive mother of “Babadook” by Jennifer Kent, joins this sad assembly of toxic parents.
The film starts from the fact that ghosts exist. There was a scene that was very important to me and which was cut during editing, where Jack discovered a book near the boiler. It was a story of the hotel; reading it, he understood that he was a creature of the place and felt trapped. I think that sequence should have been kept, because in any fairy tale paradigm there is always a moment when the hero cannot resist the offer of a poisoned gift, and that is the moment when he is condemned.”
Diane Johnson, co-writer of “The Shining”, interview from December 12, 1998
Jack himself makes a very direct reference to “The Three Little Pigs” when he pursues, armed with his axe, his wife and son.
Stanley Kubrick, unlike Stephen King who navigates from one voice to another between Jack, Wendy and Danny, places the whole film at the height of Danny. It is through Danny’s eyes that we experience the events that take place in the Overlook hotel.
And even if Danny, from the height of his five years, is particularly mature and endowed with extraordinary psychic powers, the permanent ordeal he undergoes at the Overlook is nothing less than an initiatory journey during which he must tame his fears and accept his abilities – whether supernatural or not – in order to eventually become more mature and more independent (admittedly, it’s a bit violent in the film, since he consciously drags his father towards death and that this has nothing to do with a symbolic death).
The mirrors, which are omnipresent in the film, symbolize the duality and the struggle between the social being that one tries to build and the fears and dark passions that constantly agitate the human being. Jack will not have the resources to fight against the darkness that invades him, while Danny will be able to save himself.
In the same psychoanalytical vein, we also understand better that Danny’s initiatory journey is very personal: even if he has extraordinary psychic powers that allow him to see the immaterial world, to communicate from a distance or to see past, present and future, the ordeal endured at the Overlook also reflects the emotional trauma experienced by this particular child who suffers from his father’s latent alcoholism and violence and who is in full dissociation – which explains his terribly frozen attitude during a hug with his father (fight, flight or… freeze), his mute attitude after his traumatic visit to room 237 or the existence of his imaginary friend Tony, who is only another version of himself.
Danny lives to the rhythm of his games and the many cartoons he watches and his mother has something of the somewhat silly and clumsy Disney character, Goofy. Her first name, Wendy, recalls that of the little girl who dreams of being a mother in “Peter Pan”. Danny lives like any other child, even if he understands unconsciously and in a totally repressed way that the adult world can quickly become deadly.
Danny must have some concerns about his mother’s inability to protect him – even if she eventually reveals herself to be a full mother when she wants to leave the hotel to save her son, placing his well-being before her husband’s wishes and when she physically defends him against a father who has become possessed.
Danny must also have some concerns about his father’s latent violence and his perverse-narcissistic character who would like to see the world revolve around him, and not around his child’s needs.
From this psychoanalytical angle, the film “The Shining” is indeed a universal fairy tale which would largely deserve its place in Bettelheim’s “Psychoanalysis of Fairy Tales”. And maybe it’s because “The Shining” is a universal fairy tale that it still resonates so much with us today.
So here is my little psychoanalytical contribution to the thousand theories that “The Shining” may have given rise to. I have not read it anywhere, and in this I join the cohort of people obsessed with this film which leaves me absolutely stunned each time. Because that’s the beauty of “The Shining”: I talk about ghosts and fairy tales but many of us remain hypnotized by “The Shining” and try to fall down the rabbit hole and walk through the looking glass, like Alice.
Stephen King’s novel is a marvel, Stanley Kubrick’s film is another (I repeat, I recommend the American version, not the European version). For enthusiasts, Michel Ciment’s book “Kubrick” is a must, as is “Once upon a time… Shining” by Delphine Valloire.
Marni top – Vintage trousers – Sergio Rossi flat shoes – Chanel necklace – Gucci vintage handbag – At the Grand Hotel Amrâth Amsterdam
October 6, 2023
