by Nelson
Since I first read it way back in the sixth grade, Stephen King’s The Shining has been my all-time favorite book. It takes a lot to knock R.L. Stine’s The Cuckoo Clock of Doom off of its pedestal, but King accomplished just that with his famous tale of a writer bringing his family to a remote hotel for a winter caretaking job.
The Torrances are a haunted family. Jack and Wendy are haunted both by their pasts and their present, and five-year-old Danny is haunted by the sins and missteps of his parents, his growing concern for the future of his family, and a mysterious, often frightening power.
So, of course, Jack brings the whole gang with him to a hotel that also happens to be haunted by its past, only The Overlook Hotel’s past is one of bloodshed, murder, and corruption, and the “haunting” is done by literal ghosts instead of emotional scars.
A recovering alcoholic with severe anger issues stemming from an abusive childhood at the hands of a domineering father, Jack Torrance is quickly absorbed by the checkered history of the hotel, seeing it as an opportunity for literary success. He abandons the play he hoped to complete over the winter and spends hours in the hotel’s basement pouring through a dusty mound of ancient documents.
Wendy Torrance is reeling from her husband’s alcoholism, her conflicting feelings towards her marriage in the aftermath of Jack drunkenly breaking Danny’s arm months before the events of the novel, and, much like her husband, an overly domineering parent, in this case her mother. For her, The Overlook is a final chance for the fragile Torrance Family Unit to survive, but, as the story progresses, she becomes unable to deny the changes in her husband and the increasingly supernatural events that take place in the hotel.
Danny’s “shining” gives him premonitions of the horror that awaits the family within the Overlook’s walls, but it also makes him tragically aware of what a desperate situation his parents are in, how Jack’s caretaking job is a last ditch effort to salvage the shattered Torrance family, thanks to his ability to read the thoughts of the people around him.
Most people know the story, largely thanks to Jack Nicholson’s legendary performance as Jack Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film based on the novel. Kubrick’s version of the story differed significantly from King’s novel in almost every aspect, from minor cosmetic details like Jack’s usage of an axe rather than a croquet mallet in the finale to significantly altering the story’s main characters as in the case with Shelley Duvall’s Wendy.
Kubrick portrays the Torrance household as one of abuse, with strong implications that Jack is just as abusive to Wendy as he is Danny. While, in the novel, Wendy is a strong woman who hesitantly holds onto the pieces of her marriage for the sake of her son and quickly springs into action when the hotel fully consumes her husband. This is a stark contrast to Shelley Duvall’s portrayal, which sees a much more submissive personality. Duvall’s Wendy has already been stepped on by her husband enough times to be used to it, and Nicholson’s Jack comes across as the unyielding, dominant force in his family from the first moment we see them together on-screen.
The 1980 film is so full of subtext, and many have come away from it with radical interpretations ranging from how the movie is a commentary on the treatment Native Americans received at the hands of white settlers to how it is really Stanley Kubrick’s coded confession to staging the moon landing for NASA. As out-there as some of those ideas may seem, it truly is a movie that lends itself very well to deep analysis, and you can really get into some interesting, surreal stuff through a closer look. Ever notice Jack’s color changing typewriter or the fact that the existence of Mr. Ullman’s office window is structurally impossible based on the established layout of the hotel? Kubrick’s Overlook seems capable of bending reality to its will, a prospect that’s a bit more terrifying than Jack Nicholson running around with an axe.
Stephen King hated the movie. It’s easy to see why. I can’t imagine what he must have thought when he first saw it, especially after dozens of late night phone calls from Kubrick asking King philosophical questions like “do you believe in God?” during the film’s production. On one hand, The Shining was a very personal novel to King, a novel that saw him channel and face many of his own demons through the character of Jack Torrance. In the book, Jack is a struggling man, a doomed man, but a man who strives to do the right thing for his wife and son. He’s a multi-time failure, a guy with sixty whole dollars to his name at the time he and his family relocate to the luxurious mountain resort of evil, but he means well. In the book’s finale, Jack manages to overcome the hotel’s grip on him long enough to save his family and send The Overlook to a fiery end, a far cry from his icy fate in Kubrick’s adaptation. King’s Jack is given a glimmer of redemption, while Kubrick’s Jack plunges headlong into insanity, becoming in incoherent roaring monster by the end.
After years of hating the movie, King finally readapted it as an ABC miniseries that aired in 1997. This was my introduction to both the story and Stephen King in general. Of course I’d heard of King and his horrific stories, but I was an R.L. Stine guy. I don’t think I’d ever even seen a Stephen King movie before The Shining miniseries.
The miniseries had already proven to be a pretty successful medium for King’s stories. The extended runtime allowed for more accurate adaptations of his typically voluminous novels. It and The Stand, two of King’s longest works, had already been successfully adapted for television. With The Shining, King was poised to right one of the greatest wrongs of his career.
Starring Steven Weber, Rebecca De Mornay, and the kid Pinhead takes hostage in Hellraiser: Bloodlines (Courtland Mead), the miniseries was a slightly modernized, but far more accurate, take on the book. Weber had, by far, the biggest shoes to step into, as Nicholson’s Torrance and his “here’s Johnny” entrance were both cemented in the annals of pop culture forever. But comparing Weber’s performance with Nicholson’s is entirely unfair. It’s like comparing Keaton’s Batman with Bale’s. You’ve got two very different approaches to the same character. In the case of Batman, at least Keaton and Bale both dressed up in bat costumes and took out criminals. With Weber and Nicholson, you’ve got two characters that essentially resemble each other in name only.
While it was initially successful both critically and commercially, the legacy of The Shining Miniseries is practically nonexistent. Today, it’s widely viewed as an inferior product, a pale imitation of Kubrick’s authentic version. It’s criticized both for its (admittedly) cheesy effects and for sticking too closely to the source material. The irony.
The miniseries was the first Stephen King adaptation I was allowed to watch. I vividly remember being forbidden to enter the living room when The Stand miniseries was airing a few years earlier, so seeing this one was a big deal for me. In sixth grade, cheesy effects were not on my critical radar, so, when the hedge animals came to life in pursuit of Danny, I was completely terrified and utterly oblivious to how terrible they looked.
More so than anything, it was the story that stuck with me. I had already been advised by a classmate and close confidante that I should consider dropping the habit of reading Goosebumps books the minute they hit the shelves because, as a sixth grader, I was far too old for them. So Stephen King was a natural progression for me. I had to make a strong case to both of my parents to get them to agree to let me read the book, but I guess the idea of their son advancing from Stine to full-on adult novels was too appealing to let a little profanity, sex, and violence stand in the way. So, as my parents shopped in our local grocery store, I made my way to the book section and picked out a paperback copy of The Shining that would eventually fall apart due to repeated readings. It was the book, not the miniseries and not the movie (which I didn’t watch until after my first read through of the source material), that I was obsessed with. King’s penchant for getting into the heads of his characters grabbed me in a way that no R.L. Stine book was ever going to, and, to this day, I still count myself as a huge fan of his work.
For years, I argued that the miniseries was the “real” version of the story, that those who were only familiar would the 1980 movie were unenlightened heathens who didn’t know what they were missing out on.
But, the more I sat down and watched it, the more I grappled with an undeniable truth…a truth that I didn’t want to admit.
In the case of The Shining, the miniseries is completely irrelevant in comparison with Stanley Kubrick’s movie.
I don’t know why. It’s not the performances. Weber gets to flex acting muscles that his comedic roles rarely granted him the opportunity to use; De Mornay plays a strong, confident, and tough as nails Wendy Torrance, and Courtland Mead gives us a far more endearing and less creepy version of Danny. The story barely differentiates from the novel, but it somehow lacks the “oomph” of Kubrick’s claustrophobic, nightmarish vision. Sure, the miniseries tells us all about the hotel’s former caretaker, Grady, and how he chopped up his family one winter before killing himself, but we don’t get the creepy Grady girls inviting Danny to play “forever and ever and ever,” and, when Grady does show up, he lacks the uncomfortable menace of Kubrick’s version.
It’s not even the different mediums. King’s works had to be significantly toned down for network television, but, even so, The Shining didn’t have a whole lot that actually needed toning down. Furthermore, the miniseries version of It still trumps the recent film adaptations, so it’s not a case of Kubrick’s version winning out because it had a bigger budget and a more notable lead actor.
It’s just that, despite its significant deviations from the original story, Stanley Kubrick’s Overlook is more ominous, more mysterious, and more unsettling than anything you’ll see in the 97 version. Kubrick’s Jack is a more menacing, more dangerous villain because, unlike King’s, we’re under no illusions that he means well. There’s no internal struggle whatsoever; Jack’s been waiting to pick up that whiskey bottle and that axe since the opening scene, and his gleeful “here’s Johnny” moment only serves to drive home how much fun he’s having terrorizing his wife and son.
For all its deviations, the one thing that the 1980 film brilliantly took from the novel was the hotel’s bizarre displacement from time. In The Overlook, the present merges with the past, and the hotel’s ghosts are permanently residing in a 1940s July 4th masquerade ball. Well, a 1920s masquerade ball in the movie. Cause Stanley Kubrick said so. But regardless of the decade, the miniseries only scratches the surface of this out of time phenomena, whereas Kubrick’s ending shot of a photo of Jack enjoying himself at a ball he couldn’t have possibly been present for manages to drive this idea home masterfully.
When it comes to The Shining, nothing will ever top Stephen King’s novel. It’s a tragic, horrific, and haunting story that has stuck with me for over twenty years now. Stanley Kubrick managed to successfully and accurately adapt the supernatural tone of the novel while playing fast and loose with the plot, and the miniseries serves as a totally watchable but slightly underwhelming misstep in Stephen King’s otherwise excellent track record of made for TV movies.
In many ways, the Kubrick and King versions serve as a point and counterpoint. King sympathizes with Jack and ultimately redeems him, while Kubrick embraces a colder (literally!), more unforgiving view of the character. For me, the different takes on this story are all part of the fun. They’re a testament to the richness of the concept, how chilling the notion of a father being driven by the figurative and literal ghosts around him to pursue his own son with murderous intentions really is. It’s my favorite book of all time, and I’m in love with the idea of choosing which iteration of the story I want to go with. And, let’s be honest, without The Shining, I’d probably still be reading Goosebumps books.
Doubtfire 