[The Great Owl]

Be nice, everyone.

The Shining is one of Stephen King's most personal novels, and, being his third published novel, was written shortly after King himself had been dealing with real-life struggles similar to what Jack Torrence goes through in the story. While making ends meet as a high school teacher when he was sending short stories to publishers and trying to get his first novel published, Stephen King had to overcome alcoholism issues and juggle his obligations as a parent and husband under some tough circumstances. Whenever an artist creates a work of a highly personal nature like King did with The Shining, the artist will naturally be overprotective of that work.

Stanley Kubrick's adaptation did touch on these issues, and, in fact, addressed some of the issues quite well. The movie, however, has a strange off-center vibe that Stephen King's novel lacked. In the novel, Jack Torrance undergoes the transition of a normal adult struggling with alcoholism and unfortunate job experiences to a man under the thrall of the influence of the hotel, because his life experiences and condition left him especially susceptible to these influences. In the movie, however, one senses that Jack Nicholson's Torrance is crazy from the beginning, and that he left his mental groceries at the market long before the events depicted in the film. The concept is effective both ways, but, once again, this was a touchy issue for King, since there were so many autobiographical elements to the character of Jack Torrance.

I am not taking sides, necessarily, because, as I've previously posted, I loved the Stephen King book and the Stanley Kubrick adaptation equally, but in different ways.

The Shining is such a fascinating story idea that carries over so well. I like how Stanley Kubrick presents The Shining as a story with no reliable narrators. Jack Torrance is struggling with alcoholism. Wendy Torrance is torn from dealing with her husband's alcoholism and brushes with abusiveness. Danny Torrance is traumatized from an incident where his father abused him while under the influence of alcohol. At the beginning of the movie, the Torrance family is a family in crisis and a family that, by today's standards, would benefit from counseling and from the presence of a helpful community, as all people in such situations would. The idea of these three people living together in close quarters in an isolated remote mountain hotel away from community resources over the winter is the worst idea in the history of bad ideas. The fact that the hotel has a grisly past is the final straw that ignites the explosive situation, but it is secondary to the human element of the story. Kubrick recognizes this quite well, and, as such, his portrayal of supernatural events is somewhat less overt than the portrayal of events in Stephen King's novel.

I apologize for going nerd on all of you just now, but I wanted to explain my thoughts on why King and Kubrick both deserve a fair shake with respect to the history of this fine novel and this fine movie.