The Shining has become so ubiquitous in pop culture that one needn’t have seen it to know its plot, be able to recite lines from it, or enjoy parodies of it. The 1980 film—an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name from three years prior—was the final film of director Stanley Kubrick’s most prolific period, after which he only completed two more movies before his death in 1999. Like many of Kubrick’s films, The Shining has been viewed more favorably in the decades since its release than it was by critics of the time. One person who was especially displeased with the film is Stephen King, although his negative feelings haven’t dulled one bit in the ensuing 36 years. As love of the movie has grown, so has the push back to King’s hatred of the movie, chalking it up to a guy who is just being overly sensitive about his work at best, and who is jealous that Kubrick's movie surpasses his book at worst. So quick are the movie’s fans to stick up for the film and reject King’s disdain towards it that they miss the inconvenient fact that the author is absolutely correct about the movie's failings.
Set in the fictitious Overlook Hotel in a remote Colorado town, The Shining stars Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a struggling writer who has just accepted the job as the Overlook’s caretaker during its five-month offseason. He brings along his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their young son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), and together they set about on their long, isolated stint in the hotel. The Torrances weren’t the most functional family to begin with; Jack is a recovering alcoholic with rage issues, Danny has an imaginary friend who lives inside his mouth and talks through Danny with a raspy voice, and Wendy is a bundle of neuroses who does her best to keep it—and her family—together. It isn't long before the already-unstable foundation of the Torrance family comes tumbling down within the confines of the empty hotel. Or is the hotel empty? Thanks to Danny's psychic ability to see the after-images of dead hotel guests and the events that surrounded them—the titular "shining," as the power is referred to—he sees glimpses of blood spilling out of elevator doors, creepy twin girls beckoning him to play, and a woman decaying in a bathtub. However, the seemingly shine-less members of the Torrance family are soon seeing ghosts of their own, and through interacting with them/being goaded by them, the deteriorating mental state of the trio is soon manifesting itself in mental breakdowns, physical and emotional abuse, and ultimately, murderous rampages with axes.
Whether or not the movie The Shining is "better" or "worse" than the book The Shining is an impossible comparison to make for precisely one of the main reasons King hates the movie so much: they are essentially two completely different beasts. More specifically, the Jack Torrance character in the book is nothing at all like the Jack Torrance in the movie. The book's Jack Torrance seems to want to be a good guy, and his losing of that fight is the tragedy that the entire story hangs on. By contrast, the movie opens with Jack already an unlikable jerk who barely needs any pushing at all to cross over into a violent psychopath. He essentially relishes the excuse that the hotel's dark influence gives him to surrender all traces of morality, and willingly gives in to the killer that was apparently already lurking underneath. The book shows glimpses of the loving father and husband that still exist inside of Jack even after the evil has taken hold, while the movie doesn't seem interested in giving him any sort of redemption or humanity once the descent into madness begins - which barely takes a full half hour after the movie opens. While it's easy to give Kubrick all of the blame for this, that responsibility must also be shouldered by Nicholson, who chews the scenery with his snarling, demonic smile and campy "catchphrases." The viewer is given the impression that Jack - both actor and character - are enjoying the havoc he is wreaking, and that is certainly intentional. But it only further lessens the humanity of Jack that it is being hammered home just how much of a thrill he is getting out of the psychological torture he is inflicting on his family and the planning of their deaths, which makes him less of a sympathetic - and therefore compelling - character and more of an empty vessel for violence, not unlike the evil avatar in a million other shallow slasher films. One critic suggested that the audience should actually have sympathy for Jack and the dark past and inner demons that made him so weak to the Overlook's evil influence. However, there just isn't enough time spent with him pre-lunatic to develop anything but disgust toward his actions, and it weakens the emotional impact of his eventual rampage.
Shelley Duvall's Wendy doesn’t fare much better. As King (accurately) points out, she doesn’t seem to have any place in the movie other than screaming and running away; not unlike the previous criticism of Jack, she is the cliché shrieking, helpless female horror movie victim. Anyone watching the movie only feels sorry for her on a superficial level, but it doesn’t go beyond general sympathy towards a woman who is being chased around with an axe. To her credit, Duvall does play the role of “terrified woman†very well, but it's still unfortunate that that’s all Wendy really is in the movie. It has been suggested that the archetypal nature of the characters in The Shining - and Jack in particular - was an intentional choice by Kubrick, serving a satirical role that plays off of and against the clichéd horror film conventions. Whether or not that is true doesn't make the lack of character depth in the film any less of a detriment.
Where The Shining excels as a film, coincidentally, are in its cinematic elements. Like any Stanley Kubrick film, it is impeccably shot, with gorgeous cinematography in every frame. Kubrick was always known as an extreme perfectionist, and nowhere does that come through more profoundly than in the visual splendor of his movies. The opening shots of the movie are breathtaking, with huge, sweeping shots of a snowy, mountainous countryside. And although the action quickly moves indoors, where it stays for the bulk of the film, the cinematography is no less gorgeous and lush than the opening shots. The Overlook is a luxury hotel, frequented by the wealthy and the famous, and therefore is ornate and sparkling at every turn. As the Torrance family settles into their life there, the scenes switch between wide-angled shots of large ballrooms that dwarf the tiny family to tight shots of the hotels smaller areas, with the Torrances uncomfortably front and center. Only a visual master like Kubrick can make a location seem both expansive and cramped at the same time. When The Shining was going into production, the Steadicam was a brand new technology, and Kubrick made some of cinema’s first iconic uses of the system. He even got the system's inventor, Garrett Brown, to man the Steadicam himself in the movie, and Brown has since credited the experience with deepening his knowledge and appreciation of his own creation.
So is the conclusion here that The Shining is fine as a movie but mostly only fails when compared to the book? Not necessarily. While the movie's shortcomings certainly burn much brighter when viewed through King’s disapproving magnifying glass, Kubrick's film has problems even on its own terms. One of the reasons that people love to discuss and dissect the movie all these years later is in the film’s ambiguity between whether or not the horrors are provided supernaturally by the hotel or whether they are just manifestations of the Torrances' fractured mental state. In the book, as with many of King's books, there are indeed paranormal forces at work against the Torrance family. King makes that very clear. The movie is much vaguer about the conflict, and while there are certainly parts that strongly lean on things not all just being in the Torrances' heads, there is still just enough mystery to enable that debate. The problem is, in not quite committing to one approach or the other, The Shining film isn’t quite effective enough as a ghost story or a story about people driven to madness by their own inner demons. This jack of all trades, master of none conceit only works against the film, making that mystery more distracting than compelling.
It's easy to brush King's complaints about the movie aside and to attempt to view it as its own separate creation. But doing so is not only unfair to King, who deserves to have a strong opinion about the way the characters that he labored over for three years - and who he claims a deep autobiographical connection to - were treated in the hands of another artist, it is also ignoring the glaring ways in which the film never reaches its potential. The Shining not only falls short of its potential to properly capture King's book, but also its potential to be a masterful horror movie. In the end, despite promising the underpinnings of something much smarter and more complex, The Shining ultimately ends up like so many scream queens of the era: beautiful to look at and capable of making a lot of noise, but nothing more than easy fodder for a one-dimensional villain. The key is recognizing that said shallow villain is the thinness of Kubrick's characters and not easy target Stephen King, who didn’t originally write them that way.
