The Shining: the book, the film, and recovery

Unfortunately, there has long existed a cultural schism when discussing The Shining, in terms of how Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation relates to Stephen King’s original novel. Proponents of the former sometimes make the argument that Kubrick elevated King’s boilerplate thriller into a complex work of art, whereas proponents of the latter sometimes argue that Kubrick’s cold, near-mechanical approach to filmmaking misses the visceral scares and everyday relatability of the bestselling source material.

To be sure, there are huge differences between these two versions of The Shining. Kubrick tones down some of the overt supernatural elements from King’s book, and the storied history of the Overlook Hotel is more glimpsed than explored, giving us brief fragments versus the expansive past which King reveals.

But the most significant deviation would be the main character, Jack Torrance. In the novel, we spend a great deal of time in the head of alcoholic writer Jack, learning of his childhood spent with an abusive drunk for a father and the way this trauma has imprinted on his soul, destined and doomed to replay itself within Jack’s own life. As the demonic hotel slowly takes possession of Jack, the presence there uses his insecurities and obsessions and self-hatred to worm into his brain, preying upon Jack’s repressed, misdirected anger at his wife Wendy and son Danny. Torrance begins the story as a sympathetic but deeply troubled man, by the end transforming into a monster who becomes a threat to his family.

Kubrick’s movie, however, jettisons the compassionate approach to Jack as well as the gradations of his malevolent internal metamorphosis, instead implying early in the proceedings that Torrance is already at his breaking point. While the Overlook does drastically corrupt him in the film, the path to madness proves much shorter, and Jack bridges that gap with relative ease. In King’s work, Jack is a good man struggling with his dark side; in Kubrick’s, he’s a seething, resentful jerk who just needs the necessary push to finally strike.

The closest the Kubrick film gets to a vulnerable portrayal of Jack is a brief scene where he’s had a nightmare about killing Wendy and Danny, which he tearfully confesses to his wife while in a confused state after waking. Here, we see Jack genuinely afraid, horrified at the actions of his dream self, but the stricken haze does not last and he quickly goes back to being hypnotized by the hotel. However, for most of the film, Jack waffles between passive-aggressive and outright aggressive before snapping into irretractable, murderous antagonism.

Kubrick’s approach in The Shining is frequently seen through the lens of the psychological. This angle seems to fit better with the director’s worldview, given that in his life Kubrick made statements suggestive of materialistic rationalism and atheism. Stephen King even claimed that Kubrick’s own supposed lack of belief in God or an afterlife hampered the filmmaker’s ability to make the otherworldly credible. Indeed, much of the Kubrick movie could be chalked up to a man losing his mind, his many bottled frustrations reaching a boiling point due to isolation, creative impotence, and the lingering effects of untreated alcoholism.

Meanwhile, King’s book leans heavily on the supernatural, the ghosts of the Overlook quite literal as they attempt to control Jack Torrance, the hotel apparently alive with some diabolical force or consciousness attempting to manipulate him. Kubrick’s movie ends with Torrance freezing to death in a hedge maze, posed like a parody of a meditating monk, where King ends his tale with Jack briefly coming to awareness and restraining himself, giving his family time to escape before the hotel’s boiler explodes. (A suitable metaphor for Jack’s pent-up rage and hostility). As King himself has pointed out, one version ends in ice; the other, in fire.

However, the Kubrick vs King narrative represents a false dichotomy, as a closer inspection of their two respective Shinings reveals a great deal of overlap. After all, both stories are about a white-knuckle alcoholic or “dry drunk” — in other words, an addict who may be abstaining, but is not really dealing with the underlying causes of their addiction by pursuing treatment or recovery, nor truly addressing the fallout of their behavior.

In both versions, Jack Torrance has convinced himself that several months caretaking the Overlook Hotel will give him the solitude he requires to focus on his writing, and will mend any lingering tensions with his family despite his growing bitterness towards them for, in his mind, forcing him to give up booze. He is, of course, catastrophically wrong; being alone in the mountains strands him face-to-face with his multitude of lifelong issues, and those dragons tear him apart, the Overlook’s sinister influence becoming a surrogate for Jack’s drinking and the way alcohol controls him. (Kubrick’s movie especially hammers this home at the climax, where Jack — despite not having had a drop of alcohol — stumbles around the snowy hedge maze, slurring and shouting nonsense as if intoxicated, the Overlook’s psychic rot having seeped into the fissures of his being).

Ironically enough, King and Kubrick each also made statements that reenforce the presumed perspective of the other. King has talked about how the real ghosts of the story are memories, and the real monsters our most awful impulses, and that what he wanted to do was blur the line between the psychological and the supernatural . . . depicting a man with metaphorical phantoms stalking his psyche, only to find very real phantoms which nudge those fanged, preexisting mental shadows into the realm of insanity. This, by and large, is the exact same trajectory Kubrick walks in his adaptation, albeit with somewhat different surface dressing.

Likewise, Kubrick — who could admittedly be contradictory when discussing his intentions — elucidated how what always piqued his interest in the story was the scene where Wendy locks her husband in the pantry, only for something to later free Jack. To Kubrick, no psychological explanation answers how Jack escapes the food closet; the root cause would have to be paranormal. So, while critics up to and including Stephen King have claimed that Kubrick shied away from a depiction of actual ghosts, Stanley Kubrick’s whole fascination with The Shining stemmed from the fact that King’s novel presents a moment where the supernatural is incontrovertibly present. (Kubrick had even considered retaining some of the more fantastic elements of the book, such as the topiary animals which come to life, but the era’s pre-CGI special effects were not up to the director’s standard).

And the image of Kubrick as a stodgy, hardline militant atheist is also not entirely based in reality, anyway. While he was somewhat skeptical of the supernatural, Kubrick’s comments here and about 2001: A Space Odyssey betray a desire to believe in something mystical which transcends rationalist perspectives, even if only in the arena of make-believe.

In other words, both SKs viewed The Shining as a story about symbolic and genuine hauntings, where the specter of the past looms large in the human mind as well as in the settings which have witnessed those events, and how that history keeps itself alive through repetition, allowing another reality to bleed into our own while also offering a skewed glimmer of hope that perhaps some part of us survives death. Despite what many have claimed throughout the years, Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick were ultimately saying the same thing.

In past interviews, King mentions that The Shining served a bit as a confession for him: of his drinking problem, of his insecurities as a writer, and of his occasional feelings of violence towards his children. Therefore, perhaps it’s not surprising that he took Kubrick’s version almost as a slight. Jack Torrance was the author’s way of admitting to certain unpleasant facts through the lens of fiction, and to watch Kubrick rather clinically excising various elements of the story while focusing on the worst aspects of Torrance — who comes across in the movie as hateful, misogynistic, and physically and verbally abusive — and tossing out Jack’s genuine love for his family in the process, could understandably feel like a personal attack. (The Shining was also made much earlier in King’s career, before he had become desensitized to the mangling of his intentions through film and TV adaptations).

But even in the book, Jack is still abusive; he’s merely wrestling with those behaviors more overtly. The opening scene of the novel has Jack silently judging the manager of the hotel, his inner monologue fuming with the summation “officious little prick,” a micro glimpse of the toxic fury to come. The literary counterpart of Torrance breaks his son’s arm (as in the film), and also angrily assaults one of his own students, which gets him fired. When we meet Jack in Kubrick’s interpretation, the characterization is not alien to the source. This Jack is just further along a path he’s already walking on King’s page.

(Much could be written about the portrayal of Wendy Torrance in the movie, considerably meeker than her presentation in the book. But despite Kubrick’s infamous and unforgivable mistreatment of actor Shelley Duval, the film offers an empathetic depiction, where Wendy is a woman in deep denial about what’s happening to her family … not naive, as often claimed, but desperately trying to rally for a husband who’s already left the figurative building. Again, the villain of the story in either version is the percolating viciousness of Jack).

Decades after The Shining, King would write Doctor Sleep, a sequel eventually turned into a film by Mike Flanagan. Flanagan has the rather difficult dilemma of somehow honoring the two King novels and Kubrick’s movie, and the director admirably rises to the task.

Doctor Sleep deals with the adult Dan Torrance, who has become an alcoholic like his father after years of reliving the damage from his troubled childhood, but who seeks recovery through AA and through using his psychic powers to help dying people find peace as their souls transition. (Dan’s knowledge that we continue in a fashion after physical death offers a positive counter to the grim spiritual implications of The Shining). As opposed to Jack, Dan stops running from his fears through alcohol or the suppression of his abilities, and instead addresses them head-on, giving away that resulting tranquility to others. Dan must eventually face against the True Knot, a collective of psychic vampires who feed off of people such as him, which in Flanagan’s film returns us — and, by extension, Stephen King, now among the audience — to the abandoned Overlook Hotel, to reckon with Kubrick’s own contribution to the legacy of The Shining.

Flanagan meticulously recreates the sets from Kubrick’s film, but instead of relying on nostalgia, he renders our memory of the Kubrick Shining yet another ghost among many. In Doctor Sleep, the spirits of the Overlook and the soul-sucking clairvoyants in the True Knot parallel one another, and offer further commentary on addiction: similar to addicts, the hotel’s ghosts are trapped in the hell of repetition, recreating the same incident from their lives over and over like a stuck record, while the True Knot are reliant upon psychic energy to the point where they enter deathly withdrawals as they starve without a fix. Both sets of beings flock to those who “shine,” people such as Dan, feeding on that ethereal radiance while they themselves are decrepit, selfish things withering in darkness. The True Knot serves as a gruesome parody of community and connection, whereas Dan, having let go of his addictive behavior, gives of himself to help those in need.

When Dan confronts the soul of Jack, now an apparition tending bar at the hotel, this is an approximation of his father, a faded snapshot come back to life . . . yet also not his father at all, but the hotel’s warped, mocking impression of Jack Torrance after having absorbed the man’s essence. In all these different renditions of the Overlook, the place freezes people in time, often trapping them at their worst. Recovery, therefore, is the denial of such metaphysical stagnation.

Doctor Sleep builds its thematic foundation on the concept of recovery, the novel written years after Stephen King sought help for his addictions. Mike Flanagan, who got sober during production of his film, interprets and interrogates the theme of alcoholism from The Shining, reconciling book and movie by crafting a follow-up which functions as a concise character study of someone who does the work to dismantle their inherited trauma. While tempting to view this situation as Flanagan synthesizing two disparate pieces which happen to share a title, what he achieves with Doctor Sleep is so successful in part because King’s and Kubrick’s visions exist not far from one another.

Different wings of the same hotel, haunted by the same ghosts.