Three Looks at the Overlook: A Shining Project (REPOST)

Note: What follows is a reposting of a lengthy and detailed thread about The Shining (book, film, and miniseries) that buzzed up the old forum for a brief period circa January 2016. I have dug it up from the archives and reformatted it for the current forum. The transition isn't 100% perfect - and there may be a few HTML errors - but it should be relatively clear who is saying what, who is quoting whom, and why one dummy keeps popping into the replies with Simpsons jokes. Anyways, enjoy.





24 Nov 2015
guttersnipe
This thread is for a multi-format discussion of The Shining between myself and Zarnium, and anyone else with thoughts on the book, film or miniseries.

I've finished on the reading and watching front, and my post on the book is ready to go as and when. I'll have the film and miniseries posts done in the next couple of days, so I'll be ready to launch whenever you catch up.

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24 Nov 2015
Zarnium
Great! I'll catch up when I don't have finals, so I wouldn't expect to be done anytime sooner than a month from now.

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25 Dec 2015
Zarnium
Say, Guts: Exactly how long are you planning for each segment to be? Mine on just the movie is already pretty long, but I don't want to end up with something that's waaaay longer than yours so its lopsided. I can condense to make it more digestible.

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25 Dec 2015
guttersnipe
I'm fine with whatever you've got; my film post is about 3000 words (and apparently 935 of them are “difficult” words).

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26 Dec 2015
Zarnium
Ah. Then I won't worry about it being too long .

FYI, the deadline I'm setting for myself is January 10, the day before I go back to school. I may get it done before then, but that's the latest.

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6 Jan 2016
Zarnium
All right, it's done. I'm ready for posting whenever you are, Snipes. At this point, part of me feels like this is just going to be a retread of the “film vs. television” topic, but on the other hand, maybe there's no better time to give my extended thoughts on why I didn't like a classic film.

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6 Jan 2016
guttersnipe
OK, so I'm rolling with the book post just as soon as I proofread it again.

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6 Jan 2016
guttersnipe
Before really getting started, I'd just like to clarify one thing that's present in all the versions: I don't get the central concept. The Shining has been part of my life in one form or another for nearly twenty years, and there's never been a point at which I thought, “yeah, you want to seclude yourself so you can work. Take out a job as caretaker of a massive hotel in the middle of nowhere over its winter season”. For one, emergency help is a pipe dream. Secondly, your efforts to concentrate on your work will be perpetually impeded by maintenance. I can understand retreating to stay at a hotel to write, a la Dylan Thomas, but to work there in isolation? And who would trust you? I have a job at a twelve-room hotel in a town centre, and we'd never lend the reigns to a stranger for any length of time. And this is before we factor in a troubled family history and horrific backstory of the hotel.

It's not a big deal (I think we're encouraged to take the synopsis as “Here's your scenario, buckle up”), but I just wanted to put that out there.

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The Book

OK, so I see what the fuss was about regarding the book's emphasis on characterisation and process.

To be perfectly honest, the prose is a bit more blue-collar than I'm used to, but then perhaps I've been spoiled by Wilde and Marquez over the past ten years or so. As it stands, King's much more 'everyman' style of writing still works well, and he has a strong sense of structure and momentum. I did have a slight concern about its 500-strong pagination (nearly all of my favourite novels are around the 300 mark; not so much a concern about time spent but rather whether a story warrants that much coverage), but it was easy to work through (essentially four bursts) and there was precious little excess.

I grew a little weary of the multitude of dialogue suffixes with 'said', when I figured there are plenty of 'replied's, 'exclaimed's, 'remarked's etc at a writer's disposal, but that's me being petty. Still, there were some clunky lines, such as: “Wendy suddenly felt bad, almost crying bad”, “Now he was in a room filled with strange furniture, a room that was dark”, “There was not a gun in the place” and “It came to her with a sudden numbing reality that he meant to beat her to death with the mallet he held in his hands”, which are all a bit amateur hour. But they're few and far between; for the most part the writing is very agreeable. There's also some overuse of the adjective 'battered', used in reference to boots, Wendy's radio, repeatedly to the VW, but again not a big deal.

I did harbour the slight worry before getting started about King's stance on Jack's course of action, having heard that the novel focuses on his difficulty in resisting alcohol and this process results in his eventual dislocation from reality and efforts to murder his nearest-and-dearest, because I simply don't see this as concurrent with any actual cases of alcoholism provided the drinker wasn't already suffering in some other capacity. Happily, I think for all the claims that the novel's principle concern is AUD, I think it's a lot more accurate to state that Jack's real problem is anger management, and the drink actually facilitates that rather than inherently flipping some otherwise non-existent switch.

What transpires from the core scenario is that violence begats violence, as Jack recalls the misery suffered by his mother at the hands of his father, whose own drinking masked a more central problem with rage. Jack's feelings of inadequacy with regards to his writer's block, maintenance of the hotel and simple disinclination to understand Tony cause him to believe that he might have to assert control by a similar application of alpha male force. He attempts to resist this path and “cut all the father out of him”, so there is definitely a sense that whenever sober, Jack has perspective on his anger and can identify its source (the initial injuries he inflicts on Danny are accidental). Unfortunately, his rationale tumbles when under the influence, so the ghosts find his Achilles heel and supply him with said to exacerbate the 'correcting' process: the sins of the father. This angle makes for rather satisfying drama.

Danny's process to me seems to be to realise the extent of his father's innate brutality and divert his sense of belonging from him to his mother. This is essentially what Tony's aim is by providing him with omens and warnings (I have to say I'm pleased that we don't get any more closure as to what specifically 'constitutes' Tony than we do in the film, though both take different approaches towards his manifestations. If he is essentially part of Danny's psyche or imagination, then his purpose is one of latent self-actualisation). When Jack starts binging, Danny leaps to his father's defence against Wendy's accusations; indeed, she remarks at one point that he is “his father's boy”. Appealing to the tragic angle of Jack's downward spiral, Danny will eventually have to realise that the dislocated shoulder wasn't a one-time-only event, and that Wendy is the parent would never harm him. I think this trust element is metaphorically applied via the wasp's nest: though Jack gifts him with the ostensibly vacant nest, the mass stinging is a harsh lesson in blind trust. Jack doesn't deserve it happening (as far as he can tell, the bug bomb worked), but it functions as a portent of future intentional damage.

I think Wendy fares less successfully. I'd heard that she's a much stronger character than her film portrayal, but despite being afforded essentially equal space within the novel, I don't feel I have that firm a grasp on who she is as a person any more by the end than I do at the start. By and large, her actions are carried out as an extension of the two males, and her primary worries are for the both of them. I don't think we really gather her personal, particular motivations or back history beyond being a wife or mother archetype and some brief allusions to her disapproving mother. Indeed, the chapter actually entitled 'Wendy' basically finds her walking around worried, putting some soup on and attacking Jack in self-defence when she finds him behind the bar before dragging him away, so it because more about what she does rather than who she is. This is true of film-Wendy, of course, but then characterisation is typically less important to films than novels and there we spend far less time with her, so I don't feel that her written incarnation is much more three-dimensional. This isn't actually a surprise, though, judging by my experience hitherto with King (the short story compilations Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight), as I don't feel he's a great writer for women anyway (females barely feature at all in The Body or Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption). Throw in some repeated references to her breasts and “golden” hair and she strikes me as more idealised than understood.

Dick Halloran is quite a fascinating one. We don't spend that much time with him, even to the point of him forming something of a deus ex machina given his extended absence, but his presence and characteristics sure are interesting. Courageous, resourceful and amiable, his character is essentially anti-Jack. His rapport with Danny is extended beyond just a surface mutual likeability, but a fundamental understanding of the shining given that both possess it to varying degrees. When the shit starts to hit the fan at the Overlook, Dick is Danny's first port-of-call and he barely hesitates to abandon his holiday plans and come to the rescue, despite the treachery of the roads leading him to his quarry. What really sparked my imagination (perhaps because I knew what elements sparked Kubrick's and my recent escalation of interest in colonialism) is the racial angle, which is a neat subtext to the central story. Whenever Dick is mentioned, barely a page goes by without an innocuous reference to his colour or one of outright prejudice (he picks up on Jack's racist rage as he gets closer, when he is contacted whilst driving a fellow driving comments on his 'niggery' hairdo, and so forth), yet he becomes the man of the hour.

This ties into the scant, yet important references to the Old West peppered throughout the story, such as when Danny enquires about the rug before seeing Watson dressed every bit the cowboy, the 'red drum' interpretation and Danny's 'Can You See the Indians?' reading primer. There's a later hope from Danny during one of his scares that “there really weren't any Indians at all” - Danny hasn't any reason to fear Native Americans beyond what is taught to him, a situation that perpetuates racism around the world. In his actual encounters with the minority Dick, he doesn't process his colour at all, so to harbour any fear about Natives is similarly illogical, and that apprehension eventually evaporates. Comparatively, Jack's overt racism is merely held in abeyance until his rage levels it at Dick prior to his arrival. The United States is of course founded upon genocide and slavery, so for Jack to maintain this white power status quo suggests an inability to progress from history. Danny, however, is a post-Civil Rights Gen-Xer, as liberal as a newborn, and thus able to reciprocate Dick's friendship, transforming the Overlook into a microcosm of varying racial positions. I think Danny's realisation that Jack's hatred is ill-founded helps to divorce him of their connection and make Dick into a type of surrogate father (expressed by the formation of a new trio come the epilogue), and the discovery that Dick's offer for him to join him in Florida when they first met carried more merit and meaning than anyone could have realised. Good food for thought.

Particular fondness goes towards the chapters in which Jack searches through the crates for old clippings about the hotel. History can be fascinating, particularly if it concerns the very ground you're standing on. The United States factors a number of myths or whitewashes into its history, so it's only fitting that the Overlook's shameful past should be swept under the rug in favour of a pleasant veneer also. You get a real sense of Jack's excitement as he pries into its past, the hunger to publish it overwhelming his desire to finish his own fiction. And there are interesting character insights to be obtained from his phone call to Ullman, chomping meds to stave off his alcohol pangs. Hitting upon scandal begat his own desire for blackmail, so even at this stage we can see a malevolence that exists outside anything the ghosts try to convince him to do (and a subsequent sense of futility when he eventually relents).

On the other hand, I find myself returning to the opinion that though King is best known for horror, I'm not convinced it's his forte. I don't know about you, but my pulse didn't pound until about the last fifty pages. To me, this suggests that character-based drama is his real strength, and the novel took on a horror bent essentially because he had already established a foothold in this genre and was spooked by staying in an otherwise-empty hotel. It's very clearly autobiographical, so I'm not sure this story really needed the supernatural to sell itself, especially given that some of those elements are pretty regrettable: I should imagine Kubrick omitted the hedge monsters (which I feel would be better if they were nothing more than tricks of the eye; what animating hedges has to do with ghosts I don't know. Inventive poltergeistery, perhaps?) and antics with the dog mask guy simply because they would have seemed silly on the screen, as they are silly on the page (of course, that very thing happens when Garris visualises them for the miniseries). Which brings me onto the adaptations...


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6 Jan 2016
Zarnium
Before we begin, a word on spoilers, for those who haven't read or watched everthing: there are spoilers here and there in each of my posts, but most of them are fairly minor, and none of the three versions of The Shining are the kind of work where I think foreknowledge of the plot matters a whole lot. Take that as you will.

With no further ado, my post on the book:



Stephen King's The Shining (novel)

The Shining is, in the most general sense, a horror novel. But it's not just a horror novel; it's also a story that deeply explores its three central characters, how they interact with each other, and why they do so. It's a horror novel that's scary not just because it has scary ghosts and threats of death, but because it involves the total self-destruction of a family that you've been wanting to root for since the beginning.

The story begins with Jack Torrance. Jack has a rather sketchy past; he's a recovering alcoholic with anger management issues who once accidentally broke his son Danny's arm in a drunken stupor. This event haunted him so much that he quit cold turkey, and he's been on the wagon ever since, trying desperately to hold himself together for the sake of his wife and child. He was doing well for a long time, but after an incident where he lost his temper and belted a misbehaving student at the private school he worked at, he's reduced to looking for work as the winter caretaker at the Overlook hotel.

The first scene in the book is of Jack being interviewed by the hotel's manager, Stuart Ullman, and right off the bat, we're presented with what this book does best; putting the reader into the headspace of the characters, and making them understand what it is the characters are feeling. During the interview, we get an inner monologue of all of Jack's thoughts. Jack can barely contain his contempt for all of Ullman's putdowns and his smug attitude, but he knows he has to be on his best behavior because this is his last lifeline. Without this job, he has nothing, so he sucks it up and puts on a smile while he's boiling inside. The tension and desperation is palpable, and it simultaneously makes us like Jack despite what we later learn about his past, and it paints a picture of just how desperate he his.

The book is full of moments like this, where no matter how illogical a character is being or how deserved their predicament, we can feel their pain by seeing their side of the issue. Jack has done bad things, but he isn't evil; he's just lost his temper a few times, and feels like the world will never forgive him for what he's done. He looks wistfully back at the days when he had a nice job and a happy home life, but now he has nothing and his wife views him with suspicion. No matter how justified these consequences are, we never lose sight of why Jack is so angry and unhappy. He feels that despite all of his trying, his sins will always be following him.

Jack isn't the only focal point of the novel, though. His wife, Wendy, gives us the perspective of the other half of their marriage. Wendy and Jack had a good relationship until Jack's drinking started getting the better of him, coincidentally around the time that Danny was born. Wendy saw the warning signs that he was becoming a danger to himself and others, but didn't do much about it until the aforementioned incident where Jack broke Danny's arm. She resolved herself to divorce him for the sake of Danny's safety, but before she could get the words out, Jack promised that he would shape up his act. And he did. He never drank again, and was on the right path until he eventually ended up assaulting the student, which is what sent them packing to Colorado in search of work.

Wendy loves Jack, either out of genuine passion or habit, but she's also a little bit frightened of him. While Jack has kept his implicit promise to quit drinking, he's also proven that he's a loose cannon by losing his temper in such drastic ways. Jack's behavior isn't enough to make her abandon him, but it's more than enough to make her be worried about her and Danny's future. She feels she has to be vigilant in watching Jack's behavior to make sure he doesn't do anything regrettable again. This feeds into his feelings of being persecuted, and is a major source of strife throughout the novel.

Much like with Jack, the writing for Wendy's inner thoughts is very well done and it complements Jack's perspective. In comparison to Jack, Wendy seems more trapped by her situation, with very few options to escape if things truly took a turn for the worst. In that sense, she's more of a victim of Jack's shortcomings than he himself is. That's why she acts so guarded around him, why she'll never quite forget that Jack broke Danny's arm, even if it was technically an accident. Ultimately, she's right to feel this way and treat Jack accordingly, which is why her POV in the novel is so important. It reminds us that while Jack is sympathetic, he's still wrong, and it also plays an important role in showing us the stakes of what people besides Jack have to lose if he doesn't control himself.

To round out the main cast, we have Danny, Jack and Wendy's five year old son. Danny happens to be psychic, with the ability to read minds and receive visions of the future. Danny loves both of his parents dearly, and due to his supernatural abilities, is much more privy to their inner thoughts and feelings than either of them realize. He sees everything that we see. He feels Jack's pain as he goes through withdrawal and deals with his anger, and he feels Wendy's fear and worry as the family goes deeper and deeper into a hole they can't dig themselves out of. He understands both of his parents more than they understand each other, or even themselves. That's not necessarily optimal, and it's quite a lot of baggage to put on a five year old's shoulders.

Danny views the world through the eyes of a child, and this is realized in the writing through the simple way he tries to understand the concepts that he picks up through his psychic abilities. Danny doesn't always fully understand what he hears; when his father thinks about “suicide,” Danny doesn't know what it actually is, but he feels the emotional turmoil and finality that goes with it. When he feels his father slipping away and losing himself in his desire for a drink, he knows that Jack is thinking about “the bad thing,” drinking, but doesn't entirely understand what it is or why it would cause him to behave in that way. By having the reader view adult thoughts filtered through a child's understanding, King allows us to view Jack and Wendy's behavior from a more detached perspective, one that highlights the stark emotion behind every thought and action without dwelling on the surface details the way the adults do. It's also just good writing; Danny's parts of the book really feel like they represent a five-yer old, albeit an exceptionally intelligent one.

The interplay between these three characters is the key to understanding the story, and it's what makes the book so good. We have Jack and Wendy, who exist in opposition to each other, and we have Danny, who bridges the gap between them. As the family goes through their ups and downs, we see all three perspectives in extensive detail. This provides real emotional resonance, and it gives meaning and context to all of the strife and hazards that these characters go through. We care about these people because we know them. We know what they want out of life, why they act the way they do, and how they relate to each other. That's why it's scary and chilling when Jack eventually goes axe-crazy. We've seen his fall. We understand how his failings as a human being have allowed the hotel to get a grip on him, and we understand why it was able to chip away at his sanity and free will much more easily than it was for it to take hold of Wendy or Danny. He's become possessed by not only literal demons, but his figurative ones as well, the ones that were following him long before he ever came to the Overlook. Conversely, Wendy and Danny's fear and dread feels so visceral and real because their relationships with Jack are so detailed. Danny isn't just scared because there's a crazy guy with an axe after him; he's scared because his beloved daddy has lost himself. Wendy is scared not because she's as attached to Jack as Danny is, but because Danny is her world and she's afraid that the decisions she's made that align the two of them with Jack's path in life have placed them in danger. Every scene, every event in the novel is colored by these rich character portraits.

There are a few hiccups here and there, most of them fairly minor. For one, a lot of the writing about sex falls just a bit under “too much information.” I don't need to know anything about “drying seed” or the nature of Jack and Wendy's foreplay. For another, there's an occasional moment where the book loses grasp of its metaphorical or emotional relevance in its horror scenes and just does something superficial and goofy, like when Dick Hallorann is fighting the shrub lion. Details like this are a bit wearying, but they're not actually that big of a deal in the grand scheme of the novel. There is one thing that could be considered a major flaw, though, and that's the way that Jack loses most of his agency towards the end of the book. There's a certain point where the Overlook's domination over him is so complete that it's directly controlling his body, and Jack isn't actually at home. Since we see Jack battling the Overlook's influence for most of the story, seeing his body just rant and rave and try to kill things without any internal struggle or insight is a bit of a letdown. That said, Jack's total loss of self-control at this point could be taken as a metaphor for alcoholism and drunkenness, so his loss of agency is arguably the whole point. I'm a bit conflicted on how I feel about this, but one way or another, it's also only present at the very end of the story, so there's still more than enough substance throughout the novel.

Overall, The Shining is a story that succeeds not only for how well it paints its characters, but for how accessible they are. It does a good job of putting the reader in the shoes of people who may be entirely unlike themselves, and it uses this to good effect when crafting its drama.





EDIT: Exactly how do you want to go about posting the others? Alternating until they're all here?

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6 Jan 2016
guttersnipe
Lovely post.

Firstly, I'd like to comment that I agree with you on the strength of the inner monologues. Though a unit, the trio actually spend more time in isolation than together, and that allows breathing spaces for these trains of thought to convey feelings, hopes and desires to the reader. I mentioned about Jack's phone call; that only carries the weight it does because it's a direct follow-through on his earlier consternation during the interview. King makes sure that Jack has nothing positive to say about the man, so by filtering Jack's persona into our own, there's increased satisfaction when he mischievously attempts revenge-blackmail, and subsequent letdown when he realises he can't really pursue it.

Similarly, Danny suggests that King remembers his own childhood acutely, given the sense of wonder, mystery and danger of a world of possibilities, threats and varying avatars of trust. There's a genuine sense of melancholy knowing that he's an innocent who desperately wants to play, have friends and recieve the love of his parents, but the actions of Jack, ostensibly Tony and of course the crazy shit happening at The Overlook constantly sabotage this. Following his inner thoughts was almost like daydreaming, because daydreaming permits you to temporarily forget adult certainties (or maybe I'll just always be somewhat juvenile), leaving you open to possibilities both beneficial and malign. I say melancholy of course because he's quite the victim, and if Jack wasn't gonna go apeshit at The Overlook, how long would it be before he went berzerk at home?

Wendy, as I say, I'm less impressed with. When you wrote “We have Jack and Wendy, who exist in opposition to each other, and we have Danny, who bridges the gap between them”, I'm more of the opinion that the fellas are the twin pillars and she's just a go-between. She exists as an extension of them; she doesn't pursue much and isn't threatened much (the ghosts seemingly pay her precious little attention). This is why I claimed that King isn't much of a writer for women, as the males are the doers and she reacts accordingly.

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6 Jan 2016
guttersnipe
If you like. When we've exhausted discussion on one version we can press onto the next.

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6 Jan 2016
Zarnium


You're too kind .



The book is no feminist masterpiece by any means, and I'd have to ask an actual woman about the matter in order to get a full perspective on exactly how well Wendy is realized as a female character. But while she is defined almost solely by her role as a wife and mother and by the way she reacts to Danny and Jack, I don't find this to be problematic for two reasons. One, Jack is also defined by his role as a spouse and parent, and Danny is defined by his role as a child. The story is very much about exploring the three as a family unit, and all of them rely heavily on the others in a family context in order to function as characters in the novel. (Admittedly, Wendy's backstory isn't quite as deep or revealing as Jack's.)

Two, the book was written in the seventies and takes place in the seventies, a time when housewives and stay-at-home moms were a lot more common and men were expected to be the heads of their homes who were respected accordingly. Consequently, women were more frequently defined by their husbands and children. The Shining explores this by showing just how reliant on her husband a stereotypical housewife is. Wendy doesn't have much of a life outside of her family and no means to support herself outside of it, which is why she unfortunately decides to stick with Jack more than is strictly reasonable. She's trapped because of societal norms, and she doesn't even entirely realize it. The males are the doers, but that's kind of the point. Wendy is something of a tragic character because she isn't a doer, so she gets buffeted around by forces that she doesn't think are in her control. She grows out of this by the time she actually defies Jack and leaves the Overlook, and her new life as a single mother working to support her son could be seen as a commentary on how gender roles were changing at the time. (Now, I have no idea if all of this subtext is purposeful, or if it's just there because King was a man who lived in the seventies and he was writing what he thought was the simple reality. Either way, I think it's pretty interesting.)

As for Danny bridging the gap, I say that because so much conflict in the book comes from Jack and Wendy refusing to communicate, and when they do communicate, they misunderstand each other. Danny, who has the ability to read their minds, understands both of them very well and can clearly see both sides of every issue. Throughout the novel, he repeatedly tries to smooth things over between them as best he can, but he's limited in his capacity to do so because the adults have such a stubborn refusal to lay down their biases and sort through their problems. (Well, Jack a lot moreso than Wendy.) He's the bridge between them in a rather literal sense, and whether this holds up on a deeper level depends on your opinion on Wendy as a character, I suppose.



Sounds fine. Tell me when you think we're ready to move on.



EDIT: Oh, and another thing: like you, there's not really any point in the novel where I was truly scared by anything. I rarely see or read something and feel frightened myself, which is why I tend to find horror movies rather boring. There are, however, a lot of points where King sells the idea that the characters feel frightened, which is the closest I generally get to anything I read or watch feeling “scary” to me.

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7 Jan 2016
guttersnipe
Just to clarify, I don't really get offended by certain representations or anything like that in any medium. At the very most, I tend to find unsubverted stereotypes and cliches just lazy or a bit unfortunate. What I meant about Wendy's characterisation was that her every move is reactionary; just about every time she's the focus it follows on from a substantial action by Jack or Danny, about which she worries or reminisces, usually whilst making dinner. It's this kind of supplemental writing that reinforces my idea that King can't really make women three-dimensional, which is a shame considering he can be terrific with boys and blokes.

Having said that, your point about it reflecting Seventies attitudes makes sense. If she's something of a spineless hausfrau and her journey reflects a transition from domestic servitude to independence, that's fair enough. I just feel that if that's part of King's design then it comes a little late (she has to get knocked around before she fully accepts Jack's a raging, racist megalomaniac) and is especially overshadowed by ghostly hijinks and, well, whatever Jack or Danny are doing at the time.

I forgot mention earlier that the internal monologues feature so heavily in the novel that hindsight makes me question how exactly King expected this to translate to the screen, and indeed doesn't bother providing anyone with voiceover for the miniseries with which he intended to ressasert his story. You'd think that if the miniseries only exists because King found the film really misrepresentative (I certainly do, as I claimed before) he would learn that some things simply must be jettisoned in translation.

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7 Jan 2016
Zarnium


Perhaps. Maybe I'd find she's less three-dimensional than I think she is if I re-read the book again, but since I find that one of the most interesting things about the book is the way Jack and Wendy's fears and insecurities play off each other, I wasn't really looking at her character in a vacuum.

A couple other things to note: I like your thoughts on Dick's character from a racial angle. I didn't really want to delve into that in my own review since I lack the experience to really write about it properly, but I have always liked the way Dick is portrayed. He almost seems to live in a different world than the others, constantly running into little reminders that he's living in a white man's world that's barely tolerating him. By contrast, one could say that Jack is given all sorts of leniency throughout his life due to white privilege, yet he's not terribly appreciative of it. Jack may have gotten fired from his last job for punching a student, but if he were black, he probably would've gone to jail, or worse.

I also disagree that the supernatural elements are unnecessary. This book could've still been really good without them, but if nothing else, Danny's psychic abilities are so important to his character and the structure of the novel that it would've been an entirely different story. I also like the way the ghosts serve as a metaphor for drinking, anger issues, mental illness, or what have you. It's all rather Buffy-esque. (Admittedly, those hedge animals are pretty loony, even in the book, and unless the Overlook is built on top of an ancient zoo burial ground, they don't make a whole lot of sense.)



And what better way to examine this than by moving on to the adaptations next? I'm ready with the Kubrick film when you are.

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8 Jan 2016
guttersnipe
I think Dick is a pretty cool character, even when he's absent for huge swathes of the book. It's very possible that I was simply looking for supplemental detail because the film is rife with it, but I think that King was only keen to emphasise his ethnicity and according social status to stress that the times they are a-changing. You can imagine that Dick wouldn't have dared to jokingly offer Danny a trip to Florida with him ten years beforehand, and there's that neat sense of panic from Wendy when she briefly worries that he's going to abduct him when they go out to the car. Of course, this moment again suggests to me that King only wants Wendy to exist in reactionary terms whilst extending more gravity to a (male) character who occupies far fewer pages.

As for the supernatural, I get the metaphors but I reckon that King simply doesn't play it all that well; in the grand scheme of things they needn't go anything but magic some booze together then sit and wait. Danger and tension arrive far more palpably in tangible scenarios such as Jack battering the door in and Dick nearly careening off the road. I'm fine with Danny being psychic but sensitive kids are such a staple of King (Gordie Lachance, Carrie, the kid in Firestarter, probably many more) that I reckon it could be played without any genuine ESP; just being frequently ignored and curious would allow him to glean some insight on what his folks are going through, and writing from a child's perspective means that we could make sense of certain experiences even if he can't. I of course found my expectancy regarding “REDRUM” rather hamstrung given my earlier familiarity with the adaptations, but that's really to be expected.

I'll give the film post a final read and post that next.

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8 Jan 2016
guttersnipe
The Film

OK, so here I have the option to carry out a particularly extensive full review of this so very dreamlike movie (which could probably be upped for the site's film section), but given the catalyst for the project, I think it's better to really try and grapple with why I think it's a very successful adaptation.

To begin with, I believe that the transformation of the topiary to the maze (plus the labyrinthine nature of the hotel itself; Wendy comments on this in the kitchen) is very crucial to understanding Kubrick's methodology. For King, I reckon the hedge animals forming monsters are indicative of a very primal need to insert standard horror tropes into a story which reads more like a straight drama that flirts with the supernatural, partly impeding the final rescue in the interests of third act tension. For Kubrick, the maze has much reduced 'scare' in a literal sense, rather riffing on the notion of uncertainty and confusion that stalks practically every frame of the film. Indeed, the fact that the map doesn't match the actual thing is rather telling, and speaks volumes of Kubrick's desire to constantly wrong-foot the audience with regards to thematic underpinnings and his particular skew on genre work.For me, this is half the reason why so much of the book is discarded (considering the pre-Overlook scenes consist of a very brief interview, Danny's vision and Wendy realising his apprehension to leave, you can imagine the director literally yanking out the first eighty pages), the other half being what I consider part of what makes him the GOAT: his acute understanding that what works on the page won't necessarily work on screen. For his money, it must change on a fundamental level, because the strengths of each are almost diametrically opposed.That particular quote comes from an early interview, pre-Lolita, which he (and I) thought was marvellous. Perhaps fittingly, it's not one of his best, and is guilty of certain un-Kubrickian moments (which is to say, didactic and uncinematic) such as Peter Sellers' character running at the mouth at every opportunity and a scene in which information is conveyed by a close-up of a typewriter as it bangs out a letter with voice-over. Nearly every one of Kubrick's films are based on a novel (note, never a play) and all bar Spartacus were afforded his final cut. His process then, is an artistically solipsistic one: to map each work to his own obsessions and peculiarities (the tagline “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” is rather telling). I'll probably have to return to this point later, for now I'd just like to suggest that comics are arguably more conducive to cinema than novels or plays (given the aesthetic emphasis and slimmer dialogue), though at the same time this essentially imposes imagery on a director, making it less imaginative.

For the characters? Well, Jack and Danny are far less three-dimensional than in the source. I totally understand why this is a concern to fans, but from my angle they are essentially pawns on a vast board, and I'm more than comfortable with that. I say the main character or the real focus is the Overlook itself. Here we find a giant playground for the director to meddle with, and feels spellbinding before we even get there, thanks to the hypnotic vortex of the long mountain drive, the eventual inherent absurdity of the building's layout and the editing and music choices. A dreamlike quality is a long-vaunted passion of mine in cinema, and Kubrick's Overlook affords that in spades. The dimensions don't make sense under scrutiny, the lighting and fadeouts mislead us as to the time of day, effects and cultural artefacts repeatedly grab the eye and beg us to make sense of their placement. All of these combine to disorient the viewer long before anyone is placed in danger, thereby ratcheting up the dread to the heights of those impossible walls. Cinema's inherent artificiality has long fascinated me and nine times out of ten I'll prefer magic to realism, so I figure if you can use those sets, do take after take until the meaning changes, distort perceivable reality, etc, I say go for it.* As I mentioned earlier w/r/t to the alcohol trigger, I'm pleased that the book didn't have some Reefer Madness-style effect on the man by which a human being's perspective is completely turned upside down by nothing more than imbibement. Kubrick obviously thought the alcoholism was entirely secondary to querying the unrealities afforded to him by genre.

Though characterisation is less of a concern in this version, I don't believe Jack and Danny lack journeys. Their reactions illustrate diametric positions towards their encounters in the hotel, flip sides of the same coin: Jack is in denial of the woman in 237 and becomes furious at the suggestion to leave, whereas Danny learns from Dick that “they're just like pictures in a book”. In a way, Danny matures and grows up fast, compartmentalising his scares whereas Jack devolves, becoming more primal, brutal and childish, considered only of his own selfish pursuits (hence his lack of resistance towards the woman and his refusal to process the event): I think this might be Kubrick's wake-up call to humanity. Though the core narrative is linear, I wonder if Danny's visions are in fact reflecting rather than prophesying. The blood torrent never really finds contemporary comparison because the hotel is essentially deserted and we only witness Dick's death (we don't see Jack freeze), so it must be a hearkening back, a warning from the past as to its own circumstantial history (that, and if they were forecasts you'd think they'd tell Dick he was going to die). So Danny grapples with the past and Jack negotiates a future in which he'll kill as the previous occupants have.

I don't know if you watched the Room 237 documentary (I loved how the moon landing conspiracy theory guy claimed that the only word you can derive from “ROOM No” is “MOON”, when you can also get “MOOR” and “MORON”), but the underlying theory that's always made the most sense to me is the Native American guilt angle. From the designs on the walls, the paintings, the Calumet cans and how there's no response here about the news of an Indian burial ground (compared to book-Wendy's upset at hearing about the murder clippings), deliberate suggestions abound as to the evidence of colonialism, genocide and subsequent grandiose myth-making. This has been very much on my mind lately in my reading, but I don't think I'm looking for what I want to see, as these totems (too strong?) have always caught my eye and practically begged to be filtered into a reading. It's often been mentioned that Kubrick has dotted little references to the Holocaust throughout his work and chalked up to a failed attempt to adapt Wartimes Lies to his belief that processing such a huge and damning event was beyond cinema's capability. From my perspective, he believed that the destruction of the Native Americans was again beyond the remit of mere filmmaking, so he used The Shining as a platform to sneak in references to it and comment on an intrinsic violence in the guilt-free white American male. I should stress however, that this theory needn't be accepted any more than the myriad others, but I love that it has a surface reading (cabin fever, booze and ghosts drive a man bananas) and permits certain undercurrents, which is how I like my cinema.

As evidenced by his surrounding filmography (especially 2001 and Full Metal Jacket), the arrogance of violence in the name of conquest was very much part of Kubrick's cinematic DNA, especially considering his work was largely made during the Vietnam era. The chronological games played in The Shining (the two Gradys, the two Jacks, etc) reflect contrasting results of dual acts of American violence: the successful Holocaust of the Natives, and the failure to defeat the North Vietnamese. The total absence of living Natives in the film speaks volumes about their absence from everyday American life; Jack's eventual death reflects the later loss and retreat. This means that the trio find themselves at the epicentre of a historical microcosm that informs subsequent opinions and values in contemporary Stateside society (provided it's not ignored outright, of course). Though delivered in drips, Jack's racism is also apparent here, in his “White Man's Burden”, “A nigger?” and that he has nothing to say to Dick in the International cut. In lieu of Injuns and the recent revelation of black equality, Jack exercises what was a common European belief as to the racial agenda of Vietnam by dispatching the sole minority. I think what Kubrick's ultimately stating here is that white power types are only interested in the submission of the 'lower' races and the absorption of their goods; when they interfere with white society a toll must be paid... until that core violence swings around 180°. Dick dies to prove Jack's point, then Jack dies to prove Kubrick's. Those who forget the past (insofar as sanctifying their own violence) are doomed to repeat it, but the world is ahead of the game.

What I feel I must tackle (because it's a common complaint) is the situation of Kubrick's humanism. As his close friend and biographer Michael Herr claims, “He was often enough dismissed as an inspired mechanic by people who were unaffected by his work”, and what unites Kubrick's work for me beyond just his thematic concerns is what can only be described as a sense of awe. It's true that he never made a weepie, and it's not unfair to claim he maintains a clinical distance from his characters' suffering. I don't mistake this for evidence of a lack of care however, and I certainly don't think it says that much about him as a person nor me for responding to it. And respond I do. I'm of the opinion that Kubrick's films are deeply, profoundly affecting, but not in a way that people readily describe when we use the term 'emotional'. I reckon this sense of awe (best exemplified in 2001, of course but very much in evidence in The Shining) bestows a feeling that there is something far grander than us, way beyond conventional understanding. This is why the Overlook's character overpowers the people it encompasses. His humans are pawns to his vision, to be sure, but I don't think they suffer in and die in vain. Ever the intellectual, Kubrick was making points about humanity's arrogance and ambition: he cares about people enough to teach us why such endeavours are Faustian pacts. It all makes perfect sense why the heist goes spectacularly wrong in The Killing, why Spartacus is crucified, why Joker kills the sniper in Full Metal Jacket to his compatriots' laughs and hurrahs whilst he is torn apart with guilt, etc. In other words, I understand why people think Kubrick is the true monster of The Shining (or that's he's HAL, etc), but I feel argument to the contrary. At the end of the day, he's a realist, never a romantic.

Other elements I've always loved about the movie:

#As the picture distorts time, we are treated to what I call a '4AM feeling'. It's that moment in the small hours of the night (not necessarily a long, dark one of the soul) in which a combination of tiredness and deep thought seem to concoct an almost euphoric sense of self-worth and actualisation. It's like certain elements of your life suddenly become clear as a still lake and the surrounding detritus of the everyday seems to collapse around this sensation of profundity. This needn't always take place at night; the moments where Jack stares out at Wendy and Danny playing in the snow and when Jack threatens her in the Colorado Lounge seems to convey a similar sense of unreality simply via the glare of the noonday sun. Night is horror's best friend, but it's overused and easy. If you can make something out of that weird snowblindness of a piercingly bright daytime, I find that similarly affecting.

#I love games with echolocation, as I mentioned in a couple of Dekalog reviews. This for me works best when Wendy is fleeing upstairs before finding the bizarre sex act in the bedroom, and we hear this incredible chanting that we assume is non-diegetic score, but Wendy's reactions suggest she can hear them too, like it's the chthonic protest of the earth itself, soaked in Native blood. Speaking of which, I can't get enough of the tuba (?) blasts just before Wendy sees the blood leak from the elevator doors, to me it's like the sound of the earth groaning and geysering free.

#The unsettling cinematographical decisions that immediately disorient, such as tracking Danny's big wheel and the POV in room 237, which by that point has escalated to incredible proportions by continually hinting at its concealed horrors but backing away only to return again down the line.

#Grady's slow-burning persona. When we meet him, he's an affable, genteel delight, even though we can't clearly see his face. When we do, as he listens to Jack's account, his tone becomes steadily ominious without being outright threatening, culimating in the “nigger cook” and “correcting” his daughters. Chilling stuff.

#When Wendy reads the “dull boy” manuscript we get our only decent look at the ceiling, which again features Native American iconography. It's possible I'm belabouring the point, but I read that as the spirits rising and calling for vengeance.

#As Jack dances away from the bar, Lloyd remains immobile and vanishes from the screen, just before Grady emerges from the opposite side. Are they taking shifts, or can the hotel only co-ordinate one 'interactive' ghost? Note that the twins speak with a single voice.

#The hotel survives the ordeal, which is perhaps the most frightening take-away. Just as the Gradys' murders proved cyclical, Jack becomes the new caretaker. The fact that the Overlook overlooked its earlier carnage suggests that it'll do this time and again. Indeed, if you stick with the credits, “Midnight, the Stars and You” ends to the sound of applause and a general commotion of people.

I think what ultimately irked King (and the reason for the whole shebang) was that the book is roman a clef (Jack is King, Wendy and Danny are his wife and son respectively, they stayed at an eerie, near-empty hotel in room 217, etc), therefore it's difficult not to imagine that his vitriol is based on an assertion that Kubrick changed him. What emerged from their meeting was not only a clash of two powerful egos but two very different temperaments: the writer felt his work should be altered as little as possible (probably would have helped in hindsight for him to arrange a clause by which his intellectual authorship was respected to the letter, or if the film was imply released under another title (though book sales almost invariably benefit from movie adaptations)). In other words, he clearly didn't see him himself or his family in Kubrick's characters, and practically blew a gasket at any suggestion that Jack carried an inherent monster who required less of a push from alcoholic and supernatural persuasion. I should imagine another issue arose when what transpired as iconic pop culture moments of the film were in fact Kubrick inventions: the maze, the axe attack with “Here's Johnny!”, “All work...”, the blood torrents, etc.



*This may also have a relatable bearing. When I was young my mum worked as a cleaner at my school, so for a few years I wasn't permitted to go home by myself to an empty house. As a result I typically stayed at school after everyone had gone, and though I don't regret my time there (I think it helped me to eventually handle solitude, like holidaying alone) I sometimes got this feeling like everything was a set, a fabrication. Wandering the quiet grounds which teemed with life during the day led me to sometimes expect to overturn tables or chairs and find stickers bearing stage directions, like I was only just now becoming aware that my life was some sort of cosmic play. As such, I think this is why I spend so very much of my time even today thinking constantly about what lies 'under the skin' of everyday reality. I'm not a believer in ghosts or the supernatural, but there are times (like that 4AM feeling I mentioned earlier) when I wonder if life is largely dull and predictable for most people because there might be something hovering above reality and we can occasionally dip or 'phase' into it. Needless to say, the film gives me this feeling, and I get that sense of the uncanny sometimes at my work. At lot of people claim the hotel's haunted, and I like how this stretch of corridor is very similar to when Danny sees the massacred twins, but it's the artificial light and intense red of the carpet doing the work there:



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8 Jan 2016
Zarnium
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (movie)

Stanley Kubrick's loose adaptation of The Shining is widely considered to be one of the greatest films of all time, and it's not too difficult to see why. A lot of time and effort obviously went into making this movie what it is. Kubrick clearly had a vision for what he wanted this film to be, and he cut no corners in making sure that it was perfectly realized. That said... I don't like it very much. But let's start with what I did like.

First off, there are a lot of pragmatic changes made to the plot. A significant amount of the backstory is cut out entirely, as well as a lot of the general goings on during the Torrance's stay at the hotel. This is a good move for a film that's only feature-length, considering that the book is pretty long and there's no way that every detail could have been crammed into the running time satisfactorily. Kubrick gives us (for the most part) all of the details we need to know about this family for the purposes of this movie, and doesn't waste space with things that don't need to be there. I'm a bit unclear on exactly why Jack is looking for a job at the Overlook in the first place, but it's possible that I just missed something, and in any case, it's not one of my major problems with the film.

Some of the casting is very good. Danny Lloyd was great for a child actor, and while the actual character of Danny suffers from the same problems that most other characters in this movie have, there's nothing wrong with Llyod's acting. He's perfect as a scared little boy who's privy to more dark secrets of the universe than anyone should be. Similarly, Scatman Crothers plays a good Dick Halloran. It's not a particularly huge or demanding role in any version of the story, but in this film, he's one of the few characters that I feel I can get a good read on. He seems genuine and feels like an actual person, and throughout all of the scenes where he's psychically linked to what's happening at the Overlook and trying to travel there, Crothers does a good job of emoting what he's thinking and experiencing without us hearing it in words. (Incidentally, These scenes are some of the few that are both very true to the book and are well-adapted for the visual medium. The miniseries never pulled off any of the psychic communication with this level of panache.) I'd also like to add that while I don't think the casting of Jack and Wendy fits the characters particularly well, I don't have anything against Nicholson or Duvall as actors. They do a good job with the material and direction they're given.

There's also the visual style and craft of the film. Everything is very deliberately shot, and all of it looks good and is generally very effective at setting a certain mood. A lot of the individual scenes are pretty creepy even if I have other issues with them, like the famous “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” scene or the slow pan at the end to the 1900s photograph. While this kind of thing is not what I find interesting or engaging in a movie in and of itself, I must give credit where credit is due. If you're into this sort of cinematic imagery for its own merits, you'll appreciate Kubrick's The Shining way more than I do.

With all this said, however, I still find the movie to be fairly problematic from a narrative point of view. None of the characters, except for maybe Dick, feel at all like real people that I should care about or get invested in. They're either totally byzantine and unknowable, doing things according to a twisted logic known only to themselves, or they're flat archetypes with no personality who end up performing predictable horror movie routines. For our first example, let's look at Jack; he's bizarre and creepy from the very beginning, only barely managing to mask his arrogant disdain for everything around him. Every time he talks to someone, he looks either like he's waiting for the first chance he can get to throw them in the gutter, or he's grinning like they're merely a cog in some nefarious plan of his. I have to ask myself; why? There's no explanation for any of his behavior throughout the film. The few windows we get into his psyche are extremely ambiguous, and it's impossible to tell whether he's ever being sincere or not. There are a handful of scenes where he shows some sort of affection towards Danny or claims to “love the little bastard,” but they're so few and he shows so little passion that they don't tell us a whole lot about how he truly feels. To make things worse, no one seem to find any of his behavior strange at all before he starts to really go off the deep end, so we don't get much insight into him from how other characters view him; Wendy and Danny take his sociopathic detachment in stride, like it's completely normal. There's no subtly or depth to his character, he's just a crazy guy who likes to kill people for no reason.

On the almost opposite end of the scale, there's Wendy, who tends to be a spineless wimp. She has no definable personality except that she's extremely clueless. Throughout the entire first half of the movie or so, she seems to view her relationship with Jack as perfectly ducky, despite the fact that he consistently acts bored or annoyed around her, and he supposedly has enough issues with anger management and alcoholism in his past that she should be a bit more guarded. She has no backbone, and as the movie goes on, she's willing to take a significant amount of abuse from him and only stands up to him once she thinks he hurt Danny. Now, this sort of behavior might be ok in a character if we're given some reason as to why they behave this way, but as it is, she's a fairly basic and uninteresting “subservient wife” archetype who fits in nicely with so many other screaming victims from so many other horror movies.

With characters this flat and with such arbitrary behavior, the story really falls apart. I don't understand what it is they want, or why they do the things they do: I don't understand why I should care about anything that happens to them. There's a lot of scary imagery in the meticulously well crafted visuals, but none of it is actually impactful since there's no rhyme or reason behind any of it. None of it has any weight. Jack's rampage at the end is only scary in the sense that any random guy from any random film would be scary if he were running towards you with an axe. Without more detail behind it or more reason to be invested, I don't have a reason to care once anyone's in danger.

This is why I think the book works so much better, both as a story and as something that can be genuinely creepy: The characters are very detailed, and the scary parts are scary because we understand who the characters are and what's driving them. In the book, Jack isn't frightening just because he's swinging around a weapon; he's frightening because we know him, both who he used to be and who he is now. We know what led him to this point. Similarly, Wendy is a far more interesting character in the book because she's a believable human being who is willing to call Jack out when he does something wrong, but who still puts up with him despite all he's done, whether it's out of genuine love for him as a person or out of desperation and fear of living without support.

Having this sort of detail allows us to connect with the characters and have some kind of stake in what's happening. As it is, I can't engage with this movie, because it's just so many artsy set pieces that don't have any underlying message or purpose to them. For a good example, take the scene where Jack smashes the radio: in the film, he purposely smashes it just because he's pissed off at Wendy. In the book, he hears his dead father speaking on it, and he's so shocked that he loses his composure and ends up destroying it in a fit of rage and confusion. This scene had a purpose beyond merely destroying their link to the outside world; it's a gut-wrenching, character-driven moment where the characters' actions have a clear motivation, and it doesn't just happen out of plot convenience. In the film, it only happens because Jack is a crazy guy who does weird things. Jack wants to strand them all there, we guess, but we have no clue why he wants to do that. Maybe he's being controlled by the hotel at that point, but if that's the case, we don't really understand how the hotel managed to get a grip on him or make him do it.



If it were just the radio scene, I wouldn't care a whole lot, but the entire movie is like this. Practically every scene and every character action is lacking any human context for why it's happening or why I should care. It's just ambiguous for the sake of being ambiguous. Now, I know that characters in a film usually have less detail than characters from a novel due to runtime constraints, but I've seen plenty of films that have good character work nonetheless. Triangle, for example, places a heavy emphasis on its mindscrew plot and creepy visuals, but it also features a surprisingly detailed and human protagonist, which gives the viewer something to be invested in and an anchor for understanding what's going on. The visuals and plot also serve as metaphors for what the protagonist is going through in her life, so they're not just neat ideas that exist for their own sake. This being the case, I see no reason why The Shining couldn't have maintained at least some inkling of the character emphasis from the book, even if it wasn't as deep.



Besides the problem of the film feeling lacking in comparison to the book, there's also the simple issue of originality. Since so much of the film is taken directly from the source material and then robbed of its context, I have a hard time seeing it as this amazing creation. I might have been able to appreciate it more if it was Kubrick's original story that he built from the ground up, but it isn't. It's someone else's complete story that Kubrick hacked away at until it no longer made any sense. So many scenes, plots elements, and images are cribbed directly from the book, but sapped of their purpose with no understanding of (or at least no respect for) why they originally worked or what they're supposed to be.

That's ultimately why I do not like Kubrick's The Shining; it has lots of style, which I'll give it props for, but that style doesn't really lead anywhere. In addition, it also misses the entire point of the book, copying the basics of the plot but none of the substance, when it should be the other way around. I don't blame others for liking this movie, as I'm sure it's still a triumph of visuals in filmmaking, but I'd appreciate it if more fans of the movie took a few seconds to understand why Stephen King and his fans don't like it. There's a place for films like this, but that place is not on top of an independent IP that takes a completely different approach.

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8 Jan 2016
Freudian Vampire
I adore The Shining and I might add something substantive later but for the minute I'd just like to pose a question to Zarnium: do you like Starship Troopers?

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8 Jan 2016
unkinhead


This is a fantastic post Snipe. Well done.



This is an understandable complaint until you see the end of Paths of Glory. Kubrick did make a weepy. (kinda)

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8 Jan 2016
Zarnium
I'm going to respond to anyone else's posts and write more on the subject of whether the movie is a good adaptation or not once I think about it a little more, but for the time being, I'll just make one thing clear: while I'm not pleased with it as an adaptation, Kubrick's The Shining still exists, and I don't have anything against people who choose to view it as its own thing and judge it on its own merits. I'm also more or less content to take everyone's word that it's a masterpiece of film visuals or something of that sort. My aim is really just to explain why I don't think it's a good adaptation, why I think an adaptation should stay true to its source material in some meaningful capacity, and why I simply don't like the movie very much even when viewing it without comparison to the book.



Never seen it.

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8 Jan 2016
Freudian Vampire
That's a shame because Starship Troopers is a fascinating case as an adaptation; Verhoeven took the bare bones of Heinlein's story and adapted them quite faithfully but diverged from its message so wildly and intentionally that the film becomes essentially a criticism of its own source material. If you sympathise even the slightest with King's dislike for Kubrick's adaptation I'd love to know what you'd think of ST because if Heinlein saw and understood how Verhoeven had utterly destroyed his work I imagine his hatred for it would have made King and Kubrick's beef seem minor.

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8 Jan 2016
Other Scott
I've heard similar things said about Kingsman: The Secret Service, and it definitely does fly into blatant self-parody in the latter half. I don't know enough about the comic book to say whether it's true of that as well though.

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8 Jan 2016
Freudian Vampire
No, ST is on another level. It is a direct attack on everything the novel stands for. Like if FMJ was an adaptation of a pro-war book.

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8 Jan 2016
Jeremy
I actually watched Starship Troopers way back when I was a kid. My very first R-rated film. Good times.

Out of curiosity, Guttersnipe, do you plan on discussing your thoughts on the Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror short “The Shinning”?

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8 Jan 2016
guttersnipe
I see where you're coming from, 100% I think the way I can best sum up my reaction to the film in a sentence fragment is simply: it's fun to get lost.

It's true; motivation isn't exactly Kubrick's concern, and this attitude was a real strain on some of the actors who worked with him (Duvall legendarily suffered on this film, and George C. Scott resented his methods). I guess this requires the viewer to basically abandon faith in all concerns save his. This is essentially why I wanted to stress that King's characters are total chess pieces in Kubrick's hands: he's (arrogantly) unconcerned about whether or not you're on the same wavelength, he just hopes that his visual tapestry will ensnare you and you'll pay attention to his esoteric particularities. In my case, absolutely; it's way beyond a simple case of 'looking good', he discards absolutely everything that doesn't correspond to his own vision. I think this a wonderful opportunity for a director who operated in a variety of genres, like every story type was just waiting for his arrival. This naturally explains why he didn't bother reading King's own screenplay and only used “10%” of Nabokov's for Lolita (though it's important to mention that Nabokov approved of Kubrick's changes, and some were out of his control what with the Hays Code).

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8 Jan 2016
guttersnipe
Thanks! And yes, that is true.

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8 Jan 2016
guttersnipe
I hadn't really considered it, but it is an excellent lampoon and using Groundskeeper Willie as Dick was absolutely inspired.


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8 Jan 2016
Jeremy
”No TV and no beer make Homer something something.”

“Go crazy?”

“Don't mind if I do!”



...I'm afraid I don't have much else to add to this thread.