Episode Details

Stanley Kubrick’s sublime The Shining breaks all of the rules. It breaks the rules of adaptation by completely upending the plot and meaning of Stephen King’s original book. The plot of the movie doesn’t really even make sense from a story point of view. King’s book is very much about telekinesis inside people and inside the Overlook Hotel. The hotel wants the boy Danny because his powers are so great. In their way is the mother Wendy, strong and protective, who will keep them from getting the boy. They use recovering alcoholic Jack, a writer, to kill off the mother and bring the boy into the fold.

In the movie, Jack simply loses his mind inside the potentially haunted Hotel. Kubrick has simplified it greatly, to focus on the claustrophobia of the snowed-in hotel, and how that might break down a marriage.

If The Shining was released today it would be trashed by some 200 self-appointed critics who operate more or less as a hive mind that monitors issues of social justice, as every industry controlled by the left does, as much as it does anything else. But in 2021, there is no such thing as a purely great movie unless it crosses all of the t’s and dots all of the i’s. Amazon Studios has even written it into its DEI guidelines for filmmakers. The left has been consumed by its own righteousness and has become every bit the zealots of the Evangelical Right.

The Shining is allowed to mostly exist as a film made before the religion took hold (pre-2014). It would not be made now the same way. Not a chance. First of all, you could probably count on one hand those working today with Kubrick’s talent and ability. But secondly, there is no way it would be told the way Kubrick decided to tell it.

Kubrick’s The Shining would be described as misogynistic, no doubt, by many of those who cover film. The irritation with the actress Shelley Duvall by director Stanley Kubrick and star Jack Nicholson is clearly evident and, dare we say, hilariously funny.

But it’s funny in that way you might only get if you are a member of Generation-X, that is those of us who really were jaded throughout our young adult lives and preferred subversive art to almost every other kind. We think Taxi Driver is funny. We think Blue Velvet is funny and, yes, we think The Shining is funny.

But it’s also brilliant. The reason is, quite simply, that Stanley Kubrick was a great director. He took material that wasn’t his and made it his.

Kubrick’s The Shining spoke about the social issues of the time in a quiet whisper, like many of the films of the late 70s did. Feminism, in particular, was taking a hit. If you remember the 80s you’ll remember how no woman wanted to admit she was a feminist. It had a negative connotation, at least to any woman who wanted to attract a man. You heard “I’m not a feminist but…” a lot. It took a while for the word to come back into style. Of course, now it barely exists as a stand-alone movement because it’s been overtaken by trans rights, or non-binary or LGBTQIA+. Feminism? What’s that?

Stephen King wrote The Shining in 1977 and is (and was) most definitely married to and influenced by a feminist, his wife Tabitha. So his book isn’t the same kind of commentary that the film version of The Shining is. If you are familiar with King’s work you know what an important person Tabitha is to him. He has called her his “ideal reader” and there is no way she doesn’t get the first pass when he writes a draft. Because of that, even with the awkward sex scenes factored in, his books have always been feminist-friendly.

Kubrick, however, was having none of that. The film version exists inside the mind of a man who is driven so insane by his wife and son that he imagines a hotel driving him towards murder. If you had not read the book, that might have been your takeaway. I find the book actually scary and the movie kind of fun