Thoughts About The Shining

I have read The Shining many, many times over the years (although I saw the movie first, and like it better) but it’s been a while since I read it. I finished it last night and, oh boy, I’ve got some thoughts. Hot takes on old(er) pop culture are a dime a dozen on the internet, but I still thought I would add my opinion to the pile.

Stephen King famously hates the 1980 movie version of The Shining because it’s so different from his book and doesn’t have the same tone, moral, or take on the protagonist, Jack Torrance. King saw his book as being about a fundamentally good man who is struggling with alcoholism and failure and is pushed over the edge by an evil hotel. He thinks the movie version doesn’t work because Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrence “has no arc” and that he’s crazy and scary from the beginning. He thought Shelley Duvall’s portrayal of Wendy Torrance as “one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film.” And he finds the movie “cold,” which doesn’t align with his style [Link to King’s various opinions about The Shining.] 

I realized as I was typing that this will end up being mostly a criticism of the book and I don’t know if that’s because I love the movie so much or because I have genuine issues with the novel. Either way, while there are some things I like about The Shining, I think King is wrong in his view of the film, and looking at these specific criticisms of it exposes deep flaws within the novel.

Jack Torrance in the book was clearly written by King as a version of himself, circa 1976: a writer, alcoholic, and failed teacher with anger issues. King’s male protagonists usually fall into two categories: the hero/good guy with no real personality (Stu Redman, Ben Mears, Johnny Smith, Mike Noonan, and many, many others) or the flawed, but trying, good guy (Larry Underwood, James Eric “Gard” Gardner, Arnie Cunningham, Paul Sheldon, and many, many others). Jack Torrance is a member of the second group and King writes about him with great empathy and fondness. He clearly sees him as a man who would have gotten his shit together and been a good husband and father had they not gone to the Overlook Hotel. I disagree.

Reading this book in 2023 puts Jack in a very different light than I saw him when I read the book for the first time in the late 1980s. I bet even Stephen King would see him differently if he read the book now, much closer to his onscreen version than he had once appeared. My hot take is that Jack Torrance is an asshole from the very beginning of the novel. He’s violent, petulant, self-involved, and abusive to his family (both verbally and physically). He seems completely unable to see anyone else’s point of view and is only concerned with his wife and child in terms of how they affect his life and work.

The reason Jack goes to work at the Overlook Hotel is because he’s been fired from his teaching job for attacking a student in the parking lot and causing a head injury. It’s not clear how badly he hurt this teenager, but the incident is portrayed as just another instance of him losing his temper instead of assault. There’s no talk of him being arrested or charged with a crime and his friend, Al Shockley, who is on the school’s Board of Directors, implies that he could probably get his job back once the dust settles. I know the ‘70s were a different time, but none of this seems in any way the actions of a “good guy.”

Jack has also been violent with Danny, something that’s also mentioned in the movie. This is treated with more gravity, but still dismissed as the result of his alcoholism, a mistake that’s not in keeping with his basic character. I would disagree, given what we see of him during the course of the book, even before the Overlook gets its hooks in him. He seems to have violent rage bubbling under the surface all the time which oozes out occasionally through verbally abusive outbursts. We don’t ever learn anything about the other people who have been caretakers at the Overlook (besides the homicidal Delbert Grady), but it seems clear why Jack sails over the edge so quickly (6 weeks) while other people were able to get through the whole winter unaffected.

Jack is also clearly a misogynist, treating Wendy with barely veiled contempt, talking down to her:

It had been Jack’s idea to separate for a while - to get perspective on the relationship, he said. She had been afraid he had become interested in someone else. Later she found it wasn’t so. They were together again in the spring and he asked her if she had been to see her father. She had jumped as if he’d struck her with a quirt. "How did you know that?" "The Shadow knows." "Have you been spying on me?" And his impatient laughter, which had always made her feel so awkward - as if she were eight and he was able to see her motivations more clearly than she. "You needed time, Wendy." "For what?" "I guess . . . to see which one of us you wanted to marry." "Jack what are you saying?" "I think I’m proposing marriage." (p. 45-46)

Many conversations they have consist of him pontificating at her, lecturing on every topic under the sun including history, literature, and science. When he gets angry at her, he compares her to her shrew of a mother [“Like mother, like daughter,” Jack muttered p. 48; “‘Don’t you dare leave us alone! She shrieked at him. Spittle flew from her lips from the force of her cry. Jack said ‘Wendy, that’s a remarkable imitation of your mom.’” p. 250] or calls her a bitch [“‘Got any aspirin?’ ‘Sure.’ She pawed in her purse and came up with a tin of Anacin. ‘You keep them.’ He took the tin. ‘No Excedrin?’ He saw the small recoil on her face . . . ‘No Excedrin,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’ ‘That’s okay,’ he said, ‘these’ll do just fine.’ But of course they wouldn’t and she should have known it, too. At times she could be the stupidest bitch . . .” p. 176] We never see Wendy be anything but supportive and kind and Jack treats her like total shit, and even worse, we as the audience are supposed to side with Jack (at least in the beginning) and see her as somehow demanding or overbearing, as if her very reasonable requests that he stop drinking or stop hurting their child are an imposition, and that her needs are impeding Jack’s writing endeavors.

This leads us to King’s claim that Shelley Duval’s portrayal of Wendy in the movie is misogynistic. Wendy in the movie is very different from the book’s version, and I think she was very misunderstood in the years following the movie’s release. Wendy in the book is one of King’s perfect wife/girlfriend characters: pretty, nice, sexually available to the protagonist but not promiscuous, and mind-numbingly bland. Almost all his early books have this female character (Susan Norton, Vicki McGee (née Thomlinson), Rachel Creed, Frannie Goldsmith) and these portrayals of women are far more misogynistic than anything in The Shining film. 

Every thought that Wendy has throughout the book is either about Jack or Danny. She has no interests or desires outside the domestic sphere and seems completely content with this life. She supports Jack’s writing by (seemingly) doing all housework and most of the childcare and has no interest in having her own career. She has no flaws or quirks or personality traits at all. She is a two-dimensional character whose entire identity is based on her relationship to the much more interesting and dynamic men in her life. Even more galling, she seems very interested in maintaining an active sex life with Jack no matter how badly he treats her. They have sex mere minutes after he’s been berating her for wanting to leave the Overlook.

You could argue that this is the behavior of a woman who’s trapped in an abusive marriage, but there don’t seem to be any signs that she thinks of her marriage in a particularly negative way, outside of Jack’s drinking. I see her character and her character’s behavior as the result of an author who doesn’t see women, or at least sexually attractive women, as being fully formed humans outside of their relationships with men. King is capable of writing interesting women characters, but only if they’re outsiders or older or suffer from mental illness. The sexual desirability of his female characters is in direct proportion to how fully realized they are.

In contrast, Wendy in the film is deeply idiosyncratic and does seem like someone who’s been traumatized by an abusive relationship. She seems to have crippling anxiety and is obviously accustomed to tiptoeing around Jack’s temper. We don’t see any violence between them (until the end of the film) or learn about any history of violence, but her behavior seems like the actions of someone who’s navigating a relationship full of fear and rage. This is a much more empathic portrayal of a woman who’s been abused and traumatized and is trying to convince herself that her situation will improve if she can just maintain her grip on reality. It’s well known that Kubrick’s treatment of Shelley Duvall was very harsh during the filming of The Shining, and while this is never acceptable, it helped give her performance an authenticity that the book lacks.

Finally, I do think the movie version of The Shining is “cold.” I think all of Stanley Kubrick’s movies are cold. And I also agree that Stephen King’s books typically have a warmth and humanity to them, which is probably one of the reasons that they’re as popular as they are. The coziness is a nice contrast to the subject matter. But when it comes to horror, coldness is scarier and more off-putting. Kubrick really has a handle on the uncanny, something that King has clearly never been interested in. Things are wrong in the movie version of the Overlook, but it’s never as simple as a haunted hotel. It could be ghosts, but that’s never made definite. Instead, Kubrick gives us images and ideas that don’t make logical sense, but also aren’t ghostly in a way that we understand:

• An elevator opening to unleash a torrent of blood

• An Overlook with an impossible floorplan

• Doors and furniture that disappear or change position

• Jack reading a Playgirl magazine in the lobby while waiting for his boss.

Kubrick was more interested in the psychology of fear than telling a conventional ghost story. People may prefer one over the other, but I think King’s criticisms of the movie are actually some of its strong points.

Clearly I like the movie more than the book and certainly think it’s scarier, but there are parts of the book that I think are very effective. King is good at exploring the history of creepy places and he was obviously interested in the history of the Overlook. He went so far as to write a prologue and epilogue to the book (“Before the Play” and “After the Play”) that did just this, but these were ultimately removed from the book by his editor (back when an editor actually had the power to make his books shorter). What’s left is a chapter where Jack finds a scrapbook in the basement filled with news articles about fucked up events in the Overlook’s past. This is fun and creepy in a subtle way.

There’s also a chapter where Jack finds unsettling ephemera amongst the piles of paper in the basement:

He had found some odd things tucked in among the invoices, bills of lading, receipts. Disquieting things. A bloody strip of sheeting. A dismembered teddy bear that seemed to have been slashed to pieces. A crumpled sheet of violet ladies’ stationary, a ghost of perfume still clinging to it beneath the musk of age, a note begun and left unfinished in faded blue ink: “Dearest Tommy, I can’t think so well up here as I’d hoped, about us I mean, of course, who else? Ha. Ha. Things keep getting in the way. I’ve had strange dreams about things going bump in the night, can you believe that and” that was all. The note was dated June 27, 1934. He found a hand puppet that seemed to be either a witch or a warlock . . . something with long teeth and a pointy hat, at any rate . . . And something that seemed to be a poem, scribbled on the back of a menu in dark pencil: “Medoc / are you here? / I’ve been sleepwalking again, my dear. / The plants are moving under the rug.” No date on the menu, and no name on the poem, if it was a poem. [p. 213]

This sequence is creepy because it’s never explained. We never know where all these things come from and we don’t understand their meaning, and that’s how it should be and Kubrick knew this.