A Minotaur In A Maze

The original ghost story, published in 1977, was only the author’s third novel. It tells the story of the Torrance family — Jack and Wendy, and their young son Danny — as they spend the winter caretaking the isolated, empty, haunted Overlook Hotel. The supernatural entities at the Overlook warp the mind of Jack, a struggling alcoholic writer, until he attacks his wife and son. Jack is just one of many alcoholic authors King has written into his works, and he has self-professed that the character is based on elements of his own lie. In King’s version of The Shining, Jack Torrance becomes a horrifying figure, mostly through supernatural influence. Jack may have been a monster but in the novel even monsters deserve pity, perhaps because that monster is King.

So it’s no wonder that Stephen King took issue with Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation, because Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining has no love for Jack. It’s a cold film, a shivering and lonely nightmare, in which Jack Torrance was never a good person. The warmth with which King portrayed the character becomes, in Kubrick’s eyes, a litany of preposterous excuses. In both versions, Jack dislocated Danny’s shoulder before they encountered the ghosts of the Overlook, and in both versions that’s a red flag. But when Kubrick reveals this backstory it’s through an unconvincing monologue: Wendy’s hands shake, her rationales repeat and repeat as though practiced. When the topic comes up again, Jack claims he never hurt Danny, then admits he did, then says it happened years ago. Even though Wendy clearly said it had only been a few months.

Stephen King has said that in Kubrick’s version Jack has no dramatic arc to speak of, and that even casting the notoriously intense Jack Nicholson gives the game away. But Kubrick’s film views abuse not as a dramatic reveal but a poorly kept secret, one that his characters are both hiding and trying to solve. That it’s right there in front of us the whole time isn’t a flaw, it’s the point. The Shining isn’t a film about a good man’s downfall. It is a film about abuse. And yes, it’s also about ghosts and telepathy, that much is true, but only in service of a real, heartbreaking story about a family in crisis. Jack sees ghosts in the Overlook, but only when there’s a mirror in the room. That’s not a hint or a twist: we know the ghosts in The Shining are real, we have all the evidence in the world, but we also know they’re just reflecting Jack’s true nature back at him.

Jack Nicholson portrays Jack as a hollow man who slowly devolves into a mythological beast, a minotaur in a labyrinth, hunting his own loved ones. Jack can barely contain his disdain for his family on the long, long drive to the Overlook. Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall, is eager to play happy family; it’s a tragic case of denial, and it’s sad, even pitiable to watch her illusions slowly shatter. Poor Danny, played by Danny Lloyd, has retreated into himself, rarely speaking except to an “imaginary” friend named Tony, who lives inside his mouth and warns that staying with his father alone all winter is a bad, bad, bad idea. Danny has a psychic gift called “The Shining,” and he uses it to protect himself from traumatic memories and physical harm. It can’t shine brightly enough to erase all this darkness, but it’s a light that refuses to be extinguished.

The Overlook Hotel is only seen briefly in its everyday glory, a few brief shots of visitors and a departing staff. When emptied out, except for the Torrance family, it creates a liminal, disquieting space, a precursor — like Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) before it — to the modern Backrooms, Skinamarink, and Severance.

Cinematographer John Alcott’s floating Steadicam glides through vacant hallways, itself a ghost, witnessing the action within a desiccated architectural husk. Danny rolls his Big Wheel down the corridors like an oxygen cell through a spiderweb of veins, encountering ghostly presences as if they were viruses. Or perhaps the interloping Torrances are the virus, and the demons of this hotel’s past are its white blood cells, killing and absorbing the invading family.

In any case, the void that is The Overlook is a place where no façade is needed, no excuses are given, and the horror within the Torrance family finally receives the space it needs to fester. Jack is free to be Jack, and Jack is revealed to be a selfish, lying, misogynistic, racist abuser. The full extent of his depravity is only hinted at. Stanley Kubrick, famous for his attention to detail, shows Jack reading a Playgirl magazine with an article about incest on the cover. When Wendy finally encounters the Overlook’s specters, she sees a man in a teddy bear suit performing fellatio on another man. There’s only one other place where you can find a large teddy bear in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining — in Danny’s room. Now that’s horror.

Those clues are hard to make out, and you don’t need to consciously connect the dots to appreciate Kubrick’s vision. Indeed, it’s easy to get swept up in the directness of Kubrick’s narrative. The Shining introduces a family, then it destroys that family. It has corpses and axe murders and familiar scary movie clichés; for Pete’s sake, it’s about a haunted building built on an Indian burial ground. If you’re just looking for a scary story, The Shining provides. If you’re looking for the darkness at the heart of an abused family, you’ll find that too. If you’re looking for evidence that Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing — as some conspiracy theorists have claimed, pointing to Danny’s “Apollo 11” sweater and the portentous Room 237 (there are approximately 237,000 miles from Earth to the moon; but actually, it’s closer to 238) as their “evidence” — you may be grasping at straws. Maybe.

Stephen King wasn’t the only person who didn’t love Kubrick’s The Shining. After decades of critical acclaim the filmmaker’s antepenultimate opus was met with resistance. Many critics found the film disappointing, slow, even shallow. It was ignored by the major awards bodies, except for The Golden Raspberries, which nominated Stanley Kubrick for “Worst Director.” (He “lost” to Robert Greenwald and his notorious disco-musical Xanadu.) The box office was kinder, but not without peril: The Shining opened opposite The Empire Strikes Back, and on significantly fewer screens. It still turned a tidy profit.

This is the version of The Shining that lives on, arguably more than King’s own novel, and certainly more than the TV mini-series King wrote in 1997, which finally put King’s own interpretation on screen, with modest success. In 2019, Mike Flanagan adapted King’s sequel novel Doctor Sleep, finally weaving a connective thread between the original novel of The Shining and Kubrick’s own, distinct interpretation. Doctor Sleep posits that the novel and film both took place, and that the novel was Jack’s version of these events, while the 1980 film was from the perspective of Jack’s terrified child. When Danny grew up, fell prey to alcoholism and returned to the Overlook, only then did he find sympathy for his father’s plight. Forgiveness? Perhaps, perhaps not. But understanding at last.

The Shining has been claimed by the pop culture firmament. Its iconography is now familiar to those who have never stepped through the doors of the Overlook Hotel, and never questioned its true, sinister nature. But The Shining is not just a horror movie, it’s not just a vibe. It’s a disturbing tale, arguably the darkest of Kubrick’s career. In most of his films, Kubrick’s camera appears relatively objective, observing people in states of transition and crisis from a distance, daring the audience to come to their own conclusions. The Shining finds the master stepping right into the muck, guiding our eyes through empty hallways, before suddenly filling the caverns with an eerie jolt. The twins around the corner, the elevators filled with blood, these are among the most dreamlike and lingering images in Kubrick’s massive gallery. They are windows into the subconscious, not just King’s or Kubrick’s, but the haunted mind of the Overlook, which observes its own denizens, judges them harshly, and slowly swallows them, digesting their souls within its brightly painted, deep red guts.

If anyone is entitled to an opinion about The Shining, it’s Stephen King. But literally anyone is entitled to their opinion, and a devastating work of art like Stanley Kubrick’s morbid, fascinating adaptation is bound to be divisive. We still discuss it, and watch it, and absorb it, because it digs into our synapses, becoming a shared experience across multiple generations. It’s a nightmare everyone has, a dream we cannot shake. It’s scary because it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful because it’s real. It’s real because it’s about family, doomed from frame one.