Stanley Kubrick’s new film, The Shining, is about a man
who wants to kill his wife and son. It does not matter that the
movie uses the conventions of the horror genre, explaining the
man’s desire in supernatural terms; Kubrick has simply taken the
wonderful trash novel of the occult by Stephen King, which was a
big bestseller, and has used the basic outline of its plot to tell
his more gruesome and more serious story. From the Bomb in Dr.
Strangelove, to the Mysteries of the Universe in 2001: A
Space Odyssey, to the Family in The Shining —
Kubrick likes to tackle the Really Big Subjects. In this movie he
reverses Ivan Karamazov’s famous question, asking instead: “Who
wouldn’t desire his son’s death?”
Jack Torrance, a would-be writer, takes a job as winter
caretaker at the Overlook, a grand old Colorado resort hotel which
must be closed down from November to May due to the cruelty of the
snowstorms. During his job interview he is informed that a previous
winter caretaker went berserk and axe-murdered his wife and two
little girls; nothing like that would happen to me, Jack assures
his new boss. Jack moves himself, his wife Wendy, and his
five-year-old son Danny up to the Overlook, and things begin to go
awry when the first snows come. Jack begins consorting with ghostly
presences in the hotel’s ballroom, and Danny, who has the gift of
precognition (the “shining”), begins seeing the axe-murdered girls
all over the place, beckoning him to come and play. Jack’s wife, a
cipher of a woman, cannot understand what is happening around her.
Jack begins to get violent, and finally, egged on by one of the
hotel’s ghosts (who bears the name of the axe-wielding caretaker),
takes off after his own family, wielding his own axe and forcing
them to flee in terror through the hotel.
Although there is nothing wrong per se with Kubrick’s using just
this plot outline from the novel and not the characterizations that
went along with it, his changes of characterization (and incidental
action, too) are seldom to good effect, and they go a long way
toward explaining why the movie fails where the novel succeeds. In
King’s book, Jack is a devoted husband and an adoring father. What
happens to him in the course of the book is the stuff of tragedy:
His will is perverted, his soul is corrupted, his love turns to
hate. A wonderful man becomes an unrecognizable monster. In the
novel, the hotel itself is the agent of evil which forces Jack to
go on his murderous rampage, preying upon his weaknesses and his
feelings of guilt about his failings.
But in the movie there is something wrong with Jack from the
very beginning. (He is played by Jack Nicholson, who uses his
natural repulsiveness to brilliant effect throughout the film.)
Although outwardly affable, underneath he seems full of contempt
for everyone around him; he grins constantly, but his eyes tell a
different story. As he and his family drive to the Overlook, he
answers his wife’s banal questions with a mixture of sarcasm and
indifference, and is dismissive of his son’s innocent comments. He
behaves in a way that always seems to suggest intelligence, but
there is still something hateful about him. It would, and does,
take very little to turn him into a homicidal maniac.
SO THE JACK WE SEE at the end of the film is much the same as
the Jack at the beginning, except for a newfound unkemptness and
inclination toward humor (“Wendy? I’m home!” he cries out, having
broken through the door to his family’s suite with an axe). Where,
then, is the drama in the movie? There is none, as it turns out.
After an inspired opening sequence and some compelling scenes of
Danny racing around the hotel on his tricycle, the movie becomes
tiresome, neither very frightening nor very interesting.
If we did not like Jack, but truly liked Wendy and Danny, the
movie might have become a nail-biting exercise in sadism; we would
have to watch as Jack heartlessly swung his axe at his lovable wife
and adorable son. But here again the movie subverts the emotional
logic that make the book work so well. Wendy is a tremendously
sympathetic character in the novel, as she should be; in the movie,
however, she is a dull, stupid woman, and, as played by Shelley
Duvall, not even pleasant to look at. She calls Jack “hon”
obsessively. She intrudes upon him at his typewriter, saying “Hi
hon, how’s it going, can I read what you’ve written?” (finally he
screams at her, banning her from his presence when he is trying to
write). She sits around a lot watching television; sometimes she
gets up enough energy to cook dinner. Moreover, she is emotionally
catatonic, unable even to work up too much interest in her son. We
cannot help feeling a little sympathetic toward Jack when he takes
off after her with the axe.
Danny (played by an angelically beautiful child named Danny
Lloyd) is a compelling character — sweet, moving,
vulnerable. His psychic gift manifests itself whenever he talks to
“the little boy that lives inside my mouth,” whose name is “Tony.”
By the end, Danny has retreated into himself and “Tony” has taken
his place. “You stay here hon, okay?” Wendy says to him. “Yes, Mrs.
Torrance,” Danny replies in the scratchy voice we know to be
“Tony’s.” The little boy has retreated into schizophrenia when
faced with his parents. There is great pathos in this, but
unfortunately Kubrick merely makes his point and then retires Danny
from the action for most of the movie’s second half. Danny comes
alive again at the very end, when he must finally save himself from
the maniac with an axe, but at this point, roughly two and a half
hours into the movie, we can no longer find it in our hearts even
to try to care.
All of this paves the way for Kubrick’s final, thematic,
deviation from the novel and for the realization of his own theme:
In the movie, the family is itself the malevolent agent, not the
hotel. The family destroys itself, or wreaks psychic havoc
on those, like Danny, who are too young to fight back. Indeed, how
can the family be anything but malevolent (and grossly
unattractive) when it has Jack Nicholson as Father and Shelley
Duvall as Mother? And given Kubrick’s penchant for the Really Big
Subjects, would we be mistaken to assume that he wants us to see
the Torrances as representative of all families? As the
Family?
NEVER BEFORE HAS KUBRICK so effectively demonstrated his hatred
of all things human than in The Shining. Man is horrible;
this we got in Barry Lyndon. Women are contemptible; this
we got in A Clockwork Orange. Children are the
unsuspecting victims of their parents; this we got in
Lolita. But the image of Danny fleeing in terror as his
father chases him, screaming obscenities and brandishing that axe
— it is more than disquieting to think that this is Kubrick’s
final word (to date) on human nature. He is, after all, a man with
two children — two little girls.
