Room 237 and The Shining

[mcjulie]

A few months ago I saw the movie Room 237, a documentary about obsessive super-fans of Stanley Kubrick’s movie The Shining, who have watched it more times than you’ve seen Star Wars and developed interesting interpretive theories about Kubrick’s film. These range from the relatively plausible (small incongruities aren’t continuity errors - they

Comments

[beer_good_foamy]

I loved Room 237, partly because I'd recently rewatched The Shining for the first time in over a decade. I'd always thought Kubrick's film was deeply flawed for much the same reason that King has always said - that Nicholson plays Jack as wolf-grinningly dangerous right from the very beginning, rather than being a good man slowly corrupted by addiction and/or ghosts. When I rewatched it this time, I realised that that's the point (in as much as you can talk about a "point" without sounding like the moon landing guy). We're not supposed to relate to Jack, we're supposed to relate to his wife and son. Kubrick traps us and them in a relationship with a man who's already hurt the son once, who is obviously going to do it again, and you never know what tiny thing will set him off next time... and yet they have no other place to go. And it suddenly became a far more powerful movie.

Jack has actually been deranged and abusive the whole time, and what happens is that the mask of normalcy comes off.Exactly. Without the mundanities of everyday

[mcjulie]

I'd always thought Kubrick's film was deeply flawed for much the same reason that King has always said

I thought it was a good movie and never quite understood King's issue with it -- his stuff has been turned into complete and utter crap enough times, why was he upset by a first rate adaptation that wasn't exactly how he would have done it? But now I think it is because of what, in particular, was changed. I think King identifies with Jack Torrance, and that for him the book is like a personal cautionary tale: look out, addiction can turn you into a monster. So he doesn't like the altered message of the movie: look out, you may already be a monster.

I think it was a wise choice, though -- one of the challenges of adapting a movie is that you have to really condense the story, so books that trade off an epic sense that months or years are passing can't really use that in movie form.

[beer_good_foamy]

I think King identifies with Jack Torrance,

Given his very public battle with various addictions, that's probably very true - if anything, more so now than when he wrote the book.

I think it was a wise choice, though

These days, I definitely agree. It becomes a different story, but a very worthwhile one, and arguably more terrifying. Horror stories (and this is where the conspiracists in Room 237 get it so very wrong) are always metaphorical, it taps into something within us. John Carpenter once said that horror stories probably started around a campfire somewhere in Africa half a million years ago, where some people would look out into the darkness and tell stories of the things that lurked out there and wanted to eat you... while others would stare into the fire and tell stories of the darkness inside themselves. The Shining, especially in Kubrick's hands, really blurs the lines between the two.