Watched The Shining by Kubrick last night, and I can honestly understand why Stephen King hates it so much. It’s definitely not the best adaptation of the book at all, and the film really did destroy all the characterization the book goes through for each of the characters.
He might’ve been a bastard and a drunk, but Jack Torrance did love his wife and son, and the book does show that. It’s only towards the late middle and end that he really goes psychotic, and that’s mainly because of the hotel itself essentially possessing him and bringing out the worst of him. I am in no way excusing his actions, because he is an attempted murderer and an abusive father, but he did love Wendy and Danny, and he wasn’t a psychopath. Ultimately, it was his love for his son that stopped him when he managed to catch up to Danny, and it was what made him try to kill himself in an attempt to save his family. Unfortunately, at that point the Hotel was too powerful, and it didn’t matter if Jack was alive or dead; it just needed his body. The movie really failed to show his descent into madness; it just jumps right into crazy, with nothing to show the man he was before everything at the hotel happened. It also failed to show that the Hotel - the ‘manager’, as was stated - was truly what was behind everything. Had the Torrances not gone to the Overlook, would Jack have snapped and killed his family? It’s a possibility, but a low one - it’s more likely that Wendy would’ve ended up divorcing him, or he would’ve carried out his suicidal thoughts.
Wendy Torrance was not a weak woman - she not only had the courage and drive to stand up to her husband when he went batshit crazy, she locked him in a pantry, stabbed him, and went up multiple flights of stairs while very badly injured… and then she lived to be happy afterwards! She survived having her back broken by her husband when he tried to kill her, and lived a happy life afterwards! I can name maybe three people in my life who I am confident could do that. Kubrick’s decision to depict Wendy as an emotionally fragile woman was just demeaning to her character. Shelly Duvall did an incredible job, however, and I respect her immensely for it. That’s not an easy role to be put into in any way, especially not when you’re working for a nightmare of a director who decides that the best way to get results is to psychologically torture the star actress. She depicted the movie version of Wendy perfectly. I was cheering for her the whole way.
And then there’s all the other changes which I can understand from a filmmaker’s perspective as being more logical to making a movie, but they did change the story quite a bit. Having Jack use an axe rather than the roque mallet was an understandable change, as it was more recognizable to the public as a dangerous weapon, however… it meant that most of the important scenes, such as when Wendy’s back gets broken, never happen. You can’t exactly do that with an axe, can you? But that scene is one of the most impactful (pun not intended) and important to the book, at least in my view, since it shows her resilience and her love for her son, as mentioned in the above paragraph about her character. The choice to use the axe also meant that that Dick Hallorann died when he should not have.
That man, the chef with the Shine, was more important to the book, I think, than any character. He was the first to tell Danny that he wasn’t alone, that there were more people out there who had the same abilities he did, and that it wasn’t a bad thing. He was the one to tell Danny of the strange happenings at the Overlook, and to tell him that the visions might be scary but ultimately he didn’t think they could hurt him - which ended up being a major part of Danny’s choices. The main part of the reason Danny went into room 217 (237 in the movie) was because he remembered Dick telling him that the visions couldn’t hurt him, that all he had to do was look away when he saw them. And then there was how Dick came all the way across the country to help Danny when he was called. He pledged to help that boy if needed, and when he was needed, he came immediately, and ended up saving the remaining Torrances. His refusal to let that boy and his family die was such a big part of the story.
I can also understand the decision to turn the hedge topiary into a hedge maze. Making bush animals move is not at all easy, especially for a movie made in the 80’s. However, the animals were also fairly important to the story; they were the first real visual of Jack’s descent into madness, and then later a big factor of his possession by the Overlook; when he refused to believe that he’d seen them move, he essentially shut down any possibility of belief that there was something wrong at the hotel. By the end of the book, we sort of find out that the hotel itself was influencing his willingness to believe that, but his initial refusal did push that along. Once someone has made up their mind about something, even something they’ve seen with their own two eyes, it’s often very difficult to get them to change it, especially in a scary situation. The topiary was the first big turning point in Jack’s psyche.
Then there’s the decision to change his death scene - having him freeze to death after getting lost in the hedge maze and suffering a mild heart attack. It was… definitely a choice? In the book itself, after Jack ‘kills’ himself (again, the Hotel was possessing him fully at that point and no longer needed him alive, just needed his body, so him fighting back and bashing his own face in really did nothing in the long run but was a rather important scene - see the paragraph on Jack Torrance for clarification) the boiler in the hotel begins to overheat. The Hotel (possessing Jack’s body) goes to release the steam from it to prevent it from exploding - the problem here is that Jack was told by Watson that the boiler would blow long before the pressure gauge reached its red zone, because it was so old. But since it was not Jack present in that body but the Hotel itself, it had no idea about this and believed the boiler was now safe, as it had managed to reach it before the needle hit the red… and then the boiler exploded. Having Jack freeze to death in the hedge maze (and thus forcing us to experience that absolutely ridiculous final scene where we see him frozen) was a much less final and impactful death than that of the boiler exploding. With the explosion, his body was destroyed, and so the ‘manager’ of the Overlook was destroyed (the ghost/demon). It was a finale; the evil perished, the good guys got away, and everything was right in the world. With the freezing, it was much less final, and much less satisfying.
Objectively, if you separate the book from the movie, the movie wasn’t terrible. I did like it, and I had a lot of fun watching it. But as an adaptation, I found it VERY lacking. I can understand why King hates it so much.
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