{"id":1918,"date":"2023-06-05T21:27:55","date_gmt":"2023-06-06T01:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/?p=1918"},"modified":"2023-07-08T11:20:07","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T15:20:07","slug":"unpopular-opinions-why-i-dont-like-stanley-kubricks-the-shining","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/unpopular-opinions-why-i-dont-like-stanley-kubricks-the-shining\/","title":{"rendered":"Unpopular Opinions: Why I Don\u2019t Like Stanley Kubrick\u2019s The Shining"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Heeeere’s Nicholson!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In all honesty, I\u2019m not sure how unpopular this opinion is these days. I mean, Stephen King himself famously disliked the movie made from one of his classic novels. But for a long time, Stanley Kubrick\u2019s The Shining<\/i> has been a landmark\u00a0horror film and has given pop culture at least one iconic moment. Even if you\u2019ve never seen the movie, you\u2019re probably familiar with \u201cHeeeeere\u2019s Johnny!\u201d or \u201cAll work and no play make Jack a dull boy<\/i>.\u201d Maybe you instinctively shudder whenever you see identical twin girls in blue pinafores.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Anyhow, let\u2019s get to it: Lots of people love Kubrick\u2019s adaptation. Not me. I watched it for the first time when I was 14, and I was underwhelmed. And for a long time, I couldn\u2019t figure out why. It has genuinely frightening moments\u2014it knocks the Room 237 sequence out of the park, for example. And I love the soundtrack. Wendy Carlos\u2019s \u201cDies Irae\u201d on the synthesizer<\/a> is a chilling opening piece, and the sound effects are so much more interesting than the usual \u201cJumpscare!\u201d musical stingers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

True, the film deviates quite a bit from its source material. But that hasn\u2019t been a deal-breaker for me in other cases. I love Blade Runner<\/i>, which bears very little resemblance to the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For a while, I thought I disliked it because I found the movie horrendously miscast. I read the novel before seeing the film, and although I realize now that Kubrick\u2019s take was basically an alternate-universe version of King’s story, I couldn\u2019t open my brain up and remove the character impressions I\u2019d already formed from the book. That was a stumbling block.<\/p>\n

Jack Torrance in the novel has a volatile temper and a drinking problem he’s fighting hard to overcome but he genuinely loves his wife and son, and he doesn\u2019t start going murderously\u00a0insane until he\u2019s in the Overlook. Jack Torrance as played by Jack Nicholson seems like he\u2019s two seconds away from driving his family off the cliff during the opening credits. He plays a great maniac, but I don\u2019t think the story works as well if Jack\u00a0is\u00a0menacing right from the start.<\/p>\n

And while I like Shelley Duvall and appreciate that Kubrick cast her to play a woman described as a stunning blonde in the novel (Hollywood usually does that the other way around), I didn\u2019t like her passive, weepy Wendy. The novel\u2019s Wendy is a tougher, far more assertive character.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, after all this time, it hit me:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t like the movie because it rarely seems as if\u00a0the Torrances love, care about, or even particularly like each other. Even before things start getting bad, they mostly\u00a0seem cold and stilted when they have to interact, something they avoid doing whenever possible. There’s some warmth between Wendy and Danny, but that’s about it. Jack\u2019s always secluded in his den with his typewriter, Wendy\u2019s cooking or doing housework, and Danny\u2019s riding around the Overlook’s halls on his Big Wheel. They mostly behave like three strangers who just happen to be inhabiting the hotel at the same time. I know this was a deliberate choice; I just don\u2019t like it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t necessarily need my characters to be good <\/i>people. I greatly enjoyed the HBO series Barry<\/i>, where every single main character was some flavor of appalling. But those characters all had things and people they genuinely cared about and real chemistry with each other, and that made them engaging.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve watched The Shining<\/i> dozens of times. I cannot think of one moment in that film when Wendy and Jack\u00a0appear to be either a believable married couple with history between them or particularly loving parents. Scatman Crothers\u2019s Dick Halloran seems far more fatherly towards Danny in the brief screen time he gets. (And do not get me started on what the film did to Dick. Just don\u2019t.)<\/p>\n

And when I don\u2019t care about the characters, it\u2019s hard for me to get invested in what happens to them. That, in a nutshell, is why Kubrick\u2019s adaptation has never really worked for me.<\/p>\n

Then again, I watched King\u2019s attempt to adapt his own story for a TV miniseries in the 90s. That didn\u2019t work either, to put it mildly. Maybe The Shining<\/i> is one of those books that\u2019s basically unfilmable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In all honesty, I\u2019m not sure how unpopular this opinion is these days. I mean, Stephen King himself famously disliked…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110,33,113],"tags":[16,17,132,133],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1918"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1945,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1918\/revisions\/1945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nicolewillson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}