Director Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING is one of the most highly respected movies in the horror genre along with such seminal films as THE EXORCIST and ROSEMARY’S BABY. Yet, for all its acclaim, there have been rumblings from some who feel its deviation from the novel is to the detriment of the movie. Most notably, Stephen King himself has, for decades now, griped at certain alterations made to the story by Kubrick. Some complaints from King and from others include Jack Torrance’s frosty fate in the hedge maze, the existence of the hedge maze itself, and its depiction of Jack’s relationship with his family. That latter critique about Jack’s dynamic with Danny (Danny Lloyd) and Wendy (Shelley Duvall) is what sparked my interest in discussing the film and pleading my case for why I believe many people have been looking at that aspect of it from the wrong angle.
Many people view THE SHINING as a movie about the dissolution of a loving family brought on by a father’s descent into supernatural induced madness. The issues some have with the film’s depiction of that is, unlike his novelized counterpart, the Jack Torrance in Kubrick’s film adaptation doesn’t seem like he enjoys his role as the ‘provider’ or his own family very much, for that matter. In the book, Jack is still flawed but he’s initially a much more caring, warmer presence.
From the outset of the film, however, Jack is annoyed and sarcastic. He acts as though simply being around his family is a burden–put a pin in that word for later–or at the very least, an irritation. If I’m honest, I could see how the idea of having to formulate a potential lifetime’s worth of conversations with Wendy could make a person contemplate a more… permanent fix. I kid, I kid. We love Wendy, seriously. Back to Jack. His demeanor could be assumed to merely be his normal, crotchety idling speed when it’s just him and his family away from the prying eyes of society. Contrast this with Jack’s happily upstanding, if obvious, facade when being interviewed by the manager of the Overlook Hotel, Mr. Ullman and again when the family is being taken on a tour of the hotel.
Many people believe that Jack Nicholson, under the direction of Stanley Kubrick, simply missed the mark in portraying Torrance as a loving family man but I have a different perspective. I don’t think what we are seeing in Stanley Kubrick’s version of THE SHINING is an observation of a loving family on a collision course with terror. What we are seeing is the underbelly of the nuclear family unit amidst the realization that the post WWII version of the American Dream was maybe nothing more than a bill of goods sold mostly to middle class white America, complete with a strict adherence to heteronormative gender roles and an emphasis on home ownership and the associated financial burden. There’s that word again. At the time of filming THE SHINING, America was at the end of and at the highest point of a period known as The Great Inflation. This period was marked with high inflation and low growth. The cost of living began to pull financially at the middle class in a way that hadn’t been seen since WWII. The task of maintaining one’s lifestyle became more weighty with many families having to cut back on essentials and many women, who’d previously chosen to stay at home, were now having to join the workforce en masse. Many men, shortsightedly, saw this as a failure of their duty as the sole provider for their families, causing tension in the home.
Jack is the embodiment of the modern man’s perceived failure to live up to the fabled and highly flawed ideals of masculinity of the previous generations. His frustration is suppressed and seethes just below (not far enough below) the surface. Jack is entitlement. Jack is resentment. Jack is a lie that wishes it were true and hates the world for no longer playing along. So, no. This film isn’t a story of a loving family being torn apart by malignant, supernatural forces. This is a story of an abusive man, isolated from the judgement and boundaries of society, free from any push-back against his abusive nature. My take is that the isolation and supernatural infestation of the hotel allows Jack to release the evil that has been inside of him the entire time and in fact, it is his very nature that draws the forces within the hotel to him, unlike the novel which centers Danny as the focus of the forces within the hotel.
I mentioned the word burden earlier on. When Lloyd, the ghostly bartender, appears to Jack for the first time, Jack mentions the phrase “white man’s burden.” The assumption is that Jack is speaking of the bourbon that was just poured for him or, more specifically, his personal struggle with alcoholism. But there is much more to it than that. “White Man’s Burden” is the title of a poem written by Rudyard Kipling. The poem itself is an overtly racist assertion of the white man’s and, by extension, the Western world’s ‘duty’ to colonize and civilize the non white countries, calling their inhabitants “half devil and half child.” This is backed up in the movie by Delbert Grady’s suggestion that Jack should “correct” Danny in the same way Grady corrected his twin daughters. The poem goes on to position white men as the saviors and stewards of the world whose task was arduous and thankless.
The phrase, “white man’s burden”, was not a line from Stephen King’s novel. Kubrick and co-writer Diane Johnson introduced this idea in the film version of the story. Knowing what we do about Kubrick’s semi unhinged insistence on perfection and his intentional nature, I’d argue that this was a purposeful part of the sub-textual conversation Kubrick was having with the audience about how men of the time believed themselves to be the lords of their families, and how, due to shifting outside economic and social forces, were losing that control and with it their purpose and identity.
In THE SHINING, Jack has been tasked with being the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. The roles of provider, husband, and father are what Jack sees as a burden holding him back from his new purpose and new identity as the caretaker of solely his own wants and needs. The hotel is the embodiment of Jack’s selfish desires and the reason he so desperately wants to trade his role as the caretaker of his family for that of the role of the caretaker of the hotel. But maybe, Jack only believed that he was cut-out to be a family man. Maybe Jack, deep down, when it came to his own selfishness i.e. the hotel, he’d… “always been the caretaker.”
THE SHINING is notable for its terrifying imagery, chilling score and iconic lines. Those elements on their own don’t fully explain the otherworldly eeriness that the movie conjures. It’s almost as if every frame is glazed in a haunted intangibility that we can’t quite put our fingers on. I’d argue that the lack of warmth and sterility that we feel when watching it is our subconscious understanding that this movie is less about fulfilling or playing against the audience’s expectations and more about confronting us with the nihilism and selfishness at the core of the modern version of the human condition. For us to acknowledge this creates a discomfort and dissonance with our previously accepted world views. This is the true horror that lies half-hidden at the center of an already viscerally disturbing story.
In my opinion, the shift in tone of how Jack relates to Danny and Wendy in the novel compared to the screen adaptation is one of the things that allows the more surface level horrors present in the story to feel so effective. Jack never feels like a protector and the family never feels safe from him. He feels like a disgruntled employee just waiting for the right job opportunity to come along so he can say goodbye to his old one. Unfortunately, saying goodbye in this situation, involves a bit more blood shed and ax-murder than your typical employment resignation.
