The Shining vs. The Shining

 Thoughts from someone who's a fan of both King and Kubrick

I'm both an avid reader of Stephen King's works, and an avid viewer of Stanley Kubrick's films, so it's quite natural that I'd eventually hear about the controversy over Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the Stephen King novel The Shining.

Much to my surprise, the room didn't immediately burst into flames when I put these next to each other...

 

I'd say that overall, when it comes to film adaptations of books, I'd rather have a loose adaptation that makes for a good standalone film than a super-close adaptation that makes for a mediocre or poor film.  Also, both mediums have their own strengths and weaknesses, and what works well in print might not translate well on screen (or vice-versa).  Indeed, many of the most iconic scenes in the Kubrick adaptation of The Shining weren't in the book, while many scenes in the book that I liked (including the fire hoses attacking Danny like snakes, or when Danny is playing in a concrete pipe in the hotel playground and hears something scratching and crawling around in the pipe with him) would have been either difficult to pull off special-effects-wise, or would have been confusing on screen.  Also, it must be kept in mind that films are meant to be viewed in one sitting, while books can be read on-and-off, so a lot of content has to be cut for time as well.

This wasn't in the book...

Neither was this...

In the book Jack used a roque mallet, which just doesn't look as menacing as an axe...

One of the biggest controversies about the changes was the decision to change the sentient topiary animals into a hedge maze.  While part of this was probably due to the technical difficulty of making convincing animated/animatronic topiary animals, especially in a pre-CGI world where the only options would have been Harryhausen-style stop motion, puppets, or actors in suits (although The Empire Strikes Back was filmed at around the same time, and it made Yoda and the AT-AT walkers quite convincing using puppets and stop-motion), I think the maze worked better thematically with the visuals used to depict the hotel itself as a maze-like environment, with its distinctly labyrinthine carpet pattern and long hallways.

 I think another factor that inadvertently made me a defender of the Kubrick adaptation was that I got into Kubrick before I got into King, so I saw the film first and then read the book; one unintended consequence of doing so was that it raised my expectations of the book to frankly unattainable heights.  In the discussions of the book vs. the movie that I read, King fans seemed to praise the book as some kind of transcendent masterpiece that the film absolutely butchered, so when I did read the book I was let down somewhat by the fact that it was (to me at least) a very good but still flawed book rather than the magnum opus it was hyped as.

Some other thoughts and observations on the two works:

• I think that a big part of why King hated the film so much was because the book was an extremely personal work for him, as he wrote it (in part) to deal with his own alcoholism and drug addictions, so I think that had Kubrick adapted a different one of King's works and changed it in a similar matter King probably wouldn't have objected to the same extent
• Of the 4 films Kubrick made between 1971 and 1987, The Shining is the only one that doesn't have any kind of narration; A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket both had voice-overs of the main protagonist (often quoting the books verbatim), while Barry Lyndon had a third-person omniscient narration (compared to the book's use of a self-serving first-person narrator with the occasional editorial note)
• Another change I liked was making the nature of the Overlook Hotel's haunting ambiguous for much of the film, up until the ghost of Grady unlocks the pantry door; before then, the audience is left to wonder about how much the possibility is that the hotel is haunted, and how much is it the effects of the isolation of being alone in a place that manages to be both claustrophobic and agoraphobic at the same time.  Another factor lending credence to the idea that the ghosts are all in Jack's head is that whenever he interacts with a ghost before the pantry scene, there's a mirror present, and the first ghost Jack talks to is wearing a maroon jacket that's the same color as Jack's jacket:
  
  
  
  
  
• If Jack used a roque mallet like in the book, it would have been a lot less menacing, and a lot more looney tunes-like for me; when he hit someone with that mallet, my first thought probably would have been something like "Are there now going to be stars or birds circling around the victim's head, or is a comically large lump and "NO SALE" sign going to stick out of the top of their head?"
• One of the criticisms I've heard about Jack Nicholson's portrayal is that he's crazy from the start rather than starting out good and then descending into madness, but in the compressed timeline of the film I feel that this was necessary (plus, when he does snap, he's appropriately menacing)