THE SHINING
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson, based on the Stephen King novel
Starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall
Released in 1980
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Written by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson, based on the Stephen King novel
Starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall
Released in 1980
The Shining, before it was a movie, was a novel. The man who wrote the novel was Stephen King. At that time, 1978, Stephen King's books were of the horror genre. The Shining was so intensely horrifying that it was at times psychologically painful, higher praise for which does not exist. By contrast, the movie was not painful. The movie lured the viewer in most seductively, went together waltzing, cleverly cascading through unexplained episodes that again were too compelling not to be trusted.
The King people hated it. Adherents of strict translation of novel to film felt betrayed, generic horror fans shrugged out of the theatre (no doubt thinking, "Will somebody please tell me what this film is about?!?"), and King himself was so displeased (he claimed that among other things, he strongly disliked Jack Nicholson's performance and felt this was very much the wrong actor because his work in an earlier film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, led people to assume the same character had stumbled into this film) that twenty years later he produced the abysmal remake entitled Stephen King's The Shining.
Despite the objections of literary purists, the Kubrick film was not only cinematically magnificent, it also pulled off associations and manipulations equally affecting casual viewer and celluloid scholars. the perfect mental association is formed when the Jack Torrance character (played with superhuman strength by Nicholson) destroys the bathroom door behind which his wife and son are hiding, puts his face up to the curtain of wood, and prefatory to the anticipated slaughter of his family, bellows with great jocularity, "Here's Johnny!" So successful was that burst of tension relief and so exact was the actor's delivery that from that moment on it became impossible to listen to Ed McMahon's introduction for his boss on "The Tonight Show" without conjuring up that same mental image. Earlier in the same motion picture, the audience is persuaded to identify with Jack Torrance, even though this character becomes a very bad man. His wife, Wendy, played by Shelly Duvall, does not deserve the bad things that her husband is trying to do to her. And yet the audience is clearly pulling for Jack. In one familiar scene, Wendy is protecting herself from Jack by wielding a baseball bat. Jack has the funny lines, the motivation, the flattering shots, and far more name and visual recognition than Ms. Duvall, who in her character comes across weak, helpless, and pathetic. It may be that Kubrick lured the audience into siding with Jack because the director believed that we could only understand the character's public and private demons if we sympathetically identified with that character. Or, just as likely, the director himself enjoyed this type of psychological manipulation and may even have felt his film's successes depended upon this.
The King people hated it. Adherents of strict translation of novel to film felt betrayed, generic horror fans shrugged out of the theatre (no doubt thinking, "Will somebody please tell me what this film is about?!?"), and King himself was so displeased (he claimed that among other things, he strongly disliked Jack Nicholson's performance and felt this was very much the wrong actor because his work in an earlier film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, led people to assume the same character had stumbled into this film) that twenty years later he produced the abysmal remake entitled Stephen King's The Shining.
Despite the objections of literary purists, the Kubrick film was not only cinematically magnificent, it also pulled off associations and manipulations equally affecting casual viewer and celluloid scholars. the perfect mental association is formed when the Jack Torrance character (played with superhuman strength by Nicholson) destroys the bathroom door behind which his wife and son are hiding, puts his face up to the curtain of wood, and prefatory to the anticipated slaughter of his family, bellows with great jocularity, "Here's Johnny!" So successful was that burst of tension relief and so exact was the actor's delivery that from that moment on it became impossible to listen to Ed McMahon's introduction for his boss on "The Tonight Show" without conjuring up that same mental image. Earlier in the same motion picture, the audience is persuaded to identify with Jack Torrance, even though this character becomes a very bad man. His wife, Wendy, played by Shelly Duvall, does not deserve the bad things that her husband is trying to do to her. And yet the audience is clearly pulling for Jack. In one familiar scene, Wendy is protecting herself from Jack by wielding a baseball bat. Jack has the funny lines, the motivation, the flattering shots, and far more name and visual recognition than Ms. Duvall, who in her character comes across weak, helpless, and pathetic. It may be that Kubrick lured the audience into siding with Jack because the director believed that we could only understand the character's public and private demons if we sympathetically identified with that character. Or, just as likely, the director himself enjoyed this type of psychological manipulation and may even have felt his film's successes depended upon this.
