[For my annual
Valentine’s follow-up, I wanted to keep the FilmStudying going and
highlight some non-favorite filmmakers and films. Share your own non-favorites,
film or otherwise, for what is always the most fun crowd-sourced
post of the year!]
On why I greatly
prefer the ending to King’s novel than Kubrick’s film.
I don’t like losing readers, even for the best of reasons; but if you
either haven’t read Steven King’s The Shining (1977) or haven’t seen Stanley Kubrick’s film version (1980) of the
novel, and are interested in checking them out sometime, you should probably
skip this post, as I’m gonna SPOIL the heck out of the endings to both. Because
while there are definitely stylistic and even thematic differences between the
two versions throughout (and while I prefer the novel throughout for reasons
related to those I’ll focus on in this post), it’s really the endings where
they become not only distinct but starkly contrasting and opposed. I won’t
spoil every single detail, but suffice it to say that King’s novel ends
hopefully, with notes of redemption for its protagonist Jack Torrance and
especially for his relationship to his son and family; whereas Kubrick’s film
ends with Torrance murderously pursuing that same son with an axe and,
thwarted, freezing to death, more evil in his final moments than he has been at
any earlier moment in the film (during which he has already gotten plenty evil).
There are various ways we could read this striking distinction, including
connecting it to the profoundly different worldviews of the two artists (at
least as represented in their collected works): King, despite his penchant for
horror, is to my mind a big ol’ softie who almost always finds his way to a happy ending; Kubrick has a far more bleak and cynical perspective and tended to end
his films on at best ambiguous and often explicitly disturbing notes. Those different worldviews could also be connected to two longstanding
American traditions and genres, what we might call the sentimental vs. the
pessimistic romance (in that Hawthornean sense I’ve discussed elsewhere in this space): in the former, such as in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the darkest supernatural qualities give way by
the story’s end to more rational and far happier worlds and events; in the
latter, such as in his contemporary Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (also 1851), the darkness is only amplified and deepened
by concluding events, leaving us adrift (literally and figuratively) in an
eternally scary world.
King’s and Kubrick’s texts, and more exactly their respective conclusions,
certainly fit into those traditions. But given that both create similarly
horrifying worlds and events right up until those endings, I would also connect
their distinct final images to the dueling yet interconnected ideas at the
heart of my last book project: dark histories and hope. Where the two versions differ most overtly, that
is, is in whether they offer their audiences any hope: in King’s novel,
Torrance finds a way through his darkest histories and to final moments of hope
for his family’s future (achieved at great personal sacrifice); in Kubrick’s
film, hope has abandoned Torrance as fully as has sanity, and both his family
and the audience can only hope that they can survive and escape his entirely
dark world. Obviously you know which I personally prefer; but I would also
argue that, whatever the appeal of horror for its own sake, without the
possibility of hope and redemption it’d be a pretty bleak and terrible genre.
Last
non-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Responses to this post or other non-favorites you’d share?
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