The Life of Doctor Shining

Two things can be true: (1) Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, The Shining, is an undeniable horror masterwork, and, until recently, (2) it had never really worked for me. 

I grew up a Stephen King kid. I picked up a copy of his book, It, from my parents bookshelf in 5th grade, and read almost nobody else until high school. By the time I first watched The Shining, I had read the book about a half dozen times, and was well aware of King’s own criticisms of the film. I may have been too primed by that knowledge to see the film in any other way, but I’ve always come away with the same impression when I watch it: it is truly dazzling to behold, with iconic performances from Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall, as Jack and Wendy Torrance, yet I find the film to be hampered by how empty Kubrick’s takes on the characters are, particularly, how little agency Kubrick gives to any of the Torrance family in the story. 

King faults Nicholson’s Jack for being crazy from the start, which I believe overstates it a little, but I do think he does start out so wanting as both a husband and father in the film, that there is no real surprise when he becomes violent towards his own family. Short of a joke about cannibalism on the drive to the hotel, you never see a shared moment between Jack and his family to indicate that he still has any real emotional bond with them. Jack Torrance’s character in the book loves his family, despite his numerous screwups; he’s an alcoholic sincerely trying to stay on the straight and narrow for their sake. The Jack Torrance of Kubrick’s film doesn’t seem like he especially needed a haunted hotel to convince him to fall off the wagon and kill his family.

Narratively, Jack being like he is in the film does establish a sense of dread and inevitability to the story early on, so that when you hear a naive Wendy describe how a drunken Jack broke young Danny’s arm not all that long ago, you know that the whole idea of anyone spending five isolated months alone with him would be a terrible mistake. But, for King, that also makes it a fundamentally different story than the one he was trying to tell. 

For King, he was telling a story about his own recovery from alcoholism and working through his own fears about what his drinking might have done to him if he hadn’t gotten it under control. In the book, Jack is a clear stand-in character for King, and the sympathy we have for him because of that means we mourn what he’s lost when he accepts his first ‘drink’ from the hotel. And also, because the core of the novel is so overtly about addiction and recovery, there always remains some tension about whether there is still something resilient in Jack that can lead him back to the path.

Kubrick is telling a different kind of story and evidence indicates that he was right to do so. In 1997, Stephen King got the chance to script his own adaptation of his book for a three episode miniseries that would be directed by Mick Garris. This time, with Garris, King would get to tell his story exactly as he’d always intended, and it was…fine. It was a perfectly acceptable diversion, that faded into obscurity almost as soon as it had finished airing, and all the while, the legacy of Kubrick’s film adaptation grew, further cemented with each passing year. It may not be what I wanted, but Kubrick had an undeniably better handle on how to turn this material into a film. 

At least that was my take until I finally saw Mike Flanagan’s underseen 2019 film, Doctor Sleep - the adaptation of King’s 2013 sequel to The Shining. Written more than 35 years after the original book, Doctor Sleep, recounts what happened to Danny Torrance and his mother after they escaped the explosion of The Overlook Hotel. That detail alone makes it an unlikely candidate for an adaptation, as the filmgoing public, more familiar with Kubrick’s take, might struggle to accept that fate for the hotel. It’s also a fundamentally different kind of story, which I hesitate to talk about too much because of how underseen it is; That said, the theme the sequel borrows most explicitly from the original is that it’s a book about alcoholism, but one that leans much more heavily on the idea of the possibility of recovery. Young Danny struggled mightily with the trauma of what happened to him and his mother and he spent a long time lost. However, he finds his way back to the path, and is presented with the chance to help a young kid in danger, much like he once was. 

Mike Flanagan, has become something of the principle adapter of King’s work these days with 2019’s Doctor Sleep, 2017’s Gerald’s Game, the eagerly anticipated, The Life of Chuck, coming next summer, as well as his announced multi-part adaptation of King’s Dark Tower series. Flanagan may have been the only person that could have gotten a credible version of this film made, because he may have been the only person who both had the standing with King to sell him on the idea that any successful adaptation would have to find a way to get along with Kubrick’s film, and who also had the writing chops and handle on King’s voice to craft a compromise that King could live with. 

Flanagan didn’t just convince King, but his narrative compromise also saved the Kubrick film for me with the addition of one key scene. King’s novel already provides an example of what recovery can look like with Danny’s journey, but Flanagan is able to bring that arc back home to Jack by creating a scene where an adult Danny goes back to the still standing, if abandoned, Overlook Hotel, and has a conversation in the Gold Room bar with the version of his dad that has became a part of the hotel. There isn’t a lot of Jack left, and he mostly tries to deny it whenever Danny refers to him as his father, but for a moment, the old Jack peeks through.

Danny tries to confide in the bartender about what it was like when his mom, Jack’s wife, finally did die, but the bartender just nudges a drink towards Danny. “Something warm, to push away such unpleasantries.” But, in trying to encourage Danny to take the offered drink, what also slips through is more interiority into Jack’s character than is contained in the whole of Kubrick’s film. He says: 

Medicine. Medicine is what it is. Bonafide cure-all. The mind is a blackboard. And this is the eraser. A man tries. He provides. But he’s surrounded by mouths. And a family. A wife. A kid. Those mouths eat time. They eat your days on Earth. They just gobble them up. It’s enough to make a man sick. And this is the medicine.

We only have subtext to read into what affection Danny ever had for his father to make him care about even having this conversation in the first place, but this blunt articulation of Jack Torrance’s addiction and resentments retroactively enlivens his character all the way back to the original film in a way that finally makes him make sense to me. And, while we don’t get the notion of recovery that King originally had in mind as part of Jack’s story, the way this scene bridges Jack’s addiction with Danny’s recovery creates the arc I always wanted, just spread out over two films. Just as Jack has always been at the Overlook, Kubrick’s The Shining has always been an undeniable classic, but now, thanks to Mike Flanagan, it’s also become something of the story I always wanted it to be.

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Damian Masterson

Staff Writer

Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and three children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.