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The focus of the argument is on the central themes of the novel and the film, aspects of metafiction and postmodernism, and Kubrick's deployment of Freud's ...
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Nicola Camoglio Essay/Degree Project: 15 hp Program or/and course: EN Level: (^) First cycle Term/year: (^) HT Supervisor: (^) Joe Kennedy Examiner: (^) Marius Hantea Report nr:
Title : The Shining: A Separation - A Fundamental Flaw in Adaptation Studies Author : Nicola Camoglio Supervisor : Joe Kennedy Abstract: In recent years, the academic field of adaptation studies has started questioning the fidelity- led approach to adaptation that was long its guiding principle. This essay builds upon this novel approach by focusing on the conflictual relationship between Stephen King’s novel The Shining (1977) and the film version (1980) directed by Stanley Kubrick. This comparative study shows the ways in which Kubrick’s film transcends its source material to establish itself as a unique piece of art, not beholden to standards of fidelity in order to succeed. The focus of the argument is on the central themes of the novel and the film, aspects of metafiction and postmodernism, and Kubrick’s deployment of Freud’s ideas about the uncanny. Keywords : The Shining , Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King, adaptation studies, metafiction, postmodernism, The Uncanny, film theory, film adaptation
The Shining , the novel authored by Stephen King and the feature film directed by Stanley Kubrick, is one of the prime examples of the conflictual and complicated relationship between two art forms: the literary and the cinematic. As such, it has been a frequently examined work in the field of adaptation studies, which has long explored the relationship between literary source material and its adaptation. Regrettably, the field’s examination of the inter-medial relationship between the drastically different art forms that are cinema and literature has a chequered history, with its strongest offence being the subordination of cinema as a medium due to the way in which “adaptations are studied under the sign of literature, which provides an evaluative touchstone for films in general” (Leitch 3). Although the author is the main figure in the creation of a literary work, one that exists with neither budgetary restrictions nor limits to what can be represented on the page, once the text crosses over into the cinematic realm it becomes a part of a collaborative process in which, under the unified vision of a director, the story is processed through the idiom of a different medium, and the means and the scope of the given production. In my writing of this thesis, in no way do I wish to strip the authorship of the original work away from the author, nor do I intend to diminish it, but I certainly would argue that as the source material continues to exist in its original form and is in no way altered by the making of an adaptation, it is unreasonable to subject its transposition to another medium to a process of evaluation and assessment based on criteria intended for a literary medium. In the decades since The Shining was adapted, King’s literary oeuvre has become a treasure trove for film adaptations. While the author has become synonymous with the best the horror genre can offer both in written and adapted form, the 1980 film adaptation of The Shining is best known for the director behind the adaptation, Stanley Kubrick. King’s disdain for Kubrick’s adaptation has been vocal and constant throughout the years, and it is clearly aimed at the treatment reserved to this specific novel, rather than a general stance on adaptation. In the 1990s, King penned a faithful TV adaptation, specifically titled Stephen King’s The Shining , with mixed results, although he claimed it was a superior transposition. King seems to have unwittingly proven that a faithful adaptation does not necessarily translate into good cinema and that writing great literature is not the same as writing great screenplays.
This very conflict will be the focus of this thesis, in which I will make the case for a stronger separation of the mediums of cinema and literature, as an adaptation can serve as a unrelated statement that operates more as an unbound piece of art rather than as a subservient product upon which to apply mandatory demands of faithfulness to the source material. The theoretical framework for this study will therefore compare and contrast aspects of the novel and the film and the respective auteurs’ approaches to storytelling, in order to highlight the manner in which Kubrick’s meta-fictional and avant-garde handling of the source material transcends it to create a work that stands on its own, with its own independent themes and ambitions. The wildly differing characterisation of Jack Torrance, the story’s main character, and the family unit as a whole will be one of the vehicles through which to address Kubrick’s manipulation of the source material. Beyond the specifics of the story and the way characters are used in the novel and in the film, a broader discussion of metafiction and postmodernism will be included, as the central figure of Jack Torrence as a writer assumes different connotations in the context of the written word and in that of the moving image.
perspectives such as those presented by Leitch and Cartmell, critical of the traditionalist views of adaptation studies, in order to position the study in a space that examines the two different pieces of art on a level plain, rather than assessing the merits of the film uniquely in relation to the intention of the novel’s author. The study follows a funnel structure that will identify different levels through which to approach the scope of the differences, and the few but relevant similarities, between film and novel. Although this thesis does question fidelity as a qualitative touchstone in relation to The Shining , it should be noted that it is not an absolute maxim by which to go in the assessment of all adaptations, as is argued by Wright in regards to it not being “an appeal to anteriority” (174) (in terms of the practice being a solely antiquated critical practice within both adaptation studies and film theory). Consequently, said variance in the approach to fidelity is particularly relevant once the film theory concept of “auteur theory” is taken into consideration. Auteur theory, as originated in the Cahiers du Cinema and then embraced and developed by film theory, positions the director as the “author” of the film, and as such, the issue of fidelity is dependent upon the director’s ambitions and intentions towards the adaptation of a given source material. Despite the limitations of auteur theory, in the case of Kubrick it certainly applies, as each of his undertakings involved years of research and thorough involvement in each facet of the filmmaking process, creating a unified vision that is markedly his.
The topic of Kubrick’s The Shining and his process of adaptation has long been the focus of essays and literature, as the lasting image of Kubrick as an auteur is one of particular interest, once it is taken into account that out of thirteen films he directed, twelve were adaptations. In “Introduction: Kubrick and Adaptation,” I.Q. Hunter raises the idea of Kubrick as an “auteur of adaptation,”, for whom “adaptation, or rather collaborative adaptation, was crucial to realising his personal vision” (Web). Both “The Uncanny, The Gothic and The Loner: Intertextuality in the Adaptation Process of The Shining” by Catriona McAvoy and “The Unempty Wasps’ Nest: Kubrick’s The Shining, Adaptation, Chance, Interpretation” by Graham Allen seek to “explore the adaptation process in the space between book and film” (McAvoy 345) by looking at pre-production material and the way in which Kubrick adapts King’s novel while incorporating a myriad of elements stemming from other sources, such as Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny , and how that changes the nature of the source material to fit the medium of film to the best effect. Furthermore, “Shades of Horror: Fidelity and Genre in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining” by Jarrell D. Wright ponders on questions similar to those brought forth in this thesis, will be consulted and built upon with the purpose to further the critical assessment of the film, in partial agreement with its proposed notion that “a film participates in—and should therefore be conceptualized as part of—a sequence of adaptations of which the “original” text, in turn, constitutes a segment” (Wright 175). A number of secondary sources will be referenced in highly specific contexts within the discussion to provide additional background information on the history of the relationship between King and Kubrick and their works, or to strengthen the analysis of stylistic and thematic choices made by either the author or the director. Additionally, extracts from interviews made at the time of the film’s release with King, Kubrick and Diane Johnson, the author and novelist who assisted the director in the writing of the screenplay, will be immensely helpful in approaching their artistic intentions and cementing their positions in relation to each other’s work.
evil is won. This is also explored at length in the part-autobiography, part-essay Danse Macabre , where King adds: The horror story, beneath its fangs and fright wig, is really … conservative … its main purpose is to reaffirm the virtues of the norm by showing us what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands. … Modern horror stories are not much different from the morality plays of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries … We have the comforting knowledge when the lights go down in the theater or when we open the book that the evildoers will almost certainly be punished, and measure will be returned for measure. (395) His issues with the director’s handling of the story and the characters, in conjunction with the perceived clash in terms of personality and artistic ambition between himself and Kubrick, form the foundation for his long-standing antagonistic stance. King’s views of cinema in general do not seem to be particularly positive either, having said that “the movies have never been a big deal to me. If they’re good, that’s terrific. If they’re not, they’re not. But I see them as a lesser medium than fiction, than literature … They’re not high art the way I think books are high art” ( Feast of Fear 16). With the exception of The Shining , King is not particularly critical of the other adaptations of his works, which makes his position against Kubrick’s film stand out. Kubrick did not set out to make a typical horror film, and he enlisted the help of author and professor Diane Johnson to help him find an academic approach to horror that would unearth its psychological roots and the Freudian notions at its core. In addressing the very basic aspects of the process to adaptation, Kubrick noted: There are a number of scenes that work in the novel -- such as the topiary, in which the hedge animals move and pursue a victim -- that I deleted from the screenplay because I didn't think they would work in the film. There are no creaking doors, no skeletons tumbling out of closets -- none of the paraphernalia of the standard horror film. In a story of this kind, establishing believability is the most important matter, which is why I tried to establish a matter-of-fact visual style. (“Review by Hofsess” Web) Kubrick’s creative ambition, compounded by his career-wide success in redefining and revolutionising every genre he approached, was to bring to life the scariest film he could while not relying on many of the genre’s long established machinations. In retrospect, his undertaking was a risky one, but one that ultimately paid off. This attitude is further corroborated by Diane Johnson, whose involvement in the project was intended to help the director in rooting the film in an academic foundation of philosophy and psychology:
When it came to the horror film, he did not want to make a movie that depended unduly on ghosts and gimmicks for horrific effect. Though he did not rule out the supernatural, he wanted to create a film in which the horror generated from human psychology. He wanted to know what the King novel was about, in the deepest psychological sense; he wanted to talk about that and to read theoretical works that might shed light on it, particularly works of psychology and especially those of Freud. (Johnson Web) Kubrick’s distinctive directorial and tonal approach operates as antithetical to King’s, favouring a theatrical and abstract approach that allows for extreme interpretative openness. Kubrick and Johnson drew from a multitude of novels and academic sources in the writing of the screenplay of the film, but none is more important than Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny”, from which Kubrick drew the maxims that would inform his approach to the horror seen in the film (McAvoy 346). Chief amongst them is the approach to the “uncanny” - translated from the German word unheimlich , “unhomely”, which is the opposite of heimlich, the “familiar,” the “belonging to the home” (Freud 2). As such, what is most uncanny, or most unhomely, is the homely itself, a twisted representation of something to us very familiar. It is in regards to these guiding principles that I would argue that Kubrick’s The Shining is as much an adaptation of King’s novel as it is an adaptation of Freud’s The Uncanny. Another key theme present in the film, which also finds its roots in Freud’s writing and is closely tied to the uncanny, is that of the Doppelgänger. Much of the iconic imagery originating in film, such as the Grady twins, Danny and his internalised representation of Tony, and the woman in room 237, at first beautiful but then revealed as a decaying but animate corpse, are direct results of Kubrick’s inclusion of the theme. Duality becomes a core thematic aspect of the film, enhanced by the ubiquitous presence of mirrors in the Overlook Hotel and by its predominant placing during key scenes. Despite the eventual success of Kubrick’s implementation of Freud’s principles, King derided the insertion of Freudian elements in the story: No body has a Freudian view of the relationship of man to his society. Not you, not me, not Kubrick, nobody. The whole concept is abysmally silly. And as a movie-goer, I don’t give a tin whistle what a director thinks; I want to know what he sees. Most directors have good visual and dramatic instincts (most good directors, anyway), but in intellectual terms, they arc pinheads, by and large. Nothing wrong in that; who wants a film director who’s a utility infielder? Let them do their job, enjoy their work, but for Christ’s sake, let’s not see Freudianisms in the work of any film director. (“King on Carrie” Web)
seeing himself in ten years … as if the Daniel Anthony Torrance that would someday be — was a halfling caught between father and son, a ghost of both, a fusion” (King 446). This means that all of the visions and hints that Danny receives through his ability to shine are actually memories for Tony, in a use of foreshadowing that creates an added parallel between the use of memories for Jack, who keeps looking destructively at the past, and Danny, who looks hopefully at the future. Ultimately, the clash between director and author finds its roots in the radically different philosophical beliefs that inform the themes upon which both film and novel are built. Of chief importance is their approach to evil, which, according to King, “is always an act of free and conscious will – a conscious decision” (“King on Carrie” Web), while Kubrick believed that “there’s something inherently wrong with the human personality … There’s an evil side to it.” (“Kubrick’s Horror Show” Web). These thematic constructs are key to the identity of both versions, and Kubrick’s particular perspective leads me to a fundamental disagreement with McAvoy in her assessment that “Kubrick’s approach to the adaptation of The Shining as a fairy tale […] can perhaps be read as a positive and optimistic film” (357), especially in relation to her using the following quote from Kubrick himself as a reason to think the film “can give us hope” (ibid: 357): “If you can be frightened by a ghost story, then you must accept the possibility that supernatural beings exist. If they do, then there is more than just oblivion waiting beyond the grave” (“Kubrick on The Shining” Web). This quote seems to oversimplify Kubrick’s ultimate intentions, as the philosophical attitudes previously presented contradict this, while the historical context in which fairy tales operate was a facet of the fantasy story that he intended to and ultimately did twist. In the very same interview, while professing his curiousness and fascination towards ESP and the supernatural, he hinted at what would become a defining element of the film by saying that one of the aspects he had appreciated of the novel was that it: Seemed to strike an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological: "Jack must be imagining these things because he's crazy". This allowed you to suspend your doubt of the supernatural until you were so thoroughly into the story that you could accept it almost without noticing. (“Kubrick on The Shining.”: Web)
The director’s approach towards balancing the supernatural and the psychological is of paramount importance, an aspect to which I will return in successive sections of the thesis, especially in relation to Kubrick’s meta-fictional and postmodernist attitudes towards the material and the ultimate goals he had for the film. A further source of friction can be attributed to the fact that Kubrick did not have particularly kind words for King or the novel at the time the film was being made, saying about the novel that it “is by no means a serious literary work, but the plot is for the most part extremely well worked out, and for a film that is often all that really matters” (“Kubrick on The Shining.” Web), he added that “King’s great ability is in plot construction. He doesn’t seem to take great care in writing … He seems mostly concerned with invention, which I think he’s very clear about” (“Interview by Foix” 675). This stance aligns with the answer to a question fundamental to Kubrick when approaching an adaptation: Is the novel translatable into a film? Because most novels, really, if they are good, aren’t; it’s something inherent about a good novel, either the scale of the story or the fact that the best novels tend to concern themselves with the inner life of the characters rather than with the external action. So there’s always the risk of oversimplifying them when you try to crystallize the elements of the themes or the characters. (“Interview by Foix” 673) This stance, shaped by his decades of experience, seems to contradict earlier comments made at the time of Lolita ’s release, about the perfect novel to adapt being: Not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters [as] it will give the adaptor an absolute compass bearing, as it were, on what a character is thinking or feeling at any given moment of the story … and from this he can invent action which will be an objective correlative of the book's psychological content, will accurately dramatise this in an implicit, off-the-nose way without resorting to having the actors deliver literal statements of meaning (“Words and Music” Web) Both perspectives ring true to Kubrick’s process at different stages of his career, informing the analysis which follows in the coming sections.
In terms of style, King’s prose and style keeps close to the canons of the Gothic novel, with its explicit references to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death and the undeniable
instead builds on the momentum by showing us the impending doom, as Jack approaching Wendy at such a pivotal point in the film can only lead to a further descent into darkness. Similar reversals can be seen in the handling of many of the moments of great suspense and their frightening payoff, which Kubrick consciously undercuts in order to make the audience feel uneasy and regularly unsafe throughout the entire duration of the film. Aiding the editing are Kubrick’s characteristically unorthodox musical choices, which have become staples of the horror soundscape, such as various avant-garde pieces by György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki, and a contemporary electronic score by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, which includes the iconic rendition of the Hector Berlioz’s “Dies Irae” which has become so closely tied to the film that most people do not know it originates as a piece of classical music. The duality of the music present in the film heightens many of the previously mentioned aspects which relate to the uncanny, as Kubrick juxtaposes drastically different composition styles to establish a firm post-modernist perspective that challenges the conventions of horror music and sound design.
In this section, I will delve deeper into the execution to unearth how the deployment of thematic devices and a postmodern perspective sets the two apart.
Although the fidelity-led approach to adaptation would point to the smaller changes that concern character traits and character arcs and their translation to a different medium as the defining differences between the two versions of the story, the different attitudes towards the development of the themes make the strongest case for a more drastic separation of the two entities. For the purposes of the analysis, the elaboration of the themes can be approached both through a meta-fictional perspective, which mirrors the philosophical and creative predispositions of the two artists, and the exploration of the dichotomy of King’s conservatism and Kubrick’s postmodernism. With these defining qualities in mind, two important distinctions are of importance in regards to King being a naturalist and Kubrick oppressive and controlled. The paradox at the very core of King’s writing is the very naturalism for which he is known, as the author explores concepts and stories that are inherently supernatural through highly realist techniques. Kubrick, on the other hand, often deals in scenarios that are anchored in the real world and in their resulting realistic consequences, but does so with a technical approach to storytelling that strips away any naturalistic element and subscribes to expressionist and postmodernist stylisation instead, rendering the coldness and controlled elaboration of any scenario an eerie experience. Their drastically diverging philosophical perspectives form the foundation upon which the two different versions of The Shining were constructed. Although King’s vitriol for the film adaptation is rooted in a multitude of disagreements with Kubrick, the most important is in the handling of Jack Torrance and his thematic relevance. The character is in many ways a proxy for King’s own personal experiences and fears related to alcoholism and fatherhood. The mirroring of the author in the main character lends the novel a profoundly impactful meta-fictional key of reading, which King has spoken about on several occasions:
Torrance, and The Shining as a whole, exist in a highly personal metafictional space for King, the writing of which was a cathartic and expurgatory process for the author. Which makes Kubrick and Johnson’s writing of an adaptation that refuted much of what made the novel such a personal affair for King an unsurprising source of contempt. Regardless, the meta-fictional aspects of Jack Torrance do not stop at King’s auto-biographical reflections, as the choice of focusing the story on a writer has profoundly different effects on a narrative depending on whether it unfolds on the page or on the screen. In a novel, there are varying approaches to this. King allows us to inhabit Jack Torrance’s mind and witness his inner turmoil and eventual descent to darkness, while never allowing us to read what he has been working on, as doing so would add a meta-textual dimension of text-within-the-novel that clashes with the author’s style. In Kubrick’s adaptation, on the other hand, the conservative qualities of King’s writing are mutated and transferred to thoroughly postmodern territory that alters the meta-fictional aspects as presented in their original form.
For Kubrick, postmodernism represented an ideal context in which to bring the private and personal level of King’s metafiction in order to elevate it to an examination of historical and philosophical issues. The fascination with cinema and cinematic techniques is strongly present in postmodernist literature, where films and television appear as an ontological level as “a world-within-the-world, often one in competition with the primary diegetic world of the text, or a plane interposed between the level of verbal representation and the level of the “real” (McHale 128). This is filtered through the lens of cinema itself, where in turn it is the literary dimension that becomes a separate ontological level, albeit in a limited fashion. Kubrick does this through the use of details both small and large: the chapter cards that mark ever-shorter intervals of time throughout the running time of the film, the opening credits scrolling in a way to mimic the first pages of a novel, and most importantly, through the use of Jack’s writing. We are shown Jack writing frequently, as his manuscript becomes an object of importance, the content of which is hidden from the audience until its reveal finally unmasks the madness that has been building up throughout the film.
Kubrick’s use of metafiction and self-reflexivity, coupled with his Freudian views on the uncanny and his refusal to abide to the traditional rules of horror, creates a piece of art that is fully concerned with the medium itself and utilises unorthodox cinematic and literary methods to explore its central theme. McHale describes the distinction between literal reality and cinema as a metaphorical vehicle in postmodern literature which “becomes increasingly indeterminate, until we are left wondering whether the movie reality is only a trope after all, or belongs to the ‘real’ world of this fiction” (128). It is in this approach that we find the crux of Kubrick’s thematic and stylistic handling of the material, which is the balance between the inherent human evil and the supernatural, or the lack thereof. In the context of postmodernism, the fantastical is a relevant notion to appraise Kubrick’s perspective. The most influential epistemological version of the fantastical is the one defined by Tzvetan Todorov: Less a genre than a transient state of texts which actually belong to one of two adjacent genres: either the genre of the uncanny, in which apparently supernatural events are ultimately explained in terms of the laws of nature (for instance, as deceptions or hallucinations); or that of the marvellous, in which supernatural events are ultimately accepted as such—where, in other words, the supernatural becomes the norm. (qtd. in McHale 74) H.P. Lovecraft is one of the defining authors in the realm of the fantastical and, to a degree, of the marvellous. His influence and the adoption of concepts closely connected to his cosmic horror appear in entirely different facets of the novel and the film of The Shining. King’s story takes a rather literal approach to the iconography of H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, as the Overlook Hotel is presented as a powerful supernatural evil that seeps into the lives of the Torrance family, while also explaining at length the mechanics and origins behind its nefarious force. Kubrick strips the Overlook of almost all of the outright supernatural power it had in the novel, while also obfuscating nearly all of the explanations behind the apparitions and phenomena that occur throughout the story. This can be traced back to Kubrick’s explicit acknowledgement of Lovecraft’s influence, saying that he had read one of the author’s essays: You should never attempt to explain what happens, as long as what happens stimulates people’s imagination, their sense of the uncanny, their sense of anxiety and fear. And as long as it doesn’t, within itself, have any obvious inner contradictions, it is just a matter of, as it were, building on the imagination, working in this area of feeling. (“Interview by Foix” 677)
