But when they're alone, Jack appears to go insane, pushed into fantasy – or hallucination. Eventually, he attacks his family, attempting to kill them in a twisted mirroring of the awful events that, it transpires, occurred in the hotel's past. This is the story of both King's 1977 novel and Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation three years later, but they're vastly distinctive beasts. For the King fan, however, it's hard to think of one without the other. The Shining is two stories, both the same, but somehow very different.
I first read the book when I was 13, and loved it. It wasn't scary per se; it was tense and atmospheric. Then I watched Kubrick's film (long before the rating on the box suggested that I should). It burned images into my mind: Danny's endless steadicam cycle down the hotel corridors, ending with the twins in the hallway; the woman in room 237; the creepy partygoers in animal masks; the horrifying reveal of the message "Redrum"; the wash of blood from the elevator; Jack Nicholson with the axe at the door calling "Here's Johnny!"; and the maze, with Jack's sloping walk as he pursues his wife and child. It destroyed me: it's the only film which, to this day, I have trouble watching alone. The original book is close enough to the movie in story that – when I began to reread it – I honestly couldn't remember what was from the source material and what wasn't. They were so entwined that I was unable to separate the atmosphere of one from the other, to not let book-Jack's motivations bleed into my watching the movie, to not let the horrifying twins appear as I read about the hotel corridors.So, how much is actually different? The maze is an addition; a replacement for a topiary animal garden, which I'll come to later. The catchphrase (for that's what it has become) was movie only; room 237 is actually room 217; and the visual tricks Kubrick employed – the long tricycle-ride corridor shots, the use of colour as signifier, the doubling up of visual motifs – all came from the director's imagination. He chopped from and added to the novel as he saw fit. In the novel, the famous movie-poster axe isn't Jack's weapon of choice; instead, it's a roque mallet. But the most glaring shift, one that colours the book entirely, is tonal. In the book, King goes to great pains to stress that Jack Torrance is a good man. He was a teacher, and he developed a problem with drink just as his father had. When he accidentally breaks Danny's arm, Jack realises he has to change his ways. He's scared of the past and who he could become. He wants to make amends, and the hotel offers security and time with his family. King wants us to feel empathy for Jack. Everybody screws up, he wants us to say; everybody deserves a second chance.
In the movie, however, Jack Torrance is Jack Nicholson. He's crazy from the start, the man you saw in Easy Rider and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. He's got that manic grin and unkempt hair, and you don't trust him. He has a swagger and a temper, and there's a constant feeling that Wendy (Shelley Duvall) – so much more timid and subservient in the film than the novel, reduced to little more than a long face and a shrill voice – hasn't left him because she's just too weak. In the novel, she wants her husband back. And Danny …
Well, that brings us onto "the shining" itself. In both novel and movie, it's almost a footnote. Some people can "shine", which means they're psychic. Danny Torrance has the ability. He can see the darkness in the Overlook and tell us – in all our naivety – what it is we should be scared of. (It also gives him an invisible friend, Tony, who is little more than a scary indicator of when bad things are going to happen.) He's super-bright in the novel, well beyond his supposed five years, and he knows when things are wrong. He's our window into the horrors of the Overlook. In the film, he's a kid, scared and almost uselessly infantile. When we can see the horrors ourselves, we don't need a cipher.
The only other character in both versions who has "the shining" is Dick Hallorann, the hotel's cook. In both, he comes back to try to save Wendy and Danny after Jack has gone crazy (and after Danny's used the shining as a long-distance loudspeaker). In the novel, he's deus ex machina; in the movie, he's fodder. This is a general attitude of the movie versus the novel: in the film, everything is designed to make Jack the monster he's destined to become. In the novel, it's all there to be rejected, if he's strong enough. The fact that he isn't – bar one final moment of control, when he tells Danny to run away from him, before he beats his own face to a pulp with his mallet – shows you how powerful the hotel's evil really is. It's stronger than the evil of man alone, certainly.
It's fairly common knowledge that King isn't a fan of the film adaptation. He has described it as "a domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones", saying that, "a visceral sceptic such as Kubrick just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel." In the novel, as in so many of King's early classics, location is all. The Overlook Hotel itself is alive; huge and vacant, with secrets hidden everywhere. Haunted bathrooms, the echoing memories of debauched parties, a topiary animal garden that seems to come to life, wasps' nests that feature a never-ending stream of hostile insects. The hotel wears its malevolence on its sleeve. It has a history of bringing power towards it, and of trying to grow by consuming that power. Jack hears the voice of the Overlook as the novel progresses – his own touch of the shining – and it gnaws at him, turning him away from his family. It wants Danny, because of his special ability and whether it gets him or not is down to Jack. As Wendy explains to her son, "It wasn't your daddy trying to hurt me … the Overlook has gotten into your daddy!" Jack's misdemeanours – his failings as a father and husband – aren't even his own. The primal thing that makes him who he is, which he's so desperate to supress, is what the hotel thrives on. In the movie, he's a monster. The hotel isn't alive: Jack might be possessed, he might not. Either way, he's a bad man. What happens would have happened anyway, even if they hadn't been able to see the hotel's ghosts; the memories of those it has left for dead.
But probably the most telling scene in both – a scene that really shows how they are different – is when Jack finds himself at the hotel bar in a vast empty ballroom, with no alcohol. And then, suddenly, there's a bartender, Lloyd, and shelves full of bottles. Lloyd serves Jack a drink and listens to his woes. There's Jack and the hotel and … something else there with him. In the book, we're told the drinks are "imaginary": the hotel is making Jack see what it wants him to see. Everything changes: the hotel becomes alive to Jack and him alone, and he is suddenly out of control. The bartender even gives him advice, telling Jack he needs to "correct" his family. In the movie, however, the bar is, for that moment, real: there's no attempt at an explanation. When Jack leaves, spiralling into insanity, we have to take the bar scene for what it is – a momentary blip.
The endings are equally different. The movie closes with Jack quietly dying in the snow, Wendy and Danny fleeing his frozen corpse; and a closing shot of a photograph taken years before, of a crowd of revellers at the Overlook. In the middle stands Jack, somehow a dead man who lived again, doomed to repeat his old mistakes. It's a mystery that isn't explained – and doesn't need to be. When the book ends, however, it's with an explosion, as Jack fails to stop the rising pressure of the hotel's overworked boiler (an ongoing metaphor for his own simmering insanity). After that, Wendy and Danny end up on a beach somewhere: as in Salem's Lot, after the darkness, the survivors seek heat and light to counteract all they've seen. They understand the hotel was evil: that it sought Danny, his power, and that it would do anything it could to get him. They live to fight another day.
I hold the movie and book in equal measure. I remember moments from both, where neither medium is more valid than the other. They're both stories about hidden evil emerging when the snow sets in; when a family is isolated and broken, and when a man with buried darkness finally collapses and becomes what he was always, inevitably, going to be. Neither is the correct version: one is the original, and one is a cover; a different take on the same powerful, terrifying material. Neither stands in the way of the other's brilliance: and, if allowed to, each can help the other to … well, shine.
Connections
"The shining" is a concept used again and again in King's work: not always called by that name, but always with similar traits. The strongest connections are with The Stand, where characters do indeed "shine"; and with It, where Overlook chef Dick Hallorann once saved a character's life in a nightclub brawl. There are also connections with the Dark Tower series: the Overlook's Red Eye Lounge, some thematic concepts regarding the use and gathering of psychics, the suggestion that Danny's imaginary friend could be one of the Dark Tower's Twinners. But the biggest connection by far is with the soon-to-be-released Doctor Sleep. A sequel of sorts, it's about a middle-aged Danny Torrance, now a doctor, struggling with his own alcoholism and a group of psychic vampires.
