The Director's New Clothes

Rating: 7/10 (15 December 2013)

Stanley Kubrick is probably my favorite film maker. Dr. Strangelove and 2001 are on my top 10 list. Clockwork Orange blew my mind when it first came out. I think Barry Lyndon is a visual masterpiece. But The Shining has always struck me as "the director's new clothes" a film that forces me to question whether Kubrick was really a charlatan.
I remember being at a bookstore back in the late 70's and seeing a paperback book called The Shining with the tag line "soon to be a Stanley Kubrick motion picture." I immediately grabbed it and devoured it in a day or two. I had never heard of the author and I had never experienced such intense horror while reading it. I absolutely could not wait for the film to come out.
I imagine that Kubrick must have had a similar reaction to the book which is why he bought the rights. The advertising for the film promised a horror roller-coaster: the blood pouring from the elevator, the creepy girls, Jack Nicolson with the ax, the boy and mother running through the maze in the snow. But when I sat there at the first showing the movie just never took off.
Was it me? Had I been expecting the book? Shouldn't I have known better than to expect a faithful adaptation from an iconoclast like Kubrick? But the screenplay seemed amateurish and way over thought. The whole production struck me as an attempt to create big effects with music and sound to cover up a complete lack of substance.
What went wrong? I think that Kubrick picked the wrong book in his attempt to recreate movie horror in the same way that he redefined science fiction with 2001. I'm guessing that he was bowled over by the book and committed to it before really thinking through whether it was the right material for his style. Once he started working on it and trying to break it down to its essentials (throwing out half of the book in the process), he found that the "bones" of the piece just didn't work.
So, in essence, Kubrick became the character Jack at the typewriter, struggling to create something but going mad in the process. To me, Kubrick's Shining is the cinematic equivalent of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."