Good, sound horrific fantasy

Rating: 10/10 (24 May 2000)

I watched a documentary about Stephen King recently. One of the critics interviewed (a critic favourable to King - there was no other kind present) gave us an old line: King uses brand names, makes references to popular television, and has his characters eat at McDonalds, in order to bring horror out of the musty old castle and into the streets of the very suburbs in which his readers live.
The interviewer didn't actually say, in so many words, that this was a good thing. He didn't have to. It's almost impossible to say something like this without it sounding like praise. But I consider it damning criticism. I LIKED the musty old castle. Why I should I rejoice when it gets demolished to make way for some fast food outlet? McDonalds has managed to invade our cities, our countryside, our airwaves and our sporting events; I don't see why it should be allowed to invade our fiction as well.
Sure, our imaginative has been enriched by artists who have managed to find beauty where none had been previously thought to reside. But it's not possible to find beauty just ANYWHERE. McDonalds (for instance) is so squalidly banal, so dully horrible, that it would defeat ANYONE'S attempt to find something attractive or even picturesque about it. Some things can't be romanticised. Not, I suspect, that King would romanticise McDonalds even if he could: he seems to have been infected with the modern idea that one must never romanticise one's subject, that romanticism is a kind of a sin, or at best a 19th-century toy which we have now outgrown. King, remember, is a writer of fantasy. How can he write good fantasy WITHOUT romanticising one's subject? He can't. No one can.
At this point I should mention I haven't read `The Shining', but I have seen the 1997 miniseries which King wrote and produced, and the pattern holds: the hotel is, you know, just this place. But KUBRICK is a romantic. (Look at anything he's made in colour and try, if you can, to dispute this.) HIS hotel doesn't have Big Mac wrappers in the driveway and used chewing gum under the seats to invest it with a boring plausibility; instead it's the kind of grand place, the very archetype of a haunted hotel, which anyone with a soul will WANT to visit. Fictionally speaking.
Each of the four principle actors is perfect, even the kid (I'll concede that Nicholson looks a bit too familiar, but that's a problem generated by other films, not this one) - they certainly beat the insipid, T-shirt-wearing nonentities in the miniseries. Many of the complaints you'll hear about the acting are foolish ones. Nicholson does not overact. Maybe real madness should be understated; but this is fantastic, supernatural madness - what did you EXPECT it to be like? And Shelly Duvall is there to gain our sympathy, not impersonate Sigourney Weaver.