Kubrick's Nihilism Desecrates King's Humanism

Rating: 3/10 (11 November 2018)

I hate nihilist cinema. I find it a lazy way for filmmakers to remain apolitical when storytelling is by definition a political artform. A personal artform. If you have nothing to spew but indiscriminate misanthropy, your work will begin to grow tedious for me. So was the case for my relationship with the filmography of Stanley Kubrick. I can only be told so many times how evil and misguided and unsubstantial humanity is over and over and over again before I grow tired of it. I'm perfectly resigned to Kubrick following this childish philosophy on his own works, that's his right as much as it is mine to avoid them. However, when he takes the deeply humanist and personal work of Stephen King, my favorite author, and spins it into a hateful, ugly excuse for him to preach his toxic, unproductive and adolescent worldview, that's where I draw the line.
I despise Stanley Kubruck's The Shining with every fiber of my being and I say that while acknowledging its technical achievements in the fields of cinematography and visual storytelling. On a purely aesthetic level, The Shining is an admittedly unsettling and uncomfortable work. I would never in my right mind accuse Kubrick of not knowing his way around visuals. Images like the blood drenched elevator, Jack's smiling visage peering through a door hole and the Grady twins holding hands in the Overlook Hotel are undeniably memorable, striking and disturbing. That being said, they hardly improve the writing. Kubrick's films feel more like museum narrations than movies, hollow collections of imagery with nothing in the way of true narrative significance. The stories serve the imagery and not the other way around. It's all so empty and insincere, why should I even care?
Jack Nicholson is an incredible actor let down by miserable writing. Sure, he makes for a presence both amusing and frightening, and for the one-note caricature of an abuser he's asked to play, he does everything required of him and more. Unfortunately, his performance lacks any character, as Kubrick forgot to give him one. Kubrick is so caught up in his disgust and distaste for humanity and all it represents that he takes no care to examine where its detestable aspects even stem from. Jack Torrance is nowhere close to his literary counterpart; a good man driven towards the path of darkness by both interior and exterior factors. Instead, he is nothing more than a monster confident and proud of his own monsterhood, a cartoonish and one note villain for the sake of villainy. Violence and abuse are turned into subjects of cheap and lazy mystery by a man who neither has the answers to them nor particularly cares to find them. His film's narrative depth, for all the film's deep pretensions and misconceptions of a higher artistic purpose, extends no further than that of a slasher film. Torrance's inhumanities later in the film are as unearned as Kubrick's rights to ravage and strip away any semblance of substance and humanity King's work may have possessed.
Poor Shelly Duvall. The highly talented, charming, funny and lovable actress of Nashville, Thieves Like Us and 3 Women is reduced to an overacted, screaming mess here. It's one of the most obvious and blatant cases of awful overdirecting I've ever seen. If a director can't get a natural, convincing performance from an obviously actress without psychologically and emotionally torturing to them, they aren't a great director to me. With all of the interesting ways Kubrick could have utilized Duvall's talents to match the personal and heartfelt work of King's outstanding story, he apparently found Duvall bugging her eyes out and screaming like a goat to be the most fascinating and appropriate from a narrative standpoint.
The various attempts at symbolism regarding the suffrage of Native American tribes (The Hotel being built on the basis of an ancient Native American burial ground, the designs of the carpets, e.t.c) are lip service at best, half hearted attempts from an apolitical, art-minded cynic to imbue his work with just enough racial politics to appear credible, but not enough to actually be thought provoking or challenging to Kubrick or the audience in any way. It feels condescending and insulting, if anything.
From Sergei Eisenstein to Orson Welles to James Whale, the great filmmakers of all time Have always been political. But Stanley Kubrick is not one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, as much as he wishes to be. The Shining on its own is just another Kubrick film; a style-over-substance museum piece made by a man who believes in nothing, who we're apparently supposed to believe in. For Kubrick to be cited as the greatest filmmaker of all time is something I'll never quite agree with. However, as an adaptation of Stephen King's work, it's absolutely unforgivable. It's telling that out of all of the adaptations that King could have chosen to slate, he's been particularly harsh on this one. He has every right. The Shining is less a "fall to darkness" story as it is an exercise in just how passionate a filmmaker can appear with nothing interesting to say at all narratively.