I have held off on a number of movies so I can read the book first, and not out of some puritanical belief in the superiority of the book. Okay, not JUST because of a belief in the superiority in the book. Reading asks more of its audience than movies do, a story comes alive in the minds of readers. In reading we translate descriptions into images, sounds, emotions; movies do all that work for us. Keeping the movie out of your reading experience is much harder than the reverse.

I read that Ken Kesey was upset by the exclusion of Chief Bromden's voice from the movie of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and I spent a good deal of time considering the conflict through my reading. Voiceover tends to be a crutch in movies but the story is changed substantially when moved from the perspective of the Chief. Bromden himself nearly disappears in the movie. On the other hand, Stanley Kubrick tended to succeed as a filmmaker in spite of source material, not because of it. He saw that a great movie is a different creature than a great book, and though a surface description would be identical for both, I tried to separate them while I was reading.

Of course, the associations were still there, I wanted to picture Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick MacMurphy, but the more I read, the further these characters got from the movie—I felt like the book's MacMurray was more of a fighter and more self-important, I saw someone like Mickey Rourke. They were crueler, the patients had greater agency than their movie counterparts, MacMurray was more dangerous-seeming and the stakes felt more real, particularly in terms of the struggles with mental illness. Chief Bromden's voice makes the story more immediate, it takes us out of the bounds of the ward and introduces a subplot of his own dealing with his young life and the move of the American government into tribal grounds. 

The book struggles with a question that still hangs over our mental health system today: are we working towards optimal health (whatever that means) or simply minimizing conflict? One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest also achieves something rare in stories about mental health, the people come before the diagnosis. It isn't a story about depression or schizophrenia, it is a story about people and those are some of the challenges they face.

Best of all, it is a counterculture story that goes beyond the window dressing. No hippies, drugs (okay, some drugs, mostly prescription and mostly construed as negative), no concerts, no road trips, no discourses on poetry, no dabbling in Buddhism. It is a story about the ideas of the counterculture and how they come to affect people.

Day 19: Favorite book turned into movie (or, favorite movie adaptation of a book) 

Gotta give this one to THE SHINING. Yeah, they're almost completely different beasts, but they are utterly extraordinary. Phooey on King for dissing Kubrick to this day.

When I was in college, Bill Blakemore published his article about The Shining, and I enjoyed it so much that I made a photocopy of it that I still have to this day.  It wasn't that I believed what he was saying -- that the movie was about the genocide of the American Indians.  What impressed me was his seriousness and the care he had taken to prove his case, a case that rested, absurdly enough, on a few cans of Calumet baking powder.

I might as well admit it:  I love a good conspiracy theory.

Until Room 237, however, I had no idea that Blakemore's article had spawned a small industry.  The movie presents five interpretations of the film, including Blakemore's (which, I was pleased to note, had pride of place, being the one that opens the film).  None are as cogent as Blakemore's (he simply has more to work with since the film, which is set in a Colorado hotel, is full of Native American imagery), but all are fascinating.  In the novel, Stephen King makes much of an incident involving his hapless protagonist, Jack Torrance, when he was coaching the debate team at the high school where he worked.  And the lure of all these theories is that that they are like positions in a debate, albeit positions on the losing side.  The suspense (and, indeed, the humor) hinges on our own interpretation -- of how well the debater makes his or her case.

I won't mince words.  In fact, I'll use Vincent Bugliosi's words in referring to the majority of theories cherished by JFK assassination critics:  they're "as kooky as a three-dollar bill."

It isn't long into the movie before Juli Kearns opines that a Monarch skiing poster on one hotel wall depicts not a skier but a minotaur.  We have the "suggestion," she says, of a ski pole, but it isn't really there.  Personally, I'd "suggest" that she consult an ophthalmologist.

And then there's Jay Weidner's theory that The Shining is Kubrick's confession to having faked the footage of the moon landings.  I like this one, because it widens the conspiracy to include the government.  Weidner wisely sidesteps the actual landings:  he doesn't say that we didn't land on the moon, just that the footage of said landings was faked.  What he doesn't say, and what I learned only after seeing the film, is that he believes the fakery was necessary in order to "hide the advanced U.S. saucer technology from the Soviet Union."

But again, these are (one hopes) serious people with earnest opinions.  Director Rodney Ascher lets them tell their stories in their own words, filling the screen with images from The Shining or complimentary scenes from other sources.  He doesn't judge and he certainly doesn't ridicule.  He leaves that to us.

And theory aside, some of the information presented is both fun and interesting.  I admit that I never noticed, for instance, that after the mysterious ball rolls to little Danny, playing with his toy cars in a hotel corridor, Danny stands up -- facing the opposite direction.  We can tell because the pattern on the carpet is reversed from one shot to the next.  Other examples of odd continuity similarly passed me by.  As did the fact that the hotel itself appears to be, architecturally speaking, an impossibility.

I can buy this, the idea that Kubrick intentionally included these elements rather than that they are merely errors of continuity.  But if he did, I don't think he did it for any other reason than simply to disquiet the audience on a subliminal level.  Ascher points out -- he shows us quite clearly -- that in the opening helicopter shots of the VW winding up the mountain road that the shadow of the helicopter is visible.  No one seems to have a theory about why Kubrick allowed this in the film.  Which tells me that there's general agreement that it's a "mistake."  So, yeah, maybe Kubrick added in some of these things on purpose, and then again maybe he didn't.  Obviously, he wasn't perfect.

I grew up hearing that "you can prove anything from statistics."  Well, let me tell you:  statistics ain't got nothin on art.  Back in high school a friend and I contemplated writing an essay about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and how it was really all about Nazi Germany.  I have no doubt that we could have "proved" it, too, but we chickened out at the last minute.  (Our teacher, when we told her about it, was disappointed that we hadn't followed through.)  Subjectivity is the mother of interpretation.  That's why we can have Marxist analyses and feminist analyses and Freudian analyses of the same work.

And just as these various theories are all valid (at least, shall we say, in theory), so, too, on one level, are the viewpoints expressed in Room 237.  I thought an art dealer in one episode of Columbo captured the essence of art very well.  I'm paraphrasing, but she said, "You look at a piece of art and it either does something for your or it doesn't."  For the interviewees in this film, The Shining clearly did something.  And while I may think what it did was encourage a certain brand of lunacy, I still respect the effort that is so glaringly on display.

I've read many of Stephen King's books (more than 15, less than 20) and the one I enjoyed most on the first reading was Danse Macabre. But if we restrict the field to King's novels, it would have to be The Shining.  Having recently finished it again, more than two decades since my last read, I see no reason to change that opinion.

I think the reason for this is an accumulation of subtle differences. Like his other books, The Shining is King all over, which isn't always a good thing. It's wordy, it's got a kid much too advanced for his age, and it ends with that Mythbuster mentality that isn't satisfied until everything gets blown to hell. But this book, more than the others, is the one that was built for King's style.

Maybe it's the Overlook Hotel itself. For anyone who doesn't already know, the story is about Jack Torrance, an alcoholic man who, naturally, carts his family along when he takes a job as the winter caretaker of a posh hotel in the Colorado mountains that just happens to be haunted. He doesn't know this going in, of course, nor does Wendy, his wife. But his son, Danny, does; his "shining" -- psychic talent -- clues him in real fast that the Overlook is one Bad Place. But what's a five -year-old kid gonna do? Refuse to go?

In the Overlook, King has a boogeyman just big enough for all those words and yet small enough to keep things focused. In other words, it isn't like Pet Semetary, which is the same length as The Shining, but all about that little place in the woods where Sparky was buried. And it's not like 11/22/63, either, which might have merited its 800-plus pages if were really about what happened on that date, but instead is split into three different stories rudely rammed together.

King's a character guy. He said somewhere that his ideas tend to start with, Wouldn't it be funny if -- which makes him sound like a plot guy. But it's obvious that plot doesn't interest him nearly so much as his characters. His books don't run as long as they do because his plots are intricate or complex; they balloon because he can't stop riffing on the characters. Every once in awhile, he finds a happy confluence of both, and when that happens, he can give us all a heck of a ride.

Most of King's characters, if they went looking for a house to contain their egos and their histories, would end up buying the Overlook Hotel. But only Jack Torrance gets to do that. He gets to do it because he's a haunted man who needs a haunted house to feel at home. Jack isn't a deep man, but he skates a wide surface. There's the time he broke his son's arm, the time when he and a friend nearly killed a kid, the time when his father attacked his mother, and so on. It's not without reason he thinks the Overlook is hot for him.

But the Overlook has more than a quick roll in mind. For that, it needs Danny. (Why King made the kid five when he could just as easily have tacked on a few years is a mystery. Would you take a nap with your five-year-old sitting on a street curb? Wendy does. And the hell of it is, you can't really blame her, because Danny ain't no ordinary kid, quite apart from his psychic talent. There's a funny line very late in the book, something about Danny having his first adult thought. I'm pretty sure he was having them all along. In any case, his age, because it has little relevance beyond "young son," is easily ignored.)

For Jack, not being the favorite threatens to turn him into a living pun: a man overlooked. And that he can't abide.

So The Shining is all about what happens when an insecure man with violent tendencies gets backed into a corner, when inner demons meet real demons. If they were serial killers, Jack would be Ottis Toole to the Overlook's Henry Lee Lucas. (Toole, in fact, lived for awhile in Boulder.) It's a match made in Hell, a Molotov cocktail.

That's probably why King's explosive ending works much better here than in other novels. Usually it's not much more than an afterthought. Here, it's an inevitability.



Some thoughts on the movies: Kubrick's version and King's miniseries

* It's easy enough to see why someone who prefers faithful adaptations wouldn't like Kubrick's version of The Shining. Kubrick turns the story on its head, and doesn't waste any time doing it, either. I don't usually remember first lines, but I've remembered the opening line of The Shining ever since I first read it over 30 years ago: "Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick." That line sets the tone for the whole book. It's Jack, uncomfortably subservient yet violent, against an inferior world that neither understands nor accepts him. But he's got good reason to dislike Mr. Ullman, the hotel manager to whom he's referring. Ullman doesn't like him, either, and wouldn't be going through the motions of a pro forma interview if it weren't for the fact that one of his bosses happens to be a friend of Jack's and has informed him that he wants Jack to have the job. In Kubrick's version, which, after the credits, also starts with Jack's interview, Mr. Ullman is delighted with Jack and couldn't be happier to be turning over the hotel to him for the winter. In a way, this scene also sets the tone for the movie, because what Kubrick has done is take a story about people and turn it into a story about the bad things people do. He's swapped character for plot, and in doing so he has rendered the initial animosity irrelevant.

* From Stephen King: "What's basically wrong with Kubrick's version of The Shining is that it's a film by a man who thinks too much and feels too little; and that's why, for all its virtuoso effects, it never gets you by the throat and hangs on the way real horror should." To which I would respond that those "virtuoso effects," among other things, are what make the film powerful and memorable, two qualities distinctly lacking in the miniseries. The "all work and no play" scene -- all by itself -- is both scarier and more memorable than the miniseries.

* On the surface, the miniseries is much more faithful to King's novel; after all, King wrote the teleplay. Many of those scenes not even dreamed of in Kubrick's version are present here: the wasps, the fire hose, the scrapbook, the topiary, and so on. But underneath, it still ain't the book. And that's because King spends too much time recreating the events of the novel instead of reinventing its psychology. One example. In the book, the first wasp scene is part of a chapter called "Up on the Roof." The wasps themselves occupy only about a sixth of the chapter; most of the rest concerns the duplicitous, violent events that led to Jack losing his teaching position in Vermont. Of the two, it's obvious which one King thinks is most important. In the miniseries, however, what we get is Jack getting stung, Jack almost killing himself by falling off the roof, Jack getting mad, and Jack getting a bug bomb. The scene is there, but the really important information is lost. King, like Kubrick, swaps character for plot, and ends up with an adaptation that only appears more faithful. (To further demonstrate how unimportant the wasps are, this chapter is the first of Part 3, which is called "The Wasps' Nest." Part 3 is when we see the evil in the Overlook. The hotel itself is the real wasps' nest.)

* The endings. Kubrick's visual puzzle of the photograph might have limited appeal, but it's hard to imagine that King's soppy endings would interest anyone. That's not a typo, by the way, for King gives us two endings, both soppy and the second one more maudlin than the first. After that, he gives us a third ending that might have been scary if it hadn't already been done a thousand times. The novel features one of his best, most logical conclusions, but giving him -- a man with well known problems in this area -- a second chance turns out to be a terrible mistake. A few minutes earlier, in fact, he writes one of the dumbest scenes I've ever seen. I don't really want to give anything away; suffice it to say that if he'd been honest, the whole family would have been toast.

* On the plus side, the topiary is well done.

In the news today we see that Emma Watson, the gorgeous, gamine ingenue who first portrayed Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter films, will be cast in a post-apocalyptic female "Game of Thrones" type movie. I guess post-apocalyptic female dystopias are in the air! Good; Perhaps someday Spunk, a Fable, will be made into a movie, and won't that be fun!?

Okay, I'll admit it, I've played the game (in my mind of course); "who would I want to play the lead in the movie of my book?"

For the physical description of the character Pink, I imagined, not the singer who goes by that name, but the actress Lily Cole, who I consider a great beauty.

For Yuki-Kai, I imagined Paz de la Huerta, an altogether different type of beauty, but a beauty nonetheless.

I imagined Helen Mirren as the perfect Senga, but the other older women characters seemed too different to be embodied by any present-day stars. Of course, Buffy could only be played by someone like Kathy Bates, or even Kirstie Alley, a woman of substance. And who could play The Abbess? In a movie, the villain always has to cut the most striking figure-- and yesterday I read that Barbra Streisand, a most striking figure indeed, has been awarded an honorary degree--Yes; Doctor Barbra Streisand would be a most suitable Abbess!