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8. The Shining
49 Plays1 year ago
One of us reads Stephen King for the first time and we both revisit the familiar haunts of Stanley Kubrick's film.
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Transcript
A Humorous Start: Marge and Homer
00:00:00
Speaker
Woah! Stay away from me, Homer! Give me the bat, Marge! Give me the bat! Give me the bat! Come on! Give me the bat! Give me the bat bat bat! Ha ha ha! Dirty cat!
00:00:21
Speaker
You stay here till you're no longer insane. Hmm. Julie will be good tonight.
Editing Decisions: Transparency or Trim?
00:00:35
Speaker
No, that didn't work. I'm gonna have to cut that part out. I can leave the other part. Leave it in, bro. Leave it in, warts and all. Let the audience know how we do our magic. They want to know what these two artists, how they make what they make.
Van Gogh and 'Starry Night' Exploration
00:00:50
Speaker
Wouldn't you want to know what Van Gogh was up to as he was producing Starry Night, other than being like really hallucinatory and unstable?
00:00:59
Speaker
White Mansburton, Robert, my man. Yeah, there it is. White Mansburton. That's it. There it is. Hey,
Introducing 'Candy Jail': Hosts and Chaos
00:01:06
Speaker
everybody. I'm Brendan. This is Candy Jail. I'm here with Robert. And what are we getting into this week, man? So basically, and I realized upon reflection that I have subjected you to so many books at this point that at first I felt a slight
00:01:26
Speaker
twinge of grumpiness when I realized I had to read an entire novel, and then I quickly hit myself with a croquet mallet and said, Jesus Robert, you're a hypocrite. So what would...
Puppy Problems: Books at Risk
00:01:38
Speaker
Go ahead. Wait a minute. Actually, speaking of books that you subjected me to, so two things happened simultaneously. One is that I got an Amazon order. The other is that my brother came to visit with his new puppy. So in the mail the other day, I received a copy of
00:01:56
Speaker
Stolen by Elizabeth Gilpin. Nice. The Rhetoric of Reaction by Albert Hirschman, which is actually not one that you recommended that I get, and Camera Lucida by Roland Barths. I left these books on the stairs in the presence of a young dog. And so this is my brand new copy of Roland Barths, and this is my brand new copy of Albert Hirschman.
00:02:24
Speaker
How are you feeling about the destruction of Brendan's library?
Brendan's Book Misadventure
00:02:30
Speaker
I'm mildly traumatized and I'm indignant that my brother does not seem to feel my pain. It's not as though I would demand that my brother pay for the books because I did leave them out on the stairs at dog level. It's just that I wish that the sympathy seemed a little bit more genuine for my loss.
00:02:49
Speaker
Well, I guess you weren't listening to the really excellent parenting advice of the caretaker, Grady. You just needed to correct your brother and correct that puppy. They will be corrected. I am glad to hear that because you've always been here, Brendan. This is nothing I can't handle, Robert. You just, if you could just let me out of this fucking room, we could get on with it.
Defining 'Candy Jail': A Playful Exchange
00:03:17
Speaker
It's a candy jail and you can leave anytime you want. You just have to stop buying things on Amazon. I haven't been able to leave yet.
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah, no, I'm just totally fucked. Okay, you want me to do it? I'll do it. I'll do it.
Delving into 'The Shining': Book vs. Film
00:03:31
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, go. So what we did for this week was we read Stephen King's wonderful, excellent novel, The Shining. We then watched Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining. And then we watched a, you could call it a documentary about
00:03:50
Speaker
What would you say, Brendan? A contingency of Kubrick heads, of shining heads that have found all kinds of deep primordial secrets that explain everything from the Nazi Holocaust to the moon landing being faked to really the origins of the universe and why we're here and what it all means. So that was room 237 was the other film we watched.
00:04:19
Speaker
How'd I do? Yeah, that's fine. And we'll get into room 237 in the next episode. I think today we're just going to focus on Stephen King's The Shining versus Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. So I have watched Stanley Kubrick's The Shining probably at least 10 times at this point, maybe more. I did watch it a lot as a kid, which explains a lot really about why I'm troubled. But, um,
00:04:45
Speaker
I had never read the novel and I really have not read, didn't read anything Stephen King had ever written. And so this was my first exposure to reading a King novel. I enjoyed it, but, but Brendan, you've had much more experience with and history with
00:05:03
Speaker
reading Stephen King's book. So do you want to just speak to like, before we get into the thick of The Shining, like how you came to King, what sustained your interest in his work? And then finally, if you want to then loop us back into The Shining. Well, I think The Shining was the first Stephen King book that I read. And I was in my early teens, maybe even younger, maybe like 12.
00:05:28
Speaker
And I remember sitting on the sofa at my grandmother's house for some kind of family function and reading that first sentence. Jack Torrance thought, officious little prick. And I don't know that either the word officious or the word prick confused me, but I know that I'd never seen them combined that way. And I'd never read a voice that sounded like his.
00:05:51
Speaker
You know, during my teen years, I read a lot of King, not everything, but almost everything I could get my hands on. But around the same time, I started to get into, quote unquote, highbrow literature or real literature. So I was like reading Dostoevsky
Brendan's Evolving Taste in Stephen King
00:06:05
Speaker
and Conrad and stuff like that. And I was aware that King was not really regarded as much more than like a pop
00:06:14
Speaker
genre novelist, and so I let that influence the way that I saw him, even though I was still devouring his books. Then I think a long time went by when I didn't really think of him that much at all. Maybe if I was back visiting my parents' house, I would find one of my books and I'd read a short story or something, but that was about the size of it.
00:06:36
Speaker
In my 20s, when I was in the Peace Corps, I stayed a couple days in a house that had a shared library where you just, you know, leave a book, take a book kind of a deal. And I needed something to read just for the couple days that I knew I'd be there. And there was a novel called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which I'd never heard of. It was one of King's newer books at the time. What year just out of curiosity? 2003.
00:06:59
Speaker
OK, when was the stand the stand? Well, there are a couple of different versions of it, but the the main version of the stand, I want to say, was 1990 because I had a king head that I just talked with in preparation for this that said in his mind, everything after the stand sucked. So we don't need to go down that rabbit hole. But I'm I'm interested now that you've referenced a book that's clearly, you know, completely out of the decades of the 90s as something that it sounds like you liked.
00:07:28
Speaker
Oh yeah, no, he went through a rough patch definitely where he was publishing stuff that was not up to his normal standard. He actually went through two rough patches and both of them really coincided with the first one was when his initial bout with addiction was reaching its peak and the second one was after he was hit by a car and nearly killed and then was doped up on prescription drugs for a really long time and he didn't become addicted to those.
Stephen King's Challenges and Influence
00:07:54
Speaker
They did, you know, he was writing under the influence again. But The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is just fantastic. It's this lean little novel about a girl who's lost in the woods. And I read it and I was like, oh my God, this guy's a master. And since then, I have spent a lot more time with him.
00:08:10
Speaker
But it wasn't until I was in my 30s that I really, really was able to situate him and understand what it is he does so well and what it is he does so unassumingly that people overlook it and mistake him for a far inferior stylist than he actually is.
00:08:32
Speaker
So I was guilty of sort of trying to make King into a guilty pleasure for a while just because I was so attuned at that time in my life to what you were supposed to think about literature. And so I'd read The Shining many times. I did reread it for this episode. But I'd also seen the film many times because the other thing that, you know, those teen years, like at the same time that I was getting into everything from Stephen King to
00:09:01
Speaker
Charlotte Bronte or whatever was also getting into movies and my dad turned me on to Bergman and Tarkovsky and Antonio and he also turned beyond Kubrick. And so I would have watched The Shining for the first time as a teenager and I remember.
00:09:18
Speaker
I knew the movie was iconic and I'd seen some Kubrick that I loved. So I went into the movie with high expectations and then there's the scene where Danny is imagining the Overlook Hotel and the elevator doors open and the blood pours out. And it's one of the most iconic scenes in the film. And when that came up for me watching the movie the first time, I rolled my eyes. I was like, this is idiotic. Like it's so- How old were you? How old were you when you watched it? Oh, probably 16.
00:09:47
Speaker
Okay I saw that when I was seven or eight which I mentioned in Speak No Evil and I found that to be legitimately frightening. I totally also would have found it to be legitimately frightening at seven or eight and I did end up being scared by the movie.
00:10:02
Speaker
in the end, but that elevator scene took me out of it. And even the color of the blood is not right, which I noticed. Or the consistency or something, it doesn't look like blood. It looks like water that's been dyed with food coloring. And- That's a CIA conspiracy, Brendan. It's a cover up. They don't want you to know that we never landed on the moon. Well, that would- Science also isn't real.
00:10:28
Speaker
It's the stuff coming out of the elevator looks like the Kool-Aid that the people in room 237 drank before they agreed to be interviewed by a respectable filmmaker. But I did end up at the time with an appreciation of the movie. And over the years, I would rewatch it from time to time. But at the same time that I was over the years realizing that my appreciation for King was rising and rising, I was realizing that my appreciation for Kubrick was falling.
00:10:57
Speaker
When I went back to rewatch The Shining this time around, say it was the fourth or fifth time maybe that I'd seen the movie, it was really hard for me to get into it. It was the first time in my life that I'd read the book and seen the film so close together. I don't know that I like the movie anymore,
Kubrick's Adaptation: Effective or Not?
00:11:15
Speaker
man. I mean, there's stuff in it that I respect. There's technical choices that he makes that I'm impressed by. Jack Nicholson's performance is iconic.
00:11:27
Speaker
I mean, I still have a visceral Pavlovian response to the music, and I suppose I always will. But I think it's kind of a silly movie. I kind of got the sense that maybe you were going through something similar. Yeah, I think I came at it in a different way, but maybe arrived in a similar place. For me,
00:11:50
Speaker
And I don't say this as a brag. I would actually say this as a cautionary tale, like don't do what I did. But I basically haven't read a novel in eight years and have only been sucking down like history and economics texts, which explains also a lot about
00:12:07
Speaker
different things. But so actually, I am I appreciated as I as I was grumpy at different moments that you insisted we read a novel. So this is the first novel more or less that I've read in eight years. So A, I was enjoying giving my brain a break. And I say that with respect to King, it's not as if it's not a great novel. And therefore, you don't have to think it's just a different kind of thinking than
00:12:34
Speaker
that sort of heavy-duty, dry academic writing that I was subjecting myself to.
00:12:41
Speaker
That was a welcome experience. And I was also pleasantly surprised to really find myself getting into the book and respecting King as a writer. And I think I told you, like, you know, the first at least hundred pages, I felt pretty convinced that he had yet to hit a false note with dialogue. I was astounded by his ability to
00:13:08
Speaker
convincingly render dialogue and further convincingly render his characters. And also the fact that there is indisputably many supernatural, if you want to call it that, elements to the book as there are in the movie,
00:13:23
Speaker
And that can be very hard to render convincingly because it's not grounded in real experience. And even with that, I was like, damn, this is, I think, as you put it, I'm comfortable using the word master. I was like, this is a masterful novel.
00:13:39
Speaker
And all those folks that get pretentious about, you know, like the Harold Blooms, God rest his soul, but, you know, who clearly would be snooty about King and level the charge that he's a genre writer, you know, it's genre fiction and therefore it's not, it's not worthy.
00:13:57
Speaker
Oh my, it just seems so ludicrous to me and I think it's grounded in a lot of different things that are pernicious in our culture, one of which being the jealousy of some who can't seem to manage to sell books of their own that they write. So King is clearly a towering talent and I want to read more of his books and so
00:14:19
Speaker
I was very impressed with the book, pretty much from start to finish. There were a couple of things that I think he, not dropped balls, but I'm not sure I was completely taken in the sense of like being in a trance the whole time, but most of the time I was. And yeah. Well, I was gonna say, let's get into that for a minute. So obviously we're gonna spoil both of these if somehow someone is not familiar with the story of The Shining.
00:14:49
Speaker
And we may also end up spoiling some aspects of Doctor Sleep, which is the sequel to The Shining. But yeah, what were the moments for all of your praise and your enjoyment of the novel? What were the moments where you felt like there was a little bit of a hiccup or where King made a little bit of a misstep? Probably if I were forced to
00:15:11
Speaker
put my finger on it, it would probably time and again link back up with the character of Danny, who on the whole, I think he does a fabulous job with. But there's a couple instances where we forget that he's six years old and or he is six years old. And
00:15:28
Speaker
We know he's precocious, we know he's unusually intelligent, that comes up in different ways and is part of how they explain this ability to shine. But some of the dialogue that came out of Danny's mouth at different points, I'm like, wait a second, this is not actually how a young kid talks, no matter how smart they are, there's just something here that's not.
00:15:48
Speaker
ringing true for me, even while I'm witnessing this in the backdrop of a totally untrue situation, totally made up. But again, the power of King's imagination is so robust and his ability to put that imagination into language that's convincing was so wonderful that I do think that in spite of that, there were a couple of instances where I'm like, this is just not
00:16:11
Speaker
exactly danny as he's being rendered convincingly in other parts of the novel and i couldn't tell you like. The exact lines of dialogue but there were probably a handful of moments i'm just like this just doesn't work there a couple actually like physical moments like where wendy hits jack and he's unconscious and they're dragging him into the pantry in the book.
00:16:35
Speaker
Danny's helping her in the film Danny's nowhere to be found that might actually have been one instance where I thought Kubrick made a good choice because when you look at what a six year old boy actually is like in the body of the actor that played Danny.
00:16:50
Speaker
It wouldn't really make sense for that little child to be helping the mother and dragging Jack's heavy, totally passed out body into the pantry. Again, these are like technical things that are fairly minor, but the more that I sort of saw these moments matched up against the book, I thought, okay, some of that doesn't quite pull itself off in the ways that it does in other portions of the book.
Character Complexity in 'The Shining'
00:17:17
Speaker
Yeah, I hear you on both of those. I definitely, on this reread, I did notice a couple moments where I thought Danny's language had gone beyond precociousness, like you said, and that maybe King was so, he was so heavily empathizing with the character in those moments of writing that he was letting himself get a little bit carried away and letting maybe too much of an adult voice creep into Danny's speech patterns.
00:17:45
Speaker
The only- Oh wait, can I throw in one more? Yes. One more issue that I had that I was like, okay, this is how King renders it, this is how Kubrick rendered it in the adaptation. So there's a very important scene when the cook, Halloran, the main cook at the Overlook Hotel, and we find out very quickly that he can shine as Danny can and he knows Danny can shine.
00:18:07
Speaker
And he winds up in the book taking, he says, hey, you know, help me with my luggage. And they wind up in his car while Wendy is watching this little child get into the car of this adult that he's just met to have a private conversation. I don't think that's realistic. I think most parents would immediately like Wendy is like, Oh, I was nervous. But I kind of just sat there and my nervousness and just hoped it was okay. It looked like they were talking and I'm like,
00:18:34
Speaker
This is not how mothers, at least the United States, respond to their kids getting in the cars with strangers. And so I thought that that was, I understand why he wanted it in the car. King did, to have that conversation be as private as it could be. But I didn't think it was in keeping with how mothers respond to their children in instances like that.
00:18:57
Speaker
I'm whereas in the movie he's eating ice cream with holler and they're just having a conversation while the parents are away which actually felt.
00:19:06
Speaker
Again, maybe for all of the film's deficits, I thought Kubrick made a couple choices that actually, when you think about it in relation to the book, King might have benefited from a couple of those himself. I'm actually going to push back on that, but I'm going to replace it with something that's very similar in my mind.
00:19:28
Speaker
I think that's just a 1977 thing. Stranger Danger didn't really become a moral panic until after that, and I think there was a general level at which people were just a little bit more trusting. And she's watching from the window and she feels a sense of alarm when she sees him get into the car, but then right away she realizes they're just talking and she's
00:19:49
Speaker
curious and a little bit concerned, but she doesn't go rushing out. She doesn't run for the authorities. And I think that's just a 1977 kind of a thing. I remember
00:20:01
Speaker
growing up in the 80s, say 10 years after that, my mother would usually walk me to the bus stop. And one morning something came up and she couldn't, and we were having work done on the house. There were contractors there. She didn't know these people from Adam. And one of these construction workers ended up walking me to the bus stop. And it's really hard now, I think, to imagine a parent trusting their young child to a stranger in a hard hat.
00:20:28
Speaker
But what I noticed that I would put in the same category on this reread was that at the very end of the book, there's no hedge maze in the
00:20:39
Speaker
the novel and the denouement takes place in the hotel itself and Jack is pursuing Danny upstairs somewhere in the maze of corridors. Wendy and Halloran are badly injured and they're downstairs and they can hear Danny and Jack upstairs but Wendy does not go upstairs because she believes that Danny's been killed already.
00:21:04
Speaker
And I only picked up on it this time reading the book, but that struck me as a false note, that I think Wendy the mother, even if she'd lost most of her limbs, she'd still be finding a way to drag herself up the stairs to find the corpse of her son, rather than assuming that he was dead and sitting in shock with Halloran down below.
Wendy's Actions and Motherhood Realism
00:21:27
Speaker
That did strike me as a false note about motherhood. I think the car scene played out the way it did because that interaction actually struck King as totally normal. I don't think he wanted them in the car. I think he wanted them in private and he could just as easily have had them sit on the porch or something. I think the car thing just would have worked according to social standards in 1977 in a way that it probably wouldn't play out today.
00:21:53
Speaker
Fair enough, fair enough. But it's interesting that both of us, we did seize on moments of motherhood as the thing that was striking a somewhat false note with us, which I think is interesting.
Recurring Themes in King's Work
00:22:06
Speaker
It's also kind of interesting as you track King's own language patterns, but also like favorite words. So I don't know if you noticed the word petulant is definitely a favorite of his and it shows up throughout the novel and it's a fairly unusual word. You don't encounter the word petulant often and I don't usually, but
00:22:26
Speaker
he likes it and uh there are these interesting sort of flourishes and sort of i don't know you've read a lot more of his work but i would guess that this stuff probably extends across his novels not just favorite words but even probably images of gosh knows what else that would kind of register and a king had like yeah this is a king novel you know it'd be interesting if i i remember
00:22:52
Speaker
A few years ago, well, back when you and I were working together, actually, somebody ran a computer study on different authors to find out what words they used most frequently, or at least what adjectives and things they used most frequently in an interesting way.
00:23:10
Speaker
Most authors probably use the word said or the word he or something all the time, but I remember that they'd done it on Nabokov, and one of his favorite words was mauve, the color mauve. He apparently was, and I've read, you know, a million pages of Nabokov and I believe it, but it never stood out to me.
00:23:29
Speaker
it would be interesting to have the results of that for Stephen King and would a word like petulant be on that list. I bet it. I have a feeling it would. So before we get into like a full blown comparison between the book and the movie, I just wanted to focus a little more on like
00:23:46
Speaker
get into the nitty-gritty man of what you like about this novel. Why did it speak to you when you first read it? And in a way, how did it invite you to become a real fan of King's work up until present day? And yeah, just speak. But really, actually, let's focus on the book. Let's focus on The Shining. So what about The Shining?
00:24:10
Speaker
did you find and do you find compelling? Well, let me just really briefly cite another King book he wrote about 20 years ago. He published a book called On Writing, which is kind of legendary now. It's not that I've read many books on writing, but most of them are garbage and his is extraordinary. It it's probably the greatest book on writing ever written. And I've heard other like I've heard even people who who are not Stephen King readers have read that book and have been blown away by it.
00:24:39
Speaker
And somewhere in one writing, he talks about writing aggressively, not defensively. And normally I wouldn't like describing something as writing aggressively, but I know what he means when he says, do not write defensively. He means don't edge around things, don't apologize for what you're about to say, don't clear your throat at the beginning of the story.
00:25:03
Speaker
The opening of The Shining was maybe the first time in my life that as a reader emerging from childhood into adulthood that I'd felt this sense of this utterly confident storytelling voice, Jack Torrance thought, a vicious little prick, and opening a book and knowing that I'm going to be told a good story. And so I think I knew The Shining going in was a kind of haunted house story, which
00:25:30
Speaker
who doesn't love one of those and then that voice just captured me immediately but his insight into human character is extraordinary and I know we just nitpicked it a couple things but we both agreed those really were nitpicks and he just gets even if he sometimes with dialogue he goes a little bit over the top he hits a few false notes here and there although
00:25:57
Speaker
If you spend time watching interviews with him, he himself is a kind of over the top character. Like I think it's not that he sometimes makes his characters say things that aren't realistic, it's just that he sometimes makes them all a little bit over the top in the way that he himself is a little bit over the top. But even when his dialogue gets a little bit over the top or he conceives of a particularly outlandish
00:26:25
Speaker
plot device or something, there's just this fantastic understanding of human nature. I don't know that as a those years that I was, you know, growing up reading King, I probably learned more about human character from Stephen King than from anything else that I read. And his portrayal of Jack Torrance as a loving father who is nonetheless a deeply wounded person who has a serious problem with addiction, even when he is not drinking.
00:26:56
Speaker
and his portrayal of Danny as a precocious child who's a daddy's boy for reasons that, you know, nobody ever understands. Nobody ever understands why a child gravitates to one parent more than the other. And Windy as a devoted but concerned woman who is carrying her own baggage and sometimes makes the wrong decisions based on that and the way that these three people
00:27:23
Speaker
Interact with one another and are bound by love and yet in the end You know are exposed to terrible evil. It's just Everything about it rings true. That's the thing like I I think I was responding to the truth in King before I was responding to anything else and all these years later as I've gained a far greater appreciation for his style and
00:27:47
Speaker
And also I think I have a pretty good ability to be honest about when he does suck because he can from time to time really suck. But even in the worst King books, which I do not recommend you read, but even in the worst ones, he's just on a page by page basis, he's doing more emotional and stylistic heavy lifting than most novelists ever get to even in the climax of their novels.
00:28:15
Speaker
Well, and I will say as a former like heavy duty fiction reader, I love to read novels. That's what really got me into reading in general. You know, certainly wasn't reading dry history books, was reading novels, reading fiction, reading some poetry, but mostly fiction.
00:28:32
Speaker
I really, really, really enjoyed watching him move us towards what I felt to be deep insights into human nature. But also, if you want to put it this way, thesis statements of the book
00:28:50
Speaker
I think he has a few thesis statements, and he was intent on being explicit about them, not in a didactic way, but in a, okay, this is the aha moment. These are the aha moments that we've been building towards, and I think he delivers on those aha moments. I have my own ideas about what they are. I'd be curious to know what you think they are, or if you think that's in here at all.
00:29:20
Speaker
Yeah, I wanna actually, you cited a passage to me ahead of time that I'm gonna ask you to read. I would like to read a passage that I highlighted ahead of time. So Danny has a imaginary friend who may or may not be an imaginary friend called Tony, who sometimes appears to him and gives him advice or warnings. And Tony tells him that his mother is gonna be hurt and may be killed. And so Danny cries out the word no.
00:29:49
Speaker
And then I'm gonna quote, he cried it out in a distant grief, a terror that seemed damped by these dreamy, dreary surroundings.
00:30:01
Speaker
Nonetheless, death images came to him. Dead Frog plastered to the turnpike like a grizzly stamp. Daddy's broken watch lying on top of a box of junk to be thrown out. Gravestones with a dead person under everyone. Dead Jay by the telephone pole. The cold junk Mommy scraped off the plates and down the dark mall of the garbage disposal.
00:30:26
Speaker
Yet he could not equate these simple symbols with the shifting complex reality of his mother. She satisfied his childish definition of eternity. She had been when he was not. She would continue to be when he was not again. He could accept the possibility of his own death. He had dealt with that since the encounter in room 217, but not hers, not daddy's, not ever.
00:30:55
Speaker
That sentence, I mean the images that he associates with death are themselves fascinating, the cold junk going down the garbage disposal, but then that description of how his mother satisfied his childish definition of eternity. She had been when he was not, she would continue to be when he was not again. That is a primal human truth about childhood and maybe even adulthood. If you're alive in adulthood and you haven't lost a parent yet,
00:31:25
Speaker
And it's such a simple truth that is so seldomly articulated and so seldomly articulated that clearly when it's just one of these perfect flashes of perfectly described insight into the human condition. You know, let's say I've read this book five, six times. Every time I'm sure I would have read that and internalized because I was being carried along by the story, carried along by the writing, I would have
00:31:51
Speaker
felt the truth of that passage and just moved on. And this time I skidded to a stop in front of it and I was like, I want to single this out this time because this is so well done.
00:32:03
Speaker
That's a good, yeah, I remember that moment in the book and it is very well written and does speak to something, what do you want to call it, universally true on some level about how children relate to their parents and their mortality or their sense of their immortality. Yeah. And I think actually the passage that you'd singled out was kind of along the same lines, wasn't it? I came at it from a slightly different angle. So I'll read my favorite, what I would consider to be
00:32:33
Speaker
pretty much the center of the Chichiro Pop. So it goes like this. Danny stood without moving. There was no place he could run where the overlook was not. He recognized it suddenly, fully, painlessly. For the first time in his life, he had an adult thought, an adult feeling. The essence of his experience in this bad place, a sorrowful distillation,
00:32:58
Speaker
Mommy and daddy can't help me and I'm alone. And I went fuck. Yeah. So this is, if it isn't clear in the final act, really in the final pages of the book, when Jack Torrance is fully possessed, running around with a croquet mallet in the movie, he has an ax
Danny's Growth and Resilience
00:33:18
Speaker
in the book. He has a mallet.
00:33:20
Speaker
I'm sorry, get your pretentious lawn games right, Robert. It's a roke. I'm sorry, roke. You're right. I think it was probably like an unconscious desire not to mispronounce roke. So yes, a roke mallet. What's interesting is you go back to his original interaction with Halloran, who's the only other character in the book who can shine and he can't shine as powerfully as Danny can, but he has enough shine to be able to play ball with him, you know?
00:33:49
Speaker
And Halloran says at the beginning, you're going to see some shit. The hotel itself shines. Sometimes inanimate objects can have a kind of shine depending on what happens in and around them. And so the Overlook Hotel is also a kind of
00:34:07
Speaker
character personified that's capable of shining. But he says, and I thought that this was interesting, he basically says, if you remember that it's essentially pictures in a picture book,
00:34:20
Speaker
It can't hurt you and it's not real and it's substanceless. And when he goes into room 217, which is an important moment in the book, he lets his fear take him over. And as a result, he actually gets injured. So you have this feeling like, oh shit, these ghosts can actually hurt you. They can kill you.
00:34:38
Speaker
But then you get to this flash forward to the final moments of the book when he has to face down his father, who's, you know, possessed. And he's encountering all these other sort of demonic figures as he's in the hall. And he's able finally to say, you're really not real, like basically fuck off, like you don't exist and they vanish. And so
00:35:03
Speaker
He gets to his father. His father's about to drop a fucking mallet on his face. And he says, you're not my dad. You're the hotel that's possessed my dad. Get the fuck out of here. And the dad comes back momentarily and drops the mallet and has enough sense to say run. But I bring all this up to say, and I go with going all that background to basically get at why I think that line
00:35:28
Speaker
Mommy and daddy can't help me and I'm alone is so central to this. He comes to that realization in the midst of this agonized, nightmarish, you know, chase scene. It's a moment that I, again, kind of what you said about the truth of the child recognizing the mortality of his mother for the first time. She's not going to live forever. She is a mere mortal.
00:35:54
Speaker
is a similar adult realization to this, which is, I'm going to have things that scare the fuck out of me beyond this hotel as a human being, as we do, right? We are confronted with all kinds of things that scare us. And some of that stuff is a result of unworked through traumas from our childhoods.
00:36:17
Speaker
And I'm going to have a point, and this is one of the first, where I can't lean on either of them, I can only lean on myself. And I thought it was just a staggering and such an important insight about, in my mind, what it really does mean to be an adult. And so further,
00:36:37
Speaker
This is where I think King really pulls it off, and I'll stop so I don't go on a monologue, Brendan. But I think you kind of have his father, Jack, Danny's father, with all of this unprocessed trauma from his father, who was an alcoholic that beat him and his siblings and his mother. And he never got over the fear of that. He never faced down that fear. And so he avoided it through his alcoholism.
00:37:01
Speaker
His mother, Danny's mother, never quite faced down the rejection and the fear that was connected to that from her mother, who was a fairly calloused character from how she's rendered in the book. So Danny is being raised by two purported adults, but upon closer inspection are adults in children's bodies. And Danny, upon closer inspection, is an adult in a child's body. And this is where you go, wow, there's nothing about this that's fair.
00:37:30
Speaker
It's not fair that Danny has to shoulder the burdens of his parents' emotional immaturity and inability to face their own fears. He not only has to face his own fears, he now has to face their fears for them on some level. And I thought, you know, you end the book with Halloran at the lake saying, you just have to fucking get on, man. Sometimes you got to go in a closet and cry, but get over it and keep, you know,
00:37:58
Speaker
having a capacity to love people, be in love, have love for the world, and keep going, keep moving. And I'm going, that's exactly right. And so if I were to condense this all into a single koan, right, or a single aphorism would be nothing about this is fair.
Themes of Unfairness and Resilience
00:38:16
Speaker
And in spite of its patent unfairness, you have to carry on anyway. And that's what Danny learned and what Jack
00:38:23
Speaker
never did, his father. So I'm like, fuck, this is unbelievable. I am very much, I do feel there's a deep truth in that. That is not airport, you know, philosophizing. That's serious insight in my mind. Yeah, I think that's beautifully put, man. The idea that Jack and Wendy are children in adults' bodies and Danny is an adult in a child's body and that he has to deal with his own fears, but he also has to deal with their fears.
00:38:52
Speaker
And then nothing about that's fair, but he does it anyway. Exactly. Do you mind if I just spoil a little bit of Dr. Sleep, which is, yeah, do it. So if you're going to read more King, I would not recommend starting with Dr. Sleep. It's, it's okay. It's not a terrible book, but it's not, it doesn't quite come up to the stature of the shining, but in Dr. Sleep, when we meet Danny again as an adult, he is an alcoholic and a drug addict. And it's hard because.
00:39:22
Speaker
Of course, he's victorious, in a sense, at the end of The Shining.
00:39:27
Speaker
The character of the little kid played extraordinarily well by Danny Lloyd in the movie has become this iconic sort of avatar of like mature innocence or something. And so we went the best for that kid. And, but if you think about it, of course he grew up to be an addict after not just growing up, watching his father's addiction, but then the trauma that he went through.
00:39:54
Speaker
of his father trying to murder him, and then the additional trauma of having the shine, which allows him to hear other people's thoughts, whether he wants to or not. Of course that kid turned into an addict, of course he did. So that's the only thing about Dr. Sleep that I wanna say is just that in King's imagination, we do know a little bit about where Danny went after the end of this book, and it's dark places, because how could it not be?
00:40:22
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'm interested now in actually reading it, even if it's not as good as The Shining, just to see where he takes all that. But yeah, I mean, just to maybe hammer home the points that you made earlier, and I think what brought you to King and has sustained your loyalty to him is like,
00:40:41
Speaker
He really is able to, I guess to use a cliche, get inside the heads of his characters and get at aspects of the human experience that I think we all have to go through, even if it's not precisely in the ways that his characters go through them. There's so much truth to them.
00:41:02
Speaker
to those struggles and how they're, how they're explored, made sense of the psychology, right? Of why we do what we do. Yeah, it's impressive. So I am, I don't think I was surprised. I was actually ready to like it and like him because of your championing of his books and others that I respect that like his work, but I was definitely happy that it was consistent with the high praise that I'd heard from you.
00:41:32
Speaker
And he mentions, I think it's actually in on writing, but maybe in other places as well. He mentions in retrospect, he was a raging drunk and drug abuser at the time that he wrote this. And the fact that he was actually, to a certain extent, writing about himself completely escaped him at the moment. But on some level, I think he was I think he was exploring his own nightmares as a father.
00:42:00
Speaker
What if the addiction that I refuse to acknowledge to myself that I have became so bad that I hurt my children? He was exploring the depths of his own psyche without realizing that he was doing it.
00:42:16
Speaker
But in the course of doing that, he was also creating the characters of Wendy and Danny and other incidental characters in the novel who are completely realized human beings with wildly different perspectives from each other.
Influence of Experience on Creativity
00:42:33
Speaker
The fact that he was able to commit to that kind of empathy, while at the same time not realizing that he's actually exploring himself too, is fascinating. What kind of dark magic
00:42:47
Speaker
really goes on in the sellers of the human soul during the creative process, you know?
00:43:04
Speaker
There's this assumption that these folks made with Kubrick's film that Cooper, I mean, clearly Kubrick was in control of a lot. And he had a sort of obsessive attention to detail that I think we've all come to love him for. That's part of what makes his movies so great is like, holy shit, he really
00:43:20
Speaker
does care about that thing in the corner of the frame. That still doesn't mean he fully understands his own creations, the same way King doesn't understand his own creations, the same way no one does. And so, so much of these conspiracy theories depend upon this notion of an artist that is fully conscious of every single move they're making. And what you just spoke to, which I think is much truer to reality, is
00:43:46
Speaker
we can actually be so fucking blind, even when we're making a masterpiece, that King can come out and say, holy crap, years later I realize this is me working through my addiction problems. You know, from the man himself. I mean, that to me is almost a QED against any of these totally bizarro
00:44:06
Speaker
conspiracy theorists claims that depend upon the sort of total omniscience of the creators of these products, the media they make. Anyway, we don't need to go there by that. That's an important detail. No, that's actually a perfect segue into talking about what we think of the film, which unlike the book, the film is a revisit for both of us. Stephen King famously hated Kubrick's movie.
00:44:34
Speaker
His most, I think, specific criticism at the time was Kubrick had turned the character of Wendy into a quote-unquote shrieking dishrag, and he thought that it was a misogynistic movie.
00:44:48
Speaker
And in the years since, as the movie has become more iconic, there's been more and more light shed on the fact that Kubrick treated Shelley Duvall terribly on the set of that film. And her performance is often justifiably lauded. She gives a remarkable
00:45:06
Speaker
portrayal of a woman who is in the extreme of terror, and she deserves all the credit for that. But she was also frazzled to the limits of her sanity by the way that Kubrick was treating her. And I was struck watching the movie this time at how
00:45:29
Speaker
Unsexualized she is in the movie and it's you know their sexual relationship Jack and Wendy It's not a focus of the book, but it's definitely a part of it. You know he King has them in bed after they've they've had sex and
00:45:42
Speaker
Jack is very flirtatious with Wendy a lot of the time. They laugh a lot about making sexual references in front of Danny that he doesn't understand. Jack is always admiring her legs and putting his hand on her leg when they're sitting near each other and things like that. When Jack isn't drinking, they have a really good healthy sexual relationship. When we first meet Wendy,
00:46:06
Speaker
Well I guess we first meet her in the car but when we first really spend time with her in the film it's when she's back in the apartment in Boulder and she's wearing this kind of even by 1980 standards kind of strikingly dowdy outfit and she is dressed that way throughout the majority of the film and
00:46:27
Speaker
I don't mean to imply that she should have been held to some artificial, shallow standard of feminine sexuality, but I do think those are the expectations that Kubrick was working in, and he did make a deliberate choice to desexualize her. The idea that Jack Torrance as played by Jack Nicholson and Wendy Torrance as played by Shelley Duvall in the universe of the film
00:46:55
Speaker
ever could have been sexually attracted to one another seems faintly ridiculous. So I kind of squarely came down on the side of the fact that Kubrick was a misogynist and he was incapable of making a portrayal of Wendy that was not misogynist and that it's one of many things that don't work in the movie at all and King saw it right away in 1980 when that thing came out and
00:47:21
Speaker
People forget, because there have been a lot of shitty Stephen King adaptations in the last 30, 40 years. People forget his first novel, Carrie, was adapted by Brian De Palma. He had a history early on with really respected directors picking up his stuff. And so when Kubrick came along and picked up a Stephen King adaptation, I think King's expectation would have been this is going to be incredible. And so for King right at the time to call it out for being sexist, misogynist,
00:47:51
Speaker
I think is spot on. And so I guess let's use that as an entry point into what we think of the film. Like all these, you know, you said you've seen it 10 or 11 times now, like how does that sit with you?
00:48:03
Speaker
Well, I want to back up and also say that I was at a bookstore in Albuquerque over the sometime earlier in the week and a lovely bookstore, page one books. If anyone ever wants to go to an incredible used and new bookstore, there's a plug for page one. I wound up with a box of books that I should not have bought, but
00:48:24
Speaker
Anyway, as I'm at the checkout counter and I was listening to the banter of the employees, I'm a unrepentant bibliophile but also an aspiring kind of bookseller, at least that's how I envision my years of retirement and gradual decrepitude.
00:48:46
Speaker
It's interesting to listen to employees in these bookstores because you learn a lot a about whether they themselves are book people, which you hope that they are, but also, um, if they're having a good time, which, uh, as indicated, at least by the banter I was overhearing, they're having a pretty good time, which again is hats off to that bookstore. You know, it's good. It's good when the employees are.
00:49:10
Speaker
A into what they're doing and also feeling good in the environment. But I bring this up just to say I'm checking out. I'd already listened to some of the banter, so I felt a little bit bolder in speaking to something, but the man at the register, the employee, the male employee was wearing a shirt. The shirt was a door with the numbers 217 on it. So I knew immediately this was a Stephen King head. So I said, what'd you think of the book?
00:49:38
Speaker
And what did you think of the movie? And what did you think of what Stephen King thought of the movie? And he said, well, the quote that I'm reminded of that King made regarding the film was, he thought it was like a very beautiful Porsche, but upon closer inspection, you realize it doesn't have an engine. I thought that was hilarious. But then he said, from what he's read, that King has warmed to the film over time, which I thought was interesting. I don't know if he knew that, but apparently he has
00:50:08
Speaker
rewatched it since and felt a little better about it. So I thought that was interesting and just a random sort of serendipitous encounter with a stranger that had something to say about this. So in terms of the misogyny, the more that I thought of what I felt or was failing to feel in The Shining,
00:50:32
Speaker
might in fact cover the entirety of Kubrick's filmic corpus. So let me get at what I think struck me, and I think it does loop into your own critiques, even if, I'm not sure I'm ready to say categorically that Kubrick was a misogynist, but I am definitely comfortable, I think, saying at this point, he doesn't do very well with emotions in general.
00:50:59
Speaker
I didn't really feel anything in this movie other than the requisite and expected psychological discomfort.
00:51:10
Speaker
anxiety he did a good job as you pointed out with the music with the camera angles with the with Nicholson's performance it's atmospherically very unsettling but there's no character development per se I mean Jack Nicholson kind of starts crazy you can tell in the car this guy's fucked up and he just continues to get more fucked up but you get none of the
00:51:34
Speaker
sort of complexity and nuance of the inner lives of the characters as king renders it in the book and so granted i know i'm watching a movie and i know that movies are different from books and filmmakers have to make choices to adhere to the form that they are operating in.
Kubrick's Style: Precision vs. Emotion
00:51:52
Speaker
You can't fit 600 pages of book into a two hour film. You just can't. You have to make choices. So some of the choices I respected, as I mentioned with the pantry scene, I even felt like the ice cream scene with Halloran was an interesting choice, actually maybe even better than what King had chosen in his own book. But in terms of like just, yeah, like character development feeling sort of connected to any of these people,
00:52:19
Speaker
Um, even Danny, even Wendy, who are the victims in this, I'm not sure he got me there. I'm not sure he did very much work at all in that department. And further, the more I started to go like, okay, wait a second, 2001 space Odyssey, full metal jacket, clockwork.
00:52:35
Speaker
orange eyes wide shot for sure. I'm like, none of these movies ever make me feel anything really. They make me think he's often attributed with being cerebral, which is probably right. They are cerebral and intellectually stimulating films. But in some ways, yeah, my respect for The Shining was diminished and
00:52:59
Speaker
maybe more damningly, my respect for Kubrick as a filmmaker was diminished when I started to ask myself, how important is it that when I'm watching a movie, that that movie really does get at my feelings and makes me feel invested in the characters and moves me in some kind of deeply human way? I feel like there's, I don't know, I mean, with all due respect to this great filmmaker,
00:53:27
Speaker
There's a kind of coldness to his films. And I might even go farther and say there's a little bit of, what's the word? They're like emotionally sterile. There's a sterile quality to them. And I find that
00:53:43
Speaker
as much as i respect as you put it the technical achievements and kubrick's incredible i aesthetic sensibility. It's like a be it kind of is like a beautiful car but in this instance it's a beautiful character that upon closer inspection has nothing inside them. And nothing that could make me connect to them on a human level and the more i thought about the more i fell actually that might be the case across his entire body of work and that's.
00:54:12
Speaker
a heavy critique, but I think I'm comfortable with it. I think that's correct. I don't think I've ever felt moved, emotionally moved. I've been frightened. I've been anxious. I've been cerebrally stimulated, but not moved by Kubrick's movies. How does that land with you?
00:54:29
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with it. This is not going to be an episode where you and I are are butting heads, I think, about our takes, because I agree with that completely. I've seen I haven't seen everything I've not seen Eyes Wide Shut and some things I have not seen in a while, but I've seen most Kubrick and most of it I've seen multiple times and.
00:54:49
Speaker
I will still, I will take 2001 A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove and put those in my private canon, I think, but I think both of those for different reasons were perfectly suited to his gifts as a filmmaker and not subject to suffering from his weaknesses as a filmmaker. And look, there is art where you, maybe all art, like you have to be willing to open yourself up to the spell. You know, you go to an art gallery
00:55:18
Speaker
Maybe you're gonna go in in a bad mood, not ready to be receptive to things, and then you'll see a painting that'll just take you aback and it'll sort of break through and then you will find yourself under its spell. But that's not really ideal for anything. I think I've gotten pretty good over the years. If I'm opening a novel by a writer I'm not familiar with, I'm willing to be seduced. I'm putting myself out there to be seduced into this story. And if I close the book and I say this isn't doing it for me
00:55:48
Speaker
or this is crap, I've already put the effort into it. And so I know, I'm willing to concede, there are parts of The Shining where you have to be willing to put yourself under its spell. I just didn't find myself willing to do that this time, and I didn't find that the movie was doing any work to draw me in. And there are things in it, like for every scene that remains iconic for me, Danny throwing the darts in the game room and then turning around and seeing the little girls, for instance,
00:56:18
Speaker
There's another scene that just makes me laugh, like when Wendy stumbles into the dining room and it's full of cobwebs and skeletons. So cheesy, so cheesy. Yeah, it's completely cheesy and it's not self-consciously cheesy, it's just dumb. Or the blood spilling out of the elevator or Danny Lloyd, you know, the little kid does such a fantastic job, but the moments when he's like in the trance because he's having the visions, you know, and he's like shaking and drooling and his eyes are wide. And then we see Halloran and his bed in Miami doing the same thing when he's getting the
00:56:47
Speaker
the visions of the hotel where the camera just pans in on Scatman cruthers with his eyes really wide and his mouth open. And it's just kind of laughable. It's just silly. And that kind of broke the spell for me in a way where I don't know that I'll ever be able to fall really under the spell of the movie ever again. And I think King's criticism is apt.
00:57:14
Speaker
I do think like King also famously has really bad takes on movies. Like he's a writer and he is not a filmmaker and he's not really wired to be a film critic. His movie tastes were shaped by like the hammer horror movies or the universal horror movies of like the 1950s, which is fine. And definitely you rewatch The Shining if you hated it the first time, you can come to appreciate some of the technical choices Kubrick makes or some of the performances in the film.
00:57:43
Speaker
the deafness with which, I mean, God, Danny sitting on the carpet playing with the trucks and then the ball rolls down the hallway and then he looks up and there's nothing there. Yeah, that'll make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. How fantastically well done is that? But as a whole, you're right, there's no character development. And I also don't have any idea what it's about. Like, we could talk at much greater length than we did about what The Shining the novel is about.
00:58:10
Speaker
from failing parents and children in the bodies of adults to addiction to trauma being passed from generation to generation to maybe even, you know, because in the novel you get into the whole history of the Overlook.
Mysteries of the Overlook Hotel
00:58:25
Speaker
And there's never, King is way too smart to make any attempt to understand, to explain
00:58:30
Speaker
why the hotel is the way that it is. Is it because Horace Derwent was the one who opened it? Is it something about him or is it the location? He never gets into any of that. Kubrick has a stupid throwaway and arguably racist line where Stuart Allman explains that the hotel was supposedly built on an Indian burial ground. Oh god, here we go again, fucking Indian burial ground shit.
00:58:55
Speaker
But beyond that, I don't know what the movie is about. Because there is no character development, and Jack Nicholson is clearly batshit unhinged from the opening frame of the movie. So it's an interesting technical exercise in sustaining dread or unsettledness for 90 minutes.
00:59:16
Speaker
I don't think it's really a good movie. And I think if you do watch Room 237, it's interesting how many of those people recount their first time seeing the movie in the theater, how they were fans of the book and the movie left them deeply disappointed. I think there's something- And they had to start reading the labels on the cereal boxes and the pantry in the film to make the film greater than the book. And 30 years later, here they are. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And part of that is an attempt, I think,
00:59:45
Speaker
to find substance in the movie because we went there to be a there there behind all of the the glossy sophistication and the technical chops and I don't think there is. So I will say like now that I read the book and as you put it so closely on the heels of watching the film what I thought was also interesting were these little details that I never caught
01:00:12
Speaker
Or if I saw them, I didn't tie them to the book, of course, because I hadn't read them. But now, having watched the film, I'm like, OK, this is Kubrick kind of being cute. Or maybe it's Kubrick dropping balls and really not being able to tie it together, even in a halfway reasonable way, keeping in mind he's making a film and not a book. So let me give you a couple examples. One is, as Jack is writing in the film, you see a scrapbook opened on the desk.
01:00:40
Speaker
And I hadn't read the book up until last week. But now that I've read it, I know that Jack in the book comes across a scrapbook in the basement in the boiler room. And the book plays a central role in him sort of projecting or using it as his alcohol crutch, the same way that he gets excited.
01:01:01
Speaker
and triggered by alcoholism he's now feeding the subsessional fascination with learning about overlook through the scrapbook and you see the scrapbook on the table in the movie but if you haven't read the book you would just see it as another random thing an object on the desk that has no bearing on the movie which it doesn't actually.
01:01:22
Speaker
That's the thing. It's like, okay, here's a kind of a real book tie-in, but Kubrick never went anywhere with it. So all you get is maybe, at best, a wink to the readers who know why that scrapbook's there. But here's another example.
01:01:39
Speaker
At the end of the film, it zooms in on a photo of a Fourth of July event in 1921 at the Overlook. And you see that Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, is in the photo at the front. And as a viewer, you're going, what the fuck does that mean? And I actually did, I had two friends come over last night to support me as I watched this, because I'm a little more sensitive to horror films than you are at this point. But
01:02:06
Speaker
I asked them, like, what do you make of that? Because I'd read the book. So I had my view on what that is. That was what I think Kubrick was doing. But one of the friends, one of my friends said this, maybe it's like the hotel has claimed him. And now he's in that photo in this weird way that he can sort of he can conceivably in the logic of the film and the logic
01:02:31
Speaker
in quotes of the overlook craziness, be that sort of permanent caretaker that was always there, as Grady said in the bathroom, which is used in the book too. That's right. I mean, that is about as close as you're going to get to what King was going after in his own book.
01:02:47
Speaker
Um, but if you haven't read the book, uh, my other friend didn't get close to that. He was just speculating. I think most viewers are sort of scratching their heads going, I don't know. This is just Kubrick being eccentric and making you wonder what the fuck is going on here. And, you know, I think again, that was sort of his, I almost, I'm like, I feel like I'm like, I'm like defacing a saint or something, a patron saint when I leveled these kinds of critiques against Kubrick, but I'm going to do it. I don't think.
01:03:15
Speaker
he earned it in a certain way. It adds to, as you put it, the atmosphere. You have the creepy music, Jack Nicholson's showcase performance. In some ways, the whole film is sort of just letting Jack Nicholson be crazy to me, is what the movie winds up being. And he does a good job of it. Although, again, no disrespect to Jack. I wonder how hard it was for him to do that. I actually think it was probably fairly easy. It's almost like, just do you. Be Jack, but
01:03:45
Speaker
wall drunk or like if you did a line of coke and then do Jack Nicholson. And he's like, no problem, as they're both probably beating up on Shelley Duvall, you know, verbally. But so I'm just sort of like, as the reader of the book, I now understand why Kubrick ended with that photo. But as a viewer of the film, had I not read the book, I wouldn't know what to do with it. And I think you are kind of left with a puzzle that's yet to be completed.
01:04:11
Speaker
Kubrick passes it off as more psychological, atmospheric, masterful artistry. And I think we're both sitting here going, it's kind of sloppy. It's kind of loose. I don't know. It just doesn't quite, I don't know, it didn't. So those are two examples, the scrapbook on the desk and the photo in the end where it's like,
01:04:32
Speaker
If you read the book, you have a fuller sense of why that's there. If you haven't, you probably miss them both. Certainly the scrapbook and the photo is just enigmatic at best. Yeah, Kubrick started out as a photographer and the number of iconic images in The Shining is, you know, in the dozens probably. And, you know, it was famously innovative for using the steady cam to get the big wheel shots of Danny going down the hallway.
01:05:00
Speaker
I think his greatest gift was in some sense as a photographer in conceiving of how to frame Scatman Cruthers face or how to frame Jack sitting at the typewriter or how to create the sense of disorientation that comes from the fact that the interior geography of the overlook doesn't really make any sense.
01:05:23
Speaker
But when it comes to, as you said, the human elements that it takes to tell a human story, he falls short. And I think you will see that in many of his other films. One of the many stories that gets told about the making of this is that Kubrick wanted to make a horror movie. And so he had somebody send him a bunch of recent horror novels. And I always picture him sitting on the floor when I picture this scene, but I doubt it played out quite that way.
01:05:53
Speaker
I imagine him sitting on the floor surrounded by paperbacks and just opening one and reading the first three pages and throwing it over his shoulder and saying, not that one. And then just going through that process with a dozen novels. And then when he got to The Shining, he said, this is it. This is what I'm going to film. And it would be easy to say, well, that's probably because he read a bunch of bad books and then he finally got to a good book.
01:06:16
Speaker
It's become commonplace to point out that a lot of what King does that makes him so great is unfilmable because it's so internal. I've heard it described as extreme internal intimacy or something like that. You're so deep in Wendy's and Jack's and Danny's and Halloran's thoughts and feelings.
01:06:40
Speaker
You can't film that shit. You have to come up with other techniques in order to film it. And so, in a way, he picked, as the horror novel that he wanted to adapt, he picked one of the most unfilmable ones. I don't know if there is a good, I mean, I know King himself oversaw a made-for-TV version of The Shining, which I hear is not very good. I'm not surprised it's not very good it was made for TV. I don't know if there is a good version of this movie,
01:07:08
Speaker
It's tempting to imagine, you know, Kubrick style and the, and the music and everything with Jack and Wendy as well-rounded human characters, like they are in the film. I don't, I don't know. Well, I'd also say just so it gives a bit of trivia with Kubrick and how he worked. He apparently had a chess game going at all times on all of his sets and he was constantly playing chess. And I think there's something interesting there because
01:07:34
Speaker
It's a highly strategic game, and I think on some level he makes movies like he plays chess, and it reminds me of Hitchcock to some degree, where you're like, wow, these are so technically, even on a cerebral level, so masterful, so complex, so well-navigated, masterfully pulled off.
01:07:59
Speaker
I don't watch a Hitchcock film to feel things. That might actually be part of why I've never been that into Hitchcock, but
01:08:06
Speaker
I guess I'm also revealing my hand that I want to feel things when I watch a movie beyond just like mental, you know, like anticipation or a kind of cerebral anxiety or sort of a thriller sort of, you know, emotion of sorts, if you call that an emotion. But I guess what I want to say is, and again, like this is me editorializing about Kubrick, the artist, and I hope I'm not being unfair, but it takes vulnerability.
01:08:32
Speaker
to feel things yourself. And it takes vulnerability to explore feelings as an artist in the art that you make. And I don't think he was into vulnerability. I think he was into control. So I think what's funny, actually, is that the same way that King was like, oh, I made a movie. I wrote a book, excuse me. And I realized now years later, I was grappling with my alcoholism. I could almost see Kubrick coming back from the grave and going, oh, I made a movie.
01:09:02
Speaker
that was about a guy yada yada yada but really it was about my you know need to control everything and in doing so squeezing all feeling and potential character development out of my out of my work of art. Yeah no i think that's absolutely right and there's something about. When you watch a movie that's about a bad person where the bad person is foregrounded or when you read a book you know reading the lead to where the main characters.
01:09:29
Speaker
a child rapist, right? And in some ways, I think that is sometimes maybe the pinnacle of art is to portray a bad person in a way that draws you in so that you despise the person, but you want to keep spending time with them at the same time, maybe the ultimate trick that a storyteller can pull off. And it's very easy, not very easy necessarily, but it's relatively easy if you're a savvy
01:09:56
Speaker
reader or audience member to understand that you're being shown behavior that the artist does not endorse. He wants you to see this behavior, he wants you to confront it, but he's not endorsing it just because he's spending a lot of time with the character who's behaving that way. When you watch The Shining and you see Jack Nicholson verbally abusing Shelley Duvall, you know, when she comes in and says, radio says it's going to snow tomorrow,
01:10:24
Speaker
And he gives her a look of infinitely restrained, supreme patience and says, what do you want me to do about it? Right. And then it just escalates from there and there and there. Right. I feel like I'm never sure whether a part of Kubrick isn't really on the sidelines rooting Jack on.
01:10:46
Speaker
Like if on some level he actually condones this behavior and he's making a movie about it because he condones it. And that to me suggests that there's something, there's some heart, some fundamental heart that's just missing in his work. That there's this great, at best there's a coldness at the heart of it and at worst there's something much scarier than coldness.
01:11:12
Speaker
I think it's an interesting thing to speculate about. And I'd also say, you know, one thing I didn't mention, I don't know if you felt this while watching, you use the word silly to describe the skeletons and cobwebs scene when, when Shelley Duvall, when Wendy is running through the halls. I agree. One word we haven't used is comedic. And I actually think as weird as it sounds, the more I watched Nicholson's character, Jack do what he did, I was like,
01:11:42
Speaker
Oh, this is right on the line. Actually, I had a few times where I actually laughed because it was so over the top. And I know we're watching someone purportedly losing their mind and thinking about killing their family. But the way that Nicholson does it, you're just like, I can't help but feel like there's actually a comedic strain that's sort of running through this whole thing on some level. It's a bizarre thing to say, but
01:12:08
Speaker
It's on the face of its horror film, but on some level it's a comedy in Kubrick's hands. Well, so do you think then, because maybe we're missing something. I mean, if you watch Dr. Strangelove, which I would argue is a masterpiece, it's very, very obvious that it's satirical and that
01:12:30
Speaker
Kubrick has figured out how to get his actors to play serious in a comedic way, right? And all the fantastic shots we get of like General Buck Turgenson's face and everything, and how to get George C. Scott to give a comedic performance simply by being as earnest as he can. I don't think that's happening in The Shining. In other words, do you think that Kubrick is trying to sometimes be funny and we're just missing it?
01:13:00
Speaker
No, I actually just think Nicholson really does go full loco and just leans into it in a way that is delicious. And in spite of, I agree with you, obviously, it's a deeply disturbed but misogynistic character. The scene when she discovers what he's writing
01:13:22
Speaker
And they have that exchange on the staircase. His whole shtick there is hilarious if you really look at it from a certain point of view. And the performance is incredible. He does a great job the whole way through. But I feel like I dodged your misogyny question to some degree. So let me fold that in now.
01:13:46
Speaker
and I will cop to this. I'm like, maybe this is my own latent sexism coming out, but I was reading the character of Wendy as the viewer as actually kind of annoying. I was feeling annoyed by her, certainly not to the degree that her husband in the film was, Jack Torrance, and I don't condone any of that behavior, but I do feel like she actually was
01:14:13
Speaker
I don't know what the word is, but Kubrick maybe did position her in such a way that the audience members would find her a little annoying, which would gain some sympathy in the Jack Torrance department and sort of make this all somehow a little more workable in the mind of the viewer. But Wendy's not annoying in the book. I do find her annoying as a character in the film.
01:14:40
Speaker
So again, maybe that's my own latent sexism. Maybe that was Kubrick wanting on some level to present her that way, you know? Yeah, and is he? It's an interesting question because I've struggled with the same thing because I also find her annoying in the movie. She's simpering, she says vapid things sometimes, and she says things that are not vapid in a way that is
01:15:07
Speaker
seems designed to be off-putting, and I have asked myself if there's some inherent misogyny that I have that is making me find her annoying, or if it's what I'm annoyed by is the fact that she isn't given any depth. In the book, when they're doing the walkthrough, when Allman is giving them the tour, Jack and Wendy are constantly
01:15:31
Speaker
exchanging glances because they're judging Alman because they think he's pompous and pretentious and they both think it and they're making eye contact when he's not looking at them.
01:15:42
Speaker
In the movie, Almond is a different sort of character, but he's giving them the tour, and he's talking about all the famous people who have stayed there, and Windy says, royalty? Which is just so, like, nothing at all like Windy in the book, you know, would never ever react that way. And from the beginning, you're like, oh, look at this, like, shallow, celebrity-obsessed woman.
01:16:04
Speaker
So I don't know, thinking that she's annoying is either it's either being sexist yourself or it's being annoyed at Kubrick's sexist portrayal of her. And I guess it does goes to go to show how hard it is to disentangle. I think I think it could cut both ways, but I do actually feel feel confident that Kubrick had had what do you want to call it? I don't know, positioned the character of Wendy.
01:16:31
Speaker
in just such a way that it would, they would find, the audience would find her slightly annoying. I do think that's there. And so, yeah, and I actually would like to learn a little bit more about, not for like Schadenfreude reasons, but just to get a fuller view of like, just what Shelley Duvall was subjected to while filming. I've read a little bit, I did say like,
01:16:58
Speaker
I mean, he's infamous for doing literally over 100 takes of seemingly even arbitrary scenes. In Eyes Wide Shut, there's a pool hall scene earlier in the film that's, you know, I mean, every, I guess, scene is consequential, but it's inconsequential compared to more important moments. Apparently, they spent two, if you imagine this man, two fucking weeks
01:17:23
Speaker
doing that scene over and over and over again and that baseball bat scene apparently was done 127 times. But only because of her. He didn't subject Nicholson to anywhere near the same level of repeat takes and like there's actual research exists on that like there is
01:17:44
Speaker
A point of diminishing returns with this shit like take three might be better than take one. And take eight might be the best take but there's a point at which you're not it's not helping anymore to reshoot you're just not you can do it ninety nine times but you're not gonna get better each time and that is a control thing but ultimately it's you know the question of whether.
01:18:07
Speaker
Kubrick was abusive in making the movie is a separate question from whether the result is good. And I think I've surprised myself, although I rewatched Full Metal Jacket a while back and I thought, Jesus, this is really not a very good movie.
01:18:27
Speaker
I mean, even that the climax emotional moment for me of that there's two, of course, there's the scene when Vincent D'Onofrio's character kills himself. That's very rough and important. But also the scene when the female sniper
01:18:43
Speaker
has to get killed at the end, and the other main protagonist is bearing witness to this atrocity. And even in those moments, I'm just like, somehow, even in what should be this emotional dagger to the heart, I don't feel anything other than an unsettledness. Somehow, clockwork orange unsettledness shines through rather than some deep insight into the human soul.
01:19:13
Speaker
Which I do think I'm looking for. I think Lynch, for instance, as fucked up as Lynch is, can do that at times. There's times when he's also, I think, could be charged with a certain sterileness in terms of feeling, but there's certainly some moments in Lynch where you're like, okay, he gets something.
01:19:33
Speaker
and he's doing it well and i'm connecting with it and on a feeling level not just cerebral somehow kubrick never gets there even in the most intimate seemingly intimate moments of his films. Yeah i completely agree i think this is sort of made me realize that i'm really not a stanley kubrick fan anymore and i i i maybe at one point in my life i was. Or maybe it was just that one point in my life i wanted to be.
01:20:01
Speaker
And once I let go of wanting to be, I realized I wasn't. Well, and this is with all due respect to Andrei Tarkovsky, who again, like there are moments in his movies that I deeply respect, but I am almost immediately suspicious of someone who's like, that's my favorite filmmaker, because they're so fucking hard. And not just like, just because they're hard doesn't mean that can't be your favorite filmmaker, but like they're more than just hard. This is like,
01:20:27
Speaker
you have to be a little bit masochistic to enter into a Tarkovsky film, even though it might have a real payoff on multiple levels. Like I just don't trust someone who's like, this is my favorite filmmaker. I'm like, give me a fucking break, man. No, it's not. You appreciate things about Tarkovsky, but if you say this is your you settle down to Tarkovsky more than any other filmmaker, I'm going to call bullshit. I just have to call bullshit.
01:20:57
Speaker
Next week on Candy Jail, we are releasing an emergency Tarkovsky episode. We're gonna start with Stalker and then go to Solaris and then just kinda keep it going after that. So join us if you want to, I think we'll start around six in the morning. We're gonna livestream this. I'm gonna say we gotta livestream it. We're gonna be giving away all kinds of great goodies. Like first off, our souls, we're gonna offer those gratis.
01:21:25
Speaker
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