A caveat: This is not a review of Stephen King's book The Shining. This is not a comparison between Stanley Kubrick's movie The Shining and King's book. Yes, they are very different works with significant details changed from book to movie. But I'm reviewing Kubrick's film because his changes have something to say about his thoughts on storytelling and storytellers. Are we good? Okay. Let's move on, shall we?
There are lots of movies based on King's stories that say a lot about his thoughts on the act of writing and the character of writers, but the movie version of The Shining gives us a rarer peek into the mind of Stanley Kubrick about those subjects.
Many smarter folks than me have analyzed this movie and come up with many varying ideas about what it is saying about several different subjects, from the genocide of the indigenous Americans to the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis in WWII, to it having something to do with faking the moon landing (in my mind the most ludicrous of the theories, but I digress). I, however, will look at what I feel this brilliant film has to say about Kubrick's view of the writer and the work of writing, and I think he tells us a great deal.
Let's start with the oft-told idea of a writer having to "kill your darlings." Both Kubrick and King treat that in the most literal sense in the story of Danny and his family. But it's too easy to get distracted by that notion. Neither is saying that writing is actually about murdering your family.
There's something be said for the idea of getting away to write, but we've covered that in several other reviews, so we won't go into that here, and besides, it's just more surface stuff Kubrick can distract us with.
Let's move on to "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy." Of course, he's correct in this. As writers, the time we spend away from the keyboard is as important for us to recharge our physical and emotional and (most importantly) our imaginative batteries. Writers who live only in books, well, they aren't really living at all. A great writer once said to write what you know (and yeah, I know that statement has been abused), and to some degree, it's an important truth. Writers must live to write. We to experience in order to fuel our fictional dreams.
But that's the real point of Kubrick's concept of the writer either, not completely. That's more surface distraction.
Where King lets his writer hero slowly descend into madness from father to writer to killer, Kubrick starts with a manic writer and all but ignores the father role, giving viewers a crazy Jack pretty much throughout the film. That's a huge change. But it's another indicator that Kubrick is telling his own story and he isn't talking about family dynamics. He's talking about something else.
Did you know that the maze isn't a maze at all in the novel? It's a garden. The maze was added to the movie as a visually terrifying change that would play out better on camera. I think it's more than that. The hedge maze isn't the only maze in Kubrick's vision. There's also the carpet pattern (which changes from scene to scene), the changing layouts of the Overlook Hotel itself (try to map it, you can't), and all the mazes begin when the family arrives at the Overlook when Jack is finally off the single path of the mountain's winding road and ready to begin to write. He moves from a single path to a myriad of possible directions.
What is Kubrick saying about writing (at least in my interpretation)? Writers exist in mazes when we create, and we are captured inside them by the vast potential directions at our disposal.
Think about your plotting. No matter how you do it, it's not a linear progression, not until it's edited and sent away. Then it sets in the glue. But before then, it's all about the changes in plot, shifts in focus, side trips that become important, things we thought were important that become dredge to be tossed in the bin. The act of creating a story is the act of living in a maze.
So many options. So many choices. We haunt our mazes, and we are haunted by them.
In the book, John (not Jack) is trapped in the boiler room and then the hotel blows up. In the movie Jack dies frozen in the hedge maze, one that doesn't even exist in the book. (Some say the world will end if fire and some in ice...) Danny backtracks to stay alive to leave the maze, all of them. Jack moves forward, further "being" in the maze. Ponder that for a moment.
The writer dies in the maze.
Read that again.
The writer dies in the maze.
The writer (when he/she/they leave the "real world" and begin to write), lives in the maze and dies in the maze. The stories we tell, both the untold bits that float untyped or unwritten in our brains and the finished (or unfinished) ones we actually get down on paper (or in computer files), are the world of the writer. We are in that world when we write. We are in that world when we work a day job. We are in that world when we visit friends and family. The little bits and bobs of story never leave us alone. The maze travels with us.
And when we die, the stories we didn't get to tell and still wish we could have had time to, will be with us still. Just like Jack, we die in our maze.
That's not a bad thing, I think. In spite of all the horror imagery of this very visually disturbing film, Kubrick's message to writers is one of hope. There's a part of us called "writer" that exists outside the part of us called "father," "mother," middle manager," or any other title, and we become it when we exit the highway's path and enter the maze world where stories lie. Fortunately, unlike Jack, we have the ability to step back into the highway's path again and resume the role of father, mother, or middle manager.
But there is still a part of us that stays in that maze and takes it with us. And if we're lucky, like Jack, when we are actually gone from this world, we enter the stories we found and live on through them, smiling in the "images" we leave in our words.
Or I could just be as loony as that “moon landing” person.
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