Why Stephen King hated the movie adaptation of The Shining?
“This book is so fit to be made into a movie” — if you are a reader this is a frequent feeling. When I read Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series I was as thrilled as Jason Bourne was while exploring the tatters of his life. I had a thought running constantly in my head that this book series is worthy of a trilogy. I would love to see that movie if they ever made one.
It turns out there was a trilogy of Bourne movies only I didn’t know. Without giving it a further thought I watched them all and came out disappointed. I was offended at their execution. There were so many questions racing in my mind. I am sure they had their reasons but why in God’s sweet world would you do that to a successful book series? I was a blogger back then too (I think I was a blogger since God created this world). I expressed my anguish in my post that no one ever read. My expression was closest to ranting but who was reading my blog anyway so I can say I was eloquently miffed at their attempt in my blog post.
I read The Shining by Stephen King. The book reminded me of a scene from Friends where Joey kept the book in a freezer. It was poetically apt because it was one of the coldest horror books I had read. I never thought I would get the creepers while reading a horror book. I am not sure whether Stephen King is a magician or the devil reincarnated. His stories read like you are sitting at a campfire in a jungle and an old man is narrating the haunted tales of people he buried. It has the same effect.
I have read several books and watched movies based upon them but in almost all of them, I had the same feeling — that the book was better than the movie. I am not alone though. Even Stephen King isn’t happy with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining despite it winning many accolades. Why does this happen to so many of us?
I got my answer when I wrote several stories of my own. If you don’t know by now I have written two books in fiction, one is a novel and another is a book of short stories. I am the best fiction writer in India if you believe the 20 people who have read my books. Sorry to digress from the point.
When I embarked on the journey of writing the book I realized that no matter how good, how majestic, how beautiful the movie is it will always be second to the book. Look at the Harry Potter series. Warner Brothers did a splendid and expensive job in bringing JK Rowling’s characters to life and yet people who have read the book series like me would always go back to the same memories, not the one Warner Brothers gave but the memories they developed while reading the books.
As a reader when you open a book and embark upon a journey, you are not embarking on a writer’s vision. It’s a myth that a writer makes you see things. The writer only describes to the best of his abilities, it’s the reader’s mind that fills the gap and creates the perfect visual. If I tell you that I am writing this article on a train passing through the lush green pastures of Grindelwald in Switzerland, you will have a vision ready in your mind. I only gave you the cue.
I hate to disappoint you but I am sitting all alone in my room because I cannot afford that train experience. You got my point, though.
In The Shining I can still remember the Overlook Hotel from the book. I remember where I was while reading the book (maybe wetting my pants). I have seen the movie too and I remember Jack Nicholson going crazy. I also remember vividly the bar scene and all the blood. I have better and more visuals from the book because these were conjured by my mind and not provided to me by a filmmaker.
Filmmakers and studios spend an enormous amount of money in recreating every scene for you. They even build the most appropriate movie set based on the book and yet we as an audience come out disappointed compared to the book. That’s because they are giving you the visuals and the experience. You are not doing any work. Your mind only needs to process the visual depictions from the theatre. The hardest task here is to remember. You don’t need any further processing.
This visual from the 90mm screen contradicts the visual that your mind has conjured in your head. When a writer sits down to type the scene he has a set of visuals but the scene isn’t as complete as you see it in a movie. It comes in parts of several hundreds of fragments. He can see a table with an inkpot, and an opened book with some paragraphs highlighted, the pages flipping because of the air coming from the fan above making noises that act as a company for the writer in an otherwise lonely house that was once beautiful before his wife hung herself from the fan making it noisy.
Do you see what I did there? When I paint a picture of something like that using the words your mind will conjure up some image. That image will never be the same as the one in the writer’s head. That is why the writer tells the story but it’s the reader who imagines it. It’s the reader who completes it.
There are some scenes where specificity is important like a woman trying to arrange her umbrella with a knife in one hand and a spare key of her cheating boyfriend’s house in another. You, as a reader, need to know specific details for the scene to register in your head, but the aura in the scene comes from your mental imagery.
That is the primary reason why reading fiction is more fulfilling than watching the same story on the screen. As a kid, you would love Batman or Superman in the comics more than on the screen. The behavior traits you attribute to Batman would be more prominent while reading comics with the help of your brain’s visual medium than on the theatre watching some director’s creative imagination.
If you hadn’t read a book before watching a movie you wouldn’t come out as disappointed as the reader would. That’s why The Shining is such a mega-hit despite having disappointed many along the way.
So, when Stephen King saw the movie on the screen he hated it because that’s not how he imagined it while writing the book but that’s how Stanley Kubrick imagined it. Had Stanley been a reader Stephen King would have forgiven him but Stanley imposed his vision, turned it into a movie, and gave it to everyone. This cycle will continue to go on.
The bond between a writer and a reader is sacred because they are bound by the visuals emanating from the character interacting with the scene in a unique story. The author provides the visual, the reader completes it.