obviously i wrote all this before the thread drifted to something completely different AGAIN at least 20 times. ugh.
it’s funny to me that king said that kubrick was a man who “thinks too much and feels too little” because that’s totally contrary to what makes the shining great. i understand why he said that, but where the movie really excels is in how vividly it conveys the
feeling of the psychic force the title alludes to.
it’s even there in the editing. that scene at the beginning where danny is in front of a mirror and gets hit with images from the overlook is a good example. even besides the memorability of the images he’s receiving, just the pace at which they’re shown feels “wrong” in a way that’s otherworldly and unsettling. the way the blood pouring out of the elevator seems to take forever, while the image of the twins appears and disappears so fast it’s almost subliminal (but instantly imprints itself in your mind). or how when the “ghosts” are shown they don’t occupy space and time in a consistent way. you’ll see an shot of mrs. massey walking towards jack, followed by one of her still floating lifelessly in the bathtub. it makes no practical sense, but intuitively resonates with me as how one would experience “shining” if it were real. (which it arguably is, but still.)
i haven’t seen most of his other movies, but with kubrick i get the impression that when he’s actually creating something, he’s not necessarily trying to go out of his way to be intellectual, he’s more focused on getting the visceral / psychological impact right. but he’s probably just one of those people who always seem to have weird, interesting theories about stuff in general (kind of like luka) that can’t help but come through in how he tells stories. like, i don’t know if the film is
about the genocide of native americans, etc. but those thematic forces can certainly explain a lot of the strange “minor” choices that crop up.
for example, yeah, it definitely seems to me like kubrick had some kind of “thing” about old boy network parties. as in, he was attentive to how they can epitomize this entrenched, aristocratic, epstein-style evil. which shapes the imagery in the second half of the shining (and in the book, king is gesturing towards that when he has jack become obsessed with the history of the hotel). i mean that’s obviously been
a dynamic in hollywood forever. that’s why i was wondering if
this story could be true.
anyways ignore all that. the important thing about the shining is that while kubrick’s adaptation can feel like a comedy, the king adaptation literally
is a comedy: