Movie Reviews for Writers — The Shining

 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’s ideas 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 as 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. Read more:

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