King vs Kubrick

Featured

Tags

possessive individualism, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King, The Shining

I was always fond of the phrase, “the book is always better than the movie.” Then Stephen King wrote The Shining, and Stanley Kubrick made a film by the same name.

Let’s compare and contrast the book and film, shall we?

Title

Book: The Shining

Movie: The Shining

Setting

Book: Overlook Hotel in Colorado

Movie: Overlook Hotel in Colorado

Operative Motif

Book: a wasp’s nest

Movie: a maze

Principle Conflict

Book: (literal) Ghosts of hotel seduce father to kill mother and child; (figurative) hive mentality vs bourgeois individualism; addiction vs sobriety.

Movie: (literal) Ghosts of hotel seduce father to kill mother and child; (figurative) White settler colonialism vs. everyone else; industrial capitalism vs. nature; the leisure class vs. the working class; patriarchy vs. women and children.

MacGuffin

Book: Jack’s drinking.

Movie: Danny’s ability to ‘shine’.

Jack’s Principle Weapon

Book: a mallet from the lawn game of roque.

Movie: an axe for clearing forests.

The Supernatural vs. Science Cliche

Book: Stock characters are present everywhere in the King universe to support a main conceit indulged by seemingly all purveyors of supernatural horror, and therefore common to all of it: science and rationality are ill equipped to apprehend and control the spirit world. To believe otherwise is folly and brings disaster. This is why a doctor, a cop, a lawyer, a scientist or a government agent always appear in such narratives as well intended, but naive and ineffective, allies to the main character(s). There are many in the book.

Movie: one scene involving a child psychologist establishes Danny’s gift will be misunderstood as pathology.

Supernatural anthropomorphic manifestations

Book: Topiary animals. A firehose. A boiler. A lamp (just kidding).

Movie: None. Only ghosts.

Bullshit Pop Culture Reference Worked Into The Narrative As Though It Was A Postcard Tacked Onto A Refrigerator

Book: Creedence Clearwater’s “Bad Moon Rising” lyrics portend a coming snowstorm?

Movie: none. Kubrick is meticulous and reviles pop culture.

Bullshit Literary Reference Worked Into The Narrative As Though It Was A Postcard Tacked Onto A Refrigerator

Book: Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death.

Movie: none. Unless you count the maze, in which case it is effectively worked in and therefore not bullshit.

Annoying Incongruity

Book: Caribou in Colorado. (elk yes, but not caribou).

Movie: none

Jack’s Choice of Liquor

Book: Gin Martini.

Movie: Bourbon, of course.

Jack’s Typewriter

Book: Underwood–Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Kerouac.

Movie: Adler–Nazis.

Source of Evil

Book: Bad people who did illegal and immoral things in the hotel, then got trapped there in the afterlife.

Movie: The hotel itself–a monument to the parasitical leisure class that demands everyone become a ‘Jeeves’ to serve them. The worst fucking place on the planet where the spoils of exploitation and war coagulate in shimmering infinity pools of conspicuous consumption. Our hell, their heaven.

Metaphor Used By Dick To Explain the Presence of Ghosts

Book: “Fingernail clippings and boogers” which does not work as a metaphor as both reference the entirely quotidian and therefore not frightening sloughing off that every human being experiences.

Movie: Dick says, “Burnt toast”–the perfect metaphor to represent traces a ghost leaves behind. Burnt, as in something went wrong with the cooking of the toast such that an unpleasant smell would linger. Ghosts are emotional remnants made material in our world because of unfinished business of a nefarious nature.

What Jack Means When He Says, “White man’s burden, Lloyd, my man. White man’s burden.”

Book: The civilizing mission of paint by numbers genre fiction is a heavy burden.

Movie: what a suckup asshole says to impress his bosses.

What the Ghosts Represent

Book: All the ghosts are evil; all desire to continue their evil deeds–marital infidelity, gangsterism, murder, as a manifestation of their “single group intelligence”. The source of this evil is not institutional, structural, historical, political or otherwise outside of the individual. It is located within us, in our denial of the possessive individualism at the heart of the bourgeois family.

Movie: The source of evil is the hotel itself, which cannot be separated from its history, in part erected on the bones of indigenous peoples. It is rabidly racist and demands absolute servility on the part of inferiors, most pointedly workers and their families.

Racist, Homophobic, Classist or Misogynist Scenes That Contribute To Plot Or Character Development.

Book: None

Movie: Grady calls Dick Hallorran a “nigger” in the all important restroom scene. Elsewhere Jack says, “just a little problem with the old sperm bank upstairs. Nothing I can’t handle, though.” That’s about it. Sparing, short and devastating. But Kubrick doesn’t wallow in it as King does–as a teenager expressing unfiltered repressed emotions.

Gratuitous Racist, Homophobic, Classist or Misogynist Scenes That Don’t Contribute To Plot Or Character Development.

Book: an endless parade of cringe worthy and vicarious bigotries apparently pleasurable for some people to read. Emblematic is where King has a young Dick Hallorran fire a “Nigger Chaser” firework (bottle rocket) at a wasps nest. This makes no sense even on its own terms.

Movie: none.

Resolution

Book: Serve different masters. In Wendy’s case, following escape from the Overlook Hotel, this is made possible by the generosity of Jack’s former alcoholic buddy, Al, who can be distinguished by two things: he’s rich and with his connections can get Wendy a job, and he’s emotionally stable, having defeated the demon of alcoholism. Oh, and he’s part owner of the hotel?! This makes perfect sense if the idea of the hotel is not what the problem is, just its mismanagement. This satisfying ending is a continuation of the real horror unaddressed by the novel.

Movie: Dick is killed by Jack. Wendy and Danny escape by snowcat. Jack then freezes to death in the maze.

Symbol of Eternal Horror

Book: something about August 1945 and “group intelligence”. Almost completely unintelligible, as though King finally, mercifully, tired of typing.

Movie: Jack is immortalized in a framed group photo of rich, white revelers at an eternal Fourth of July celebration, circa 1921.

In conclusion.

All of this flaunts two unavoidable truths about the world we live in: first, that the true source of horror in the world is capitalism, a system of private property and markets that is eminently rational in organization, yet bat shit crazy in its unrelenting imposition of the inequality and suffering that are the unavoidable hallmarks of its rule; and, secondly, the only way out of this maze-like house of mirrors horror show is collective struggle and a socialist future. Everything else is a part of that horror show.

Kubrick, brilliant nihilist that he was, ably deconstructed the hypocrisy and hubris at the heart of the capitalist narrative. He acknowledged that horror and identified its sources, but without any exit strategy, (as a nihilist he didn’t believe such a thing could ever exist) he succumbs to the traditional failure of nihilism: cynicism and its doppelgänger, fatalism.

Kubrick is still preferable to King, who misidentifies the true source of horror in the world we live in, then prescribes more of it as a way to escape it.

END

Why I Hate Stephen King And Love Stanley Kubrick

Featured

Posted by Jonathan Mozzochi in Essay

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, George Lucas, Jonathan Swift, Magic Negro, Repressive Desublimation, Stanley Kubrick, Star Wars, Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, Stranger Things, The Duffer Brothers, The Green Mile, The Shining

I hated Stephen King’s books when they came out and I was in high school. I had to read more than one, just to keep up with the pop culture references. I loathe them even more, today. For me his low point (to date) was writing the teleplay from his book, The Shining for the TV series of the same name (1997). There is no better example of King’s narcissism, hubris and corresponding lack of talent than this laugh out loud effort to ‘correct’ what is arguably the greatest horror film of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). The only thing to be said about the television version is that it is indeed faithful to King’s book, while Kubrick’s is not. But that’s exactly the point: King’s writing has always been cloying and soft in the middle, unconsciously mendacious in that uniquely ‘ugly American’ way. At once insipid and preternaturally neurotic, the horrors visited upon Stephen King’s Americans–and they are always stock Americans–are the character flaws and psychological failures of individuals, even when they take an institutional form.

This is precisely what Kubrick has never trafficked in, the melodrama and kitsch that characterize contemporary morality plays in the wasteland of genre fiction.

What Kubrick did with King’s pablum is extraordinary–he made a mediocre text obsessed (as always) with individual themes of personal responsibility and psychology into an indictment of American exceptionalism and universalism. And it was terrifying, but in ways that were difficult to verbalize.

Kubrick linked profoundly disturbing themes of child abuse, murderous misogyny and alcoholism with capitalism, racism and white settler genocide–he made the personal, political, and the political, personal.

This achievement is partially recognized through the fanciful documentary film Room 237, (2012). The filmmakers make much of Kubrick’s fanatical attention to detail, noting the frequent appearance of symbols that reference two genocides–those of Native America and the Holocaust. And I agree that the repeated appearance of certain symbols–cans of baking powder and a typewriter, for instance, were not incidental nor accidental; but intentional. Kubrick puts them there for reasons cited above.

Room 237 is an interesting homage to Kubrick’s The Shining but it doesn’t take King to task. As befitting the pay-to-play state of modern academia, it also includes a lengthy, tedious and stupid section that is incidental to the film, repeating conspiracy theories that Kubrick assisted in faking the 1969 moon landing. The film also fails to note what is hidden in plain view within the important scene that takes place in the bathroom between Jack and the ghost of the previous caretaker, Grady. Grady refers to the Black head cook, played by the iconic actor Scatman Crothers, as a “nigger.” Kubrick was as careful crafting language as he was with symbols, so that’s there for a reason, too. Jack’s mental illness is brought on not least because he craves acceptance into upper management at a resort hotel that caters to the well heeled, white and rich, who are forever dancing and drinking at a Fourth of July celebration. The price Jack must pay for admittance to the upper crust is the sacrifice of his family. The character played by Scatman Crothers is the only one trying to protect them. For King its all about the ‘demons’ of alcoholism and the ‘salvation’ of AA. To King, Crothers is the ‘magical negro’, a frequent staple of his stock and trade (The Green Mile, The Stand) but in Kubrick’s hands the character represents something much more.

King always resolves whatever conflicts he conjures within a morality play of possessive individualism. His characters–an endless parade of pop psychology tropes torn from a high school year book–are as wooden as his plots: The magical negro, the overburdened patriarch, the evil foreign interloper, the randy daughter, the undersexed milf, the touched giant, the addicted adolescent, so on and so forth. Each character a world unto themselves; all forbidden from exercising the only possible resolution to their woes–radical collective action.

King hated Kubrick’s movie because it skewered the very myths King had spent his entire literary career so passionately defending–the bourgeois family, the myth of a melting pot America, the ‘up by your bootstraps meritocracy’, Democracy vs the Evil Empire, etc.

All of this is now reappearing with a vengeance through a virulent strain of reactionary nostalgia for 1980s America, which is really the golden era of Stephen King. And he has imitators galore: Here come the amnesiac and conspiratorial Duffer Brothers, and Stranger Things, followed by Steven Spielberg and his Ready Player One. Both try and recast conformist and repressive strains of pop culture such as Van Halen and Yacht Rock, Dungeons and Dragons and Back To The Future as rebellion. The naval gazing, Wall Street speculating, anti communist computer nerds of Reagan’s America are the hero’s making America Great Again. There is a term for this, it’s called repressive de-sublimation. Look it up.

As an old ghost of antifascism I must draw the analogy: King’s entire oeuvre is to horror what the Anti-Defamation League is to antifascism, the Nature Conservancy is to ecology, or the 2017 Women’s March is to feminism. The latter the result of celebrities ‘leaning’ so hard into their ‘resistance’ they fell over the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated. Ooh. Scary!

Kubrick, while not a leftist, and probably not a feminist, was at least my kind of nihilist, unsparing and sharp, his erudite vitriol always serving to clarify relations of power, rather than obscure or justify them.

He may not have had an alternative to the world of shit within which we live, but his work helps us not mistake that world for a flower garden, which is more than one can say for all the typing Stephen King has ever clacked out. “All Work And No Play Makes Stephen A Dull Boy.”

Aside from the greatest American horror film ever made, Kubrick also made the greatest film of political satire: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb (1964!?!). A great satirist needs a wicked sense of humor, and I think Kubrick took some inspiration from Jonathan Swift’s, A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick (1729). You remember what that proposal was, yes?

Did Kubrick also create the greatest American antiwar film ever made in Full Metal Jacket? (1987).

A Clockwork Orange (1971) is a searing indictment of the postwar boom in youth subcultures, consumerism, social control and the inherent violence of the state.

2001: A Space Odyssey exposes every asinine iteration of George Lucas’ Star Wars as the juvenile cartoons they are. Yes, I hate Star Wars, too and I don’t care that it was originally conceived as having something to do with protesting the Vietnam War. They are all wretched films.

Long Live Kubrick!

END