King vs. Kubrick: The Origins of Evil (2020)
sensesofcinema.com
sensesofcinema.com
I didn't realise that this happened:
>Not once did Kubrick say anything about King’s constant criticism of the film and, in the same quiet fashion, took his revenge: since he still held the rights to the novel, one of his stipulations for giving them up was that King would be prevented from further commenting on his film; the other was $1,5 million. In a stunning move, Kubrick bought King’s silence but had King pay for it.
I'd seen a few analyses of the film, but was quite surprised and amazed when I happened across the Overlooked! youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr6PgWFs0Pw
I'd never noticed Jack's glances towards the camera, but once you notice them, it's clear that they were totally intentional and designed to unnerve the viewer (he's looking at me!). It's this attention to detail that makes Kubrick the master that he is.
(When you start pulling on that thread—the viewer as a vital part of the fiction, as really present, as encouraging and complicit in what takes place—and make that the focus of a horror film, you get Funny Games)
It's good.
I can imagine that King has a very deep connection to The Shining as Jack is probably the closest that King has got to an autobiographical character.
Kimg has a few autobiographical characters, but surely the closest has to be when he literally self inserted himself into the gunslinger series.
I've also seen the theory that Jack Torrance in the film had been sexually abusing Danny. There's various links with the use of bears (e.g. the fellatio scene with the man in the bear suit) and the subtle use of pornography around the hotel (e.g. Jack reading PlayGirl in the hotel lobby).
He's a great writer and I was following him on X, but his constant attacks on random people who don't share his political ideas had me.
He's still a great writer but probably a real AH too...
This happens in software development, too: someone is so single-mindedly fixated on their own approach to building understandable, maintainable software that they can't recognize understandable, maintainable software built any other way.
I've seen something happen a few times with senior engineers who are being integrated into a team. It makes sense for their first task to be a fairly easy change in the best codebase, the "model" codebase where everything runs smoothly and there aren't any nasty surprises. You won't show them the cesspool codebase that causes all your problems until later.
So you give them the easy problem in the easy codebase, and they react like they've been dropped into the pits of hell. They might say, "Where's the dependency injection?" or "Oh my god, you're instantiating this object directly instead of using a factory!" or something else, depending on their taste. They don't see any sign of the techniques they would use to build maintainable software, so they assume the worst. You reassure them: we don't have any quality or maintainability issues with this codebase. It's fast, it doesn't break, everyone understands it, and it has absorbed every requirements change product has thrown at us for eighteen months, tripling in size in the process, without losing those desirable qualities.
At this point they have a choice. They can keep an open mind, see if what you're telling them proves to be true in practice, and maybe learn how a codebase can be understandable and maintainable without looking like they expect, or they can let their obsession with their own techniques be their final thought on the issue.
Obviously this is much more crucial for software engineers, who almost always work collaboratively, than for a novelist who works alone. A novelist with a track record of success doesn't have as many reasons to appreciate the techniques of other creators as a software engineer does.
Kubric was also a sadist who was known for torturing actors on set. When you see how Shelly Duval was a mental mess, about to be mentally broken down… that part wasn’t acted.
The business or local culture here and there sometimes favors sociopath and enable them to the maximum. That is however different claim.
Collaborative art requires, I think, a strong hand and it’s often rough over people’s feelings.
I would say the opposite. Collaboration, including in art, have better results if the people running the show are not complete assholes.
A strong hand "rough over people’s feelings" is more likely to end up with completely crappy result. It does not mean that being doormat would get you good results, but these kind of people destroy team motivation and engagement - regardless of whether we talk about software development or art.
In present day terms where books are constantly, dramatically changed for film so far from the original plot that they’re basically different stories with polar opposite ideologies King’s criticisms feel a lot less heavy hitting than they may have in the past.
In the interest of fairness I'm not sure that I could do much better since I've not written long-form in years.
As with "Heart of Darkness" / "Apocalypse Now", this gets at one point I always bring up in these contexts: a book and movie can be related, but they are distinct works of art. (HoD/AN being an extreme example of distance.)
"The book was better" always strikes me as unhelpful. What is communicated visually is radically different than what is communicated in prose. Plus, an actor is an artist, too. "Here's Johnny!" cannot be achieved in text the way Nicholson delivered it on the screen.
King himself is standing too close to the prose work to assess whether the film is any good. Of course Kubric couldn't match a vision that exists in King's head.
King doesn't have to worry at all about what the score is, or how to film a wall of blood. It's simply not part of the medium. The requirements and constraints are completely different.
I think that the difference is deeper then that. Film writing tend to lean toward schematic and dumbed down motivations/characters. It is not that it would be impossible to write more smartly for film, it is possible and it was done on occasion.
But most of the time, when book is adapted every character becomes more of his own stereotype - whether by gender, age or type of person. Nuance is killed. Likewise with plot events.
Equating the script to the document seems a bit off, IMO.
Writing a bit more complex characters/plot takes skills contemporary film writers just don't have - even if the source material has that. And it would take a bit of additional time too, so they don't have option to develop those skills.
(Not to refute your point that modern scripts are more Hemingway than Updike in terms of linguistic sophistication.)
I bet they do now.
However, it does sort of point to a major characteristic in King’s typical “could’ve been good” villains: As opposed to totally evil characters, eg Bev’s husband in It, who are driven by their primal urges, these characters would have landed in a whole different place had the dice landed differently. Overall they are good but with a few weaknesses, which evil forces manipulate to pull them under. Another good example of such a character is Nick, in The Stand.
If you replace “evil forces” above by “life’s circumstances”, I think this to be a good description of how real-life villains are made.
Sucks if you have the attention span to handle more, for example if you came from a pre-internet reading culture
on edit: in a way this article on the Trinitonian exemplifies a common strategy for Internet writing, the TLDR article that summarizes another longer form article, or a number of related articles, as this one summarizes a bunch of the Senses of Cinema article https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2020/the-shining-at-40/king-v... (although not in the traditional way that one summarizes)
Often of course such a summary article is written by the same person who wrote the original and related articles.
Maximum Overdrive[1] certainly provides some support for this hypothesis. About the only good part of this movie is the soundtrack, which was provided by AC/DC.
Stephen King: The movie is about all these vehicle goings crazy and running by themselves, so we started shooting a lot of gas pedals, clutches, transmissions, things like that, operating themselves. We had one sequence: The gas pedal goes to the floor, the gas pedal goes up, the clutch goes in, the gears shifts by itself, the clutch comes out and the gas pedal goes back to the floor again. We were able to shoot everything but the transmission from the driver's side door. The transmission was a problem, because we kept seeing either a corner of the studio of a reflection.
So I said: This is no problem, we will simply take the camera around to the other side and shoot the transmission from there. Total silence. Everybody looked at everybody else. You know what's happening here, right? I'd crossed the axis. It was like farting at the dinner party. Nobody wanted to say you've made a terrible mistake. I didn't get this job because I could direct or because I had any background in film; I got it because I was Stephen King.
So finally [cameraman] Daniele Nannuzzi told me I'd crossed the 180-degree axis and that this simply wasn't done, and although I didn't understand what it was, I grasped the idea that I was breaking a rule.
Later on, I called George [Romero] up on the phone and I said, "What is this axis shit?" and he laughed his head off and explained it, and I said, "Can you break it -- the rule?" He said, "It's better not to, but if you have to, you can. If you look at The Battleship Potemkin" (which I never have), "it crosses the axis all the time, and the guy [Sergei Eisenstein] gets away with it." Then I saw David Lynch and asked him: "What's this about crossing the axis?" and he burst out laughing and said, "That always gets me." And I asked if you could do it, and he gave me this startled look and said, "Stephen, you can do anything. You're the director." Then he paused and said, "But it doesn't cut together."
https://sites.google.com/site/cultoddities/home/carrie/carri...
Aaaand... there's actually a much more relevant set of quotes about The Shining, like:
There's a lot to like about it. But it's a great big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside. You can sit in it, you can enjoy the smell of the leather upholstery -- the only thing you can't do is drive it anywhere. So I would do everything different. The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre. Everything about it screams that from the beginning to the end, from plot decisions to that final scene -- which has been used before on "The Twilight Zone."
I can't help but think keeping Jack's character more faithful to King's character of a good man slowly being corrupted by the hotel and resisting would have really changed the pace of Kubrick's movie for the worse, and taken away a lot of his really beautiful compositions.
I think King's panned adaptation for the 1997 miniseries is evidence supporting that Kubrick's character adaptations were good choices for the film he was making / the medium shift.
Edit: not sure why you're being downvoted, I think your characterisation of the changes Kubrick made to Jack's character is entirely valid
As a canonical series, it's a jumbled mess of barely connected themes tied together only by Kingcs own ego (maybe that's the point, but its still narcissistic).
At some point he even tries to take credit for Harry Potter and Star Wars, albeit in a vague "everything's connected" type of way.
I tell anybody who wants to read the series to simply read the first book, and the last chapter of the last book.
He's a brilliant writer, but his strength lies in leaving some things to mystery, instead of micromanaging his worlds.
I don't know about that. The whole idea behind the series is to serve as a recounting of Roland's mistakes along the way, and how he progressively refines his course at each iteration. Cutting to the proverbial chase just leaves the reader (and Roland) stuck in the cycle forever. You have to suffer alongside him (and his companions) to get it, I think.
By the end it was obvious that King was writing from a place that is uncomfortably familiar on a personal level. "Christ, I'm so tired of this project. If I were less conscientious, I could just walk away from it. Let's chop out some features and link in some third-party libraries so we can ship it already."
I think even his short stories adapt better to movies as well…Shawshank, Stand By Me, The Green Mile…all three to me are simply awesome movies but were heavily adapted from the source story. Misery was good as well, but I kind of blame the casting of Kathy Bates as a genius move that really made that one work.
He did.
Having read/seen both, Kubrick's vision is without a doubt better.