Stanley Kubrick's the Shining Maps of the Overlook
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One item struck me as most singular and evocative of Kubrick's wild attention to detail.
The archivist brought out a box containing a full ream of A4 paper on which was repeatedly typed "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" from the famous scene. Every page had a slightly different layout, mistakes and all, for 500 pages. Every single one typed by hand. We stood in awe at this grotesque achievement used to fill only a few seconds of film.
And then the archivist brought out the identical boxes for Italian, French, Spanish, German, all typed by hand with a different, locally chilling phrase for each.
My shock at this has almost outlasted my admiration.
In French - "Un Tiens vaut mieux que deux Tu l’auras" (What you have is worth much more than what you will have)
In Spanish - "No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano" (No matter how early you get up, you can’t make the sun rise any sooner)
In German - "Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen" (Never put off until tomorrow what can be done today)
The German is arguably the most chilling when you consider the story
Does this imply that the phrase itself doesn't matter to the story? I've seen people online try to draw subtextual theories from the (English) phrase.
I personally like that that was localized for each language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr6PgWFs0Pw (Overlooked! A detail in The Shining that you’ve never seen)
It examines the fact that Jack keeps stealing glances straight at the camera throughout the film (no-one else does this). Probably the best explanation is that Kubrick wanted to unnerve the audience and it's very effective.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shining_(miniseries)
That being said, I understand why King the author doesn't like it. Kubrick carved something out of this novel which really wasn't there in the first place, he only needed the story as a vehicle of meaning. To King, this may have appeared as an arrogant (or even condescending) abuse of his story.
Agreed and I wonder if the same could be said of 2001?
The Sentinel provided the idea for the monolith on the moon being an alien 'intelligent life detector' (i.e. to detect when humans had achieved spaceflight). But it has no man-apes, no Jupiter mission, no HAL, no star-gate sequence. The bulk of the plot came from the Clarke-Kubrick collaboration, which had numerous other inputs [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey#Writing
> Clarke offered Kubrick six of his short stories, and by May 1964, Kubrick had chosen "The Sentinel" as the source material for the film
What were the layers of meaning? To me, the shining is kubricks most straight-forward movie.
I saw the movie in high school in the '00s, very faithful to the novel and the casting was even more amazing reading the book (which is 90% of directing, according to Scorsese (who was introduced to De Niro by De Palma)), and to me surpasses the source material. Hits harder as a linear narrative.
You might ultimately be right about why King was unhappy with Kubrick's film, but my understanding is that at least ostensibly King's fundamental concern is that the the film wasn't as sympathetic to Jack as he intended it to be. King meant for Jack to be a diseased but sympathetic victim of the hotel, and feels that the film portrayed Jack as a villain who is an interwoven part of the hotel's menace. I always assumed he felt attached to this issue because of his own struggles with substance use earlier in his life, with The Shining being part of his recovery and rehabilitation, and Jack being a sort of projection of how he felt.
That's just my general impressions though. I'm not either a King or Kubrick devotee, although I respect both a lot as artists. I do feel that the film in particular is a masterpiece, and have always felt a certain discrepancy between how I feel about the novel and the film, so I've probably read more about it than most film adaptations of books. I could easily be missing something important, or misunderstanding something.
Interesting how we could see it so differently. I think the book does an amazing job of showing the struggle of alcoholism, and more generally, how good people can do evil things. How we can be a good person that cares for and love others, and how circumstance, inner demons, and our choices can lead us to hurt the ones we love. Jack in the book clearly loves his family, but struggles with anger issues, impulse control, and alcoholism, mostly stemming from the abuse he endured at the hands of his violent, alcoholic father.
The ability to be inside Jack’s head, and King’s great writing, show Jack to be a man desperately trying overcome his trauma for his family that he deeply loves. His struggles to build trust that are undone in a moment of uncontrolled anger, while extreme, are very relatable and feel real. The Overlook is a supernatural externalization of inner demons. The ghosts poisoning his mind against his family represents paranoid thinking and trust issues that come from childhood trauma. He loved his father and all his father did was hurt him, and so eventually Wendy and Danny would hurt him too.
The movie did not explore any of this. Movie Jack barely tolerates his family from the beginning, and it isn’t much of a struggle to make him hate them. The movie takes the same basic story and uses it to explore very different things. I think the book and the movie are excellent and I don’t even really try to compare them, since they aren’t even trying to do the same thing.
The interior looks nothing like the Shining.
But, if you like to ski, Timberline is worth a trip. It's one of the few places where you can park near the top of the mountain and ski down. There's also a glacier that's open for skiing (almost) year round. (This is probably why the parking lot is mid-mountain instead of at the bottom.
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Following in line with the theme, I recently re-watched watched 2001. I can't seem to figure out where the spinning part of the ship is when I see the exterior shots.
Specifically, Discovery's rotating section revolves around the ship's longitudinal axis; if we extend that axis to define "north" and "south" poles for the forward sphere (so that the "north pole" sticks out the forwardmost "nose" of the ship, in the direction of cruising flight and opposite the main engines), then the rotating section lies just within the sphere's "equator," to which the pseudogravity vector is normal.
Notably, this is behind ("south" of) the flight deck and pod bay, both of which are in microgravity, necessitated by the design constraint that both must communicate directly with the outside - the pod bay via its hatches, and the flight deck via forward windows - which a rotating section internal to the ship's hull cannot feasibly do, hence the absence of windows there. (Launching pods at several meters per second directly away from the ship would also be less than ideal.)
Movement between the static and rotating sections of the ship would be achieved by an axial corridor similar to that used by a flight attendant aboard the lunar shuttle earlier in the film, and would mostly be unnecessary by design in the cruising regime of flight. Hence HAL's bay also being outside the rotating section - not because any design or engineering constraint obviously requires this placement, but because the human astronauts aboard the ship are simply not required or even encouraged to inhabit that volume in any but the most exceptional of circumstances.