The Shining Book or Movie: the Question Put to Rest at Long Last

Ah, The Shining.

The movie is better than the book. Can we finally put that debate to rest?

The Shining is the epitome of debates between the book and the film adaptation. Mostly because it’s the exception rather than the rule. Most film adaptations don’t come anywhere near to besting the source material.

So when a movie like The Shining comes along, which so clearly advances the themes of a book, and is fundamentally a better and more essential piece of art than the original, it stirs the rat’s nest.

I recently reread The Shining novel because I am pretty much obsessed with Kubrick’s film.

The book is decent, the film is a masterpiece.

Stephen King hinted at things that Kubrick then unpacked and explored. Not heavy-handedly, but subtly and abstractly.

King hinted at a dark history of a specific hotel, and how the evil done there could give it a metaphysical resonance that could influence and impact those who came into contact with it.

Much of the violence done was attributed to the Mafia, and the hits that were done there. The Mafia, in King’s novel, was never a stand-in for the evil and violence of human history in general.

Kubrick turned this into a mediation on the violence of human beings generally, and more specifically the violence undergirding the founding of the United States.

Yes, I’m one of those. I believe 100% that Kubrick was creating an endlessly entertaining and brilliant meditation on the reckoning we as Americans were coming to at the time (and still reckoning with) with how much suffering was imposed on Native and African Americans in the founding of this country.

He was also incorporating World War II imagery, and dealing subtly with the themes of how our uncivilized and violent past expressed something that was still quite indigenous to the human species.

So while King told a ghost story, Kubrick made an eternal piece of art.

And that’s all there is to it.