The Shining: Movie versus Book
The things in Stephen King’s book that should have been included in the movie.
Many people agree that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a masterpiece, but King’s novel is a modern masterpiece for many reasons and as always, I believe that the book was better! Granted, there are time limitations with film, but here are there are also many things I think should have made the final script, for the sake of deeper lore and a chewier storyline!
- That all three of the main characters — Jack, Wendy, and Danny have ‘the shine’
Dick Halloran, the Overlook’s chef, informs Danny that all mother’s have a little ‘shine’, meaning a form of psychic ability. Wendy exhibits powers, perhaps best described as mother’s intuition, throughout the text. A previous maid at the Overlook (who was so scared by the visions in room 217 she left her job), and Wendy spy the preternatural potential of the Outlook, a hidden dimension only accessible to those with the ‘shine’. It gives Wendy ‘feelings’ and occasional glimpses into this other realm early in the text, but does not fully collide with Wendy’s world until the hotel is fully activated by Danny’s presence during the story’s conclusion.
However, Dick is less sure about whether Jack ‘shines’, concluding that he doesn’t believe Danny’s father has any kind of psychic abilities … but the events at the Overlook tell a different story. We slowly learn that the Overlook feeds off people with psychic ability and while it wants Danny the most (his shine is the most intense and startling that Dick has ever encountered), it also slowly devours Jack. Jack witnesses the hedge animals in the Overlook’s garden moving, and the dead woman in the bathtub in room 217 … but he lies to his family about his ability to perceive this preternatural dimension.
Indeed, it may be argued, that part of Jack’s depression stems from his suppression of childhood trauma (we learn that Jack’s father was a violent alcoholic), alongside his ‘shine’, an ability that presumably would have appeared in earlier life. Jack then, buries his ‘shine’ so far within himself that t can’t be perceived by fellow ‘shining’ people like Dick or Danny.
2. More of Jack’s backstory
As I mentioned in the last section, the reader learns that Jack was the victim of an abusive and alcoholic father when he was a child. We, in turn, learn that he has exhibited similar behaviours as a father, becoming involved in a drunk-driving accident he conceals from his family and breaking Danny’s arm when he became enraged by a messy desk.
During the novel, we also learn that Jack once sold a short story and that the play he intends to write at the Outlook, is his attempt to re-enter the literary world. Jack’s unfinished play “The Little School” is supposed to be a re-imagination of the events that led to his dismissal as a teacher from a New England prep school. In a period of intense drinking, Jack lashed out violently at a young student. Jack’s failure as a writer and teacher underlie some of his anxiety to maintain his job at the Overlook, but also evince his suppressed ambitions as a creative person, who now lacks an outlet.
3. On that note, more of the Overlook’s history
Jack becomes obsessed with boxes of mismatched, messy records belonging to the Overlook in the basement, which rest beside the boiler he is employed to maintain everyday. At the heart of the hotel, he learns about the dark history (which includes the Mob, money laundering, depraved masquerade parties, and more) surrounding the Overlook and is inspired to write a book based on his findings. However, this aspiration is cut short when Jack brags of his intentions to Ullman, the current manager, and an old friend with vested interests puts a stop to the tell-all book. Amongst this dishevelled archive, a scrap book by a mysterious author stokes Jack’s interest and anger …
All of this is implicitly referenced in the movie, with the spectral figures that arise and the discovery of a preternatural photograph of Jack, somehow taken retrospectively, at a party from the past, but the specific historical details laid out in King’s novels are lost. It may be argued that the ambiguity around these events lends to the suspense felt by audience members and characters alike, but personally, I love a good house history and an explanation of a narrative’s deep lore.
4. Wendy is far more aware of her impending doom that she is in the movie
The book-version of Wendy is a lot more active in the lead up to the story’s denouement. She notices slight changes in Jack’s behaviour and even suspects early that her husband “wants to be one of them and live forever. That’s what he wants”; in other words, that he has become corrupted by the hotel and although not physically drinking alcohol, that he has become inebriated by the possibility of joining the Overlook guests and their never-ending masquerade party.
Having repeatedly beseeched Jack to get the snowmobile (which he eventually destroys) and repeatedly beseeching Jack to abandon his job at the Overlook, Wendy demonstrates an implicit knowledge early on that something is going to go wrong … Suspecting that the hotel has taken hold of Jack close to the end of the novel, she sleeps with a kitchen knife close to her bed.
5. Dick Halloran’s perspective
There are things around Dick’s characterisation that I don’t like, and King’s position as a white author should be problematised. Having said this, access to Dick’s perspective in the novel is helpful and adds another layer of tension to the text, especially as the Overlook’s off-duty chef races against the clock to depart from sunny Florida for the hotel. In a tragic turn of events, we learn in the book that Dick is aware of his imminent death and yet, he decides to help Danny anyway … however, unlike the movie, Dick does not die in the novel!
Running into multiple people with the ‘shine’ on his journey towards Danny (which Dick remarks is very strange … in one day), people who are willing to help him in some small way; lending him their favourite mittens, sharing a smile on a turbulent flight; offering a home-cooked meal and warm bed on his return; providing the name of a friend who rents snow-ploughs, it seems as though the universe conspires to get Dick to the Overlook, to Danny and to Wendy.
Unlike Jack, Dick resists the entity embedded in the hotel when it attempts to possess his body. He takes Wendy and Danny away from the Overlook, and remains their friend beyond the narrative’s conclusion. Having foreshadowed his own death in the novel, I love the twist that Dick survives. It shows how, despite our ability to predict the future and our own patterns of behaviours, we can still forge our own fate, with the help of others along the way.
6. The Truth about Tony
Tony is the ghost-like presence that comes to Danny in times of crisis, almost like a spirit guide. During the Torrance’s time at the Overlook, Tony is supressed by the creature/thing, the demonic presence, that lingers there. Unlike the movie, we learn that Tony has always been a part of Danny in King’s book:
“And now Tony stood directly in front of him, and looking at Tony was like looking into a magic mirror and seeing himself in ten years, the eyes widely space and very dark, the chin firm, the mouth handsomely molded. The hair was light blond like his mother’s, and yet the stamp on his features was that of his father, as if Tony — as if the Daniel Anthony Torrance that would someday be — was a halfling caught between father and son, a ghost of both, a fusion”.
Jack, as I mentioned earlier, spends the novel fighting his inner demons and processing the trauma he endured at the hands of his abusive, alcoholic father. The Shining, a book centred on a hotel filled with dark histories, is all about the sins of the father, battling inherited traits, and rising from the ashes of inheritance as your own person.
7. Jack’s Moment of Clarity
Near the end of the novel, Danny ‘unmasks’ the hotel, asserting that it is not his father who wields the deadly mallet about to swing — but the trickster entity inhabiting Jack’s body. Momentarily, the hotel leaves Jack’s body and he asserts,
‘ “Doc … Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you’ ”.
Although Jack Nicholson’s performance is chilling and brilliant in its own right, this moment of clarity is deeply moving in the book as a reminder that Jack Torrance, although drunk with power, is still fighting to maintain control over his inner turmoil and to liberate his son from the past.
