How ‘Doctor Sleep’ Gives Stephen King His Shine Back
SPOILERS FOR EVERY SHINING AND DOCTOR SLEEP-RELATED BOOK AND MOVIE AHEAD…. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED
In the past month, I have both re-read The Shining and read Doctor Sleep in preparation for Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of the latter. It should come to the surprise of nobody who knows me or follows me online that Stephen King has developed a special place in my heart since I took a class devoted to him in my last quarter at UC Davis. The class made me read his books from a lens I wouldn’t have otherwise picked up on — the lens of viewing every book that Stephen King has written through the lens of his writing journey.
For those of us who care about his work, the Constant Readers, knowing when Stephen King wrote something is knowing what state of mind he was in when he wrote it. Rage, while published as a Bachman book after he was already a successful writer, shows readers a student and the lack of craftsmanship shows. Carrie is an ambitious young writer who, while far from perfect, is honing his craft and learning how to terrify his audience. The Shining, shows a writer grappling with his personal demons using his typewriter and imagination in the most cynical way possible. Fast forward nearly four decades, and everything from Cujo to It to Bag of Bones lets readers get a glimpse of King’s psyche.
I gain an ample amount of appreciation for his work because of this lens. As a writer, I believe that catching the whole of yourself as clearly in your writing as King does in even his weaker works is far more important than any language, scenery, or in his case, chills, that you can muster up. Doctor Sleep is far from King’s best work, but I enjoy it immensely even compared to some of his better writing. It’s a sequel done correctly that, despite some flaws in execution, reminds us of how far King has come from the coke and booze-fueled artist who could write a classic novel that he doesn’t even remember. Doctor Sleep, tonally, has hope written in between the lines and gratuitous scenes of child murder that The Shining King could never dream of. The Shining is a brilliant book with a cynical worldview that’s tied up in a semi-hopeful-but-mostly-dreary little bow at the end of the book.
When the movie comes out a couple of years later, however, it is put through Stanley Kubrick’s hopeless filter and made into a brilliant horror movie that lacks nearly all the subtext that makes the book a classic. This is common in movies, but in a movie that is as good as The Shining, it is almost more frustrating. It’s like if somebody adapted Everyone Poops by showing a bunch of beautifully-shot piles of dung with a masterful score selling every last stench and undigested snack that person or animal ate. While that may be the best technical film ever made (Netflix don’t steal this), it would strip away the themes of equality and sameness and “Kum Ba Yah” by way of shit that makes the book resonate past its excremental themes and prose. Everyone does poop, but why is this important?
Stephen King hates The Shining more than any of you hate anything. He presents his hatred in multiple books, including several times in his thesis on all things horror, Danse Macabre:
He continues his petty discourse at the end of Doctor Sleep when he speaks about the love that people have for his book:
Suffice it to say, he is not a fan. The Shining is King’s self-reflective novel about everything from childhood naivete to alcoholism, and nearly all of this is thrown away in favor of scares and even more cynicism than he could muster. Characters like Dick Halloran, who stands as a ray of hope in the book that the titular “shine” can be used for good, is used as little more than mystic exposition and gruesome death that does away with any hope. For a deeply personal piece like this, one can’t help but feel for King as he sees someone get so much praise on what is many ways an extremely savvy bastardization of one of his finest pieces.
All of this being said, this brings us to director Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Doctor Sleep. Doctor Sleep is a different kind of nostalgia trip than the others we are getting. It’s not a legacy sequel like Star Wars and Terminator and Rocky and Top Gun and so on and so forth are getting. It’s a ¾ direct adaptation of King’s sequel which was made with his blessing that uses the events of The Shining film to give it back to King.
The novel Doctor Sleep has many quotes from Alcoholics Anonymous literature interspersed with the typical song, movie, and literary quotes that King loves beginning chapters with. To do what Kubrick did and do away with the inner struggles that make The Shining work as a book may have hurt this book even more. Now let me get this out of the way. Doctor Sleep is not as good as The Shining as a book, and its sequel is not as good as Kubrick’s movie. However, the book takes the necessary steps to give the cinematic adaptation of King’s book back to the author who treasures it so much.
There are several notable changes to the film adaptation of Doctor Sleep, from composite characters who serve to keep the cast at bay to the omission of key moments from the film, specifically the arc of Abra’s grandma, who is only mentioned in the film but plays a vital role in the book. Most of these changes, while occasionally frustrating given the strength of the scenes involved, make sense for a movie that is already two-and-a-half-hours long. What remains in the movie, however, are the subtexts. Stephen King’s more hopeful worldview is intercut with scenes of graphic torture and violence, and the characters seem more three-dimensional than those in Kubrick’s Shining.
Furthermore, Doctor Sleep has the strange task of trying to pay a little bit of fan service, albeit not as much as other nostalgia-driven sequels in recent years, to fans who love the movie while appeasing King. Part of this is rather easy. Dick Halloran (played by Carl Lumbly) survives the book but dies in the movie, so he can’t Danny as he does in King’s Doctor Sleep, but we also get his Jedi ghost later on after we find out that he died years after Danny lost track of him. Introducing Jedi ghost Dick Halloran allows him to talk to Danny under slightly different circumstances.
Abra’s family life, aside from the aforementioned grandmother, is given more detail. One key omission that is, quite frankly, welcome in the film is the omission of the revelation that Danny, now played by Ewan McGregor, is the brother of Lucy, Abra’s mother. This plot twist is rather tacked on in the book, and with a smaller role for Lucy and Dave and Momo, this twist had no place in the movie.
Where the major change comes is after what I would call the fourth and fifth acts — or, basically everything after the campground fight. In the book, the plot after this moment can honestly be hard to follow, and it involves mannequins, mental sleight of hand tricks, and a campground that’s been built over the sight of The Overlook Hotel. After all, the literary Overlook burnt down after the first one, so this makes perfect sense.
The film version is complicated by the fact that The Overlook still stands at the end of that one, and if this hotel is as powerful as we are led to believe, we know that it would never be torn down by mere rubes. While I was first uneasy about this change, I settled on this line of thinking and accepted it for the reason why the book’s disheveled ending cannot work in the movie. Billy (played by the always great Cliff Curtis) is killed off through a mind trick after the campground gunfight to kick off the major departure.
Dr. John (played by Bruce Greenwood), never really as a role past Danny’s AA advisor, and Abra’s father Dave (played by Zackary Momoh) is killed off before he can help them, as he does in the book. Lucy (played by Jocelin Donahue) is non-existent after this moment until the end, and all of Rose the Hat’s (played by the perfectly cast Rebecca Ferguson) gang is dead by the time they get to the final showdown.
The showdown can’t take place at the sight of the Overlook if it is still standing, and Rose cannot stay there if there isn’t a campground. Because of this, the movie puts the power back in Danny’s hand, and in many ways gives King his story back. If Jack Torrance was King’s avatar in the original book, Danny is his avatar in the sequel, so Danny stepping back into the Overlook kicks off a series of events that, cinematically speaking, retcons the Kubrick film and gives his new film the ending King would have wanted in the original one — a change that makes the changes in this film feel more organic and justified.
Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep is relatively tame with the callbacks to the first film in the first hour-and-forty-five-minutes or so. We get the flashback at the beginning that shows Danny and Wendy (thankfully recast instead of de-aged or CGI’d), but after we flash forward to adult Danny, the references are relatively few and far between until the finale at the Overlook hotel.
Here, Flanagan merges the Kubrick film with King’s book, and while it is not perfectly executed, I admire the craft with which he does this. Danny wakes up the hotel by turning on the power and the boiler (the latter of which causes the explosion at the end of the book), then the nostalgia kicks in. We get identical shots as he walks through, plays off of the audience’s expectations, and a culmination where Danny is in the same situation as his father was — sitting at the bar. Danny’s bartender isn’t the one his father saw, however. His bartender is his father, played by a semi-off-putting Jack Nicholson impersonator who is just wrong enough to disturb me but just right enough to get a pass.
Danny succeeds where his father failed, and declines to drink, but the Overlook is officially alive. Roles are twisted and mixed up when Rose and Abra (played by Kyliegh Curran, and while I do not dive into her character much in this, I have to give a special shoutout to her wonderful acting) come inside, with Danny wielding the ax for good and Rose being the one who is being chased. The hotel which overtook Danny’s family is now under his control, and his shine comes back in full force. After defeating Rose and controlling the hotel, everything should be fine, but then the hotel that he unleashed for good on Rose takes him back, and he essentially becomes Jack Torrance — not the Kubrick version, but a shadow of the King version.
Jack Torrance in King’s novel is far more complex than Jack Nicholson’s portrayal. Nicholson’s portrayal, while swayed by the hotel, is an unabashed madman without any of the sympathetic tendencies that the novel’s version possesses. You don’t understand why Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and Danny (Danny Lloyd, who cameos in Doctor Sleep) would be with him for the most part. He doesn’t die as a conflicted man who is overtaken by the hotel with a hint of humanity that allows him to sacrifice himself, but a monster who is so bloodthirsty that he chases his son into a maze and freezes to death. Doctor Sleep’s Danny offers a semblance of this version in the finale of Flanagan’s movie.
Just as the book version of Jack has bouts of conviction as he chases Danny and Wendy around, but is overtaken by the hotel. Likewise, Danny is now half Overlook hotel, half himself, and as he comes to swing the ax at Abra, he is stopped by her before he can do anything. He is given no choice but to destroy the hotel and sacrifice himself, an almost direct, albeit more positive allusion to the way Jack dies in the book.
King’s Danny defeats Rose and lives happily ever after. Flanagan’s does not. However, he serves as something of a sacrifice that destroys Kubrick’s overlook in the service of King’s desires. Sure, it’s an homage to Kubrick’s movie and it clearly pays its respects throughout, but by letting Danny do what Jack should have done at the end of Kubrick’s version, Flanagan successfully completes the merger between King’s book and the Kubrick film, and he gives the power of the story back to King.
I shied away from a flat-out review, and I am sure that I missed some specific details along the way, but the more I think about Doctor Sleep, the more I believe that it is what needed to happen to both pay homage to Kubrick and let King have the movie that he wanted. King doesn’t need a beat-for-beat remake of his books. He’s shown he doesn’t care about that in screenplays he has written. What he wants is an adaptation that captures the underlying themes and keeps the proper tone, something many of the worst adaptations even do more than Kubrick’s film. When Danny goes up in flames, the last cinematic remnants of Kubrick’s film do too, and I can only imagine that after King saw this, he smiled and was glad he gave Flanagan the keys to his beloved work.
