The Shining: a Comparative Analysis of the Original Novel and Its Adaptation
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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Jan Zbořil The Shining: A Comparative Analysis of the Original Novel and its Adaptation Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr. 2013 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………… 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, doc. Tomáš Pospíšil, for his patience and understanding. I would also like to thank my friend Jakub Hamari, who provided incredible support during all phases of my work. 3 Table of Contents 1. Introduction...............................................................................................5 2. The Authors 2.1 Stephen King.................................................................................7 2.2 Stanley Kubrick.............................................................................9 3. The Book 3.1 Origin..........................................................................................14 3.2 Form............................................................................................15 3.3 The Narrative...............................................................................16 3.4 Critical Analysis..........................................................................20 3.5 Characters....................................................................................23 4. The Movie 4.1 Origin..........................................................................................32 4.2 Form............................................................................................32 4.3 Critical Analysis..........................................................................36 4.4 Characters....................................................................................41 5. Conclusion...............................................................................................48 Works cited..................................................................................................50 Résumés.......................................................................................................52 4 1. Introduction The culture of man is literally flooded with various artistic creations, be it architecture, music, or others. Regardless of being born several millennia later, the art of movie-making was closely connected to literature from its very beginning, as the latter provided a vast supply of unique stories. The main issue of a novel is that it can only be presented through a written word. Movie in comparison provides a wide range of possibilities and is perceived through many senses, though the movie critics often agree that even when a movie does stand on its own quite well and holds together as a stand- alone project, it only rarely surpasses the level of quality of the literary original, and usually fades in comparison. Nonetheless, the filmmakers do attempt to create a successful movie, while either respecting the original work or not. The creation and acceptance of adaptation of literature is of course very subjective and depends on personal taste, while it has become a habit to ascribe much greater severity to the literary genre, while disregarding the adaptations. I would therefore like to thoroughly study one such case, Stephen King‟s The Shining, which is then directly compared to the relations and deviations of its movie adaptation created by Stanley Kubrick. The movie used is the 144-minute-long US version. As the perception of an adaptation is always based upon a concept of standards and deviations and depends upon an understanding of its context, certain backgrounds are always more relevant than others, thus I often use personal insights from interviews of both authors. My thesis offers a comparative critical analysis of Stephen King‟s novel The Shining and its movie adaptation directed by Stanley Kubrick strictly without the use of any established methodology. The main body of the work consists of three main chapters, covering in detail each topic. At first I introduce the authors, their lives, their accomplishments, and their 5 works. The work is then divided into two major parts, each part dealing with the respective medium, the novel and the film. In both parts I first explore the origin of the stories and the reasoning behind their creation, and then I discuss the form and style used. In the case of the original story I also briefly cover the narrative as the default, essential to understanding the work as a whole. Then I carefully delineate and critically analyze the plot, the importance and meaning of specific parts of the story, followed by analysis of the characters crucial to the plot, being the Torrance family, and also the Overlook Hotel itself, as its role in the story is vital, and it varies greatly in each medium. I focus in detail on the main traits, the most relevant characterizations, and the history. These are then directly compared to the relations and deviations of its movie adaptation and its characters‟ counterparts in the subsequent chapters, while exploring the reasons of the changes and their intention. The conclusion then recapitulates and valorizes both works and their aspects, while using the learned knowledge to point out the differences and similarities between the respective works‟ themes and purpose due the different context of the two media, analyzes their worth and reaches the conclusion of how each work holds on its own in the comparison. 6 2. The Authors 2.1 Stephen King Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. He is considered one of the most famous living writers of the horror genre, while also being one of the most commercially successful. He is describing the development of his life in book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, stating he was fascinated by writing from his immediate childhood. The reason he started writing under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman was mainly because of a general opinion that a writer should not have published more than one book a year, in order of not overflowing the public, so using a pseudonym was common, while also finding out whether he had any talent or just a stroke of luck. The man in the picture assigned to the name was Richard Manuel, the insurance agent of Stephen King‟s literary agent Kirby McCaulie. He reflects on Mary Karr and her autobiographical book The Liar’s Club, and finds her work and her style fascinating and considers it inspirational. He and his brother were abandoned by their father and were raised by only his mother, moving a lot (On Writing 17). Due to health issues he was forced to withdraw from his first grade in school, and started rewriting some stories of the comic book series, Combat Casey. His mother supported him, and he soon started writing stories of his own (On Writing 28). The family moved constantly during childhood, which resulted in discovery of a special place that turned out to be a huge wilderness area with a junkyard and a train track, which stuck with King for the rest of his life, as he admits he returns to it in his memories in many of his stories, for example It or Under the Dome (On Writing 30). He got his first original story called “I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber” published in a horror fanzine Comics Review in 1965 (On Writing 36), and his own published 7 story which he got a payment for was “The Glass Floor” in Starling Mystery Stories magazine in 1967. His first novel Carrie, which was published in 1974, deals with a introvert teenage girl that snaps under constant bullying and psychological torture, resulting in a violent rampage with her telekinetic powers. King was working as a high school teacher at the time, which provided an excellent first-hand experience for writing such novel (On Writing 72), as he tried to depict “the ant farm of high school society dead on” (Danse Macabre 103). Following the success of Carrie and the movie adaptation he gained immediate recognition, and acquired a $400,000 pay check for publishing rights in 1974, after which he was able to devote himself fully to writing. At that point he set himself a goal of writing 1500 words a day, while being mainly inspired by the day to day events of his life in a small town (On Writing 169). King's interest in the supernatural and paranormal is often projected in his protagonists, as their experience and actions reveal psychological complexities and abnormalities. He builds his stories on the direct causality of his characters and current situation rather than plotting; and deals with relationships and their development. The staple elements of King‟s works are ordinary characters that are forced to deal with the supernatural while it directly changes them or people around them (Needful Things, The Shining, The Tommyknockers). In many works he deals with the development of a whole community of usually a small town, while outer influence breaks the community apart, usually in the form of few events which then snowball out of control (Insomnia, Needful Things, Salem’s Lot, The Stand). He also focuses on latent psychic abilities of human minds, which is a feature used mainly in his earlier books (Carrie, Dead Zone, Firestarter, The Shining). Sometimes there is an ancient supernatural evil confronted by ordinary and generally good people (It, Needful Things, Salem’s Lot, The Stand). The usage of child characters as the central protagonists of the 8 novels is not uncommon