As Stephen King releases a sequel to The Shining, entitled Doctor Sleep, Laura Miller defends the longstanding grudge that King and his fans hold against Kubrick’s adaptation:
A key difference between the two versions is the prominence of alcohol, which is more or less incidental in the film. In King’s novel, booze is the key that unlocks the monster inside a regular guy, and the beast’s first victim is the regular guy himself. The most significant thing about any character in King’s fiction is how he or she responds to such monsters, whether they come from within or without. That’s surely the chief reason why he detests Kubrick’s portrayal of Wendy as a gibbering victim; King’s Wendy chooses to be a heroine.
King is, essentially, a novelist of morality. The decisions his characters make — whether it’s to confront a pack of vampires or to break 10 years of sobriety — are what matter to him. But in Kubrick’s “The Shining,” the characters are largely in the grip of forces beyond their control. It’s a film in which domestic violence occurs, while King’s novel is about domestic violence as a choice certain men make when they refuse to abandon a delusional, defensive entitlement. As King sees it, Kubrick treats his characters like “insects” because the director doesn’t really consider them capable of shaping their own fates.
Jason Bailey, taking on King’s criticisms in the above video, emphasizes the creative differences between film and print:
[I]n defending King, Salon’s Miller accidentally makes the more interesting point: “The two men represent diametrically opposed approaches to creating narrative art. One is an aesthete and the other is a humanist. Kubrick was a consummate and famously meticulous stylist; King’s prose is workmanly and his novels can have a shambolic bagginess.”
King’s great novels work because they put us into the heads of his characters, because they convey psychological as well as external struggles, because their inner monologues can pour forth out of his prose. It’s part of what makes him a great writer. It’s also why there have been so many lousy films based on Stephen King books — because all of that is lost in the translation. And Kubrick would have been a lousy novelist, his meticulous detachment resulting in, we could presume, so pretty turgid and lifeless writing. But luckily, he was a filmmaker, and his gifts as an aesthete are what made him such a singularly fine one.
Previous Dish on the gulf between the book and the film adaptation here.
The Dish 