Stanley Kubrick chills our spines with his ice cold interpretation of Stephen King's venerated novel.
A top five horror movie for me, and also one of the few cases in which I think a film is more successful than the novel it’s based on.
Stephen King - who famously authored the
novel - notoriously despises
Kubrick’s film version for hollowing out the complex, painstakingly fleshed-out main character of Jack Torrance, and filling him with nothing but cold detachment. Although I do agree that the film leaves out a substantial amount of character work for Torrance - who’s entirely unsympathetic here, and you can see the cracks of instability from the get-go -
Jack Nicholson still owns the role, and the film easily stands by itself as a singular piece of media.
While King excels at creating warm and relatable characters, cold and detached is sort of Kubrick’s entire M.O. He completely mastered objective storytelling, and his films are often so cynical and distant that it occasionally feels like he’s straight up mocking his characters’ peril. This trademark is also what makes the film version so effective in it’s own right though, and the adaptation demonstrates why objectivity is often such a powerful storytelling format in the horror genre in general.
In subjective films, the audience gets dragged around with the main character for the entirety of the story (or at least most of it), and all we experience is what that character experiences, all we know is what they know, and the camera typically spends a good chunk of the time up close and personal with them so we can see their every reaction. The distance created by objective filmmaking on the other hand creates a sort of smokescreen, because while we can get a sense of the characters’ emotional states, we’re never quite sure until the end, as the director is constantly shuffling us around, never focusing on any one character for too long, and the camera mostly just observes and documents rather than trying to get us to empathize.
This objectivity also allows the audience to get a glimpse of the greater picture all at once, and it builds dread by the fact that we can see the danger coming well before the characters can, and at times our POV even seems to be from the perspective of these unknown evil forces bearing down on them. There’s an inescapable sense of fatalism at play in these types of movies, and Kubrick gets us in that state-of-mind immediately in
The Shining by opening the film with a sort of voyeuristic ghost flight through the mountains of Colorado, ominously following Jack Torrance’s car as it zooms toward his ghastly destiny at the Overlook Hotel.
Also if you’d like some examples of subjective v. objective horror films, something like
Mother! (2017) would fall near the very end of the spectrum towards subjective, and movies like
The Shining or
The Witch (2015) are highly objective. Most films will obviously land somewhere in the middle.
Comments
Post a Comment