Devil’s Advocates: The Shining by Laura Mee

Whatever the situation was immediately following its release, no single horror film in history seems to have attracted such a proliferating amount of critical commentary as The Shining. And, few films have lent themselves to so much of what many lay viewers would see as frankly barmy analysis; okay, if you’ve ever watched a certain documentary called Room 237, then you’ll know exactly what I mean, and afterwards you might have felt less that you’ve been asked to consider various ‘explanations’ of the film and more that you’ve been up close and personal with delusion. Still, The Shining is a film which can withstand a certain amount of this kind of thing, and if it can sustain being reinterpreted as a metaphor about the Greek myth of the labyrinth with Jack as the Minotaur, then it can handle being critically reinterpreted in a broader sense, as part of the ongoing Devil’s Advocates series. I’ve reviewed several of these titles before: overall, these books strike a good, readable balance between academia and general interest, albeit that academic studies often tread some familiar paths in their analyses. Here, author Laura Mee is up for the task of assessing and discussing this landmark horror film, though one which has often been seen as a cold imposter to the genre, and remains a contested piece of work.

A neat synopsis of the film is straight away linked to the film’s peculiar qualities, in particular the deep sense of unease it often generates. This unease is one of the film’s most striking features, and it is created in a range of diverse ways, though the book starts with the most obvious building-blocks: the colour palette, the interiors and the distinctive camerawork, for example. Adding further detail about the project’s background, Mee elaborates on the interesting process behind Kubrick choosing to adapt the original novel, and the ways that, almost from the first moments, this led to issues for the director.

By electing to make a horror film, Kubrick began to labour under a dual weight of expectations – the heavy burden of auteur theory on one hand, and presuppositions about what constitutes a horror film on the other. As a director whose diverse work had already attracted critical interest and a reputation for lofty symbolism, amongst other things, there was a certain discouraging babble around his decision to make The Shining, a project which didn’t at first seem to reward viewers in a straightforward way. (Earlier on in the book, Mee also mentions a number of academic film writers who have had difficulties with the content of The Shining, though bearing in mind that this difficulty is not typically shared by fans.) If this book has one key strength, then it’s how the author successfully defends Kubrick’s vision – not as something frustrated by outside forces or in any ways a misfire, but as a very deliberately constructed story, sustaining its elements of the Uncanny, black humour, garish aesthetics and overblown characterisation to artful effect.

In order to do this, Mee also spends time rebuffing a few of the main rumours that continue to swirl around with regards to Stephen King, author of The Shining (novel), and vocal, documented critic of Kubrick’s adaptation. Now, given the way that today’s Stephen King devotes so much time online to criticising everything and anything he dislikes, it seems less of a big deal; however, his complaints about Kubrick’s film are notorious, and have long been potentially damaging: can there be anything worse than having the originator of the story disown your version?

Not only does Mee debunk a lot of King’s strident criticisms of the film by offering recorded evidence which suggests that he, at least initially, really liked the film, but she goes deeper than this and makes an excellent case for judging an adaptation as far as possible on its own merits, rather than seeing it as ‘too different’ from the source material. There’s a fascinating section on what was left out between novel and screenplay and why, with supporting material from Kubrick’s own notebooks. It also seems relevant to note that Kubrick was not the first nor the last to omit or limit King’s more insalubrious sexual content from his screenplay, and for good reason: IT (2017) also springs to mind here. Ultimately, the films are not the books, and it is successfully argued here that transformative decisions are made for good reasons.

Other sections of the book opt for a more tried-and-tested approach and analyse the themes and plot of the film along the lines of viewing the film, variously, as an assault on family, a study of misogyny, and a comment on white racism. It’s usually here that I find myself feeling more and more detached from academic analysis of this kind, and I feel that aspects of this will always alienate non-academic readers to an extent; sure, film studies is always going to be refracted through the social mores of its time, and I do think there are interesting discussions to be had (and are had here) about, say, the family dynamic in the film, but positioning Jack as a “white supremacist” (p.73) because he kills Halloran seems achingly moot. Particularly in a horror film where the embodiment of white, cis-hetero male privilege loses all of his own volition and freezes to death in a maze; it’d be fairly easy to invert a lot of this kind of critique, but no one ever seems to want to…

Still, my gripes with the Devil’s Advocates series so far have been minor, and this is also a minor gripe – the above critical commentary makes up only a small share in what is otherwise a neat, well-researched and accessible text, as well as an enjoyable defence of Kubrick’s skills in adaptation and horror storytelling.