Quote Originally Posted by Master of Aeons View Post
Wow. No, Even if Stanley Kubrick wants to pretend he reads the source material with that stance, it doesn't hold up.
Irrelevant. What matters is that this is the view of the book, the possibly flawed view of the book, that informed his film making. He thought the movie wasn't that

The entire movie is supernatural. You can't deny the ability to shine, because both **** Halloran and Danny have the ability and show that the ability works.
The shining does indeed become rather undeniable by certain points in the movie. The ghosts, however, are less definitely present. And even the shining isn't all that relevant. Again, it's not strictly that the movie isn't somewhat supernatural. It's that the movie tends to be way more about all these other things
This is nothing to say that the movie and TV series actually gives Jack Torrance an actual arc as he descends into madness and attempts to redeem himself with a payoff about the boiler room job. That's the problem with your read, it actively dismisses the evidence within the script (which is more than what you cited) and drops all need for payoffs. You have the setup of the job. You have the setup of the Shining ability within Danny. You have the setup within the boy's split personality. You have the setup with Jack and **** being at the start of separate arcs. In your read, you just want do see a crazy person stay crazy and dismiss all of the supernatural elements of the film even when there's proof that it doesn't hold up to its own logic.
The movie does have an arc and payoff. The arc is Jack growing more insane from his base level of insanity, and his wife and son gaining/having the courage to escape and defeat him, in spite of their terror. Consider, whether it's consistently unambiguously there or not, what does the presence of the supernatural do to actually disrupt my claims? I would contend that it doesn't do much of anything. The ghosts could all be actually there all the time, and the story would still be mostly about that perfectly ordinary stuff I said, just cause that's the primary focus of the movie. I mean, you're talking about how these supernatural elements don't have that much focus, and doesn't that say something to you? That maybe the movie isn't about those things?

That's because I'm pretty sure that Kubrick didn't actually read the book. As far as I understand what actually happened, Jan Harlan was the one who read it and gave him a synopsis. Kubrick himself never read it and never read King's adaptation. Instead, he was just looking for a vessel for what he would write anyway. And he made it disjointed and incomprehensible on purpose. Does that make it good? No. I would say if you try to make a story to confuse people, you aren't doing your job as a creator. I mean look at this:
I wouldn't be surprised by Kubrick not having read it. My understanding of the differences between works supports that claim well enough. However, your continued contention that the movie is incomprehensible seems crazy to me. It's really a pretty linear movie, outside of a couple of weird and ambiguous things that take up barely any space and that mostly serve to support the growing insanity in the hotel.
At the end we see a photograph of a ballroom in 1923, and there is [Jack Torrance] because he’s always been the caretaker. You explain to me why! There is no explanation. A famous Kubrick sentence is, “Never try to explain something that you don’t understand yourself.”
It is indeed a weird scene. Somewhat ambiguous in nature. But having ambiguities does not preclude something being art. Cause, one of the cool things about ambiguities is that there actually always a lack of explanation. Instead, sometimes you get a whole bunch of explanations, and the open nature of the thing gives you more potential meaning. So, that scene, for example. Explanations, you demand? Maybe it's meant to imply that the ghost's of Jack's past have fully consumed him. Maybe it's a message about cycles of abuse being passed down along generations. Maybe it's an even more general claim about Jack being something of an archetype rather than something separate from an archetype, something that has always existed and always will. A presence more than a man. Maybe it's literal. After all, that would match up with stuff said earlier in the film. Maybe it's almost literal, and Jack is a reincarnation and some such. And, because the movie was ambiguous, it gets to have all those meanings simultaneously. Such is the power of ambiguity. The risk, of course, is that an individual viewer may find none of those meanings, but Kubrick just tends to demand a lot of thought and attention, and another cool thing about ambiguity like that is that it rewards rewatches, to angle you towards a particular meaning, and rewards serious thinkery.

Does that sound like the sane logic of someone making art? Because to me it sounds like a troll getting a laugh at being applauded for making high art when his only objective was to confuse. You can swallow his defense and clap when you have no idea what's going on and feel good about it, but as for me I'm going to make the bewildered face when I'm bewildered and ask for someone to show me something made with the intention of sane and logical entertainment. If I wanted to try to wrap my head around a script that served no internal purpose, I'd much rather check out David Lynch.
Even assuming it is meaningless, even if it were a laugh at our expense, does that really magically eliminate all the other great stuff in this movie? It's not like the entire film is ambiguous. It's mostly straightforward, aside from the open question of whether any particular thing is supernatural or not. You keep coming back to this one scene, but that scene takes up a pretty small amount of time. A whole movie isn't made incomprehensible by a weird and open ending, especially one that doesn't have much impact on the core plot.