MISERY 1990

In a verbose, exasperated correspondence, a reader once expressed to me his intrigued bewilderment at how my otherwise—to use his words—“perceptive and aware” observations on the toxicity of idol worship and fame culture (per my essays on Maps To The Stars, The Day of The Locust, Come Back To The 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean, The Fan, and For Your Consideration) stood in frustrating contrast to my parallel tendency to lapse into periodic bouts of unapologetic fandom, shameless name-dropping, and displays of philography (autograph collecting). 

Once the feeling of being flattered that my writing could actually exasperate someone had passed; I understood his point. I could see how my expressed disdain for the hollow distractions of fame culture and celebrity-worship perhaps suggested to the reader that I place no value on “fandom” at all, in any of its forms. In which case, my attendant essays subjectively praising actors whose work I admire, upon whom I harbor crushes, or who I’ve met (cue the autograph scans), must have come across as paradoxical at best, hypocritical at worst. 

But all of that falls under the heading of what I'd call: reading the content while misunderstanding the context. The truth of the matter is that if I do, indeed, possess any insight into the phenomenon of fame culture, it’s insight born of firsthand experience, not academic theorizing. I’ve been a film buff my entire life, even owing my 30-year career as a dancer to film fandom (I fell in love with that irresistible 1980 roller-disco glowstick, Xanadu), so I've come to recognize that not all fandom is created equal.

“Healthy fandom,” as I call it, is when the admiration for and appreciation of the artistic accomplishments of others serves as a kind of balm to uplift the spirit and enhance the quality of life. This type of artist-identification has the ability to inspire, enliven, broaden horizons, and awaken within individuals an awareness of one's potential and life's possibilities through exposure to the creative arts. Fan worship, when channeled into role-modeling, can foster self-discovery, self-actualization, and the cultivation of one's own artistic gifts. When it comes to fandom and fan culture, I don't think there's anything wrong with looking outside of oneself if, by doing so, it motivates one to look within. 

And then, there’s what I call “toxic fandom.” That’s when one focuses on the lives and achievements of others, not as a means of finding oneself, but for the sole purpose of losing oneself. Toxic fandom doesn’t look to the arts for ways to cope and engage with reality; it looks to the arts for ways to escape it.

Because the toxic fan seizes upon a personality, movie, TV series, or Broadway show with a singularity of focus more appropriate to a religious totem or fetish object, actual talent or skills aren't even a requirement (cue the Kardashians). Therefore, fandom built around the untalented and unaccomplished becomes fame worship--the empty idolization of anyone who is able to draw the eyes of the world toward themselves.  

When all that is good, happy, and beautiful in the world is projected onto a single subject of worship, said “object of affection” doesn’t merely bring the toxic fan happiness; it represents happiness itself.

Certainly qualifying as the absolute worst-case scenario of toxic fandom gone terrifyingly off the rails is Stephen King's brilliant Misery, which was brought to chilling and memorable life on the big screen by director Rob Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman (The Stepford Wives, Magic). 

James Caan as Paul Sheldon

Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes

Richard Farnsworth as Buster

Frances Sternhagen as Virginia

Lauren Bacall as Marcia Sindell

Prolific author Stephen King is the master of Le Cauchemar Banal—the banal nightmare: high-concept thrillers in which ordinary characters in workaday settings find themselves thrust into unimaginably horrific circumstances. Whether it be “bullied high school teen kills entire class,” “dysfunctional family driven insane by haunted hotel,” “rabid dog terrorizes toddler,” or, in the case of Misery, “deranged fan imprisons favorite author,” King’s particular literary gift is his ability to mine the darkest, most relatable phobias lurking behind the most ostensibly commonplace conflicts. The best of the films adapted from his novels (Carrie, The Shining, The Dead Zone) shore up King’s solid storytelling by emphasizing his almost Biblical/Freudian take on human nature. I can’t think of a work of Stephen King’s that doesn’t in some way confront matters of sin, redemption, guilt, evil, fate, transformation, loss, and desperation. Sometimes, all at once! 

The Wilkes farmhouse
Just the kind of creepy-cozy place you'd imagine a serial killer would live

Adapted from King’s 1987 bestseller, Misery is a two-character, single-location twist on the Scheherazade folk tale (wherein a princess forestalls her execution through the spinning of captivating stories), pitting deranged superfan Annie Wilkes (Bates) against popular romance novelist Paul Sheldon (Caan).

After a Colorado mountain blizzard results in Paul Sheldon crashing his car off of a snowy bluff, he wakes to find himself nursing two broken legs and a dislocated shoulder in the farmhouse of “number one fan” Annie Wilkes. How Paul’s status shifts from patient to prisoner are revealed through character (retired nurse Annie Wilkes is batshit crazy) and the development of the story’s central (and might I say, ingenious) conflict:

Annie would like nothing more than for Paul Sheldon to continue churning out Misery books—a series of historical romance novels chronicling the adventures of heroine Misery Chastain—until his dying day (which threatens to be sooner than Paul would like if he doesn’t get with the Wilkes program).

Paul, on the other hand, after writing eight financially successful but spiritually crippling Misery novels (foreshadowing the literal kind), would like nothing more than to put Misery out of her misery, move on, and, via his just-completed profanity-laced crime novel Fast Cars, pursue a career of literary legitimacy. 

Misery's tense melodrama is a macabre exaggeration of the possessive/regressive side of celebrity worship. Creative growth may be a fundamental part of being an artist, but an equally dominant characteristic of fandom is the wish for a favorite star to keep repeating past successes.  

The close-quarters confinement of two people with such fierce cross-purpose objectives generates considerable dramatic tension. But Goldman’s taut screenplay, which opens up King’s novel to include rescue-effort sequences involving the local sheriff (Farnsworth), his deputy/wife (Sternhagen), and Paul’s literary agent (Bacall), nicely replicates the novel’s escalating sense of dread born of having the true nature of Paul’s rescuer and biggest fan revealed to us exclusively from Paul’s limited perspective. 

In both appearance and personality, Annie Wilkes amusingly plays into the suppositions many of us hold regarding the kind of people who read romance novels or give themselves over to obsessive fandom. But as Annie’s fangirl eccentricities reveal themselves to be symptoms of a larger mental instability, Paul’s mounting anxiety becomes our own as Annie’s irrational outbursts and mercurial mood swings hurl Misery into violent chaos.

Scenes played for black comedy invite us to share Paul's incredulous amusement at Annie's parochial prudishness, Midwest drabness, ignorance ("Dome Pear-igg-non"), and fondness for pop-culture kitsch. But the laughs catch in our throat as we come to understand that the earnestness of Annie's beliefs are rooted in rigid dogma

Lacking the novel's built-in identification factor (the story is told from Paul's perspective), the film nevertheless does a great job of getting us to experience Annie's rageaholic outbursts and sudden bursts of irrational violence with the same sense of alarm as our hero. So much so that, in effect, Rob Reiner becomes the audience's tormentor--the male Annie Wilkes at whose mercy we suddenly find ourselves. In these instances, we (unlike Paul) can escape, but the compelling nature of the story holds us captive in our seats, no more willing to depart before first learning how things turn out than Scheherazade's king.


MISERY AS FAME-CULTURE METAPHOR

I read Misery many years after having seen the film. And while the movie is very faithful to the book, as with many adaptations, the changes necessary to mold the descriptive liberties of the written word to fit the specific hyper-reality of the screen can shift a story's narrative emphasis in ways interesting and unexpected. Misery the novel, with its stressed emphasis on Paul's point-of-view read very much to me like one man's internal struggle. Paul Sheldon waging a war with the creative process, his life-altering encounter with Annie Wilkes serving as a kind of baptism by fire through which his creative spark is reborn and over which his eventual artistic maturity triumphs. (This falls in line with Stephen King's Rolling Stone interview in which he stated he was Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes was his cocaine addiction.)

The film version, with the necessary excision of Paul's nonstop internal monologues and lengthy passages relating to the content of Misery's Return, subtly shifts the dynamics of the conflict. Since we no longer share the inner workings of his mind and are left to merely observe his behavior, Paul Sheldon may remain the story's central character, but his role in it has become more reactive. Conversely, Annie, who is depicted in the book in almost one-dimensional terms (a monster comprehensible only in as far as Paul is able to make sense of her erratic behavior), is made the more dynamic character in the film because her actions and desires propel the plot. Deprived of his character-illuminating inner monologues, Paul Sheldon's goals become simplified: survival/escape. Annie, depicted in more complex terms, has fragmented, nonlinear goals that intensify in direct proportion to the deterioration of her mental state.

Kathy Bates' unforgettable Academy Award-winning performance humanizes the monster that is Annie Wilkes. Playing a frightening character more pathetic than sympathetic, Bates somehow never surrenders Annie's humanity, even when her behavior is at its most indefensibly psychotic.

The depth given to the character of Annie Wilkes in the film (which I credit to Kathy Bates 100%) makes her Misery's "dominant focus": the most dramatically compelling element of a movie. Since interest IN a character can feel distressingly like sympathy FOR a character to our subconscious, in thrillers this contributes to creating an overall sense of unease for the viewer (think Hitchcock tricking us into identifying with Norman Bates in Psycho). We identify with Paul Sheldon's left-at-the-mercy-of-a-madwoman vulnerability; but since more of us know what it's like to be a fan than to be a celebrity, a tiny part of us can also relate to Annie. And we hate ourselves for it.

ANNIE WILKES: THE ULTIMATE THE TOXIC FAN 
If, as someone once said, success is the natural killer of creativity, to that dictum I’d also add: fans are the assassins of artistic exploration.

One of showbiz’s most enduring clichés is the artist who, upon achieving mainstream success, longs for artistic credibility: The Gidget who wants to be a dramatic actress (Sally Field), the stand-up comic who wants to be Ingmar Bergman (Woody Allen); the purveyor of pop-music candy floss who wants to be taken seriously as a musical artist (Madonna).
Some stars have reinvented themselves without alienating fans or losing popularity (Robin Williams, Tom Hanks). But in most instances, popular artists' attempts to abandon the commercial brand that made them famous tend to be met with resistance, if not outright hostility, by the artist's fanbase.
The terrifying relationship between Paul and Annie depicted in Misery is fascinating when viewed as a meta-commentary on the co-dependent love/hate relationship celebrities have with their fans.

“I love you Paul. Your mind...your creativity. That’s all I meant.”

Toxic fandom has, at its core, a one-sided inequity of intimacy: the fan feels close to their favorite celebrity, said celebrity doesn't know they exist. Love for an artist's work can be fulfilling, for it at least has the potential to feed the soul. But when the line is blurred between love of art and love of artist, you're pretty much staring into the eye of an emotional one-way street.

“You just better start showing me a little more

 appreciation around here, Mister Man!”

Sooner or later, the toxic fan learns that it's not possible to prop someone atop a pedestal without eventually realizing they've left themselves somewhere down on the ground. A realization that invariably leads to resentment. A persistent complaint of celebrities today (especially among those who hate being reminded of the very real debt they DO owe to their fans) is what they see as the pushy entitlement of certain types of fans. These fans carry with them an attitude of "You owe your success to me!" or worse, the embittered "You think you're better than me?"—the latter, sadly, an epithet often hurled by a fan mere moments after treating said celebrity as though they were precisely that. Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust is a brilliant work that metaphorically explores the deep wellsprings of envy and resentment that can lie beneath fan culture. 

“You and I were meant to be together forever.”

From Presley devotees who refuse to acknowledge Fat Elvis, to Liza Minnelli concertgoers who boo if she doesn't sing Cabaret; the symbiotic, vaguely contentious relationship between toxic fan and artist is always a struggle against stasis. Being a creative artist means development and growth, but being a fan frequently means latching onto some favored moment, digging in one's heels, and refusing to accept the fact that everything moves on. The toxic fan wants both fan and celebrity to remain together forever, frozen in aspic.

There! Look there! See what you made me do?”

Ever notice how many online fan sites, chat rooms, and movie tribute pages are rife with the most vitriolic bullying and harassment imaginable? Intense self-identification with a celebrity, movie, or TV series often makes the toxic fan (usually a person with a vague sense of self from the start) feel so special that they tend to grow protective and proprietary over time. Separating themselves from the herd by the bestowal of meaningless titles and rank upon themselves (number one fan, biggest fan, most devoted fan), fandom becomes less about the personal joy one derives from the appreciation of a particular subject, and more about appointing oneself its combative gatekeeper.
Given that the seeds of fandom so often take root in adolescence—when individuals turn to the arts as a means of coping with the pain of loneliness, bullying, or feeling like an outsider—it's the height of irony that in so many cases the bullied grow to become the biggest bullies.

“You’ll never know the fear of losing someone like you if you’re someone like me.”

With its combined elements of genres ranging from horror to crime drama, Misery is a very effective suspense thriller (so much so that to this day I can’t watch the famous “hobbling” sequence, nor can I watch that final, bloody skirmish). James Caan and Kathy Bates are both super, handling the drama and black comedy with equal skill. (Although it's amusing to think that the athletic Caan, in this and 1979s Chapter Two, is Hollywood's idea of what a writer looks like.)
The first time I saw it in 1990, I came away with the feeling of having enjoyed a real thrill-ride of a movie. I've had the opportunity to rewatch it many times since then, and it has become a favorite. Now a quaint little timepiece, what with its rotary phones, typewriters, phonograph records, and bottles of Liquid Paper, but what has remained as fresh as the first viewing are the film's characters.
Annie Wilkes may represent the crippling dominance of addiction to Stephen King, but to me, Misery is a searing horror fable (cautionary tale?) about how fame culture can promote emotional displacement through toxic fandom. Culturally speaking, what can be scarier than that?

BONUS MATERIAL
In 2008 Kathy Bates revived the character of Annie Wilkes in a commercial for DirectTV. 

Watch it HERE.

Amanda Demme

To celebrate Misery's 25th anniversary, Caan and Bates

 reunited in 2015 for Entertainment Weekly magazine

Misery opened on Friday, November 30, 1990 at Mann's Chinese Theater in Hollywood

"Misery" - 1990

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016

CARRIE 1976

Joan Rivers: "I wasn't invited to the prom. I invited the guy and I had to buy my own orchid. 

Carrie had a better time at her prom than I did." 

That Carrie can be referenced in the punchline of a joke without benefit of clarification is a testament to how deeply rooted in our cultural consciousness Brian De Palma’s 1976 film (vis à vis Stephen King’s 1974 novel) has become. Indeed, contrary to the circumstances of her character in the film (she’s such a non-entity at her school that the principal repeatedly misidentifies her as “Cassie”) and the teaser ads for the forthcoming sequel (You Will Know Her Name); I'd say that by now, everybody knows exactly who Carrie is.

Sissy Spacek as Carrie White

Piper Laurie as Margaret White

Betty Buckley as Miss Collins

Amy Irving as Sue Snell

William Katt as Tommy Ross

Nancy Allen as Chris Hargensen

John Travolta as Billy Nolan

I was just starting college the year Carrie was released and (cinema snob that I was) I really couldn't have been less interested in it. 1976 was an absolutely amazing year for movies, and the films that preoccupied my mind, my time, and my interest were the more high-profile releases: Taxi Driver, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Hitchcock’s Family Plot, Fellini’s Casanova, Marathon Man, Rocky, King Kong, A Star is Born, Polanski’s The Tenant, Network, The Last Tycoon, Burnt Offerings, Sparkle, Lipstick, Logan’s Run, Bertolucci’s 1900, Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, and Bergman’s Face to Face. I hardly saw daylight the entire year!

And then there was the woefully under-hyped Carrie. Here we had a film by a director whose only other work I’d seen at the time -Phantom of the Paradise - I remembered primarily for Paul Williams' music, and whose sole marketable cast member, John Travolta, was a fledgling teen idol from the execrable sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (his whispery pop single, “Let Her In,” had turned the summer of ’76 radio-listening into an absolute nightmare for me). Everything about Carrie, from its no-name cast to its over-explicit poster art, gave me the impression it was strictly drive-in fare; a movie suitable for a double-bill with one of those low-budget releases from AIP or Crown International about Bigfoot or small-town redneck serial killers.

Eve was Weak
Margaret White's religious fanaticism adds an effectively ominous overlay of sin, sacrifice, and retribution to the story of an awkward teen and the coming-of-age awareness of her powers of telekinesis.

It was only through the persistent badgering of my best friend that I even came to see Carrie at all. My friend, a sci-fi / Dark Shadows buff, had already seen Carrie and used the excuse of wanting to see it again as an opportunity to call in his marker for the time I’d pestered him into attending a screening of Barbarella with me. As I took my seat in the packed San Francisco movie theater where Carrie was playing, I seethed with resentment over what I perceived as my friend extracting a particularly mean-spirited payback for what, the heinous crime of exposing him to the sight of a naked, zero-gravity Jane Fonda? However, some 98 minutes later I emerged from the theater, red-eyed (from crying- that Sissy Spacek really gets to me in this movie...even today) and overwhelmed. Wow! I had NOT been expecting that!

Macabre Martyrdom

Anticipating at best a run-of-the-mill horror movie, what I got was a surprisingly sensitive character drama that morphed into a kind of a nightmarish Grimm's fairy tale. A blood-splattered religious allegory of sin and redemption that's a near-poetic parable on the inability of a legacy of pain and cruelty to beget anything other than more pain and cruelty. Just out of high school myself (an all-boys Catholic School, but let’s face it, high school is high school) it felt more than a little cathartic to see a film that depicted everyday schoolyard torments with the graveness of Greek tragedy, meting out suitably catastrophic retribution to the guilty.

I was sold by Carrie’s first five minutes - the volleyball game and the gym shower, both of which established: a) the then-atypical horror film setting of a high school; b) the female-centric thrust of the story, wherein the concerns, agency, and motivations of the women in the film appeared essential to propelling the plot forward; and c) the obvious subjective perspective the film was going to take regarding Carrie herself. Carrie absolutely floored me. I saw it three more times that month, and it has since remained one of my all-time favorite movies. A motion picture I’d readily list among the best horror films ever made.

Brian De Palma is known for his employment of the literal split-screen, but Carrie is also full of sequences in which the natural framing of a shot encourages the audience to take note of the dual /conflicting experiences of the characters as they occupy the same space.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Given that adolescence was a living hell for the vast majority of us, there’s something conceptually ingenious about a horror film set in an American high school—a “house” as haunted by the ghosts of the tortured and tormented as the dungeon of any Gothic mansion. The hierarchy of school cliques and the day-to-day cruelties teens inflict upon one another seem to be perfect subjects for a meditation on the banality of evil; a concept explored in many of the films that have proved most influential in the horror genre (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

School Days, School Days

Carrie was made at a time when "bullying" was seen mainly as kids-just-being-kids behavior

Unlike Stephen King’s novel, which expands the scope of Carrie to include news and science investigations into what happened at the prom, De Palma’s film wisely maintains a much narrower subjective focus (few things happen outside of the scope of the high-schoolers), heightening our identification with and empathy for Carrie and her rather tragic existence. I’m reminded of a review of Carrie that made the insightful observation that it was so fitting for Carrie to have only destroyed her high school in the film (as opposed to half the town in the novel); because to an adolescent, high school IS the world to a teenager. I honestly think the intimate scale of De Palma's Carrie is what makes it work so well. Carrie's nightmare is merely every adolescent's anxieties (public humiliation, social ostracism, the desire to fit in) writ in blood.

Adolescent trauma meets Grand Guignol

PERFORMANCES

Defying accepted Hollywood logic that holds horror films don’t get Academy respect, the two (and only) Oscar nominations afforded Carrie were for the impossible-to-ignore performances of Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. Taking wildly divergent acting paths—Spacek playing her keyed-up naturalism off of Laurie’s idiosyncratic stylization—the actresses share a symbiotic chemistry in their scenes together which elevates Carrie far above what is usually considered possible in a horror film. (Never cut any slack to anyone who tries to get a poorly made horror film off the hook with the excuse, "Nobody goes to horror films for the acting. They just want to be scared!" - we horror fans are not often rewarded on that score, but solid performances in horror films contribute more to the "scare" than some directors seem to realize.)
Spacek's Carrie doesn't amp up the cliche acting signals that would indicate an outcast character. Instead, Carrie's awkwardness appears to emanate not out of any innate strangeness (she's actually better adjusted than most of her peers) but out of perhaps an overabundance of feelings she doesn't understand and lack of emotional outlets. Carrie's slowly developing telekinesis is a perfect metaphorical representation of what happens when emotions are repressed.

Born Into Sin

And Piper Laurie...what risks she takes! And she makes them work! Grounding her performance in a reality alien to normal behavior yet familiar and accessible to the deeply disturbed character she plays, Laurie inhabits this monster of a woman and finds a way of tapping into a kind of twisted truth. I wind up not only believing in this broadly-drawn woman, but recognizing her. Her religious fanaticism comes from a genuine source, and Piper Laurie's performance makes Mrs. White a truly terrifying character. One who makes you shudder even when her eccentricities are making you laugh (Ruth Gordon pulled off a similar miracle in Rosemary's Baby).

One of the great unsung performances in Carrie is that of Betty Buckley as the sympathetic gym teacher. De Palma must have really appreciated her incisive portrayal, because he always seems to leave the camera on her just long to capture the brief flickers of emotion that play across her face at the end of scenes where she's forced to be tougher than she'd like to be, or when she's saying something she hopes to be true, but doesn't really trust in.  Ironically or inevitably, depending on how you look at it, the sweet-natured Buckley assumed the role of Carrie's mother in the ill-fated 1988 Broadway musical of the film.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The trademark Brian De Palma bag of tricks: slow motion, swirling camera, split-screen, complex tracking shots, subjective sound, Bernard Herrmann-esque scores, Pino Donaggio's sensual music used as violence counterpoint, copious bloodletting--have never been put to as effective use as in Carrie. And no sequence in Carrie better illustrates the seamless blending of visual style with narrative theme than the bravura prom sequence. One of the most amazing bits of film as storytelling as you're likely ever to see.

Last Dance

A tour de force sequence that conveys tenderness, romance, joy, pathos, suspense, and terror in an uninterrupted flow that's close to operatic. Like my favorite scene from Hitchcock's The Birds --the Tides Restaurant bird attack--the climactic prom at Bates High School is a sequence that has retained every bit of its impact over the years. It's such a marvelously effective scene. It grabs me each and every time.  

Contemporary filmmakers (especially those enamored of the horror genre's tolerance of excess) who strive to blow us away with the spectacle of sadism or a reliance on CGI,  can take a lesson from De Palma here. Were this sequence all about the destruction and blood, I think Carrie would have gone the way of obscurity long ago. Carrie endures because De Palma has taken the time to bring us into Carrie's dream come true before he turns it into a nightmare.

Grand Grotesquery 
The eruption of the "curtain of fire" is one of my favorite film moments. It is so horrifically beautiful...I recall getting goosebumps when I saw it on the big screen.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS NIGHTMARES
In speaking of Rosemary's Baby, director Roman Polanski is fond of saying that his intent was to make a horror film that looks like a Doris Day movie, yet reveals itself to be something dark and sinister. To me, Carrie works in a similar fashion: it starts out resembling one of those teen-empowering After School Specials of the day (a series of TV movies targeted to adolescents in the '70s and '80s), only to throw us a nasty curve as the heretofore reassuring ugly-duckling wish-fulfillment fantasy turns into a bullied teen's worst-case scenario. 
I wish the 2013 remake a lot of luck, but just as Mia Farrow is and always will be the one and only Rosemary Woodhouse; I've got a hunch that Sissy Spacek's touchingly raw performance will wind up being impossible to beat. Perhaps there only needs to be...and only ever will be...one true Carrie.

"If only they knew she had the power."

Movie poster tagline

2013 ADDENDUM: 
Saw Kimberly Peirce's Carrie remake. I found it forgettable and unnecessary, albeit better acted than I expected. The big prom scene finale trades De Palma's poetically nightmarish spectacle for protracted explicitness. It's a well-done if artless sequence; the underlying, deeply-felt tragedy of the first film being replaced by the superficially cathartic pleasure of seeing the guilty parties punished. De Palma's Carrie has haunted me for a lifetime. I struggled to remember the details of Carrie 2013 a week after seeing it.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

THE SHINING 1980

In 1980, if you were of R-rated moviegoing age and among those who first got a glimpse of that unforgettably chilling, minimalist classic of a theatrical teaser trailer for The Shining; there was no way in hell you weren't going to see the movie. (1980 Teaser Trailer for The Shining on YouTube)

If I remember correctly, I first saw the trailer at Hollywood’s Mann’s Chinese Theater as early as December of 1979 or January of 1980 (The Shining was released in May 1980 to kick off the Memorial Day weekend). Then, as now, the average movie trailer hewed to the familiar pattern of sensory bombardment combined with the suspense-killing, full disclosure of each and every plot point that might have rendered the film even remotely intriguing (the term, “spoilers” didn't exist). The trailer for The Shining deviated so significantly from the prevailing standard that when first appeared that famous static shot of the twin elevator doors, accompanied by that eerily intensifying discordant music, the theater became so still you could practically feel the collective pupils of the eyes in the audience dilate all at once.

In 1980 Stephen King was not the household name he is today so the floating title, “The Shining” drew little response. It was only when Stanley Kubrick’s name was revealed that the crowd joined together in what can best be described as an aggregate, apex-of-the-rollercoaster, intake of air. At the same time—as nothing had yet happened onscreen beyond the music growing increasingly agitated and ominous— a pervasive air of, WTF? mushroomed throughout the theater like a vapor.

And then, the slow-motion torrent of blood began to spew forth from the elevator shaft. Oh…My…God. All at once the thudding soundtrack was drowned out by a consolidated, rising-tide of “Whoooooa!” from the audience that lasted until the now-bloodstained screen once again displayed the film's title. A second or two of stunned silence was followed by applause, animated chatter, and delighted giggles of the sort usually associated with a children's birthday party after a magician has pulled off a particularly startling bit of trickery. On the strength of this one remarkably classy, 90-second trailer, coupled with the anomaly of an Oscar-nominated director of Kubrick’s stature venturing into the realm of horror, over the course of the next few months The Shining became the movie to see. 

When the Saul Bass-designed poster for The Shining began appearing all over Los Angeles, the film immediately jumped several points on my personal "Cool-o-meter" (I took this pic in April of 1980 on The Sunset Strip in front of the famous Whisky a Go Go during its short-lived punk phase)

I was especially hopeful about The Shining, inasmuch as I have always loved a good scare at the movies but had grown increasingly dismayed by 70s horror films’ over-reliance on gore and their tendency to think of shock cuts as viable substitutes for suspense and atmosphere. Considering both Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barry Lyndon (1975) to be, if not exactly masterpieces, then certainly masterful, I sincerely believed that Kubrick’s The Shining had the potential to be the Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist of the '80s.

Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance

Shelley Duvall as Wendy Torrance

Danny Lloyd as Danny Torrance

Scatman Crothers as Dick Hallorann

Barry Nelson as Stuart Ullman

If ever you want to get both the best experience of a movie, yet at the same time the least reliable impression of how that film will actually perform at the boxoffice, go see it on opening day. I attended an evening show of The Shining when it opened on May 23, 1980 at Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.  The turnout was amazing. The crowds stretched around the block, past the parking lot, and into the nearby residential neighborhood. All of us waiting in line (some as long as three hours) were geared up for the scare of our lives, positive we were going to be among the first to see the big blockbuster hit of the summer. Fanning the flames was an enormous blow-up of Newsweek magazine’s rave review of The Shining (“The Ultimate Horror Movie!”) displayed in the theater’s forecourt. When the ushers came to release the velvet rope, I’m sure our faces had about them the look of vague genuflection, as though we were being granted a supreme privilege rather than just being allowed to see a movie we’d just paid for.

Original Ending
I was lucky enough to have seen The Shining before Kubrick mandated the excising of the scene that takes place after Jack freezes to death in the maze, but before the final shot of the photograph in the Overlook Hotel lobby. The deleted scene, which adds another layer of "What??!!?" onto an already maddeningly enigmatic conclusion, had a suspiciously solicitous Stuart Ullman (the hotel manager) visiting Wendy and Danny in a hospital where Wendy is recovering from shock. Wendy is interested in hearing if any evidence had been found at the hotel of all that she had recounted to the authorities. Ullman informs her that while the bodies of her husband and Hallorann had been recovered, there was no evidence in the hotel of any of what she had reported as having seen or occurred there. 
He insists that she must have suffered some kind of breakdown and that it was all in her mind. After this, I seem to recall his making an offer for Wendy and Danny to move in with him, and (this was the kicker) before he leaves and out of Wendy's view, he hands Danny the yellow tennis ball that had earlier materialized out of that mysterious room 237.
Personally, I LOVED this ending and preferred it to the one which now stands, but I seem to be alone on that score. I went to see The Shining again the weekend after its opening and the scene had already been deleted.

There’s a point at which one’s expectations for a movie can be so high that, on first viewing, you’re not responding to the film so much as reacting to whether or not the film has met or dashed your hopes. Such was the case for me on first seeing The Shining. So keen was I on The Shining being the epic horror film the pedigree of its cast and director augured, that when it proved itself (only) to be an intelligent, superbly well-made, largely effective horror thriller, I was disappointed. 

And from the feel of things, so was the opening night audience. The electric tension that greeted the film’s early scenes over time gave way to a funny kind of mistrustful hesitancy in not knowing how to respond to the minimum horror and maximum attention to visual style. Let down by the film’s lack of cover-your-eyes scares, the eager-to-be-entertained audience instead zeroed in on the burlesque of Jack Nicholson’s performance. As Nicholson trotted out the entirety of his even-then overfamiliar arsenal of arched eyebrows, Cheshire cat grins, and baroque overplaying, the audience assuaged its sense of letdown by losing itself in the film's mood-killing, dubiously intentional black comedy.

It's very difficult for an actor to convincingly portray drunkenness or insanity without resorting to overacting and cliche. In The Shining, Jack Nicholson has the dual challenge of playing an alcoholic driven to madness (as Nicholson plays it, it's a pretty short trip). 

Taking their cue from an actor who didn’t appear to be taking things seriously himself, the audience started to find everything Nicholson did funny. Even when he wasn’t trying to be. The Shining began to pick up and find its rhythm by the latter third, but by then the audience had already been lost. The crowd leaving the theater that night was a considerably more subdued and bewildered one than had entered. By the end of the 3-day Memorial Day Weekend, word of mouth had more or less undermined all the good the trailer and the film’s sizable advertising budget had done, and The Shining limped along for the rest of the summer, a modest success, eclipsed at the boxoffice—proportionately by budget—by that other summer horror film release of 1980 (God help us), Friday the 13^th.
Ultimately, time, cable TV, home video, and the overall decline in the quality of horror films over the years, has allowed for a more clear-eyed, fair-handed assessment of The Shining’s virtues. Today it is widely regarded as a minor classic and one of Kubrick's most highly regarded films. Me, I like it a little more every time I see it, finding it easier to appreciate what Kubrick was trying to do when I no longer filter it through what I wanted him to do.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Stanley Kubrick is perhaps a little too removed a director to engage me emotionally in the way necessary for me to be made to feel real fear (the way Roman Polanski can), but there is something ideally chilling in the setup of a vaguely dysfunctional family holed up for an entire winter in an isolated hotel that may or may not be haunted. Where Kubrick really excels is in creating indelible images (the elevator scene alone qualifies the film for classic status), developing tension, and establishing a world wherein events proceed on a collision course of horror that feels devilishly preordained, yet the particulars of what is real and why it’s all happening are open to any number of interpretations. Letting his meticulously evoked intermingling of the paranormal and the supernatural propel the plot, The Shining is almost willful in its ambiguity. (And don’t let anyone convince you that there is a single “right” way to interpret The Shining. Part of the film's brilliance - and no small part of its frustration to many - is how well it supports many different, perfectly valid interpretations.)

The Torrances: One big, happy family.

PERFORMANCES

Jack Nicholson has been a star for so long that it’s easy to forget that in the years following his 1975 Oscar win for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, many thought that Nicholson had fallen victim to the dreaded “Oscar Curse” (later dubbed The F. Murray Abraham Syndrome)— a downward-trajectory jinx that befalls the careers of many Academy Award winners. Jack Nicholson’s hammy and/or ineffectual turns in the late 70s flops The Missouri Breaks, The Last Tycoon & Goin' South, played like dry-runs for his over-the-top performance in The Shining, and critics were less than kind. Until just recently, I’ve always felt that Nicholson single-handedly ruined The Shining and that Kubrick afforded him far too much leeway (as he did Peter Sellers in Lolita). Even today I can’t say that I’m fully persuaded by Nicholson in the role, but I’ve since warmed up to his particular acting “choices” for his portrayal of Jack Torrance. The common complaint that Nicholson's Jack Torrance looks plenty crazy before he's even driven insane in The Shining echo a similar grievance leveled at the choice of actor John Cassavetes for the husband in Rosemary's Baby. To critics in 1968, Cassavetes looked guilty of something before his character even did anything.

On the flip side of my feelings about Jack Nicholson is my affection for the popularly-unpopular choice of actress Shelley Duvall. I think she is terrific in The Shining and any emotional engagement I have in the film at all is attributable to her pitch-perfect performance. Perhaps I’m prejudiced, but I’ve liked Duvall in everything I’ve seen her in…especially her Oscar-worthy work in Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977).  

The casting of actress Shelley Duvall in the role of Wendy Torrance rates high on the list of controversial Kubrick choices. Even her co-star weighed in on the decision: 

“I said, ‘Shelley Duvall?! What’s the idea, Stanley?’ And he says, ‘Well, you gotta have somebody in that part that maybe the audience would also like to kill a little bit!’”

Interview with Jack Nicholson by Nev Pierce for Empire Magazine 

If critics didn't appreciate Duvall in The Shining, they more than made up for it with the raves she garnered later that year playing the part she was born to play: Olive Oyl in Robert Altman's Popeye (1980)  

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

  The Overlook Hotel as envisioned by Kubrick and his team is one creepily spectacular location for a horror film.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

As opposed to what I enjoy most about good horror films, The Shining never hits me where I live in terms of tapping into some deep-seated fear and giving it a face. The single scene that accomplishes this is the brilliant "All work and no play" reveal of Jack Torrance's insanity (which hit me with the same jolt that the Scrabble anagram sequence in Rosemary's Baby did). What I think The Shining has that keeps me returning to it and what has caused it to consistently rise in my estimation, is that it's terribly smart and thoughtful in its construction. There are worse things you can say about a horror movie than that it is one of ideas. 

The Shining has perhaps more head than heart, but its predetermination has an intrigue and attraction all its own. Whether it feels like a treatise on the eternal nature of evil, a dramatization of domestic violence, or just a vision of a family going mad together, it makes me want to watch every corner of the frame, listen to every detail of dialog, literally scour the film from start to finish in hopes of uncovering the "key" to what it all signifies. In the end, The Shining may not have much to say about the many questions it proposes, but a movie that provokes thought, any kind of thought, is always a step in the right direction.

Promotional postcard for the truly atrocious 1997 TV miniseries -The Shining.
 The Stanley Kubrick film began to look a lot better in people's eyes after author Stephen King tried his hand at adapting his own novel. 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2012