Review by Nick Armstrong
It should come as no surprise that the discourse around a canonized Stanley Kubrick film is rather toxic, but it feels particularly alarming the way people talk about The Shining in this particular political climate. On a recent re-watch, I found it especially hard to enjoy anything that Kubrick brings to the table when so much of his emotionally manipulative and abusive protagonist-turned-antagonist’s actions mirror how Kubrick himself reportedly treated the film’s other star, Shelley Duvall. Even writers who stick up for the film through a more modern understanding praise its portrayal of Jack Torrance (Nicholson) as an inheritor of abusive behaviour as opposed to a victim of a nondescript haunted mansion, not to mention their praise of Shelley Duvall’s performance, which feels downright perverse to me. Immediately following this very uncomfortable rewatch – of a film I’d go as far as to say that I truly despise – is when I realized the potential that Mike Flanagan’s long overdue sequel, Doctor Sleep, had.
Doctor Sleep catches us back up with Danny Torrance, Jack’s son in the first film, nearly 40 years after his stay at the Overlook Hotel where his father tried to murder him and his mother. Danny, played with a charming scumminess by Ewan McGregor, struggles with alcoholism and remains traumatized by his experiences at the Overlook. The film is based on King’s sequel novel that – while I have yet to read it – is evidently inseparable from the legacy of Kubrick’s film, and it leans much more noticeably into the supernatural by introducing a group of adults called the True Knot who abduct children and feed on their souls. More specifically, they tend to be drawn towards talented children who have the shining, which tends to read as a special spiritual ability that leaves you more empathetically in tune. Danny makes a spiritual connection to a young girl named Abra who holds great power and is in danger of being targeted by the True Knot. All of this plays brilliantly into the substance of what I’d like to talk about: the parallels between Danny’s father Jack and director Stanley Kubrick, as well as the parallels between Danny himself and director Mike Flanagan.
When discussing this, I have to describe these parallels as if all three dimensions of this story – the canonical text of the film, the canonical text of the source materials, and the real artists responsible for creating those texts – are on the same plane. First of all, what haunts the film is more than just the horrific abuse that Danny was subjected to by his father Jack, but more so the imagery of that abuse that was made popular by The Shining. To put it plainly, and to describe the popular genre of horror in rather ugly terms, that abuse was fetishized by filmgoers, and before you object and point out that there are other pleasures in seeing tales of abuse depicted on film, you must remember that outside of the film, there was tangible abuse taking place that the film is a specific result of. There’s no other way of looking at it, especially when the film asks us to empathize with the characters who barely have to act when they appear traumatized in the film. Author Stephen King’s negative reaction to the film adds interesting layers as well: King, while writing the novel, was struggling with alcoholism himself. He was quoted on the topic of Kubrick saying that he “thinks too much and feels too little,” and it’s hard not to draw a correlation between King’s personal connection to the material and this comment, because for Kubrick to tell this story using such insensitive tactics makes it difficult to feel that he is honoring the story in the slightest. That, I believe, is where the function of the True Knot comes in: they are a group of virtually immortal, power-hungry adults who exploit the talents of young people in order to maintain their power.
It appears that as adults in this universe, your options are to choose empathy or to choose greed. In Doctor Sleep, empathy is represented by those who hold the shining, who have good powers and choose to use them for good & greed is represented by the True Knot, who are obsessed with their own power only so that they can remain the most powerful group; in The Shining, empathy is represented by Danny and greed is represented by Jack. The Shining, demonstrated best in its father-son dynamic, is about inherited abusive qualities and how they get the best of Jack; which means that Doctor Sleep is about processing those qualities in order to reject them. You may have heard complaints that when this unconventional sequel finally returns to its predecessors infamous location of The Overlook – approximately 2 hours in, I might add – it becomes a disappointing attempt to bootlick Kubrick and ape all the imagery that made The Shining famous. This, I contend, is a blatant misread of everything that Doctor Sleep sets up in its first two acts. I weirdly sense no idolization of Kubrick’s film in it: the uncanny recreations of the Overlook – now dark, snowy and rotting – are unsettling, and Flanagan makes sure that the pain that lies dormant in its walls cannot be ignored. Of course, many of the people making these criticisms also probably have a great adoration for Kubrick’s film, which they would understandably project onto this sequel. In no way can I say that I am correct in saying the opposite, of course; rather, I am projecting my disdain for the original on this sequel and reporting the results.
The power of the Overlook’s imagery in The Shining has withstood the test of time. It has haunted cinema for decades, and Doctor Sleep does a fantastic job of unpacking that. It reminded me of last year’s Ready Player One, which tackled it in a way that was received similarly to how Doctor Sleep has been by Shining fanboys. In the film, a group of people who are playing a virtual reality video game take part in a hunt for keys left behind by its creator, a pop culture obsessed video game designed who was haunted by loneliness. They are forced to search through the Overlook hotel for one of his hidden keys, which causes one of them in particular to spiral into pure terror just by being there. The clue that leads them to the Overlook is “a creator who hates his own creation.” It very literally refers to the fact that King had great disdain for Kubrick’s film, but how that ties it to a creator of art that feels guilt for the negative impact of its creation as well is far more interesting than many of the film’s critics gave it credit for (especially since it pertains to the creator of the OASIS in Ready Player One). The other quote, however, that really unlocks this whole thing is when Art3mis says that “the whole Shining trivia is just a diversion.” The same goes for Doctor Sleep! I can’t speak for Flanagan’s intentions, but the film shows you all this imagery you’re familiar with through a genuinely new lens, I think in the hopes that you’ll reconsider its power.
Being at the Overlook tempts Danny back into wanting to drink using a vision of his father, the very same thing that happened to Jack in The Shining. I think this is where King’s autobiographical lens returns to correct what Kubrick made about himself in The Shining: to see an alcoholic man go on a murderous rampage in The Shining surely rubbed him the wrong way, so when Danny rejects these urges in Doctor Sleep, it also functions as a rejection of everything negative that Kubrick enforced in his film. That’s why imbuing the universe’s children with hope and an understanding of the responsibility that comes with having power is essential to the film, because it recognizes that The Shining was not the beginning of a cycle of abuse, but Doctor Sleep can be the end of it. I don’t necessarily condone the storytelling device of using trauma as a special tool that makes us better, but when Danny repurposes the imagery of The Shining that tortured him as a child and throughout his life – especially considering its parallel to how The Shining’s imagery technically influenced a generation of filmgoers to glorify abusing actors in the name of art – in order to defeat the True Knot, it is pretty undeniable. Not to mention that the film ends with the Overlook literally burning to the ground, which does not lend at all to the criticism that Flanagan lionizes The Shining too much. What I think is the most powerful aspect of the entire film is how it uniquely rewrites the deaths that had previously occurred in this saga. Wendy Torrance, Dick Halloran and eventually Danny all show up as ghosts at certain points throughout the film, each of them literally shining like a bright light. The actors are all different, of course – save for Ewan McGregor – but their presence feels hopeful. The three of them were disrespected and abused in their own ways in both dimensions of the story: Wendy was abused by Jack and Shelley Duvall was abused in order to get a good performance out of her; Dick, the hotel chef and the only black character in the original film, is mistreated as a character before being abruptly and purposelessly killed off by Jack; and Danny’s history we see here in Doctor Sleep. In its final moments, Danny tells Abra not to hide her shine, so she embraces it by sharing it with her reluctant mother. In doing so, she disregards the gaslighting she is subjected to by the True Knot, who told her that she was to blame for several deaths that they really caused. In reality, she honors all of these people that we’ve seen die under unfair circumstances. The film revels in the uncanny to show us the hope in this story that was withheld from us by Kubrick. The Shining is famous for its narrative ambiguity, which reminds one of the abusive tactic of withholding information in order to get a specific reaction – in this case to view Kubrick as a genius – but Doctor Sleep is crystal clear in its intentions, and Danny himself sums it up potently with a quote that comes early in the film: “We don’t end.”