10 Movies That Completely Missed The Point

From his very first scene in Stanley Kubrick’s movie adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, you can tell there’s something wrong with Jack Torrance. In the interview for the job of winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, and on the drive to the Hotel with his family, Jack’s got the arched eyebrows and manic grin of someone who disposes of his victims by eating them.

And that’s because Kubrick cast Jack Nicholson to play Torrance - a family man with a troubled past he’s hoping to put behind him. You see, he’s supposed to be a normal guy. He’s supposed to be sympathetic. In point of fact, Jack Torrance is the human tragedy in The Shining: a recovering alcoholic beset by ghosts, both supernatural and psychological, who just wants to stop screwing up and make the most of the second chance he’s been given to be a good husband and father.

That’s the Jack Torrance in the novel, of course. The Jack Torrance in Kubrick’s celebrated horror masterpiece is already madder than trousers… more than that, whether a function of the script or Nicholson’s frightening, grimacing performance, Kubrick’s Torrance barely ever shows any sign of affection or love towards his son Danny or his wife Wendy.

It’s a tricky one, this - Kubrick apologists have sneered at this argument for decades, arguing that the movie is sheer brilliance at work (it is), a masterclass in sustained, grand guignol dread (damn straight), and that this is just the perennial snobbery that fans of classic literature have for the inevitable cinematic adaptations.

But the argument here isn’t that Kubrick’s cut too much from the novel, or changed the tack of the story: it’s that Jack Torrance no longer has a narrative arc, sane to insane, family man to axe-murderer. You just don’t care about him or his family.

In the book, you don’t want the Overlook to possess Torrance - it’s the true horror of the story, that a man you like could descend into a madness so total that he’d hack his wife and son to pieces, and his redemption comes when he kills himself at the climax to avoid

In the film, you can see it’s going to happen in the first ten minutes… and with Mad Jack capering around, all manic eyebrows, devilish grin and pub psycho inflection, it’s only only a matter of before he picks up an axe.