Colorado - The Shining

"This inhuman place makes human monsters."

Each book covered in this blog to date has some kind of feature or theme that ties in well with the state its set in. Call of the Wild featured the ruggedness and importance of survival of the fittest in the still-prominent Alaskan wilderness. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings showcased the struggles of growing up black, poor, and female in rural Arkansas, a state that features some of the more iconic and violent struggles of post-Civil War race relations. Where a novel is set not only gives a reader an idea on where the story takes place, but also how that setting affects its characters, plots, and themes.

By contrast, there's nothing too unique to Colorado in The Shining. It's a story that could easily take place in any grand resort or hotel in any other part of the Rockies or some other mountain range. The hotel that was used the exterior shot in Stanley Kubrick's famous film adaptation is located in Oregon, and there's no reason why the Torrance family, the central characters of The Shining, couldn't have left a town like Portland or Eugene to take care of a mountain resort through the winter season instead of Boulder.

The reason for a Colorado setting actually comes from a random choice from author Stephen King himself. After publishing Carrie and Salem's Lot, King was looking for a different location as a setting for his next novel rather than his native state of Maine. What he ended up doing is something that we hear about as a way to escape without giving much thought into destination: he opened up an atlas, closed his eyes, and pointed to a random location. He pointed to Boulder, Colorado.

King and his wife would then travel to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park and check in at the end of October. This late arrival that approached the end of the hotel's operating season meant that they would be the only two guests in the entire building. Take a look at the hotel and you can see why this could be somewhat unsettling; the original hotel hosted 48 rooms and featured a lavish dining room and orchestral hall, all empty aside from the hotel's staff, King, and his wife. After having only one choice of meal, listening to canned orchestral music while he and his wife ate, sitting at a full bar by himself, and having a nightmare about his toddler being chased throughout the hotel's empty hallways, King had the basic plot for The Shining in mind.

"Monsters are real. Ghosts are too. They live inside of us, and sometimes, they win."

Jack Torrance is the patriarch of the Torrance family, which includes his wife, Wendy, and son, Danny. Jack is a struggling author having to take odd jobs to help his family get by until he can publish his next piece, but perhaps more importantly is the fact he's a recovering alcoholic vulnerable to anger management issues. It's this alcoholism and anger that caused him to lose his job as a teacher in a prestigious Vermont prep school. Even worse, it's this condition that caused him to break a young Danny's arm in a moment of particularly violent rage, which has placed a permanent rift between himself and Wendy.

Jack's friend back in Vermont is able to land him a job interview for the position of winter caretaker at the historic Overlook Hotel, a mountain resort that closes during the usually nasty winter season. The manager expresses reservations of both Jack's alcoholism and Jack announcing that his wife and son will be moving into the hotel with him. The manager tells Jack about how the previous caretaker, a man named Grady, succumbed to cabin fever and brutally killed his wife, daughters, and self. After Jack assures the manager that the solitude will help he and Wendy with their marriage, as well as give him time to work on his new play, he lands the job.

Meanwhile, back at the Torrance's residence in Boulder, Danny experiences premonitions guided by his "imaginary friend," Tony. Danny sees his father violently swinging some kind of mallet around, threatening to bludgeon Danny to death.

The novel kicks off when the Torrance's arrive at the Overlook. Jack is given careful instructions on tasks to perform throughout the winter, the most important of which is to manually release pressure in the basement's boiler. Failure to do so will cause the boiler, and likely the hotel, to explode.

In the meantime, Danny is getting acquainted with the hotel's head chef, a kind man named Dick Hallorann. Dick explains to Danny that he possesses telepathic abilities that allow him to see visions from both the past and the future, which he refers to as "shining." Dick warns Danny that the Overlook Hotel has quite a sordid history, but comforts him by saying that the visions Danny will likely see aren't really there, but are more like pictures in a book.

This comforting advice does help Danny for a short time. He experiences several visions in different rooms, ranging from seeing blood and brain splatters on the walls of the presidential suite to seeing the corpse of a woman in a bathtub. However, when Danny goes through a particular ordeal where the woman in the bathtub is able to do physical harm to him, he realizes that his presence in the hotel is causing the various ghosts and haunts to become stronger and more real, likely due to his shine abilities. Danny, despite being terrified, says nothing to his parents. In addition to the horrifying premonitions and ghostly encounters, his shining ability has let him see that his father is worried about keeping a job, and his mother is worried about the possibility of needing to file for divorce.

Throughout the winter and the novel, Jack begins to slowly lose his mind. The transition starts when he discovers a box of old newspaper clippings featuring some of the Overlook's major events and sketchy history, which starts to transform his passive interest in the hotel into an obsession. He begins to become frustrated by Wendy's and Danny's interruptions. He becomes destructive, destroying an old CB radio and removing sparkplugs out of the hotel's snowmobile, removing the only connections the Torrance's have to the outside world. He starts to relive some of his memories about his abusive and alcoholic father and the incident that caused him to lose his job back in Vermont. All of these instances combined start to make Jack crave alcohol once more.

Jack finally falls off the wagon once he discovers that the bar in the hotel's ballroom has been fully stocked and is even operated by a bartender. Once Jack is good and drunk, the hotel's ghosts fill the ballroom. The ghost of Grady, the former caretaker, explains to Jack that all of his problems can go away if he simply killed Wendy and Danny. Jack is initially able to resists, but finally succumbs to the hotel's influence and begins a violent rampage against his family with the intention of bludgeoning them with a roque mallet.

Wendy and Danny are able to lock Jack in the kitchen's walk-in pantry. Danny tries to muster his shine to send a distress signal to Dick, who is all the way in Florida.

The ghost of Grady appears once more and explains to Jack that the hotel isn't interested in him, but Danny. Danny's presence in the hotel has indeed strengthened the spirits and the hotel itself, but his mental will was too strong to take over. The hotel had to resort to possessing Jack, whose weak mental state after years of alcoholism, depression, frustration, and fatigue have made him an easy target. The hotel unlocks the pantry door and Jack escapes to finish the job.

Danny confronts his father, who is now fully under control of the Overlook. Danny has a brief premonition of a way to escape: he reminds the hotel creature that the boiler hasn't been unloaded in quite some time. The hotel creature panics and flees to the basement, giving Danny and Wendy an opportunity to meet up with Dick, who just arrived to the hotel after a strange battle with the hotel's hedge animals. After overcoming the hotel's attempts to influence him to kill Wendy and Danny, Dick drives them all to safety. In the meantime, the hotel creature is unable to vent the boiler in time, which causes the it and entire hotel to explode in a ball of flame.

"God wiped snot out of his nose and that was you."

It's not possible to write about The Shining novel without inevitably comparing it to Stanley Kubrick's horror classic that everyone knows. Starring the incredibly talented Jack Nicholson, the film has become a staple of American horror cinema and continues to earn top marks from critics and audiences alike. However, one person did have a problem with the film when it first came out and still does to this day, that person being Stephen King himself.

Like all film adaptations of books, Kubrick's version of The Shining made a few artistic changes to its source material. The biggest change probably has to be Jack Nicholson's portrayal of Jack Torrance. By the time filming began, Nicholson already had a well-established reputation in Hollywood as an actor who could portray antiheroes and antagonists with great skill. The man has an ability to ooze creepiness off of him, a talent which has made him famous throughout his decades-long career. Nicholson used this talent well in the Kubrick's adaptation, showing off generous amounts of sinister grins, smug and bitter dialogue, and general nastiness, all of which helped make the movie the success it is. By the time Nicholson appears on screen, you know you're supposed to hate Jack Torrance, and you do in short order.

The Jack Torrance in King's original novel, while definitely sinister and full of his own demons, is much more sympathetic than Nicholson's portrayal. King's Torrance knows his faults, and throughout the beginning and middle of the novel tries his darnedest to correct them. He loves Danny with all of his heart and wants to provide a good life for him. He spends much of the novel wracked with guilt over the incident that lead to him breaking Danny's arm. He is constantly worried, if not terrified, that Wendy never really forgave him for the incident and is only sticking around for Danny's sake. When King's Torrance finally snaps and succumbs to the hotel, you actually feel sorry for him and hope that things will turn around for the better.

In contrast, you never root for Nicholson's portrayal, and King knew that casting Nicholson would make it clear to the audience early on that this is someone you're supposed to hate. It's for that reason that King argued for the casting of a more "everyman" type actor and gave the recommendations of Jon Voight and Christopher Reeve, someone who would make falling apart more unnerving and unexpected.

Another major difference with the film is how it portrays why Jack Torrance falls apart and the actual influence of the hotel. In the film, Jack's anger and frustration come mainly from his writer's block and cabin fever caused by being cooped up too long. His alcoholism is only mentioned once or twice and takes a backseat to his other issues of dealing with a nagging wife and son, in addition to not being able to work. He's able to see the various ghosts of the hotel, but it's never made clear whether they actually exist or if they're just manifestations of his inner anger (diehard fans will point out that every scene where Jack talks to a ghost features some kind of mirror or reflective surface.) In the novel, Jack's source of weakness comes almost exclusively from his past as an alcoholic, the strain it places on his family, and his guilt associated with it. He is actually influenced by the borderline sentient hotel itself. The ghosts are real and have a clear goal in mind, that being to possess a mentally weakened and self-loathing Jack to "capture" Danny's shining abilities for the hotel and its ghosts to feed off of.

In a way, it's not too surprising that Jack Torrance was written as a sort of self-insert for Stephen King. At the time of writing The Shining, King was also struggling with his own alcoholism and the way that it affected his family along with his psyche. While the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel were real, so too were the feelings of guilt, stress, and hatred that accompanied a longtime alcoholic trying to keep his family together, all of these feelings that King had to have known too well. As he writes in the novel, ghosts and monsters live inside of us all. Whether we overcome these influences is up to us.