King's Highway pt. 50: The Shining (the movie)

The last blog (KH49, The Great Lost McBlog of 2012) was supposed to be the foundation-stone for this and the next one; I'd defined-my-terms so I wouldn't have to keep defining them, I'd referenced the relevant quotes, I'd parsed the reviews for the direct-quotes-to-which-I-planned to respond... tough to reconcile myself with having to do it all over again.

But, You go back, Jack, and do it again.

This may be a little on the long side. Don't forget to change your jacket before the fish and goose soiree...

Much has been written about this film (here's a great review, one of thousands out there), and even more about Kubrick-the-man/ Kubrick-the-auteur. Additionally, much ink has been spilled by King fans who seem to view the book-vs-film discussion as their own personal Roe v. Wade. I'm not going to get into any of that. Frankly, a) it's stupid. This isn't a case of "Everybody Comes to Rick's" vs. Casablanca, or more specifically to Kubrick, Burdick-and-Wheeler's Fail Safe vs. Dr. Strangelove. Both the novel and the film are well-recognized masterpieces. b) It may be instructional to discuss how they differ (and I don't dispute this) but there are enough side-by-side comparisons and reviews out there that I feel no need to add my voice to that chorus, and c) I'll save King's specific criticisms of the film for next time, as they definitely inform my personal bias against the mini-series.

And as if all the above wasn't enough, there are so many different interpretations of the film that they warrant their own film (Room 237). So, what I'll do here is just focus on only two of the interpretations.

Before I get to those, a couple confessions: 

Kubrick is my favorite filmmaker, and The Shining in particular is one of my favorite films. Let me get that bias out in the open straight away. Much has been made of Kubrick's alleged "coldness," lack of human empathy, over-cerebralness, etc. Reviews of The Shining in particular mention this often, but one finds the same reaction to most of his other films, as well. I've confessed my bias, sure, but... give me a break.Kubrick's work is filled with deep emotion. If you failed to be moved by the end of Paths of Glory, when the German girl (Kubrick's eventual wife, incidentally) is thrust onto a table and bullied into singing for the French soldiers and whose simple, innocent song shames the crowd, or by the tortured cries of Private Pile after he's savagely beaten by his platoon-mates and the one friend he thought he had in Full Metal Jacket, or by Alex's improbably heartwrenching post-rehabilitation eviction from his parents' flat in A Clockwork Orange, or by the bedside father-and-son moments during the latter's death in Barry Lyndon, or the comeuppance of the title character, or by roughly three-dozen other such moments from across his films, there's little chance you'll identify any which filmmakers are "cold and cerebral" and which ones aren't.

Anyway, there is more speak-directly-to-your-soul emotion in The Shining via musical-choice alone than there is 90% of other movies. Literally, 90%! I've done the math.

Another of my biases is towards the casting of Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance.

I'll get into this more next time when I address the casting of Steven Weber and King's reservations, but let me just say that this is one of my all-time favorite performances, ever.

Granted, so's Bruce Campbell's in Evil Dead 2, so take it with a grain of salt, if you must.

Consider this, as recounted (among many other places) here:

"Stephen Spielberg tells a story about talking to Stanley Kubrick about The Shining. Spielberg felt that Jack Nicholson went over the top. Kubrick asked him to name his top five greatest actors. Spielberg named people like Spencer Tracy, James Stewart, Clark Gable and Cary Grant. Kubrick noted that he hadn’t listed James Cagney. Spielberg realized this was true and Kubrick pointed out that even though Spielberg liked Cagney he didn’t consider him to be in the top five greatest actors of all time. Kubrick did and it’s why he doesn’t consider Nicholson’s performance to be too much. It made sense to Spielberg and does to me too."

When I defend Nicholson as an actor to my friend Alex, whom I bring up only because we talked about this over pitchers of beer for like three hours the other night, he always counters with Gary Oldman. I love Gary Oldman; Gary Oldman's the man. But to expect a Gary-Oldman-like performance from Jack Nicholson is like expecting Wade Boggs to pitch a no-hitter. Different actors, different approaches. And although I don't think much of Nicholson's acting after a certain point in his career, when he was on, back in the day, he was on.

As Good As It Gets, while certainly not terrible, is  from that period of Jack's output of which I don't think too highly, but it's absurd not to notice Nicholson's spot-on portrayal of a man with OCD-symptoms. Yes, he's playing Jack Nicholson. He's also playing a spot-on man with OCD.

Take this bit of physicality of Nicholson's performance in The Shining, as one of many examples:

After being accused of hurting Danny, Jack storms off down the hall...

As Ager points out in his analysis (which I'm getting to) nearly all of the ghostly-interactions Jack has are accompanied by mirrors or reflective surfaces. In this sequence, Jack's reflections in the mirrors as he walks by them is immediately followed by...

spasms of physical anger. He is clearly exhibiting the classic body language of someone in denial, disgusted with himself.

I defend wholeheartedly the casting of Nicholson as Torrance, despite many opinions to the contrary. (Not the least of which is King's, himself.) Personally, I agree with Kev's:

“As early as the opening line – “Jack Torrance thought, officious little prick.” – Torrance comes across as adversarial. He is a damaged man whose deep flaws have damaged others. A recovering alcoholic, Jack is given to fits of temper and rage; addiction seems less a cause than a symptom of his deeper character issues… Alcohol is not necessarily a trigger for these outbreaks, merely an accelerant.”

And as Karina Wilson writes: “There have been many literary portraits of drunks, but it’s unusual to see a dry drunk in all his glory. Jack’s a textbook case: full of anger, denial, self-pity, blame, grandiose ideas of his worth to society, and prone to secrecy, self-isolation, and blaming others for his failure, all without a drop of liquor having passed his lips in fourteen months.”

So, to the charge that the audience identifies Nicholson as wackadoo/violent too early on, I can only say, verily again and again, the barely-restrained-rage/simmering-anger is self-evident to me from the novel's first chapter. It's compartmentalized in the film, but it's not a mistake.

You can take issue with the absence of last-minute-redemption in the book ("Go. And remember that I love you." before smashing his own face to smithereens with the roque mallet) - actually, take issue with whatever you like, of course. Go forth and blog the gospel. But for me, the death of Jack in the film is as engaging and mythological (perhaps even moreso) as it is in the book, and I have little reservation with the changes made. That said, I can certainly understand King's being upset at the omission of his carefully-constructed backstory/ motivations for Jack Torrance in adapting the novel to film (all the stuff with his Dad is gone, the agonizing over his beaten-former-student, etc.), but it is simply incorrect to say the character changes all that much. Different flavors of the same cola. 

One last thing - go up to anyone and say "Heeeeeeeere's Johnny." (Go on. I'll wait.) Ask them where it's from/ who said it. Most people answer "Jack Nicholson, The Shining." Not that it really proves anything, but it's telling of how deeply Nicholson's performance has permeated the collective unconscious. As some-review-I-read-but-lost-to-the-Blogger-ether pointed out, Ed McMahon said that (his catchphrase/ introduction of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, for those young'ns in the audience) roughly a million times, night after night; Nicholson said it just once.

Okay, so on to the two interpretations I wish to discuss. The first is Rob Ager's "Gold Room" analysis. It's worth watching all 4 parts of, trust me (and quite fun), but I'll summarize:

1) The film, like Cronenberg's Naked Lunch or the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink, must be viewed as a story-within-a-story. What we see is partially the story of the Torrances at the Overlook and partially the imagined-story within Jack's novel, or both, as mixed-as-metaphor-for-writers block.

This is most-explicitly expressed in this next shot, where we see Wendy-and-Danny "emerging" from Jack's typewriter:

It's an intriguing idea. As he notes, the original draft of the screenplay - as seen in the Kubrick archives - ends with a close-up of the Overlook scrapbook, where Jack's story is laid to rest, and an unidentified hand closing it. Suggestive, to be sure, but does this alone prove the whole thing is or was at-least-once-conceived-as a story-within-a-story-within-a-story?

Ager argues that many of the continuity errors throughout the film are also meant to convey this. I forget who said it, but when a hack makes a continuity error, it is proof of their hack-ness; when a great artist like Kubrick does, then verdammt, it must be a clue.

I don't necessarily buy this. While Kubrick's meticulous attention to detail is a legend in the industry (and for good reason), I'm of the opinion he was not a perfection-machine. Even 2001 was the result of a five-year ongoing collaboration; he preferred to find the subtext in the filming-of-it. So, I don't see disappearing chairs in the background or mismatched carpet-colors to indicate anything other than what Jan Harlan (frequent Kubrick collaborator) said when asked about them:

"Kubrick, he explains, was always intent on pushing the form, on leaving the work open to multiple interpretations, like the French impressionists or the Cubist painters that went before. 'A straightforward horror film was not what interested him,' Harlan insists. 'He wanted more ambiguity. If he was going to make a film about ghosts, he wanted it to be ghostly from the very first to the very last. The set was very deliberately built to be offbeat and off the track, so that the huge ballroom would never actually fit inside. The audience is deliberately made to not know where they're going. People say The Shining doesn't make sense. Well spotted! It's a ghost movie. It's not supposed to make sense.'"

That may be too glib for some, but to me, it fits Kubrick's approach. (Incidentally, a disappearing-blue-sweater in 2001 is referred to on-screen by an intercom voice-over. Ager uses this as evidence that Kubrick would in no way not be aware of any continuity errors. I tend to agree, but I see Harlan's explanation, above, as more probable.)

The second part of Ager's theory is that the entire film is a metaphor for monetary history of the twentieth century, something a) definitely happened "offscreen" or hidden away from surface-level-history, and that b) Kubrick was unarguably interested in/ knowledgeable of. (There is some fun evidentiary support for this in Michael Herr's Vanity Fair piece on Kubrick, something Ager curiously doesn't reference.) He devotes considerable screen-time to said history. I won't get into it, but to back up this point, he references the famous photo that closes the film:

In Ager's view, the man with his hand on Jack's arm is "undeniably" Woodrow Wilson...

(aka the President who signed The Federal Reserve Act into law) You tell me.

Ager seems to identify several other financial luminaries in the photo, such as Benjamin Strong; apparently, the architects of America's shadow government are all hanging out with Jack in the Gold Room. These personages are visual indicators (i.e. things puzzle-makers insert into their puzzles to encourage people they're on the right track) to the audience that what we're seeing here is Jack (i.e. America's) seduction by a financial apparatus above and beyond all laws of man or charity.

"You are passionate, Mozart," says the Emperor in Amadeus, "but you do not... persuade."

I'm quite entertained by this view, but ultimately, I'm not convinced. Even if the people in the photo are who Ager says they are, what of it? The Overlook has hosted "all the best people," from celebs to Presidents to rich folks of all variety, both in the film and in the book. He goes into this much more than I am, here, and for all I know, he is 100% correct; if indeed the people in the photo are who he says they are, it certainly does suggest Kubrick is saying something about the personalities involved in unleashing what G. Edward Griffin describes as "The Creature from Jekyll Island," i.e. the Federal Reserve.

Your money's no good here, Mr. Torrance. (But your credit is excellent.)

Further to Ager's read are the shifting physical parameters of the Gold Room, indicating the deception over America's gold reserves:

But I think Harlan's explanation about deliberately playing tricks with the viewer's perception re: its proportions, etc. covers this.

and the "Midnight, the Stars, and You" song, which accompanies Jack's joining-the-party in the Gold Room, as well as over the final reveal that he has been subsumed into the Overlook:

"Midnight and a rendezvous" - referring to the top-secret trip to Jekyll Island to hammer together what became known as the Federal Reserve system, "your eyes held a message tender," i.e. tender=currency, and "saying I surrender..." loss of American sovereignty over its own monetary supply/ gold reserves.

As mentioned above, Kubrick was well-known for coming-at-a-topic in such a roundabout way. Strangelove and Lolita most particularly; the former can be read as the farce of male sexual anxiety (as can Eyes Wide Shut, but much more Freudian-ly, although this is an essay/ discussion-over-pitchers for another time) and the latter (both in the film and in the Nabokov novel) as the intellectual-European's "seduction" by this young, nubile language/ perspective, i.e. English. (Don't take my word for any of this, by any means; I certainly didn't, when these ideas were first floated by me.)

All of that said... I think this is a bit of a stretch. Also, it doesn't quite line-up with how Kubrick revealed to be approaching The Shining, i.e. as his "mainstream" film. I'm not saying he didn't put in any such subtext; I am saying, though that if he did, it's odd no trace of it exists in his archives, where he provided volumes of evidentiary support for all of his work. (Even his never-made work, like Napoleon.) What exists in the archives for The Shining is Jack's scrapbook, which does indeed detail various goings-on of the banking class of the Jazz Age, but no real "I was trying to talk about the Federal Reserve" smoking-gun.

In other words, there's some party here...

but the guests have all gone home. If you're into this sort of thing, though, here's another one. Like The Shining, The Wizard of Oz lends itself well to multiple interpretations.

The second interpretation I'd like to discuss is Bill Blakemore's theory that The Shining is about the murder of Native Americans and the consequences of that murder for the American psyche.

"If you are skeptical about this, consider the Calumet baking powder cans with their Indian chief logo that Kubrick placed carefully in the two food-locker scenes. (A calumet is a peace pipe.) Consider the Indian motifs that decorate the hotel, and the way they serve as background in many of the key scenes. Consider the insertion of two lines, early in the film, describing how the hotel was built on Indian burial ground.

"Not only is the site called the Overlook Hotel with its Overlook Maze, but one of the key scenes takes place at the July 4th Ball, (a date with) particular relevance to American Indians. That's why Kubrick made a movie in which the American audience sees signs of Indians in almost every frame, yet never really sees what the movie's about.

"Ullman says, 'The site is supposed to be located on an Indian burial ground, and I believe they actually had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it.' This bit of dialogue does not appear in Stephen King's novel.

"The film is about how the all-male British military establishment, itself forged in bloody empire-building, passed on to its offspring continental empire, the United States, certain timeworn army-building methods... yet we never meet an actual Indian. But we do get to know, and like, and then see murdered, a powerful black character, Chef Hallorann,, the only person to die in the film other than the protagonist, villain and victim, Jack. The murdered black man lies across a large Indian design on the floor, victim of similar racist violence.

"As manager Ullman says in the opening interview, 'It's still hard for me to believe it actually happened here... but it did.' The type of people who partied in the Overlook included 'four Presidents, movie stars...' 'Royalty?' Wendy asks. 'All the best people.' (Ullman responds) King's novel has nothing to do with any of these things."

"We never hear the rushing blood (that gushes from the elevator shaft). It is a mute nightmare. It is the blood upon which this nation, like most nations, was built.

White man's burden, Lloyd, white man's burden.

"As the credits roll, the soundtrack ends, and we hear the 1920s audience applaud, and then the gabble of that audience talking among themselves - the same sound the crowd of moviegoers itself is probably making as it leaves the theater.

"It is the sound of people moving out of one stage of consciousness into another. The moviegoers are largely unaware of this soundtrack, and this reflects their unawareness that they've just seen a movie about themselves, about what people like them have done to the American Indian and others.

"The opening music, over the traveling aerial shots of a tiny yellow Volkswagen penetrating the magnificent "West" wilderness, is the "Dies Irae." (i.e. REQUIEM)

"At the end of the movie, in the climactic chase in the Overlook Maze, the moral maze of America... in which we are chased by the sins of our fathers ("Danny, I'm coming. You can't get away. I'm right behind you.") Danny escapes by retracing his own steps (an "old Indian trick") and letting his father blunder past." i.e. (Bryan again) You are the caretaker here; you have always been the caretaker here...

"The Shining is explicitly about America's general inability to admit to the gravity of the genocide of the Indians - or, more exactly, its ability to "overlook" that genocide."

It's a fun theory. (Well, as "fun" as anything looking genocide square in the face can be) But does it work?

My problem is mainly with its inaccuracy. Kubrick didn't invent the "Overlook" as the name of the hotel. The novel (as discussed in the blog lost in the Phantom Zone) can be read as an overlook of personal alcoholism ("I was the guy who wrote The Shining and didn't realize I was writing about myself," King says in On Writing, something which should not be taken to indicate Jack Torrance is a stand-in for King-the-author, but as an externalization of King-the-father's fears? Probably.) but also the father-murders-child myth of countless-origins/ losing-control/ anger. Also, King might not mention Indians but the "Do you see the Indians in this picture?" motif is used more than once when describing how the ghosts may or may not be there. 

Additionally, to Blakemore's charge that the "all the best people" bit was invented by Kubrick, that is not so; the Overlook as indicative of a certain 20th-century-American-character is explicitly mentioned by Jack in the novel.

(Also, is "covering your tracks" really an old-Indian-trick? I'm pretty sure I've seen it elsewhere, in stories well-predating Columbus. The Minotaur from Greek Mythology, to name but one.)

The tying together Indian massacres with American racism thing, though, does provide a satisfactory frame around one particular image of the movie, which was Kubrick's invention:

A shot I've never been able to explain to myself satisfactorily, although it could just be color-coding. (No pun intended)

You get the idea. So, while ultimately I feel both theories above are not quite kosher, they are fun to think about. Personally, I agree with James Smythe's review in The Guardian: "(Both the novel and the film) are stories about hidden evil emerging when the snow sets in; when a family is isolated and broken, and when a man with buried darkness finally collapses and becomes what he was always, inevitably going to be."

"Symbolically," writes Kev, again, "the Overlook's preoccupation with its violent past mirrors Jack's destructive personality. Mistreated as a child by his father, Jack is unable to break the cycle of anger and abuse. (His) discovery of the hotel's scrapbook allows him to wallow in the hotel's past without being aware of its hold on the present, or is effect on his son; the scrapbook becomes a clouding addiction as destructive as his own alcoholism."

NEXT

The mini-series (God help me)

King's Highway pt. 49: The Shining (novel)

You will remember what your father forgot - Tony.

And that, my friends, is all that remains of my original blog entry.

I published my finished-blog for this earlier today, and then - as usually happens with blogger - noticed the spacing/ formatting came out completely (and inexplicably) differently than how it looked in edit-mode. So, I went in to tidy things up, somehow hit "revert to draft," then as I tried to ctrl-Z backwards, it erased the entire blog, then auto-saved before I could do anything else.

I tried a bunch of different things to recover it, but to no avail. Seems to be gone forever. After whimpering helplessly for about twenty minutes, (the horror of all those hours of work receding into oblivion was perhaps the worst, though replacing that hard-won sense of "job well done"ness with the blank-screen of blogger-glitch was a close second) I posted a s.o.s. to the Google Groups board; maybe someone can tell me how to find it.

If so, well, see you then. But, to hang all my hopes on that is too much, so I'm just going to move on.

Rather than attempt to re-create it - because I think the attempt would be so discouraging that I'd give up the entire King's Highway project altogether - I can only say... well, I guess the Overlook got this one. Subsumed into the unholy terror of Room 217, or something. Add "King's Highway pt. 49" to the scrapbook in the boiler room.

(If it was the film, I'd say "Add me to the picture of the July 4th Ball at the end," but since that doesn't appear in the novel, it wouldn't be jake to mention here.)

I thought about trying to piece it all back together from my notes, but... it's just too much. Not only time-wise, but emotional-investment-wise. Also, I rarely keep my handwritten notes once I start saving the blog-in-question to Blogger, so I don't even have the particular passages from the text that I marked as noteworthy, nor my general outline. Too bad.

Here's a laundry list of what I remember, but it of course is not the same: I wrote about child abuse, cultural-colonization of adult over child a la Inventing the Child by Zornado, Disney, and Grimm's Fairy Tales, the Torrance family drama as classic dark mythology/ perfect symbolic representation of America in the 20th century, and what I considered a pretty good argument for The Shining as King's best novel. I talked briefly on the forthcoming Doctor Sleep and King's relationship with the book, then and now, how he psychoanalyzes himself and externalizes his fears in print, what it means to tell this tale when you're a young man with small children vs. as a grandfather with his own boiler-in-the-basement well-tempered and trials endured/ bested.

I focused only on the novel. The film will be next time; that one is still saved, thankfully, just got to finish it. If that one gets erased, I will take this as proof of the hotel not wanting me to write about it. Anyway, I didn't like how every review of the book I read mentioned the film. Understandable, of course, but I wanted to write one focusing only on the book.

Anyway, the labels - slim as they are - still exist from the lost version, and here now are the pics I used, robbed of context and caption, but as a mysterious road-map to a world taken unfairly from us. Look at them as the King's Highway equivalent "Croatoan" written in the trees. RIP, entry 49, Lost At Sea.

NEXT:

If the blog-gods be willing, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining

King's Highway pt. 44: The Wind Through the Keyhole pt. 2 of 2

WE-THE-PEOPLE: I made an attempt to wrest satisfaction from the official Stephen King Forum about the shifting point-of-view in the central story, as discussed in pt. one. And I was wholly unsuccessful. ("TL;DR" was the general response.) If this changes, I'll update it here. Now... please prepare yourselves once again for the startling conclusion to...

THE DOG-TRUTH-BLOG INSIDE THE OMNIBUS.

As before, all art unless otherwise-indicated by Jae Lee, with copies of the limited edition at https://secure.grantbooks.com/z-sk-dt-twttk.html

DSO: So Marvel is adding their own original stories to the Dark Tower mythos?

 

Bryant: They are indeed.  Or at least, were.  The past few arcs have been more or less straightforward adaptations of The Gunslinger.  And the first was a more or less straightforward adaptation of the young-Roland chunk of Wizard and Glass.  But between those, there were something like five arcs that were almost wholly new.  The first couple were good -- close to great, even -- but they went quickly downhill, and ended up feeling like overblown fanfic.

I really need to get to work on a big old "episode" guide sort of post.  I think a lot of people might be interested in reading that. 

DSO: I almost hope you don't, as then they would call to me like Dark Tower glass at the comic shop. There's even a conveniently collected grab-bag of at least one of the story arcs at the counter of my local, and I've resisted temptation so far. But damn it, when you do, I may have to give in.

 

Bryant: How do you take the novel's dedication ("This is for Robin Furth, and the gang at Marvel Comics.")?  I would love to know exactly how aware King is of those comics.  I get the sense that he was involved with them during the pre-production phase leading up to the first few issues, but that he soon thereafter stopped having much involvement with them at all.  The timeline of this novel directly contradicts the comics; we see here that Cort is still in bed, direly ill, months after his defeat by David the hawk, whereas the Fall of Gilead arc in the comics (I think it was that one) shows Cort more or less back to being his old boisterous self, albeit with one less eye.  I am fine with the novel contradicting the comics, because after the first three arcs or so, I think the comics lost their way quite badly; it pleases me for King to contradict them.

 

DSO: Interesting. Reminds me of their old Star Wars comic.

Art and script by Walt Simonson immediately prior to his run on Thor. I was all about these from 1980 through the release of Jedi, then the series/ concepts seemed to drift.

Bryant: I used to have a few of those comics, but I never got to read as many of them as I wanted.  I seem to recall that Han had a smuggler friend that was a giant green man-rabbit, or something like that.  I remember something to do with landing on a water planet.  I remember a cyborg assassin.  We're talking dim, dim memories here ... but vibrantly dim, if that makes any sense.  I wonder, are there collections of that run of Marvel comics?  If so, I'm adding them to my vast, ever-expanding wish list.

Thing is, given that dedication, I have to wonder what his stance is.  My guess is that he views them the same way he views movie adaptations: i.e., he sees them as having essentially nothing to do with his own work.  I'm tempted to speculate that they have, at the very least, kept him thinking about Mid-World, though; and if that's the case, then I'm all for it.

 

DSO: I haven't looked at any of those, so I can only comment from "afar," but I imagine King sees that stuff as wholly separate from his stuff. Maybe, tho, as you say, it'll help keep his mind in Mid-World! I know when Marvel got around to Wolverine: Origin (the first mini-series; I never read anything but that, tho I know it became an ongoing thing) it was because they didn't want Hollywood to provide their own version. Maybe King will have something similar happen when it comes to any or all of the above.

 

Bryant: Yeah, that makes sense.  I get the feeling that the relationship with Marvel is both more and less complicated than it would seem, and it probably all boils down to King saying, "Yeah, sure, do what you want, I don't care."  I suspect he long ago decided to just trust Robin Furth implicitly, so that he doesn't have to worry about it in any active sense.  His involvement -- and this is a pure guess on my part -- is probably limited to fielding the occasional email question from Furth.  Who, it should be pointed out, is on the record as saying that for her, the comics represent a sort of alternate-universe version of the story.  It's all happening on another level of the Tower, in other words. Fair enough.

 

DSO: Different levels of the Tower is the gift that keeps on giving. Theme-wise, another home run for SK with the absent-father/ avenge-the-mother/ childhood's-end stuff. Many moving passages. I was very satisfied to see Big Ross's ax settle into Kells' neck.

Bryant: Indeed.  I've heard the book described as unimportant or irrelevant as regards its place with the Tower series, but the more I think about it, the less inclined I am to agree.  Roland's matricide at the end of Book IV was a major event, and the series never really dealt with it again in any way.  As such, the emphasis it receives here -- even if it is the emphasis of showing that Roland was able to make peace with his mother's memory -- does seem a bit essential to me. 

 

DSO: Absolutely essential. When I read Wizard and Glass I thought ok, if this flashback has no real bearing on why Roland wants to get to the Dark Tower (besides the whole saving-the-omniverse reason) I'll cry foul. But holy crap, did it ever. I think the same thing here and for this very reason you describe. That bit about his Mom living again through him (i.e. "I could see him falling into the tale, and that please me - it was like hypnotizing him again, but in a better way. A more honest way. The best part, though, was hearing my mother's voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more than not the best things do, I've found. You wouldn't think it could be so, but - as the old-timers used to say - the world's tilted, and there's an end to it." (pg. 106)) as he told the story really got me. King get justified credit for many things, but I think his ability to bring tears to one's eyes in never-expected ways is perhaps underrated.

 

Bryant: Agreed on all points.  He's best-known as a scare-meister, and for good reason, but the fact is that fear can't exist without love: sometimes that's love merely for oneself (i.e., I love myself and really don't want to get torn to pieces by this werewolf), but oftentimes, it's love for someone else.  I can't help but think of the death of Edgar's beloved daughter in Duma Key, which I found to be just utterly horrifying.

I'd say the vast majority of his fiction -- and all of his successful fiction -- is deeply rooted in concerns like that.

 

And I think that makes its placement between Books IV and V interesting.  A hell of a lot of stories get told in that middle section of the eight-book structure, but it seems appropriate; it's almost as if Roland is being forced to come to terms with his past before he can proceed onward toward the Tower.

And I'm with you; I think there is WAY more of that past that needs to be told.  Where it could/would fit in, though, I do not know.  Let's hope we get to find out someday!

 

DSO: Let’s discuss the language and some specific quotes. I made note of a few as I went through the novel. Let’s start with "Time was a face on the water, and like the great river before them, did nothing but flow." (pg. 8) This made me very nostalgic and damn, I can only imagine how often one's heart aches as an old man. Hell, it aches enough now, on the tail-end-of-my-thirties. One more: "It was not fair, it was not fair, it was not fair. So cried his child's heart, and then his child's heart died a little. For that is also the way of the world." (pg. 256)

 

Bryant: As you will see the further you progress into the series, the overriding emotion of The Dark Tower seems to be melancholy for a bygone world.  Which, really, is probably the emotion that lurks behind most art; it's probably what motivates most art.  A sense of "this thing is gone, forever, but if I write about it then maybe it can sorta still be here."  This is a big topic, and probably not tackle-able here, but I definitely think that the way the Tower series takes past, present, and future and then makes a smoothie out of them is a compelling facet of those works.

 

By the way, how tempting is it to never say the word "telephone" again, when such a marvelous synonym as "jing-jang" has been brought into the world?

 

DSO: It really is, you're right. I like Thankee big-big, too. Almost all the swap-words Roland uses (castles for chess, etc.) are fun. Though it's funny which terms get their Mid-World equivalent and which ones don't. Roland refers to a "lunatic asylum" in Calla and I thought, 'Now you'd figure that'd be a term they'd have their own word for.'

 

Bryant: Made-up languages and words can be a real annoyance if they're done poorly, but I think King did pretty well.  He didn't go too overblown with it, which leads to why-not-here questions like the one you pose. But I can live with that.  That sort of thing is like cologne; a little dab is really all you need.

  

DSO: "Once I asked my Da what civilized meant. 'Taxes,' Big Ross said, and laughed - but not in a funny way." (pg. 111)

 

Bryant: You've got to love big-time liberal Stephen King taking a swipe at the taxman.  Even HE hates the taxman.  That said, I think it's interesting that he made the Covenant Man a somewhat ambiguous figure.  Evil, but also kinda helpful; what you need, mayhap, if not exactly what you want.  Someday, somebody will write a highly interesting book analyzing King's work from a political standpoint.  That person will not be me.

DSO: Oh, I so hope that never happens... It's probably inevitable.

As for this part, Man-Jesus… ""Before he could continue his dumbshow, however, the sore above his nipple burst open in a spray of pus and blood. From it crawled a spider the size of a robin's egg. Helmsman grabbed it, crushed it, and tossed it aside. Then, as Tim watched in horrified fascination, he used one hand to push the wound wide. When the sides gaped like lips, he used his other hand to reach in and scooped out a slick mass of faintly throbbing eggs. He slatted these casually aside, ridding himself of them as a man might rid himself of a palmful of snot he has blown out his nose on a cold morning." Now that's how you do that. I'm always impressed with a) his willingness to "go there," and b) how well he can wax-lyrical about such things. Whether it's describing the mutie horrors of Mid-World or Trooper Wilcox's demise or Rogette's face-splitting death in Bag of Bones, there's a beauty to the prose that can't be denied.

 

Bryant: The stuff with the spider coming out of Helmsman is just pure nightmare material.  God, I hope I die before I ever have to suffer through seeing that in a movie.  That said, that particular stretch of the novel was one of my favorites; I loved those repugnant fellows.

 

DSO: I agree on the mud-men. Not only did I enjoy the setting/ events of that part of Tim's journey, it was great to "meet" them. And it tied in nicely (if sadly) with the whole theme of wistful memory/ sad sacrifice. Poor bastards.

"Time is a keyhole, he thought as he looked up at the stars... We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do - the wind that blows through the keyhole - is the breath of all the living universe." (pg. 245) I was wondering when the title would make sense/ when these themes of starkblasts would coalesce. Good stuff.

 

Bryant: The quotation about how time is a keyhole, and the wind that blows through it is the living universe ... man, that's probably one of the better bits King has ever written.  He's continually charged with having passed his prime eons ago, and I'm continually skeptical; and if he HAS passed his prime, I think he passed it very slowly, so that he is still able to turn around and shake its hand once in a while.

DSO: That charge holds little sway with me. I like that handshake-description, though.

 

Bryant: Speaking of starkblasts, a question pops to mind: what do you make of it?  Do you think that's some sort of sci-fi type of storm that's purely indigenous to Mid-World?  Do you think it's a result of the (probably) nuclear cataclysm that brought the Old world to its end?  Do you think it's a result of what the Crimson King is doing, and a byproduct of the world Moving On?  Or none of the above?

 

DSO: I hadn’t considered any of those, to be honest, but I can’t answer ‘none of the above,’ either. I assumed it was just some strange weather phenomenon unique to Roland’s world but not necessarily as a result of the Old Ones. That’s a cool idea, though, and certainly more than plausible. Perhaps it’s even alluded to in the text. I didn’t get a sense that it was related to the CK, though, but perhaps these things gather strength or are even triggered by his breaking down the Beams. Not like the beam-quakes that come later (sorry, editing this a few weeks after this conversation occured, so I'm as confused-about-sequence-of-events-and-time as Ted Brautigan) but maybe some temporal-tear-in-everything caused simply by the CK doing his business.

 

Bryant: You're on the record as to wanting to read a series of spin-off Tim Stoutheart adventures.  Could much the same be said of Sister Everlynne, the badass mountainous nun?  Man, I definitely want more of her; I can only hope that if King ever gets around to writing the tale of how Gilead fell to John Farson, and the tale of how Roland finally got even with Rhea, he will find a way to incorporate Everlynne into those tales.  She's just too good a character to exist only on a few pages here.

 

DSO: Agreed 100%. I hope the name of said novel is Bad-Ass Mountainous Nun.

Let's make a list...
- Roland gets even with Rhea
- Fall of Gilead
- Thomas (from Eyes of the Dragon) meets up with Flagg
- Further Adventures of Tim Stoutheart

and it could be that this is revealed in the last two volumes, but I for one would love a novel-length story of Arthur Eld and Maerlyn and how the hell all this got started.

I'd also love a book about the Outlaw David Quick, and perhaps Andy (though I suspect his time is short... I'm about 100 pages from the end of Calla). Also: Directive Nineteen and North Central Positronics; it'd be fun if there was a fake-welcome-to-NCP sort of book published, or an Atlas of Mid-World coffee table book.

 

Bryant: I would add several things to that list, but seeing as how they pertain to events in the final book, I shan't mention them here.  But I agree with all of the ones you mention. 

There also needs to be a third novel in the Talisman-verse; neither of the extant ones is high on my list of favorite King books, but they still cry out for conclusion.  And presumably, that would have DT ramifications.

 

Can I assume you were reading the mass-market hardback?  Probably.  If so, how great is that cover art?  I loved it the second I saw it, months before the book came out, but once I'd actually read the book it made it even better.  

Here it is again.

Sadly, the mass-market edition did not contain the outstanding interior art by Jae Lee.  That's a real shame, and I'm not sure why King and his publishers decided to go that route.  I can't imagine it made Jae Lee very happy, either; this was an opportunity for a HUGE number of people to see his work who had never seen it before.  Oh, well; I sure am glad I decided to pony up for that limited edition.

 

DSO: Mine does not have interior art, which makes me mad to discover was an edit/omission. It’s one of my all-time favorite King covers, though, particularly once I was finished and looked it over. Rich in detail and quite a stunning illustration.

 

Bryant: Just a fantastic cover; the one for the paperback seems to be from the same artist, but is a different drawing (painting?).  It's quite good, too.

The decision not to put the Jae Lee art in the mass-market editions is just galling, mainly because it breaks precedent with the rest of the series.  I get making artwork like that exclusive to limited editions; I really do.  But consistency matters, and in this instance I think the wrong decision was made.

As somebody who recently read Wizard and Glass and has since moved on to Wolves of the Calla, how did The Wind Through the Keyhole strike you in terms of tone and voice?  Does it seem consistent with the rest of the series?  Or does it instead seem like what it is, an add-on written years after the fact?

 

DSO: I think the voice is consistent. Outside of what you mentioned in your other email about the confusion of the omniscient point of view of the story within a story. Which isn't so much a tone/voice thing, I guess, but just to mention it. 

 Thanks again to Bryant Burnette for the palaver. Check out the Double-O-Rating-System at You-Only-Blog-Twice and the general goings-on at The-Truth-Inside-the-Lie. 

NEXT! 

THE DARK TOWER V: WOLVES OF THE CALLA