King's Highway pt. 53: The Tommyknockers

(The below was written in December 2012. I revisited both novel and mini-series for the King's Highway Bridges and Infrastructure Renewal Project Summer 2016, and you can read that here. Carry on, friends and neighbors.)

I tried to read this book when it first came out and never made it all the way through. This time around, though, I absolutely loved it. I'll use pictures from the mini-series throughout this blog, but let me state up-front, while it (the mini-series) was better than I remembered, it is an inadequate representation of this book, which I feel is arguably among King's best. But! Where it does follow the book, it does so quite faithfully, and well:

(I hope this is a nod to Tourist Trap, but who knows.)

Here's King describing both the basic plot and his state-of-mind-while-writing-it from On Writing:

"In the spring and summer of 1986 I wrote The Tommyknockers, often working until midnight with my heart running at a hundred and thirty beats a minute and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding.

"(It) is a forties-style science fiction tale in which the writer-heroine (Bobbi, along with her poet-friend Gardener, aka "Gard") discovers an alien spacecraft buried in the ground. The crew is still on board, not dead but only hibernating. These alien creatures got into your head and just started... well, tommyknocking around in there. 

"What you got was energy and a kind of superficial intelligence (Bobbi creates a telepathic typewriter and an atomic hot-water heater, among other things). 

"What you gave up in exchange was your soul. 

It was the best metaphor for drugs and alcohol my tired, overstressed mind could come up with."

In addition to being perhaps-the-80s-best-metaphor for cocaine-addiction, it's a) fantastic sci-fi, though maybe everyone's cup of tea, and not really emblematic of the 1940s-style sci-fi King says it is. It struck me more as an 80s-specific take on the radioactive-panic movies of the 1950s, more than anything, b) almost an ideographic history of late twentieth-century background gadgetry, from the batteries whose "molecular decomposition technology" make an ongoing appearance, to toy-ray-guns, pocket calculators, to Simon:

Future generations need look no further for a comprehensive overview of the sort of "tech" that collected in the corners of countless American households in the pre-internet age. I think both Tommyknockers (and aspects of the Dark Tower books) really capture what it felt like to grow up (for me, as a child; for King, as a parent) with this stuff permeating our lives. (Not to mention, Chernobyl/ nuclear power humming away in the background) and c) a novel so well-constructed it absolutely boggles the mind that it was put together under the circumstances King describes. While substance-abuse is not an altogether-uncommon bedfellow for sharp prose, I'm just saying: this book hits on all cylinders: the language, the scope, the characters, and the 'engineering.' Tommyknockers shares a similar structure with It, in some ways, including lengthy sections about the town's past, a massive cast of characters, and a town slowly swallowed up by the monster(s) who live beneath it. 

Also, like It, it ends with the town's destruction.

Unlike Derry, though, Haven never seems to have "bounced back." I'd been under the mistaken impression that the SyFy show Haven took place in Haven ME, and as I was reading this, I kept wondering how the hell the show addressed the events of the novel. My blogger-BFF (just kidding, BB!) set me straight:

"Haven the television series makes no mention of the Haven, Maine that is in The Tommyknockers, nor does it make any mention of the events of that novel (makes sense, given that they'd have to have the rights to that novel to deal with it any way other than giving it a shout-out); and, as far as I can recollect, King himself has never returned to Haven in any way.

It's not the same town.  Literally.  It's like how there's a Paris, France and a Paris, Texas, and this is the one in Texas, except the show never even acknowledges that there's one in France.

That's part of what's so grating -- hemorrhoidal, even -- about that show.  It's this supposed Stephen King story, yet the producers were not even knowledgeable enough to know that King's fiction already had a Haven, Maine ... which is NOT on the coast.

I watched the video of a con panel with the producers, and that fact got mentioned very obliquely; reading between the lines a bit was necessary, but it seemed pretty obvious that the producers were made aware of The Tommyknockers and just shrugged it off.

The more I think about it, it's a really terrible show."

I've only seen bits and pieces of it, but I have to agree, particularly in light of all the above. And what a waste! The town of Haven - again, like Derry - is fleshed out so well, here; it's a damn shame it seems to be confined exclusively to this novel.

Anyway, back to the book. 

(Actually, one more digression. Hit play on this, if you would. The band - if you can call a bunch of tech-nerds with samplers and laptops a "band" - is The Orb. Like the Magic Theater in Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf, they are probably "For Madmen Only." But, back in the "heady" days of 1993 and 1994, I was obsessed with this album (Pomme Fritz) and played it an awful lot. Although my only experience with The Tommyknockers at that time was from half-reading it at the tail-end of the 80s, this song always struck me as the perfect accompaniment for Bobbi's finding the UFO in the woods. It captures the mysterious, alien quality of the aliens of the novel/ the townsfolk's possession, if you ask me. If I was making a Tommyknockers movie, I'd have this playing pretty much throughout.)

As with Misery, evidence of what King mentions in On Writing (the mental exhaustion of minds-in-(ahem)-maximum-overdrive, the physical-deterioration of the characters (something that would make a movie adaptation of this a little disgusting, with all the bloody puking and teeth falling out and all; though Star Trek: Voyager managed to construct a compelling and infinitely-watchable episode around a visually-similar theme, in "Course: Oblivion"), the "power source" that must be kept a secret, from state troopers (and wives and families, of course) is throughout...

"Bobbi had discovered some huge power source and had become its prisoner. That same force was simultaneously galzanizing and imprisoning the whole town. And it was growing steadily stronger."

"They would begin the dance of untruth. The "becoming" would demand many lies. This one, the one they told themselves, the one that insisted they were really the same as ever, was the most important lie of all."

"(Ruth) slept, but her sleep was not easy... that part of her which clung stubbornly to sanity knew the truth: these were not the rising voices of the people she had lived with all these years, but those of outsiders. They were the voices of The Tommyknockers."

"She sat in the green, diseased heart of their influence and listened to them tell their lunatic fairy tales."

Cocaine excites the "power and paranoia" centers of the brain. The Tommyknockers seem to, as well. "He had come out feeling ten feet tall, ready to make love in the mud with a platoon of lady wrestlers." (I'm sure Dennis Hopper or Oliver Stone could relate to that one.)

"Don't make me mail you like some letter addressed to nowhere."

The Haven towns-folk build all sorts of new gadgets. Especially ones to guard the town-line. One of these is: 

As with any of these metaphors, they don't have to have been chosen consciously to work for either the plot or the cry-for-help deconstruction. Sometimes, as King alludes to in that On Writing quote and elsewhere, the unconscious screams any way it can. Ergo, a killer "Coke" machine, floating off the ground, attacking any who try to get in or separate the Havenites from their "power supply."

"The scream suddenly became a loud buzz in Gardner's head. He knew he was listening to the mental sound of mortal disconnect."

"When he finally went mad, none of this shit would matter anymore."

At the beginning of King's career, (especially in Salem's Lot) I thought some of the quotations he used at the beginning of chapters, etc. weren't especially relatable to the events in-text. Not so, here. Take the passage that starts Book 3 from The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing:

"I slept and I dreamed the dream. This time there was no disguise anywhere. I was the malicious male-female dwarf figure, the principle of joy-in-destruction; and Saul was my counterpart, male-female, my brother and my sister, and we were dancing in some open place, under enormous white buildings, which were filled with hideous, menacing, black machinery which held destruction. But in the dream, he and I, or she and I, were friendly, we were not hostile, we were together in spiteful malice. There was a terrible yearning nostalgia in the dream, the longing for death. We came together and kissed, in love. It was terrible, and even in the dream I knew it. Because I recognized in the dream that those other dreams we all have when the essence of love, of tenderness, is concentrated into a kiss or a caress, but now it was the caress of two half-human creatures, celebrating destruction."

Very appropos for the "becoming" of the Haven-folk into the Tommyknockers, as well as for the relationship between Bobbi and Gard in the novel. (It's worth mentioning that Book 3 comes charging out of the gate. I found the whole book to be compulsively readable, but there's a strong "second wind" in the whole last act.)

The Tommyknockers are described as an "interstellar band of Gypsies," great sky travelers but as vulnerable as mosquitoes breeding in a shallow pool. They "crashed" in Haven, ME centuries ago and have been lying dormant in their ship (which is huge - three football fields in diameter) awaiting discovery. Once Bobbi trips over one small edge of the ship, they lock onto her and through her, the town, transforming everyone into versions of themselves.

"We have no history, written or oral... Guided by the currents, both large and small, that run through the universe. 'God' is the name some people give those currents, but God's only a word, like Tommyknockers or Altair-4."

"Tommyknockers" is a term plucked from Gard's mind, as is "Altair-4," i.e. stand-ins for the aliens/ their homeworld. Altair-4 is, of course, the name of the alien world in Forbidden Planet.

"Are there more of you out there?"

Bobbi shrugged. "I don't know." And don't care, the shrug said. We're here. There are improvements to be made. That is enough.

"That's really all you are?" (Gard) wanted to make sure; make sure there was no more to it. He was terribly afraid he was taking too long, much too long... but he had to make sure. "That's all?"

"What do you mean, all? Is it so little, what we are?"

"Frankly, yes," Gard said. "You see, I've been looking for the devil outside my life all my life, because the one inside was so fucking hard to catch. It's hard to spend such a long time thinking you're... Homer..." He yawned again, hugely. His eyelids had bricks on them. "... and discover you were... Captain Ahab all the time."

The scene where Gard and Bobbi enter the ship is one of my favorite bits of King's writing, ever. Tense, atmospheric, disgusting, and brilliant. The aliens use humans/ humanoid-lifeforms as slaved-living-batteries. Which reminds me:

Poor Peter! (Bobbi's dog.)

Gardener and the Dallas Police

Played by the future President of the United States Jimmy Smits

"A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what's going on." - William S. Burroughs.

When Gard shows up at Bobbi's house, it is after a monumental-blackout-binge/righteous-piss-up. We are introduced to both his anti-nuclear politics and his alcoholism in cringeworthy, powerful passages that are are brutally-honest depictions of a mind-besotted. Gardener wakes up one morning suddenly possessed by his own Tommyknocker, a need to consume all the booze in the world. Aided and abetted by one of his fellow poets, he attends a post-poetry-reading party, where a pro-nuclear blowhard triggers his rage on the topic. He ends up, several days later, on a beach in New Hampshire. (More on that, below)

Bobbi is able to sell Gard on the whole yeah-they're-aliens-and-we're-keeping-it-secret-so-what? angle by a) enabling his need for booze, and b) invoking "the Dallas Police," as in "Do we want the Dallas Police in charge of this?" Something instantly-recognizable to not just liberals of Stephen King's/ Gard's-and-Bobbi's generation: that beyond-the-law establishment-buffer-zone, the sort of folks represented by "The Shop" in Firestarter. (Who also make an appearance, here, towards the end)

Here's Gard:

"Spent fuel rods that were stacking up in big, hot piles. They thought the Curse of King Tut was bad? Brother! Wait until twenty-fifth-century archaeologists dug up a load of this shit!"

"You talked to people who had lived through one administration after another in which their elected officials told one lie after another, then lied about the lies, and when those lies were found out, the liars said "Oh geez, I forgot, sorry" - and since they forgot, the people who elected them behaved like Christians and forgave...

"You couldn't believe there were so fucking many of them willing to do that until you remembered what P.T. Barnum said about the extraordinarily high birth rate of suckers... when you tried to talk to them, they looked at you as if you were babbling in a foreign language."

I miss this King. I don't think he's necessarily speaking through Gard, here, but there was a real anti-establishment streak in his earlier stuff. I mean, there still is, but he seems to have placed his faith in the same sort of folks he once (correctly) identified as crooks. I don't want to go too far down this path, but it's ironic to me that the guy who wrote all this/ created the Shop ended up on the side of the Dallas Police, at least on the topic most-closely-associated with them.

"I've read all the conspiracy books so you don't have to; Oswald acted alone." - Stephen King, 2011.

Gardener manages to put the proverbial monkey-wrench in the works, and the last we see of him, he is taking off into outer space, flattened to the floor as he makes the jump to hyperspace.

"Lying on the transparent floor of the control room, already better than seventy thousand miles out in space, Jim Gardener lay in a widening pool of his own blood... and smiled."

Godspeed, sir.

DARK TOWER ALERT!

Not really, but it's worth mentioning that in the first hundred pages, "Ka" and "Palaver" both appear, and "The Arrowhead Project" (i.e. that strange military experiment from The Mist that seems to have poked a whole in the Todash Darkness) is mentioned. Plus, when Gardener wakes up from his blackout, he runs into Jack Sawyer from The Talisman. Plus, Pennywise, that age-old foe/sibling of The Turtle, makes a cameo, as well. (Briefly, on pg. 510)

Is Altair-4 (where Dave Hillman spends most of the novel, here, having been inadvertently transported there by his brother) the same destination to which the Buick from From a Buick 8 transports people? Doubtful, I guess, but an intriguing possibility.

Some Final Thoughts 

Both Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok are mentioned a couple of times. Google-image search them; you may enjoy it.

Liked this line: 

"Dick was in a perfect ecstasy of fury... but at the center of his rage was terror, like a cold curdle of rancid cream in the middle of a poisoned chocolate."

The very last line is great. I won't reproduce it here, but after the 746 pages that lead up to it, I felt like standing up and saluting. Again, I started this novel thinking I might not even finish it; I ended it believing it to be among King's finest work.

Late last night and the night before,
Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers knocking at the door.
I want to go out, don't know if I can
Cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.

 NEXT!

The Dark Half!

King's Highway pt. 52: Misery

The Film

I think most people know the plot of this one, so let's just dive in.

One of the more successful King-adaptations, both in terms of box office and faithfulness-to-the-text (more or less), Misery was released in 1990 and was the second (and to-date last) Rob Reiner-helmed King project, after Stand By Me proved a breakthrough for both Reiner as a director and for King's exposure beyond "just a horror writer." (Not that perceptive fans of his work needed that last bit, of course, but in the eyes of mainstream film audiences.) Misery, though, is unreserved suspense/ horror, and it's done pretty well. It pops up frequently on best-King-movies lists, and King has referred to it as one of his personal favorite adaptations.

Easy to see why. Well-paced, well-directed, competently-scored, and strong performances from the leads:

James Caan as Paul Sheldon. (A bit of a "comeback" role for Caan.)

And Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes. (Her breakthrough performance)

And although they don't appear in the novel, two familiar faces for the audience:

Lauren Bacall as Paul's agent (alluded to in the book but given lines and a place in the plot-proceedings for the film)

and Cliff Claven's Mom/ Irene-from-The-Mist and Richard Farnsworth as the outside-authorities looking for Paul.

William Goldman - no slouch in the writer department, himself - adapted the book. I think both Paul Sheldon's addiction/ injuries are watered down a bit...

Understandable, I guess.

...as is his interior world. But Caan/ Goldman still bring the role to life. He effectively conveys the character's helplessness/ rage, and you root for him to escape.

Bates-as-Wilkes is not quite as iconic, for me, as Tim Curry from Pennywise, but she gives an exceptional performance. She captures Annie from the novel pretty perfectly, actually. When she lapses into the "cock-a-doodie" twisted-Disney-character sort-of dialogue, she sells it; when she needs to intimidate/ express-explosive-rage, she sells it. One of the better on-screen depictions of the bi-polar with violent-tendencies personality, for my money.

Unlike in the novel, Paul manages to keep both his thumb and his foot in the film, though as the above illustrates, he doesn't exactly have a smooth ride of it. The other changes and additions all make sense (a just-missed-chance to kill her and escape with the drugged wine, the aforementioned outsiders-searching-for-him stuff, etc.)

One additional change is the very ending, where, instead of Paul dealing with PTSD and taking the first few "hobbled" steps on the road to recovery, as it happens in the novel, Paul meets with his agent (Bacall again) at a restaurant, where they discuss his non-Misery new book, The Higher Education of J. Phillip Stone, and Paul sees a waitress that reminds him of Annie (played by Bates). The waitress tells him she's his number-one fan... roll credits.

I don't mind the changes, here, except I wonder why that name/ project was chosen? Is there something I'm missing? Or did they just invent a title/ new book for Paul to write? Not that it's a misstep, just curious how these things come together.

The collector's-edition DVD has no deleted scenes, which is unfortunate. Kathy Bates has mentioned a cut-scene where she runs over a police officer with a lawnmower, which, in the novel, was the fate of the first young trooper who comes to Annie's house and whom Paul alerts (tragically, for the young trooper) to his presence. But that character is compartmentalized in the film to Farnsworth, who is "merely" shot, a death that sets up the final act. This is common for many films released in the pre-DVD era, though; in those days, what was left on the cutting-room floor was often destroyed, alas.

Additionally, I discovered there's a Tamil adaptation of this as well called Julie Ganapathi. As with No Smoking, I believe it's an unsanctioned adaptation. I wonder what other non-sanctioned Bollywood-King films are out there? I also wonder what kind of money/ legality-issues arise from stuff like this.

I haven't seen it. Netflix is down at the moment of this writing, so I don't know if they have it. If they do, I'll give it a whirl.

The Novel

Misery and The Tommyknockers (the subject of our next blog) are King's last novels written "in the Dead Zone," i.e. coked/doped/sauced. He describes his state of mind while writing it as highly-disturbed, and in On Writing, refers to the plots/horrors of these books as cries for help from his unconscious-mind, the place where the monsters come from, given metaphorical form. (i.e. "Annie Wilkes is coke, Annie Wilkes is booze, and in the end I was tired of being Annie's pet writer.")

I noted a few passages that seem to describe this:

"Fact is, you're getting worse, Annie, aren't you? A little worse every day. Psychotics can cope in the world - after a fashion - and sometimes, as I think you well know, they get away with some very nasty shit. But there's a borderline between the lands of manageable and unmanageable psychosis. You're getting closer to that line every day... and part of you knows it."

"'Do you remember Brer Rabbit telling Brer Fox about his Laughing Place?'
'Yes.'
'That's what I call my place upcountry," (Annie says). "My Laughing Place... Sometimes I do laugh when I got there. But mostly I just scream."

"His stints at the typewriter grew gradually longer as the pain slowly receded and some of his endurance returned... but ultimately he wasn't able to write fast enough to satisfy her demands. The gotta which had kept them both alive - and it had, for without it, she surely would have murdered both him and herself long since - was also what had caused the loss of his thumb. Have a little irony, Paul - it's good for the blood."

"There was no Annie because Annie had not been a goddess at all, only a crazy lady who had hurt Paul for reasons of her own. (She) had managed to pull most of the paper out of her mouth and throat and had gotten out through Paul's window while Paul was sleeping the sleep of drugs... She had actually died of the fractured skull she had received when she struck the mantle, and she had struck the mantle because she had tripped. So in a way she had been killed by the very typewriter Paul had hated so much."

and

"...he yearned for Novril. Sometimes he thought it would be worth being back with Annie just to have the dope. His doctors had weaned him from it. The booze was his substitute."

I don't think it's a coincidence that his last few novels of this period in his life give us inside-views of a man trapped/ addicted to dope, or the raging alcoholism and physical deterioration of the main characters in Tommyknockers. (I'm reminded of his "Alcoholics / addicts build defenses" line; it's certainly true. And a writer of King's caliber is going to build his out of stories.) But let's not over-focus on it. Misery is a book about a writer held captive by a psychotic nurse; his dope addiction and the violent-imprisonment aspect serve that plot. I can see him picking this stuff apart in therapy in the years after he cleaned up, and as well he should. More power to him; I'm sure it's instructive. But I'm not his therapist; I'm just some guy who enjoys reading his stories.

What I'm trying to say here is, I make note of this kind of stuff (and will for Tommyknockers, as well) but if that's all there was here (just an I NEED HELP metaphor) it wouldn't interest me so much. And if that's the only thing people root around these things for, that strikes me as kind of ghoulish. But hey, since he brings it up himself, it's worth mentioning.

The plot of Misery is straightforward enough. The three-people-trapped-with-one-another scenario of The Shining has become two here (and will become one in Gerald's Game, still-to-come at the time of Misery's publication), and the isolation/ inner-torment of Paul is fleshed out quite well. His despair, setbacks, addiction - all illuminated as well as anything else on which King has turned his considerable writerly-spotlight over the course of his career. Annie Wilkes is characterized perfectly, from her backstory to her mannerisms to the "dull disinterest" she has in things like the mechanics of how the story is put together. Her triggers to rage (and Paul's desperate dance trying to stay ahead / afield of them) are, again, pitch-perfect.

And I liked the epilogue. A happy ending (our hero escapes, the monster's dead) but no easy-breezy walk into the sunlight. Paul's ordeal has taken the kind of deep toll on his state of mind that anyone could reasonably expect: PTSD is in full bloom here. But, inspired by a random observance on his walk home, he finds "the hole in the paper" again and begins to write... a flower grows in the gloom.

Couple other lines I liked:

Describing writing-something-to-completion: "For each little success, he had paid a toll of absurdity."

and

"In a book, all would have gone according to plan... but life was so fucking untidy - what could you say for an existence where some of the most critical conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren't even any chapters?"

The Novel-within-the-Novel (Misery's Return)

Any resemblance between cover-model and author must surely be coincidental. :-) This picture cracks me up.

The excerpts from the book Annie forces Paul to write (and which becomes his ultimate salvation) at first struck me as just too much. Why the hell is he including so much of this stuff? I wrote in my notes while reading. Ditto for his central, ongoing metaphor of "Africa." Near the beginning of the book, Paul remembers going to the zoo as a child and crying uncontrollably over an African bird he sees there, its wings clipped, captured from its homeland for display "in captivity." It works enough as a metaphor / touchstone for Paul's situation, but it threatens to become the "Beep Beep Ritchie" of Misery through over-use in several spots.

Then, at the end, when Paul brings the Misery's Return story to its conclusion, I ended up reading it (I'd skimmed the previous excerpts from it) and tying together the Africa-described-therein with the Africa-motif-of-his-drugged-out-thoughts. I then went back and read all those sections again, and it all clicked. Misery's Return is to Misery as the "Tales of the Black Freighter" sections of Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen are to that main narrative.

i.e. an ongoing seemingly-unconnected story that actually works as counterpoint to the main story.

Not that there aren't other examples, I just like bringing Watchmen into anything I can.

I'd noted something similar about the play Jack is writing in my blog for The Shining (novel), but alas, that one was lost to the Blogger ether, as lamented elsewhere. (Still smarts, damn it!)

Some Final Thoughts

The book is dedicated to "Stephanie and Jim Leonard, who know why. Boy, do they." Stephanie Leonard was for many years King's secretary and the editor/publisher of Castle Rock; I'd love to hear some of her anecdotes from her time as King's front-line-defense between him and his rabid fans.

As reported in The Stephen King Companion, in 1980, King signed a book for a stranger, who referred to himself as King's "number one fan." Something about the fan struck King as unsettling, but he thought nothing more of it until a few months later, when he was watching news footage of John Lennon's assassination. King recognized the assassin, Mark David Chapman, as the same fan for whom he autographed the book... Creepy.

Speaking of the Beatles, this got in my head everytime I picked up the book or saw the title along its spine:

King mentions both John Fowles and Alexander Dumas and some other writers who have explored the captivity narrative. As The Occasional Review-er notes, "King clearly respects the tradition (in which he's) writing... he has a fine sense of what needs to be left out to maintain his claustrophobic atmosphere - we get almost no backstory about Paul, and certain questions, like what became of Annie's brief marriage, are pointedly left unanswered."

I liked that.

Solid stuff all around.

NEXT!

THE TOMMYKNOCKERS

King's Highway pt. 51: The Shining (mini-series)

Stephen King has never made a secret about his distaste for two things: being asked where his ideas come from, and Stanley Kubrick's version of his novel The Shining. When speaking to Playboy in the early 1980s, here's what he had to say:

"...Kubrick is a very cold man - pragmatic and rational - and he had great difficulty conceiving even academically of the supernatural."

First, let me say that if there's anyone in the world whose opinion I'll listen to on how the book failed to materialize onscreen in the Kubrick version, it's King. I have a lot of sympathy for his viewpoint. The movie guts much of what makes his novel his novel; I've argued elsewhere it's just part of the book-to-film process (and I still believe this) but it's easy to see where King's coming from. He wrote the thing, for crying out loud. Still, this statement has always puzzled me. Isn't Kubrick's The Shining a definitive illustration of the supernatural "conceived academically?" 

I can even see it being said dismissively of the film. (Though I don't think that's how King means it. Ironically, the version he adapted for the screen himself / the subject of this blog is very much an "academic" conception of the supernatural.)

Just saying, for better or worse, if there is a mathematical equation of "the supernatural rendered academically," it would describe Kubrick's The Shining, right down to his use of set design to convey the "wrong" geometric angles and proportions, etc.

But what makes King's statement even more puzzling to me is that if his beef with the movie is Kubrick's "inability" to warmly-convey the supernatural... how does bringing Mick Garris in as director improve the situation?

Before he directed the Shining mini-series from King's script, Garris brought both The Stand and Sleepwalkers to the screen. Do either of these scream "Master of Humanizing the Supernatural" to you? I suppose a case could be made for "personal taste," here, but this is like bringing a (legally unsound to begin with) case all the way to the Supreme Court and hiring Lionel Hutz to argue it.
 

Not that Garris doesn't have his defenders. Go to the threads of The Shining mini-series at the SK Forum for evidence of that. Or consider this enthusiastic blogger's take on Garris's visual style: "He has a very unique way of doing things, and it is evident when you are watching one of his films. He has such a talent for using music over scenes and making it effective. The man can craft so much from his visuals and he lets them tell the story, which is a great talent to have and I love him for it."

I gotta tell you - it disturbs me to read this. It's just... so off on so many points. I don't know where to begin.

Let's look at one example from The Shining. King's script flips the first and second chapters of his novel so that Jack's interview with Ullman takes place after Jack meets with Bill Watson (played by Pat Hingle). The camera (as accompanied by propagandist scoring) swoops over people playing "Denver Croquet" (more on that when I get to King's script) and moves across the lawn, showing the Overlook and the exiting guests. So far, so good. Then, it swings in so we have a moving shot of Jack and Stu talking, coming with them down the stairs and ending on this:

What is the point of this framing? The camera movement calls attention to itself as much as anything in Kubrick's version, but without any of the rationale. They are framed so that the Overlook has come between them. Is this really effective subtext for this scene? Or for anything that follows? Why even bother? 

Garris shares the curious opinion his fans have about his filmography and approach: "The Shining is one of my favorite things I've ever done. First of all, the production values, we were in one place for most of it. Well, a couple of places - a stage, a hotel. So, I was able to really use some filmmaking that I wasn't (able to) in the The Stand. The Stand was guerrilla filmmaking, and I everything I could, but we were rushed and on a much tighter budget with so many locations and so much cast that we were trying to just get it and put as much art into it as possible. But in the case of The Shining, I was able to really build some dread. I think that some of the filmmaking in there was much more sophisticated in the like."

There's so much wrong in that paragraph/ perspective I don't know where to begin. (The Stand is guerrilla filmmaking?) I'll just stick with "building some dread." The most noticeable aspect of The Shining mini-series is its absolute lack of dread. Who on earth could possibly be moved to dread from watching this version of the story?

He also displays a troubling lack of understanding of how deals are routinely made in Hollywood when discussing getting the rights to make this:

"...Part of the deal was that Kubrick had the rights. Kubrick got paid a lot of money for the rights to that. He got a million and a half bucks for the rights for us to do this. And part of the Kubrick’s deal was that King could not say anything critical about his movie…"

I have heard that before re: "King can't bad-talk the movie," but I strongly suspect that's BS. I have no evidence of it either way, but until I hear Kubrick's side (which seems impossible, him being dead and all) I don't buy it. But yes, Kubrick paid a lot of money for the rights to the film, those rights appreciated in value, he got paid an amount commiserate with this. Is that underhanded? Or anything but routine?  It might seem weird to someone not in the business, maybe, but it certainly sounds like standard business practice. Maybe Garris is just bitching about the money eating into his production budget. Whatever. Disney/ ABC has deep pockets.

One more thing before I move on to casting/ the script. As Karina Wilson noted in her book-to-movie-to-mini-series review: "It takes most of Episode One for the Torrances to get settled in to the Overlook, they don't get snowed in until partway through Episode Two, and Jack doesn't get anything but tetchy until Episode Three. Proceedings aren't helped by cheesy 90s special effects (the CGI topiary animals are particularly laughable...

Indeed they are.

The decision to make them actually move rather than suggest movement/ dread with photography is so baffling to me.

As it is, onscreen, it's like being menaced by slow-moving, choppy broccoli.

"...and low-grade Halloween make-up on the ghosts (which looks comic on a modern HDTV."

It looked comic on my shitty-old-TV-from-1997, as well.

I mean, come on.

Karina continues, "King wanted to shoot interiors and exteriors at the location that inspired him - The Stanley Hotel. While it's interesting to see the original, an actual physical location often has disadvantages over a specially-constructed set. A corridor is just a corridor. Unfortunately, from the opening moments, the fancy wedding cake architecture of The Stanley is too pretty to be sinister, lacking the low-lying menace of the Timberline Lodge in Oregon used by Kubrick. And the interiors... were never going to live up to Roy Walker's custom-designed sets."

Lets' move on from Garris and get back to King, who shares an equal amount of blame for this. (And if I seem too snarky, I apologize - God knows I love and support the man's work, nor am I"out to get" Mick Garris. But having watched all agonizing what-felt-like-fifty-five hours of this for the purpose of writing this blog, I at least earned the right to a little snark. Life is short.) Again, from his Playboy interview:

"(Kubrick) used to make transatlantic calls to me from England at odd hours of the day and night, and I remember once he rang up and asked, 'Do you believe in God?' I thought a minute and said, 'Yeah, I think so.' Kubrick replied, 'No, I don't think there is a God' and hung up. Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel... This was the basic flaw. Because he couldn't believe, he couldn't make the film believable to others."

First, it is worth noting that King's story of these transatlantic calls/ Kubrick's questions has changed over the years. YouTube clips abound of King telling other variations of it, but usually it's that Kubrick called to say any tale that suggests an afterlife is fundamentally optimistic and that King responded "What about Hell?" and Kubrick said "I don't believe in Hell." Kind of a big difference/ implication in those two versions, if you ask me. But as with the rights-thing, Kubrick's side of the story is unfortunately not preserved.

Second, I agree that religion, whether God or the afterlife-in-general, need not be involved to make effective horror, but I'm not exactly sure what Kubrick is an alleged skeptic of, here. The supernatural itself? But Kubrick's film is such overwhelming evidence that the supernatural can be conveyed by a "visceral skeptic" and that audiences believed it, easily. Ask your parents. 

Or ask mine! "We believed it," say Dona and Farrell McMillan.

The horrors of the novel share some key (one might say "the essential") borderlands with the horrors of the film, like some unholy Venn diagram, but they are offspring of different fathers, to be sure. So... again, Mick Garris? That's your solution? I mean, like him or hate him, his filmography simply doesn't merit him as the expert witness for the rebuttal King has in mind, here. Put another way, I like Jack Nicholson as an actor, but I wouldn't cast him as Nelson Mandella.

Also, for what it's worth, Garris is an atheist, i.e. the kind of skeptic King intimates about Kubrick, here. Which I wouldn't even mention - hey, more power to you/ atheists-everywhere, I don't care or think it has to have any bearing on how you direct - but since King brought it up, I mean, what is he seeing in Garris's work to persuade him Garris is a "believer?" It makes me wonder if King is even capable, I'm afraid, of properly evaluating these things when he says things like this.

Still, like I mentioned before, I do sympathize with where King is coming from on Kubrick's movie, so let's continue:

"The second problem was in characterization and casting. Jack Nicholson, though a fine actor, was all wrong for the part. His last big role was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and between that and his manic grin, the audience automatically identified him as a loony from the first scene. But the book is about Jack Torrance's gradual descent into madness."

Far be it from me to disagree with the guy who created Jack Torrance, but... I'm going to. And sometimes, that's reasonable; a proud mother holding up her child's painting probably shouldn't be on the committee that decides whether or not it belongs in the Louvre.

As I mentioned last time, I think Nicholson's casting is if-not-perfect, then so close to it that the difference isn't worth mentioning. King underestimates the "angry dry drunk" aspect of his own creation. Jack Torrance is introduced as close-to-snapping from the very first, and we see him struggle with it. Most teachers don't attack their students and break their child's arm; these things alone mark him as borderline. Kubrick/ Nicholson picking up on that and translating it to screen simply shouldn't provoke these concerns. That they do is truly weird to me. Tho, perhaps understandable... he himself has said, "Alcoholics build defenses the way the Dutch build dikes," and since he's also on record as saying "I'm the guy who wrote The Shining without even realizing I was writing about myself," I think I see some denial in this comment (repeated over the years, but again from his Playboy interview, which, I should note, he gave while slamming beers back, as noted by the interviewer.)

But, okay. That's from where I'm sitting, and we're talking about from where King's sitting, right? So, his answer was (to paraphrase his own wording) to get... Brian Hackett from Wings? i.e. "though a fine actor, someone whose last big role was the smirking-other-male-lead on a laughtrack-sitcom, instantly recognizable to the audience of the time?"

My friend Mark cracked me up by saying they should have got the whole Wings cast for this mini-series. That would have been something. Particularly if Thomas Haden Church has played Danny and David Schramm played Tony.

Granted, King's first choice was Tim Daly, i.e. the other male lead from Wings. Let me just say - I was surprised in this re-watch to discover Weber's performance was actually better than I remembered. He never sells the "descent into madness" King mentions, but that's not really his fault. Garris and King structure the mini-series in such a plodding takes-forever-to-get-places way that by the time Weber "snaps," it's just very fake, very Lifetime-movie-esque.

(Need proof? Watch the very beginning of this scene, or from 2:19 through 3:27 of this.)

Visually-designing the story as an ill-conceived rebuttal to Kubrick's film was bad enough. (And no matter what Garris/ King say, it certainly comes across that way. It's like Ray Manzarek's version of The Doors story - it might be closer to what he thinks/ knows about "what really happened," but Stone's version is a film, utilizing every aspect of the filmmaking process; Manzarek's is not.) Adding awful CGI and make-up further ruined it. But the unbelievable amount of time given to "dramatic tension" scenes between Jack and Wendy (which never once seem dramatic; in fact, Wendy never seems terrified of Jack at all, even after he snaps, and Courtland Mead is just playacting. Tough to criticize child actors, I know, but the difference between Danny's terror in Kubrick's movie and in Garris/King's version is very, very great.) and establishing Jack as "not a bad guy" and basically giving him a few too many hours to not be intimidating makes the transition something sub-par to Discovery ID crime-scene re-enactments.

Ironically, in real-life, Weber's passive-aggressive, barely-concealed rage on Real Time with Bill Maher or his angry snaps to people on Twitter suggest the casting for the dry-drunk/ out-of-control part of Jack Torrance wasn't so far off. Too bad he didn't have a script/ direction to help him focus. Without it, I'm afraid, his theatrics come off as just bad / unbelievable. Particularly everytime he bellows "COME TAKE YOUR MEDICINE" or "MIND YOUR FATHER."

As someone noted somewhere (again, forgive my lack of citations - lost my notes) it has the effect of watching an episode of The Flintstones where Fred suddenly starts playacting-crazy. The main difference between Weber's performance and Nicholson's is, if Nicholson is too-crazy from the get-go, he is genuinely intimidating; Weber is neither. Though there are glimpses of what-might-have-been.

King's script is definitely a huge part of the problem. It is simply a novel ill-transposed to screen. Novels require the kind of compartmentalization Kubrick and Diane Johnson performed (or any other number of examples); none is on display here. Characters spend four minutes saying what should be expressed in ten seconds, far too much time is spent on nothing-things, (like explaining the rules of Denver Croquet. Really? First of all, it's roque in the novel; why change it? Particularly something that also has no bearing on anything except putting the mallet in Jack's hand?) and R-rated material is shoehorned into PG sensibilities: all of which ensures it comes across as a very-special-episode of Beverly Hills 90210.

How about the other performances? Some aren't bad.

Probably among the best things Rebecca DeMornay ever did, although I prefer Shelly Duvall's palpable-terror/ suffering-mother-archetype. Still, "AT LEAST SHE WAS BLONDE!" as someone wrote - yes, in all-caps - on the SK Forum.

Courtland Mead is awful. As Film Threat noted, "(He's) a sitcom-kid. He's acting for the camera. He knows it, and more importantly, we can see it. It's just little things like the tone and volume of his voice or the way he looks at the other actors. It's a dead giveaway." Particularly in any of the "Why are Mommy and Daddy fighting?" scenes. I know, he's just a kid and all, but... so was Danny Lloyd, right? The difference between directors is at volume ten, here.

The less said about Tony, the better:

Particularly the God-awful decision to have him float like this, or this tacked-on ending where Danny is graduating from high school, as-smiled-upon by Dick Halloran and his mother in the audience, as well as a ghostly-end-of-Jedi-ghost of Jack Torrance:

Holy dear God in heaven and/or Hell.

And Elliot Gould has given some fine performances over the years, to be sure, (I for one grew up with The Devil and Max Devlin and enjoy his take on Philip Marlowe in Altman's The Long Goodbye) but his turn as Stu Ullman is bad with a capital "B."

He over-enunciates each and every letter of every word he delivers as if he's trying to make sure his granddaughter in the back-row can hear Grandpa "play make-believe."

Some of the cameos are fun, particularly Frank Darabont as one of the ghosts (a screen-shot of which I couldn't find, unfortunately), or

Sam Raimi as the gas station attendant who gives Dick the snowcat, or

King as bandleader of the "Gage Creed Orchestra"

But ultimately, this whole mess belongs in the same discussion as George Lucas's alterations to the original Star Wars trilogy. Both the novel and Kubrick's version of it are masterpieces, pure and simple; this Garris/ King version of the same tale is like Greedo-firing-first for five-and-a-half damn hours.

NEXT:

Misery