Stephen King's book The Shining was not just a thriller about the supernatural; it also dealt with the all too earthly horrors of alcoholism. The new movie Dr. Sleep is based on King's recent book of the same name that takes up where The Shining left off, both in terms of narrative and theme. Dr. Sleep is not just concerned with addiction, however; in the midst of it's telepathy, ghosts, and psychic vampires it also provides a realistic look at recovery.
Stephen King has never been shy about his dislike of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film adaptation of his novel The Shining. His biggest complaint has always been that the film version doesn't accurately represent Jack Torrance; in the movie Jack, as played by Jack Nicholson in full leering cocked eyebrow mode, seems ready to blow from the first moment we see him. In King's book Jack was a decent man battling the demons of alcoholism, demons which manifest themselves in terrifying form when he takes his wife Wendy and son Danny with him on his job as the winter caretaker of the Overlook, a remote resort in the Colorado mountains. Dr. Sleep takes on the task of tying together both versions; thematically it feels like King's story, yet it also assumes many of the outcomes of Kubrick's movie.
In the Kubrick movie Dick Halloran, the old chef at the Overlook who shares Danny's "shining", a combination of telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, is murdered by an axe wielding Jack Torrance, a change from he book where he survives and escapes with Wendy and Danny. In Dr. Sleep Dick appears as a ghost, suggesting that we are following the movie timeline. Likewise the Overlook is abandoned but still standing in the new movie, although in the book it burned to the ground with Jack inside, as he sacrificed himself in a final moment of clarity. That clarity never comes to the movie version of Jack, who freezes to death lost in a garden maze while hunting down Danny with an axe.
Dr. Sleep begins right after the events of The Shining, after a prologue that introduces us to the True Knot, a group of psychic vampires who feed off "steam", a supernatural energy that they harvest from people who shine. Since the shine is strongest in children, and since it is extracted and purified through pain and fear, the movie goes to some very dark and disturbing places as we watch the True Knot hunt their prey. They are led by a narcissistic earth mother called Rose the Hat, who has a Disney villainesses' obsession with her own beauty to go along with her hunger for "steam".
Unfortunately most of these characters aren't given much development. Other than Rose the Hat and a new recruit named Snakebite Annie the members of this crew come off as pale copies of the vampire clan in the influential 80s movie Near Dark. In the book Dr. Sleep the villains camouflaged themselves as retirees caravanning in RVs, a clever idea that is inexplicably ignored in the movie. Even in the book, however, these creatures are not clearly defined, and often feel like a generic threat created to propel the plot. They do serve to provide another metaphor for addiction: their lives have been reduced to an endless search for another fix.
As the movie goes on we follow Danny into adulthood, and see the quiet, serious little boy grow into an alcoholic drifter who gets into bar fights and wakes up in strange beds. After Dan sinks to a new low in order to get booze money he catches a bus in despair and ends up in a remote New Hampshire town where he meets a new friend who diagnoses him immediately. "I know the look".
After a horrific psychic vision which causes him to face the damage he comes to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. AA features prominently in this movie; it becomes a transformative force in Danny's life. Although it is not made explicit, many of Danny's actions through the rest of the movie can be viewed as his living out the AA concepts of service and amends.
Danny finds a job as a janitor at a hospice, and finds that his long neglected psychic powers can be put to good use; he helps ease the dying into eternity by using his telepathy to commune with them. It's a beautiful idea that was explored more in the Dr. Sleep book and I wish we had seen more of it here. One of the patients refers to him as "Dr. Sleep", hence the name of the book/movie. He also befriends a shining little girl in a neighboring town named Abra, whom he has never met in the flesh but who sends him messages via a chalkboard in his rooming house.
The plot kicks into gear when Rose the Hat and her tribe abduct and kill a young boy in far off Iowa. Abra witnesses the terrible act through her mental powers and is devastated and terrified. She screams out to Dan with a psychic blast that cracks the chalkboard and calls back to the explosive telepathic cry of fear that Danny used to call Halloran in The Shining. It also references a certain word that will be familiar to anyone who has seen or read the book or the movie.
It is probably not a spoiler to say that the redeemed Dan comes to Abra's aid, or that he and Abra will eventually face Rose the Hat and her murderous clan, or that at some point we are going to return to the Overlook. By the end the movie does skew widely from the Dr. Sleep novel; if you have read the book you will still be in for some surprises.
One of the jarring things about the movie is the way that it pulls in the Kubrick movie in flashbacks and in new scenes taking place in the Overlook. The scenes are not clips from the Kubrick movie; I assume that there are rights issues involved. Instead they are meticulous recreations of shots from The Shining, sometimes with actors who suggest the original cast rather than impersonating them. This takes some getting used to.
While King's complaints about Kubrick's movie are valid, The Shining really is a work of art. It doesn't really look like any movies that preceded it, with it's bright fluorescent lighting defying conventional wisdom about nightmares only taking place in the dark and its luxurious use of the then new steadicam technology that made those long smooth unearthly shots down endless hallways possible. Kubrick inspires unconscious feelings of dread by constantly hinting that there are things happening at the periphery of the main action that would horrify us if we truly grasped them. The best horror movies, the ones we remember and that stick with us are the ones that whisper half-heard threats in our ears. The Shining does this so well that that a cult has evolved over the years devoted to deciphering hidden messages in the film; a recent documentary, Room 237 interviews people who see everything in the film from hidden confessions about faked moon landings to guilty ruminations over the genocide of Native Americans.
So the recreated scenes do take you out of the movie at first; I felt like I was watching the characters remembering seeing The Shining years ago rather than remembering incidents from their lives. I got used to them eventually, although I did have a problem with certain ghosts from the Overlook popping up again and again. What is terrifying in a quick flash can become unintentionally humorous with repeated exposure. Somebody get that lady some clothes!
At times I thought of Back to the Future Part Two or Avengers: Endgame, where we see characters interacting with recreated versions of events from previous films. There is an iconic shot in The Shining that cuts from a cascade of blood to a horrified Danny frozen in mid scream. In Dr. Sleep we get an identical scene but we cut from the blood to a different character with a decidedly different response. It feels postmodern, a pulling aside of the curtain to demonstrate how movies manipulate us. In Rear Window there are identical shots of Jimmy Stewart looking out a window that cause us to think we see different facial expressions depending on whether the insert shots of what he is looking at are a cute dog or a woman undressing, even though the images of his face are exactly the same. I'm not sure if that is the intention, or if its a little in-joke, or maybe that it is just supposed to communicate the foolish arrogance of the character in questions. It does all of these.
There is a powerful scene that comes out of this interplay between past and present. I won't give too much away, but it echoes a scene in The Shining except the character invoked is now on the other side physically and spiritually. Another character comes to the same crossroads and makes a different choice. If you've seen the movie I think you'll understand what I am talking about. It's one of those moments when the recovery theme is highlighted and where the interplay with the earlier movie really works.
There are numerous places where we see Dan embodying his father, from beating a man senseless in a bar while telling him to "take his medicine" to other scenes that once again I won't spoil, but that do all sorts of things with visual images and events from The Shining book and movie. Again, these are signifiers of the familial curse of alcoholism: so many children of alcoholics who have sworn that they would never be like there parents follow them right down that road to nowhere.
Stephen King is an alcoholic, and he wrote The Shining early in his career toward the beginning of a downward slide that went on for many years and many novels. He has confessed that he got the idea for the book when he looked into himself and saw the anger and resentment that alcohol was kindling in him towards his family, and decided to externalize this rage into the character of Jack Torrance.
King admits that he wanted to hit his children when they would disturb him while he was writing. In The Shining Jack dislocates Danny's arm in a drunken rage after the then toddler scatters his papers on the floor; it is this and a drunk driving episode that cause Jack to quit drinking. In the movie Dr. Sleep we have two different visions of Jack and his drinking; there is one account given by Dan at an AA meeting that suggests that sobriety was the most important thing in the world to Jack, that suggests that he would have made it if he would have stayed in AA and not gone to the Overlook. There is another vision of Jack in the movie that shows him as the epitome of the resentful alcoholic, marinating in self pity and blaming his failures on all those around him. We are not told which is true, or if both are true at different times, or that if one is Dan's wishful thinking or if the other is really even Jack at all.
Dan's coming to terms with the story of his addiction and his father's place in it reminds us that generational sin is a common theme in the Bible, for example, in the Book of Exodus:
And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.
It seems a bit contradictory to say that the Lord God is merciful yet at the same time will punish people for the sins of their parents, but it is important to realize that the Bible only gives us an image of God, a representation. God is not really an old man sitting in a big chair in the clouds, smiting and cursing and cutting deals. God is the source code of the universe, written in a machine language that is incomprehensible to our feeble monkey brains. Paul Tillich called this the "God above God"; that is, the God beyond the God that we are capable of experiencing. This is the God that is eternal and unchanging, as opposed to the ever evolving anthropomorphic model of God that we interact with.
Our brains are good for generating a simplistic and glitchy virtual reality view of actual reality, limited by our meager processing power and our low resolution inputs that only read from five senses; how much is out there that we can't connect wth is beyond our imagination. So although God is much more than a person, we experience God as a person; I think of this God as a sort of interface. A personal God is an avatar, sculpted to our receptivity. The God presented through much of the Bible is male, paternal, monarchical, and legalistic, but these are no more attributes of the "real God" than the files and folders in a Windows interface are actual files and folders in a drawer somewhere. Likewise the God that is described as "visiting iniquity" upon innocent children manifests in this way because this is the observed reality of how the world works. This begins to change by the time we get to the prophet Jeremiah, who writes:
In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge, but every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge.
The later incarnation of God as Jesus is even more disruptive, less about the world as is than about the world as it could be, as are similar visions in many other religious traditions.
You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor’ and ‘hate your enemy.’ but I say to you, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.
The earlier instance of God presented the world as it is and tells us how to conform to the rules; this newer version challenges us to rewrite the world. We don't have to follow generational patterns, to do things this way or that because our ancestors did, and we don't have to perpetuate the destructive cycles that our parents and grandparents passed down to us.
In Dr. Sleep, Dan faces the ghosts of his past and dialogues with them. He makes choices that allow him to free himself from the wheel of despair that he had been chained to. As a result he can also release the childhood traumas that he had boxed away in a dark place in his mind; a dangerous move ot be sure, but also a necessary one.
We don't have to continue on with our teeth set on edge, endlessly repeating the cycles of our parents lives, or even the cycles of our own younger lives. Like Dan we can disrupt old patterns and old ways of coping, adopt new paradigms to replace outmoded ones.
In the Kubrick movie Dick Halloran, the old chef at the Overlook who shares Danny's "shining", a combination of telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition, is murdered by an axe wielding Jack Torrance, a change from he book where he survives and escapes with Wendy and Danny. In Dr. Sleep Dick appears as a ghost, suggesting that we are following the movie timeline. Likewise the Overlook is abandoned but still standing in the new movie, although in the book it burned to the ground with Jack inside, as he sacrificed himself in a final moment of clarity. That clarity never comes to the movie version of Jack, who freezes to death lost in a garden maze while hunting down Danny with an axe.
Dr. Sleep begins right after the events of The Shining, after a prologue that introduces us to the True Knot, a group of psychic vampires who feed off "steam", a supernatural energy that they harvest from people who shine. Since the shine is strongest in children, and since it is extracted and purified through pain and fear, the movie goes to some very dark and disturbing places as we watch the True Knot hunt their prey. They are led by a narcissistic earth mother called Rose the Hat, who has a Disney villainesses' obsession with her own beauty to go along with her hunger for "steam".
Unfortunately most of these characters aren't given much development. Other than Rose the Hat and a new recruit named Snakebite Annie the members of this crew come off as pale copies of the vampire clan in the influential 80s movie Near Dark. In the book Dr. Sleep the villains camouflaged themselves as retirees caravanning in RVs, a clever idea that is inexplicably ignored in the movie. Even in the book, however, these creatures are not clearly defined, and often feel like a generic threat created to propel the plot. They do serve to provide another metaphor for addiction: their lives have been reduced to an endless search for another fix.
As the movie goes on we follow Danny into adulthood, and see the quiet, serious little boy grow into an alcoholic drifter who gets into bar fights and wakes up in strange beds. After Dan sinks to a new low in order to get booze money he catches a bus in despair and ends up in a remote New Hampshire town where he meets a new friend who diagnoses him immediately. "I know the look".
After a horrific psychic vision which causes him to face the damage he comes to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. AA features prominently in this movie; it becomes a transformative force in Danny's life. Although it is not made explicit, many of Danny's actions through the rest of the movie can be viewed as his living out the AA concepts of service and amends.
Danny finds a job as a janitor at a hospice, and finds that his long neglected psychic powers can be put to good use; he helps ease the dying into eternity by using his telepathy to commune with them. It's a beautiful idea that was explored more in the Dr. Sleep book and I wish we had seen more of it here. One of the patients refers to him as "Dr. Sleep", hence the name of the book/movie. He also befriends a shining little girl in a neighboring town named Abra, whom he has never met in the flesh but who sends him messages via a chalkboard in his rooming house.
The plot kicks into gear when Rose the Hat and her tribe abduct and kill a young boy in far off Iowa. Abra witnesses the terrible act through her mental powers and is devastated and terrified. She screams out to Dan with a psychic blast that cracks the chalkboard and calls back to the explosive telepathic cry of fear that Danny used to call Halloran in The Shining. It also references a certain word that will be familiar to anyone who has seen or read the book or the movie.
It is probably not a spoiler to say that the redeemed Dan comes to Abra's aid, or that he and Abra will eventually face Rose the Hat and her murderous clan, or that at some point we are going to return to the Overlook. By the end the movie does skew widely from the Dr. Sleep novel; if you have read the book you will still be in for some surprises.
One of the jarring things about the movie is the way that it pulls in the Kubrick movie in flashbacks and in new scenes taking place in the Overlook. The scenes are not clips from the Kubrick movie; I assume that there are rights issues involved. Instead they are meticulous recreations of shots from The Shining, sometimes with actors who suggest the original cast rather than impersonating them. This takes some getting used to.
While King's complaints about Kubrick's movie are valid, The Shining really is a work of art. It doesn't really look like any movies that preceded it, with it's bright fluorescent lighting defying conventional wisdom about nightmares only taking place in the dark and its luxurious use of the then new steadicam technology that made those long smooth unearthly shots down endless hallways possible. Kubrick inspires unconscious feelings of dread by constantly hinting that there are things happening at the periphery of the main action that would horrify us if we truly grasped them. The best horror movies, the ones we remember and that stick with us are the ones that whisper half-heard threats in our ears. The Shining does this so well that that a cult has evolved over the years devoted to deciphering hidden messages in the film; a recent documentary, Room 237 interviews people who see everything in the film from hidden confessions about faked moon landings to guilty ruminations over the genocide of Native Americans.
So the recreated scenes do take you out of the movie at first; I felt like I was watching the characters remembering seeing The Shining years ago rather than remembering incidents from their lives. I got used to them eventually, although I did have a problem with certain ghosts from the Overlook popping up again and again. What is terrifying in a quick flash can become unintentionally humorous with repeated exposure. Somebody get that lady some clothes!
At times I thought of Back to the Future Part Two or Avengers: Endgame, where we see characters interacting with recreated versions of events from previous films. There is an iconic shot in The Shining that cuts from a cascade of blood to a horrified Danny frozen in mid scream. In Dr. Sleep we get an identical scene but we cut from the blood to a different character with a decidedly different response. It feels postmodern, a pulling aside of the curtain to demonstrate how movies manipulate us. In Rear Window there are identical shots of Jimmy Stewart looking out a window that cause us to think we see different facial expressions depending on whether the insert shots of what he is looking at are a cute dog or a woman undressing, even though the images of his face are exactly the same. I'm not sure if that is the intention, or if its a little in-joke, or maybe that it is just supposed to communicate the foolish arrogance of the character in questions. It does all of these.
There is a powerful scene that comes out of this interplay between past and present. I won't give too much away, but it echoes a scene in The Shining except the character invoked is now on the other side physically and spiritually. Another character comes to the same crossroads and makes a different choice. If you've seen the movie I think you'll understand what I am talking about. It's one of those moments when the recovery theme is highlighted and where the interplay with the earlier movie really works.
There are numerous places where we see Dan embodying his father, from beating a man senseless in a bar while telling him to "take his medicine" to other scenes that once again I won't spoil, but that do all sorts of things with visual images and events from The Shining book and movie. Again, these are signifiers of the familial curse of alcoholism: so many children of alcoholics who have sworn that they would never be like there parents follow them right down that road to nowhere.
Stephen King is an alcoholic, and he wrote The Shining early in his career toward the beginning of a downward slide that went on for many years and many novels. He has confessed that he got the idea for the book when he looked into himself and saw the anger and resentment that alcohol was kindling in him towards his family, and decided to externalize this rage into the character of Jack Torrance.
King admits that he wanted to hit his children when they would disturb him while he was writing. In The Shining Jack dislocates Danny's arm in a drunken rage after the then toddler scatters his papers on the floor; it is this and a drunk driving episode that cause Jack to quit drinking. In the movie Dr. Sleep we have two different visions of Jack and his drinking; there is one account given by Dan at an AA meeting that suggests that sobriety was the most important thing in the world to Jack, that suggests that he would have made it if he would have stayed in AA and not gone to the Overlook. There is another vision of Jack in the movie that shows him as the epitome of the resentful alcoholic, marinating in self pity and blaming his failures on all those around him. We are not told which is true, or if both are true at different times, or that if one is Dan's wishful thinking or if the other is really even Jack at all.
Dan's coming to terms with the story of his addiction and his father's place in it reminds us that generational sin is a common theme in the Bible, for example, in the Book of Exodus:
And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.
It seems a bit contradictory to say that the Lord God is merciful yet at the same time will punish people for the sins of their parents, but it is important to realize that the Bible only gives us an image of God, a representation. God is not really an old man sitting in a big chair in the clouds, smiting and cursing and cutting deals. God is the source code of the universe, written in a machine language that is incomprehensible to our feeble monkey brains. Paul Tillich called this the "God above God"; that is, the God beyond the God that we are capable of experiencing. This is the God that is eternal and unchanging, as opposed to the ever evolving anthropomorphic model of God that we interact with.
Our brains are good for generating a simplistic and glitchy virtual reality view of actual reality, limited by our meager processing power and our low resolution inputs that only read from five senses; how much is out there that we can't connect wth is beyond our imagination. So although God is much more than a person, we experience God as a person; I think of this God as a sort of interface. A personal God is an avatar, sculpted to our receptivity. The God presented through much of the Bible is male, paternal, monarchical, and legalistic, but these are no more attributes of the "real God" than the files and folders in a Windows interface are actual files and folders in a drawer somewhere. Likewise the God that is described as "visiting iniquity" upon innocent children manifests in this way because this is the observed reality of how the world works. This begins to change by the time we get to the prophet Jeremiah, who writes:
In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge, but every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge.
The later incarnation of God as Jesus is even more disruptive, less about the world as is than about the world as it could be, as are similar visions in many other religious traditions.
You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor’ and ‘hate your enemy.’ but I say to you, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you.
The earlier instance of God presented the world as it is and tells us how to conform to the rules; this newer version challenges us to rewrite the world. We don't have to follow generational patterns, to do things this way or that because our ancestors did, and we don't have to perpetuate the destructive cycles that our parents and grandparents passed down to us.
In Dr. Sleep, Dan faces the ghosts of his past and dialogues with them. He makes choices that allow him to free himself from the wheel of despair that he had been chained to. As a result he can also release the childhood traumas that he had boxed away in a dark place in his mind; a dangerous move ot be sure, but also a necessary one.
We don't have to continue on with our teeth set on edge, endlessly repeating the cycles of our parents lives, or even the cycles of our own younger lives. Like Dan we can disrupt old patterns and old ways of coping, adopt new paradigms to replace outmoded ones.
Movies You Might Have Missed
The Dead ZoneOne of the best Stephen King adaptations, David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone benefits from an outstanding performance by Christopher Walken. A man who is able to see the future has a terrifying vision of a nuclear holocaust after shaking the hand of a up and coming politician. |
The Shining (TV Miniseries)King scripted this three part TV adaptation of The Shining that aired in 1997. It suffers from dated special effects, awkward performances, and low budget production values, but it is interesting to see how the author would have wanted this story told. It's also nice to see some of the details left out of the Kubrick movie like the roque mallet and the enchanted hedge animals. |
Jacob's LadderAnother metaphysical horror movie. Jacob's Ladder follows a man having bizarre visions of demons and the supernatural; are the visions real, is he having a mental breakdown, or is there something else going on? |
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