Paternal responsibility and bad conscience in adaptations of The Shining

Abstract

Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick are both important contributors to adaptation as an industry, so their contest over The Shining has the quality of a clash of the titans. This article discusses King’s commentary on Kubrick’s The Shining, as well as his two significant attempts at reappropriating the material: the miniseries Stephen King’s The Shining and the sequel novel Doctor Sleep. It interrogates the gender politics of each iteration, and pays particular attention to the moral status of the patriarch in order to test Greg Jenkins’s assertion that Kubrick’s tendency as an adapter was to ‘[imbue] his films with a morality that is more conventional than the [precursor] novels’ (original emphasis). It concludes that Kubrick’s vision of the patriarch is, finally, less morally conventional and certainly less sentimental than King’s, and possibly more horrifying