Spoiler Warning: This article will contain spoilers for Stephen King’s The Shining and Doctor Sleep, as well as the film adaptations.
Doctor Sleep, Stephen King’s 500-page plus follow-up to The Shining, follows an adult Danny Torrance struggling to break the cycle of abuse passed down to him by his father while being drawn into a new battle against the supernatural. Writer/director Mike Flanagan already had a daunting task in adapting the densely packed story, but then he approached it by marrying King’s novels to Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. A film that couldn’t be farther apart from King’s original novel in tone and style.
The novel wears King’s demons on its sleeve and is full of his trademark sentimentality. Kubrick’s vision is detached and cold, an isolated nightmare. That ultimately makes Doctor Sleep three movies in one, as it combines Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation with King’s The Shining and his sequel novel. With nearly 1000-pages of text to adapt and reconcile with Kubrick’s 2.5-hour film, well, Doctor Sleep is every bit as ambitious as it sounds. While it retroactively imbues Kubrick’s take with the warmth King always intended, the major changes from the novel mean Flanagan has to adhere accordingly.
Changes that ultimately shortchange and condemn Danny Torrance’s arc, and pose the question of whether Kubrick’s film and King’s novel were meant to coexist at all.
In The Shining novel, Dick Hallorann is severely wounded by Jack Torrance upon his return to the Overlook, but he lives and guides Danny and Wendy to safety. He becomes a sort of father figure to Danny throughout childhood. Furthermore, the unstable boiler explodes and destroys the Overlook. For his film, Kubrick killed off Hallorann and the Overlook was simply abandoned. These specific changes directly affect how Flanagan’s adaptation plays out. The early scene that sees Hallorann coaching a young Danny on how to cope with the Overlook’s lingering ghosts holds different context here; Hallorann is coaching from beyond the grave. A supernatural guide and conscience. It’s also early foreshadowing that Danny will fulfill this same role for Abra in the film’s epilogue, a fate that holds a different meaning in the novel.
Because there’s so much ground to cover, the film zips along with Danny’s troubled upbringing. After the death of his mother, Wendy, he falls into the same pattern of alcoholism and anger that his father laid out before him. In the novel, it’s detailed in full just how hard his rock bottom hits, including a narrative-long struggle with guilt over the death of a toddler he had an indirect, passive hand in during his worst days. Doctor Sleep tells Abra and the True Knot’s story as well, but above all, it belongs to Danny Torrance. His fight to overcome his father’s legacy. To find closure and break the cycle. It takes him all novel long, but he finally manages to accomplish it. The final battle takes place on the ground where the Overlook once stood, and he even has a touching moment of closure with the ghost of his father. He lives, achieves 15 years sobriety and counting, and remains a fixture in Abra’s life to coach her through the Shining and keeping her inner darkness at bay.
In the film version, however, much of Danny’s inner turmoil is relegated to Cliff Notes.
In the third act, it’s Danny who decides to hold the final confrontation at the abandoned Overlook Hotel, waking the past and present for a cinematic opportunity to replay the greatest hits of the hotel’s ghosts. There’s no clear closure for his past trauma, and he’s doomed to suffer the fate the befell Jack Torrance in the original novel. He didn’t break the loop, he just closed it. Even when the film ends on a note that sees Danny at peace with his role as the new Dick Hallorann, there’s an underlying tragedy about it all. Flanagan takes care to show that Danny isn’t the same as Jack, but even still, returning and dying at the Overlook feels more like childhood trauma claiming him. There was no escape for Danny Torrance, after all.
In merging both Kubrick and King’s vision, Flanagan rewrites the legacy of The Shining. In doing so, though, he also rewrites the legacy of the Torrance family. The ghosts of the Overlook offer up nostalgic chills, but don’t mesh easily with the themes King laid out for his protagonist in his novel. Being a Constant Reader, knowing how Danny’s story could’ve ended, makes the film’s final moments feel somber and melancholy. Even if you haven’t read the novel, Danny’s personal demons tend to take a backseat to Abra’s storyline so I’m not sure book familiarity makes much of a difference.
In creating an amalgam of King’s The Shining, Doctor Sleep, and Kubrick’s film, Flanagan has managed to achieve the unthinkable. But it also creates an interesting question: how much does your knowledge of all three properties weigh into your reception of this adaptation? Does having limited familiarity enhance or hinder your enjoyment of this story?
Do you feel Kubrick’s vision blended well with King’s story in this adaptation?
