We love a good deep dive. We obsess over Lego builds, Pokémon cards, and Minecraft. After I read Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days aloud, we watched multiple film adaptations and used a dry erase globe to map the journey. Before we attend a stage production of Shakespeare, we listen to commentaries, read children’s versions, and watch a film or two.
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Stephen King’s The Shining has become our latest rabbit hole. The audio book took us 16 hours over several weeks to complete. It was darker than I expected and more personal. Jack Torrance is an alcoholic writer who has not lived up to the promise of his youth. He’s tormented by his perceived responsibilities and feels that his next failure could mean complete tragedy. It does. He leaves his son with a lone parent and plenty of nightmares.
I heard many of my darkest fears while listening between destinations.
Next we rented Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film. I had only ever caught bits of the movie in the bad old days of broadcast television. Jack Nicholson is haunting as Torrance, but there seemed to be a few odd choices in what was preserved and jettisoned from the original text.
Tonight we watched Room 237, a hyper-detail exploration of the film. It delves into the departures from the book that appear to have intentionally enraged King. It also examines conspiracy theories and synchronicities that border on insanity. The movie appears to be as mad as Torrance and as expansive as the demons inhabiting the Overlook Hotel.
It has given us more history to traverse and ideas to carry forth as we continue to discuss and review what we have consumed.
Our next plan is to watch the 1997 TV miniseries. I watched it at the time, but entirely forget it. I don’t have high hopes but for the fact that it must cover the text more closely than Kubrick chose to.
I’ve never been thrilled by King and was not expecting this to be much more than a bit of scary entertainment in the car. I was delightfully wrong and look forward to learning more about Kubrick’s film and completing our viewing of the film adaptions.