‘The Unempty Wasps’ Nest and Kubrick’s The Shining: Rethinking Adaption’

Some weeks ago, on the fourth of March, Professor Graham Allen presented a seminar on his paper ‘The Unempty Wasps’ Nest and Kubrick’s The Shining: Rethinking Adaption’. I thought myself lucky as the paper is yet to be published, so those who attended the seminar were given a taster as what to expect from the issued article. The seminar focused on the issues pertaining to Kubrick’s removing of the wasps’ nest in his film’s adaption of Stephen King’s literary masterpiece. Although only one of many differences between the two media, Graham suggests that the wasps’ nest is present in the movie symbolically rather than physically. In the novel, the wasps’ nest reminds Jack Torrance of how he has been stung by life with his uncontrollable anger, his alcoholism and his abusive father. Jack decides to ‘bomb’ the nest as he thinks it would make a great decoration for his son Danny’s room: “I had one in my room when I was a kid. My dad gave it to me” (King 133). That same night the nest bizarrely comes alive with hundreds of wasps that crawl over Danny and sting him with near-fatal consequences. In the novel, the recurring motif of the wasps represent the troubles of Jack’s past. Nowhere in Kubrick’s film do we see wasps or a wasps’ nest but an unusual, although apt, correlation between the wasps and the Overlook Hotel was made by Graham during the seminar. Wasps have lidless eyes, therefore allowing them perpetual vision, and in the movie the Overlook Hotel seems to be aware of everything that is happening to the characters. Kubrick’s use of the Steadicam was revolutionary and his camera floats through the hotel’s corridors like an evil spirit, a spirit we assign to the hotel’s malevolence. Similar to the wasps, the Overlook Hotel seems to be forever conscious and an insidious participant in Torrance’s madness. The single most thought-provoking element of the seminar (for me) was the discussion Graham and some lectures attending had regarding the adaption of a book onto the big screen. A point highlighted during the sprightly conversation was that once a literary work such as a novel is adapted to another medium, that of a film or stage play, it becomes a partially original creation, and should be perceived as such. It is well known that Stephen King loathed Kubrick’s adaption of The Shining and particularly points out the film’s inability to ‘grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook hotel’ and instead focuses on Jack’s character’s descent into lunacy. King describes the film as a ‘domestic tragedy with only vaguely supernatural overtones’. However, The Shining is considered by most as a cinematic masterpiece whose innovative approach to the genre of horror transcends rather than conforms to conventions. The question asked is why an adaption should stay true to whatever it is that’s being adapted. The most iconic aspects of the film are not present in the movie and lovers of the book often consider the film inferior to King’s novel. The shining has become two stories and each is brilliant in its own explicit way. The rejection of the wasps’ nest in Kubrick’s The Shining portrays the director’s deliberate breakaway from King’s novel. In allowing the supposedly empty wasps’ nest to come back to life, King associates the unexplainable evil with the Overlook Hotel and not the character of Jack Torrance. In direct contrast, Kubrick portrays Jack as the film’s essence of evil, with the hotel acting as a complimentary backdrop to such perverseness. Therefore, the addition and omission of various aspects of the book becomes necessary and pivotal to the film’s success. The film tells a more realistic story and therefore is a more chilling tale than the novel. King portrays Jack as a character worthy of redemption and the happy ending of the novel strikes a false note with what is evidently more fitting to a Romantic novel than a horror story. Kubrick allows no room for emotional participation when watching the film and you feel instead as though you are experiencing the tribulations of Wendy and Danny. Such are the disparities between the book and the film that it almost feels unjust to compare and contrast them. The adaption of a book to a film is seldom considered the simple process of modification or adjustment but is more widely appreciated as the recreation of the old into the new, thus making it original in its own right. Although the concept of originality has lost its fundamental meaning since the avant-garde, I use the word only to emphasise the importance of a book or film’s adaption to be evaluated individually and not as an example of the direct imitation of a work dragged into another medium. In deliberately not staying true to King’s novel, Kubrick transcends the traditional concepts of horror in film. King was so unhappy with the film version of The Shining that he pushed for the production of a mini television series of his book. However, the TV-series was heavily criticised and demonstrates that novelists are not automatically the best choice when it comes to adapting their work into another medium. Writing a book and writing a screenplay are two very different undertakings and should not be assessed or categorised collectively. Mentioned in the seminar too was the influence Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny had on Kubrick’s film. The use of doubles, mirrors, repetition, numbers, and the familiar correspond with Freud’s understanding that ‘uncanny feelings’ arise when something familiar starts to act in an inexplicable and peculiar manner. This something might be a house, a pet, a neighbour, and in The Shining it happens to be Jack, a husband and father. Freud states that “Death and the re-animation of the dead are typically represented as uncanny themes…the theory of intellectual uncertainty is thus incapable of explaining that impression” (Freud). Images of death appear ubiquitously in the film – the dead twins, the resurrected caretaker and the corpse in the bathtub. What we never find out is whether the ghosts Jack sees are products of his imagination or real apparitions. Similar to Freud’s understanding of the ‘uncanny’, the viewer’s uncertainty of whether the ghosts are figments of Jack’s imagination exemplify the ‘uncanniness’ we experience in times of confusion and doubt. Whether you are a fan of the novel or the film, one must appreciate that the addition and omission of several features of the book (the wasps’ nest) becomes a necessary evil in making Kubrick’s The Shining the celebrated work it is today.

Works Cited

Allen, Graham. ‘The Unempty Wasps’ Nest and Kubrick’s The Shining: Rethinking Adaptation.’ University College Cork. 4 Mar. 2015. Lecture.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. London: Peguin, 2003. Book.

King, Stephen. The Shining. London: Hachette, 2007. Book.

Strengell, Heidi. Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism. London: Popular Press, 2006. Book.