Hijacking The Shining: Doctor Sleep

The Shining is a resource that keeps on giving. It has generated a whole “universe” of creative, critical and fan activity. Stanley Kubrick adapted The Shining once in 1980 and never looked back, unlike Stephen King, who has returned to The Shining materials again, and again. King was famously unhappy with Kubrick’s adaptation.2 He made his own execrable readaptation (Stephen King’s The Shining, Mick Garris, 1997) and wrote a reparative novel: Doctor Sleep. There is more than a touch of revenge in these manoeuvres, as King sought to reassert authority over his story. Doctor Sleep was, in its turn, adapted in 2019 by Mike Flanagan and marketed as “Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep.” Despite this marketing, this film samples the visual and narrative strategies of Kubrick’s The Shining liberally and without apparent irony, deploying the cultural cachet and style of Kubrick’s film in ways that are simultaneously exploitative and reverential. This article examines this latest act of adaptation and reappropriation to discuss how King’s ongoing public war with Kubrick, waged indirectly through Flanagan as his adapter, “keeps the wounds of revenge green” (to paraphrase Francis Bacon) and continuously revivifies the cultural property generated by The Shining. Unlike King, Flanagan is not motivated by revenge, but he goes further than reappropriating Kubrick’s work: he “Hijacking” it, turning it to his, and King’s, purposes. This becomes particularly clear through the conception of family, where King reveals himself a sentimental humanist. This sentimentality is, of course, what makes King so amenable to adaptation Hollywood, but Kubrick lanced it like a boil. Flanagan seems to be a sentimental humanist as well, which means in this sense he reads Kubrick through the lens of King. This is the double valence of Doctor Sleep: narratively, stylistically, Flanagan gives the edge to Kubrick, but the tonal, ideological edge goes to King. The result is a misprision of the cult object that is Kubrick’s The Shining. Doctor Sleep translates what it means back into the language of King from which it was translated in the first place.