Given that Stephen King is one of my favorite authors and Stanley Kubrick is one of my favorite directors—and that The Shining is one of my favorite King books and probably my favorite Kubrick film—I've always been somewhat amused by the annoyance King has shown toward Kubrick's adaptation. In a way, it feels like the author has spent chunks of the last thirty-some years trying to reclaim his intellectual property: first with the 1997 TV adaptation and now with the release of Dr. Sleep, his latest novel, which is a sequel to the book.*
In a way, I get King's angst: I'd be willing to wager that the people who have seen just the film outnumber people who have read the book by ten or twenty to one. At least. To the vast majority of people, The Shining, as a concept, is Jack Nicholson being driven insane by a hotel and Shelley Duval screaming and Scatman Crothers taking an axe to the chest. This is far different from the book, which is partly autobiographical—like Torrance, King was a writer struggling with substance abuse issues at the time—and far more interested in the human toll addiction exacts. It's understandable that he'd be annoyed.
That being said, I've always been pretty firmly Team Stanely. And that's because when it comes to turning books into films, adaptation is not transliteration.** Simply putting what happens on the page on the screen is a recipe for disaster; the language of film is far different from the language of novels. As Jason Bailey notes at Flavorwire:
In adapting The Shining, Kubrick took King’s story and King’s character, and made it his own. Kubrick’s obligation to King was not to make a book report — it was to make an effective movie, one that worked on its own terms. This is, above all else, the job of the cinematic storyteller, fidelity to source material be damned.
Film and novels are different media. What works on the page will not necessarily work on the screen. And there's no better proof of that than the King-produced TV miniseries that is based on The Shining. It just doesn't work. It's too long, the special effects employed make it look silly at times, the flashbacks showing mobsters at work in the hotel trade moody atmosphere for straightforward shocks, and nuance has been jettisoned throughout. It's ham-handed in a way that bad TV and bad cinema often is.
Transliteration from book to film rarely works and adaptations need not retain 100 percent accuracy to their source materials. Instead of scorning King for failing to recognize Kubrick's genius, perhaps we critics should thank him for (accidentally) providing an example to bolster that case.
*I'm reading Dr. Sleep right now. Through the first ten percent or so of the novel, it is focused on many of the same things that its predecessor was: drinking, addiction, and the ruin it wreaks.
**"Transliteration" is kind of an ugly and imprecise term to use here, but I hope it conveys what I'm trying to get across. To wit: Turning ancient Greek words into their English equivalent may help you understand how to pronounce what Thucydides was writing, but it will still be gibberish to you. A translation, meanwhile, may take a few liberties with the text but it will be rendered into a format you can understand. An adaptation is better understood as a translation rather than a transliteration.