The Shining: The Issue Of Fidelity In Relation To Film

The issue of fidelity in relation to film adaptation is a difficult concept to draw upon when analysing the adaptation of a novel into film. Fidelity is a complex issue, bearing a plethora of conflicting concepts and ideas, which one could propose makes it difficult for the analysis of adaptation to be entirely conclusive. Thus making the study and analysis of fidelity somewhat ambiguous. Nevertheless, it is still an integral element of adaptation discourse and exploration. Perhaps one of the most important fidelity concept to mention is that no matter how closely an adaptation follows the original text it was based on, it will still never be entirely faithful. According to ( ) “the closest a film could come to being a perfectly faithful

This will be done by analysing the some of the differences between the novel and the film in order to determine whether or not Kubrick's film was faithful to the original text.

Anyone who has read Stephen King's novel The Shining would recognise that Stanley Kubricks 1980 adaptation contains a multitude of obvious deviations. However, it is well known that whenever a novel is adapted into a film, the adaptation will often differentiate substantially from the original text. This is because the medium of which the story is being told has changed (beyond fidelity 55). During the time of the film's release, these deviations or 'differences' caused some critics to critique the film in quite an unfavourable manor, bringing the question of fidelity to the forefront. According to ( ) the initial response held by film critics towards Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining were “uniformly hostile” (173). Furthermore, critics believed that Kubrick's adaptation of the novel deviated so much so, that some deemed The Shining almost unrecognisable (173). However, with that being said, there are still obvious key elements of the novel that are present in the film. An example of how the film differentiates, but remains

Not only does Jack die in an entirely different setting, but he comes to his demise in a totally different way as well. In the novel, both Jack and the Overlook are destroyed in a fiery explosion caused by the hotel's boiler. Whereas in Kubrick's film, Jack freezes to death in the maze, and the overlook survives. Because of the way in which Kubrick's ending drastically differs from King's, it is easy to see why some film critics would have deemed the story unrecognisable and questioned its fidelity. Furthermore, because the ending is so different to the one in the novel, the choice to change the ending cannot easily be explained by it's transposition between mediums. As ( ) state “while the transposition of a narrative from a textual medium to the cinema might be able to explain the fact that the narrative has changed, the characteristics of cinema as a medium cannot explain why particular changes are made instead of others” (180). Moreover, it has been suggested that the question of fidelity should arise only if the film maker has consciously made changes to the narrative, rather than changing certain aspects of the narration which may have been a necessity to the “cinematic medium” (180). In light of this, it may not be too far stretched to say that Kubrick could have easily used King's ending in the novel, as it wouldn't have been too much of a cinematic