Jack’s seeing lots of phantoms—why not also the viewer, whom the camera brings “in” to the scene?

(When you start pulling on that thread—the viewer as a vital part of the fiction, as really present, as encouraging and complicit in what takes place—and make that the focus of a horror film, you get Funny Games)

Never seen "Funny Games" - looking on IMDB, there's what looks like the original from 1997 and a remake in 2007 that doesn't seem as well received (shame as I have a high opinion of Tim Roth).

The Funny Games remake was poorly received because it was released at the height of the torture porn craze and contemptuous spat in the face of audiences for liking that sort of thing. When a movie entices an audience to come see it them tells them to go fuck themselves, it often doesn't go over well.

It's good.

I don’t think less of King for it, though it strongly disagree with him. An artist sometimes has a much different connection to their artwork than the audience does.

Maybe I was over-harsh - I think less of Stephen King's taste in films. And yes, he's absolutely allowed to like or dislike any adaptations of his books. I used to think that the majority of Stephen King film adaptations were likely to be rubbish, but I think there's plenty of exceptions to that now.

I can imagine that King has a very deep connection to The Shining as Jack is probably the closest that King has got to an autobiographical character.

> I can imagine that King has a very deep connection to The Shining as Jack is probably the closest that King has got to an autobiographical character.

Kimg has a few autobiographical characters, but surely the closest has to be when he literally self inserted himself into the gunslinger series.

I haven't read them but that certainly sounds more autobiographical.

I've also seen the theory that Jack Torrance in the film had been sexually abusing Danny. There's various links with the use of bears (e.g. the fellatio scene with the man in the bear suit) and the subtle use of pornography around the hotel (e.g. Jack reading PlayGirl in the hotel lobby).

He literally writes himself into the dark tower series.

> Stephen King's opinion just makes me think less of him (King) although I'm also a fan of his writing too

This happens in software development, too: someone is so single-mindedly fixated on their own approach to building understandable, maintainable software that they can't recognize understandable, maintainable software built any other way.

I've seen something happen a few times with senior engineers who are being integrated into a team. It makes sense for their first task to be a fairly easy change in the best codebase, the "model" codebase where everything runs smoothly and there aren't any nasty surprises. You won't show them the cesspool codebase that causes all your problems until later.

So you give them the easy problem in the easy codebase, and they react like they've been dropped into the pits of hell. They might say, "Where's the dependency injection?" or "Oh my god, you're instantiating this object directly instead of using a factory!" or something else, depending on their taste. They don't see any sign of the techniques they would use to build maintainable software, so they assume the worst. You reassure them: we don't have any quality or maintainability issues with this codebase. It's fast, it doesn't break, everyone understands it, and it has absorbed every requirements change product has thrown at us for eighteen months, tripling in size in the process, without losing those desirable qualities.

At this point they have a choice. They can keep an open mind, see if what you're telling them proves to be true in practice, and maybe learn how a codebase can be understandable and maintainable without looking like they expect, or they can let their obsession with their own techniques be their final thought on the issue.

Obviously this is much more crucial for software engineers, who almost always work collaboratively, than for a novelist who works alone. A novelist with a track record of success doesn't have as many reasons to appreciate the techniques of other creators as a software engineer does.

Shining is a technical masterpiece. However, its characters and their progression is below-average at best and lacks all nuance or subtlety.

Kubric was also a sadist who was known for torturing actors on set. When you see how Shelly Duval was a mental mess, about to be mentally broken down… that part wasn’t acted.

Do you have actual factual support for that? Because plenty of great art is made by actually perfectly normal people who do not enjoy torturing others.

The business or local culture here and there sometimes favors sociopath and enable them to the maximum. That is however different claim.

I don’t know about _rarely_, but I think it is like rich people, most of the had to dish out a lot of pain and misery to get where they are. Sure, there are occasional examples where the rise to rishes doesn’t take that path, but it’s pretty rare. I say this as a 40 year founder having watched many of my peers become rich in a pretty horrific way. And me liking to sleep at nogjt being nice and not rich.

Collaborative art requires, I think, a strong hand and it’s often rough over people’s feelings.

> Collaborative art requires, I think, a strong hand and it’s often rough over people’s feelings.

I would say the opposite. Collaboration, including in art, have better results if the people running the show are not complete assholes.

A strong hand "rough over people’s feelings" is more likely to end up with completely crappy result. It does not mean that being doormat would get you good results, but these kind of people destroy team motivation and engagement - regardless of whether we talk about software development or art.

King has good points though. The story and psychology is pretty flat in the movie. What he miss is the movie makes up for it with stunning visuals and atmosphere.

> just makes me think less of him (King)

He's a great writer and I was following him on X, but his constant attacks on random people who don't share his political ideas had me.

He's still a great writer but probably a real AH too...