Today's really hopping with sonorous posts, harmonizing with thoughts already had.
What an annoying way to talk about that!
Anyway, what I'm really here to talk about is Dick Hallorann.
One thing I will never forgive Stanley Kubrick's The Shining for is doing Dick Hallorann dirty. (Actually, been having a lot of thoughts lately on whether Kubrick films are actually good or if it was the general auteur dicksuck that was going around at the time - I'm not sold on The Shining being 'good' as it's a poor adaptation that is way too in love with Jack Nicholson, who is doing a good job but is so wholly the focus that it makes all his nuance boring and hammering in the obvious (lol))
We're not talking about them, yet, though, we're talking about Dick Hallorann, who might be a contender for a favorite character. Scatman Crothers did a great job as Dick, he got massively shortchanged along with everyone else who wasn't Jack Nicholson in that movie.
ANYWAY, you can read infinite pieces on how poor an adaptation of the novel the movie is - it's best not to harp on it, and appreciate the movie for what it is - but it chooses to take a turn implied (or threatened, love when a novel successfully threatens) in the novel that doesn't end up panning out, which is part of the play of the whole ability to 'shine' and even more than that, the idea of inevitability, nature, etc.
If the novel successfully plays with the idea of 'Can a person be redeemed? Can they change? Can they live with what they've done on the way?' then the movie... does something else.
But Dick doesn't have to worry about any of that, because Dick is cool as fuck.
People rightly have their opinions on how successfully Stephen King deals with race and gender, but I feel I can at least say that Dick is a fully-realized person whose race is neither downplayed, ignored, or, in my opinion, overblown into a stereotype or token character place. I don't think he fits into the magical negro trope. Or, at least, he averts it. But that is a matter of opinion. The fact that we see him struggle with the idea that he even should go help out - despite having promised to - because what do these people mean to him, really kind of seals it for me. He's as much participating in the central questions of the book as anyone else. For him it's not a question of change or redemption, so much as a question of risk, of responsibility, and that is stacked up quite clearly against the very real fact that he is successful and happy despite living in a society bent against his success and happiness. He's risking a lot more than them.
He is also a great foil to Jack Torrance, whose role as a teacher gets so massively downplayed most of the time. Dick isn't a magical teacher springing into the story to assist Danny (in fact, it turns out he's wrong anyway - the things in the hotel can hurt Danny, so much for magical tutelage lending power), he's a foil, whose choice to help a more talented child in a moment of contest and struggle is pretty directly a contrast to Jack's instinct to ruin and restrain. The parallel isn't as clean as Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, but to make it clean would be to shortchange Dick as a person/character, which is the far more important feature.
He's also just fucking great. When the lady on the plane sees him react to Danny's telepathic cry for help, and he tells her its the metal plate in his head he got fighting in Korea. Is any of that true? Doesn't fucking matter. She doesn't need to know. She just needs to feel comfortable sitting next him. He plays the people around him with the shine, on occasion, but I think the text is pretty clear that most of the time he's playing on how people see him. He doesn't need to shine to do that. And again, it contrasts to Jack, who is infuriated that anyone might have a different opinion of him than he thinks he deserves.
As many people have said, one of King's strengths is his characters. That they manage to be so varied and so ordinary is a pretty remarkable skill. I feel like when a lot of people get on his case about the weird shit they do ('who would be thinking about their boobs in this situation!?') they're really shortchanging how fuckin' wild human beings are. Maybe I wouldn't be thinking about boobs, but more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, you know?
