Stephen King on the “misogynistic” Shelley Duvall character in ‘The Shining’
Having your novels turned into big-screen adaptations is surely a testing experience.
When you conjure your own characters, you really get to know them, and they reveal themselves to you as though they’ve got a mind of their own, independent of yours.
Stephen King is no stranger to this, with an overwhelming amount of his stories receiving the big-screen treatment. Seriously, if he’s written something, there’s probably a version of it out there for the benefit of those too averse to the written word. Two years after his debut novel Carrie came out and was hustled into a bloody popular feature that terrified prom queens for years to come, King was on the fast train to the starry heights of writing fame.
Subsequently, he became a go-to for studios looking for a story that struck the right note between being terrifying and grounding itself in reality. Well, girls with telekinetic powers or murderous lawnmowers might not sound like the most realistic forms of horror, but the way King approaches these topics makes them feel like they really could have some grounds in reality. His characters are often relatable, their fears much like mine or yours, so when something happens to them, you can’t help but worry that it could happen to you, too.
Look at the kids in IT, their most deeply-rooted fears—the things they’ve tried to repress—are brought to the surface by the evil clown Pennywise. In a way, Pennywise is just King, forcing us to confront the most horrifying aspects of life without any respite.
One of his most popular adaptations, however, is one that he felt uneasy about. Not long after the success of Carrie, Stanley Kubrick expressed interest in King’s 1977 novel The Shining, subsequently turning it into a movie that would arrive in 1980 to mixed acclaim. These days, it’s held as one of the horror greats, referenced countless times in pop culture, even by those who haven’t seen it, but critics, including the author himself, had a lot to say about one performance in particular.
Upon the film’s release, Shelley Duvall was nominated for a Razzie ‘Worst Actress’ award. It’s one of the greatest misjudgments in cinema history, because how anyone could think that Duvall’s performance wasn’t perfect is beyond me. Sure, she is rather hysterical, but wouldn’t you be if your husband had gone mad and was suddenly chasing you around a maze of a hotel snowed in, trying to kill you with an axe?
Duvall’s performance embodies the truly tired and terrified essence of Wendy Torrance, who is unfairly subjected to her husband’s descent into chaos. King thought that the portrayal of Wendy in Kubrick’s film was “misogynistic”, however, highlighting that her hysterical nature did nothing to show the complexity of her character, which can be found in his book.
“Shelley Duvall as Wendy is really one of the most misogynistic characters ever put on film; she’s basically just there to scream and be stupid, and that’s not the woman that I wrote about,” King said in an interview with the BBC.
While you might think that King has the last say here, he wrote the character, after all, it seems unfair to call Wendy, a victim of domestic abuse, a misogynistic character. Duvall turns in an unforgettable performance, ultimately saving herself and her son, Danny, from an impossible situation.
