Roll versus Role
As in Roll Playing Games versus Role Playing Games, at least in the style sense. Both are fun, and in my experience it's just where groups of folks settle into.
Where I've seen it, probably the key element is battle mats, grids, and figures. Theater of the mind type games tend to stay away from that level of detail, as it has a tendency to break the flow of play.
It's not an exclusive "they never do that", as the mats come out and the layouts are drawn up, but more of a tendency. Rule of cool hangs out here somewhere, as well.
I've also experienced here the roll-playing tendency to tinker with the rule sets. Blue and red box morphing into Advanced is the canonical pathway, also think of Rolemaster, Star Frontiers, Top Secret, Shadowrun, etc.
Which then eventually resulted in systems like World of Darkness, sort of the roll player's tinkering focused on getting a system that allowed and encouraged role players to come in and enjoy the pool.
I wonder how this plays out in story?
Let's see if this makes sense. Alien, the first movie, feels like it would be a Role player's movie. Ambience, setting, intense character focus.
At the same time, it's a locked-room mystery with very clear rules of engagement that are respected. Form follows function throughout.
Aliens, the second movie, feels like it should be the Roll player's movie. Jam pack the action, get moving, put cool guns and gizmos in the hands of the players and watch them go. Gonzo in the best way possible, and you can definitely see it when rule of cool is invoked, can't you?
But the role players steal the show. Bishop and Ripley especially, "back off and nuke 'em from orbit" too, it's like those moments in a good tight game where someone pulls off a one-liner that breaks the room.
What was built in the first movie, character wise, has carried over. Changed, of course, evolved and adapted, but inescapably linked.
Carpenter's The Thing and Big Trouble In Little China have a bit of this quality as well, and almost the same setup. Locked room versus gonzo, same actor and director for both, on the face of it a character focus versus a "never mind all that, let's get to the good stuff" extravaganza.
But the characters, and really it's the actors, we know that right? Everyone, James, Victor, Dennis, they're all in on this one, no seat belts, and those broad strokes become impressionistic fancy to get lost in.
These are films that, for me, work as synthesis of the duality. Are there other examples that break down on retrospect. Meaning, can I look to others and feel that, on the level we're talking about, they don't work anymore?
Road House and the first two Terminator movies come to mind, and for the same reason. The dreaded railroad syndrome.
Road House, the first one, feels in my memory like it was a set up, the GM wrote down all the set pieces and by god was going to hit every one. Because that's what was supposed to happen.
Which really just means, in this case, that a 1989 movie had to hit all the elements that made a 1980's movie "work" for the studios and producers of the time. The formula had to be set. That it worked at the time, for me comes down to Patrick, of course, but now I see it mostly as everyone having a good time, but with the seams showing.
The Terminator movies, well, that's Cameron all the way; it's when I look at all of his movies together that the rails become visible at every step. Sigourney, Kate, Linda, and yes Arnold save him from himself in the best examples; and I truly do love Jamie Lee and Arnold together. But they can only dance the rails, they can't make them go away entirely.
What about the other side of the coin then?
As much as I loved it then and now in my memory, Blade Runner. And the corollary, Total Recall and other Phillip Dick stories.
These all feel like an extend campaign where the GM could only get a couple folks together for any given night for weeks or months at a time. Everybody had a great time on any given night, but they were so separate from each other that, when you staple the pieces together, the corners overlap.
Nightmare on Elm Stree, Halloween, Friday the 13th, since they're built as series we have to take them as series: the player taking the bad guy role, and in a couple cases the other player who took on the surviving nemesis, were having so much fun that they dominated everything else.
To the point where the rest of the group stopped showing up after the first couple runs because there was no room for them in the game.
There's another type of interesting failure here as well: the one where the GM came up with what they think of as their best setup ever...
and all the players show up, don't have a clue what's going on, but they dig and give it their best shot anyway.
And as much as I love John Carpenter, this is where Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness live.
Aside: this the role side of the roll failure that is or can be a Lucas movie. With Lucas, it's more like all the players are there, they know exactly what they need to do, they're having a fantastic time, but the GM keeps handing them slips of paper with lines they're supposed to read.
So all the players read the lines and get back to doing what they're doing. Eveyrone has fun and delivers, with a running gag over what the GM's story is supposed to be doing.
John on the other hand, for Darkness and Madness, just confused the hell out of his players from day one through the end.
Another aside: End of Days and Constantine were two that I absolutely adored when I saw them, I remember that. Here and now they almost feel like responses to Carpenter's films, like one of the players from John's games moved and told the story of those games to their new GM.
Who got excited and tried their hand at it. In some ways, both Days and Constantine work better, but they still stumble a bit in similar fashion.
The Golden Child too, though it's not a response film in the same way. As much fun as Eddie and Charles were having...
I have to wonder if it's the general subject. On some level, they're all a bit of "Rosemary's Baby, but what if the cultists were gun-toting martial artists rather than New York neighbors?"
Or see why HP Lovecraft's conspiracy theorist's approach to how the world ends doesn't hold up as well as you'd think it would on film. Not that that's a blanket statement, either, considering that Alien and The Thing (Carpenter's version) are, to me at least, the best film versions of a Lovecraftian story yet presented.
There is, to me, an ultimate version of all of these. The Disney Star Wars sequels.
Here, it's like a con game room, tournament style, where we've got multiple nights, a set of common campaign notes, but each table has complete free reign to do what they want.
Every table has a completely different game going on, wildly divergent from each other in tone and style and where they want to go with this, and there's some poor sap running around journaling each table to try and build something coherent out of the confusion.
The top of each movie feels like "Day 1 here's your notes, Day 2 here's what we came up with from how you all ran it, Day 3 oh my god you folks are fantastic here's where we think it's going next!" while someone who thought they were in charge is doing the "I picked the wrong day to quit sniffing glue" bit in the back room.
I probably should stop here.
No really. But I can't. Because, however much I started this mess with a game analogy, scanning back through and I find myself compelled to address the elephant in the room.
I've picked on Phillip and HP and Carpenter and James and George. Well, and I've praised them too, because whatever I may say about that some of these films don't feel the same, that's in the rearview mirror.
Every one I've named, and many more, have a warm place in my heart. These and more are all movies that I enjoyed.
So to where I'm going, so please don't anyone let go of that. It's just that, if we're really going to talk films made in our little corner of the world called "genre movies", we have to talk Stephen King.
Because let's face it, when you add up on your fingers and toes the number of movies made from one writer's vision, King's the king. And I won't distinguish film from TV or what have you because at this point it's just silly.
Really: other than Stoker and Shelley, in our little world it's all about Stephen. The stories my friend, it's the stories.
Carrie the film came out in 1976. As we speak, here in 2025 and running on 50 years later, the web bots tell me there are 15 of Stephen's titles currently in development.
Carrie. Salem's Lot. The Shining. Christine. Hell, if I'm reading the list correctly, every one of those 50 years and counting has had either a Stephen King movie/what have you released, or somebody was getting ready to send one out.
There's no way in hell I'm picking apart every one of those. We'd be here for months, and my interest and yours would flag long before we ran out of stuff to talk about.
That said, can we make any sense of this stew, as a body of work? I mean, given what we're talking about?
If we're talking about these films in game terms, what we're dealing with here is the GM who's ideas are so big and fun that they can always fill the table. And it goes on year after year, there's always something more to work with.
And it doesn't matter what style any of the players work in, there's something there they can enjoy. The Body? Shawshank? The Shining? And sure those are the tentpoles, but the character focus and the story work hand in hand.
It, Salem's Lot (I prefer the first one, the TV mini series), Needful Things: sandbox style, really.
The Stand wants to be a sandbox, but at some point the GM had to add rails because they'd have just wandered around for years otherwise (and Stephen admitted it because he saw it happening while he was writing it!).
Misery and Dolores Claiborne are Kathy's movies. The Gunslinger movies so far have been the GM's big ideas that no one can quite make sense of. Maximum Overdrive? Ok I'll leave that one alone, but Creepshow was lots of silly fun.
And, to continue another small theme, we've got a world here where the "best" Stephen King movie is the first two seasons of Stranger Things, at least where we set aside Stand By Me and Shawshank and The Shining.
Ok, aside: Stephen has his reasons, oft quoted, for not liking how Kubrick approached his work. That's fine, but I prefer the Kubrick movie by far to the TV series later released. I'll note that the director of Doctor Sleep appears to have felt similarly.
Kubrick, Nicholson, and Duvall got the story on a fundamental level, and their work together delivered something special. From this far distant outsider's view, I read Stephen's view as being distinctly uncomfortable with finding that some of, perhaps many of the elements the writer viewed as important could be jettisoned so readily.
No one likes to be told that what they thought critical was set dressing after all.
But I also find it unfair to Kubrick, Jack, and Shelley. The history that forms so much of the book is there on screen as subtext and innuendo. It's in Shelley's eyes and posture throughout the leadup to the typewriter scene. Just as it's there in Jack's defensiveness.
And there was never going to be a chance to translate Danny's inner strength to the screen. The ages don't match up. Any more than Jake Lloyd could deliver what the fans, and originally George Lucas, were looking for from a young Anakin. Kubrick had to find another way of working.
Though... it's only a little unfair. However well Shelley worked with what she had, she was never quite given as much to work with as she could have been. There's more here, and we could I think discuss it relative to Rebecca's role in the TV series and how Wendy's character was viewed there.
But I think even in the novel, it's difficult to get past this: this is Jack and Danny's story, for the most part. Wendy isn't sidelined, exactly, but she's playing referee while the two main players tangle. This is a dynamic we tend to gloss over, that of the family itself. The idea of hero and villain, protagonist and antagonist, falls down when we're talking the three-cornered match at the dinner table.
I think for me, what's going on inside the story we see is the compressed series of time moments where Wendy's dynamic, the part of the story where she's active in her own path, are less in focus. Danny and Jack are on stage here and now; they respond to Wendy's actions before, and leave her actions yet to come that Doctor Sleep then concludes from, but we see it only just out of view, in retrospect.
In the book. In Kubrick's movie, of course, Wendy's story is at best hidden and barely glimpsed. For the TV series, whatever Stephen's personal mission was with respect to Wendy's character, the effect was blunted for me compared to the needs of the story itself.
And, as well, casting Rebecca de Mornay. Who I adore, and fits how Wendy is described in the original novel. But... inevitably, we're into appearance and what is considered beauty. At the time, no matter what the intentions were in regards to how Wendy's character was going to be viewed in the TV series, what the purpose was, unfortunately...
Unfortunately, casting Rebecca felt more like a rebuke of Shelley's role in the Kubrick move. For me at least; I can give a reason for it, if you'll forgive my digression?
Ok, when the book came out, I was almost 5. When Kubrick's movie came out, I was closing on 8 I think, when the movie came to the rental counter or cable, because that's when my father and I watched it.
And while my mother didn't necessarily have an issue with that, my stepmother did, but dad and I watched it anyway. And I remember distinctly Dad's comment that Shelley didn't look anything like the character in the book.
Which I had read, because again, neither at my father's house nor my mother's were any books within reach off limits.
Point being, I didn't then and don't now pay much attention to character description in a story. Water off a duck's back, thanks, I'll have my own view of the characters where needed.
Dad and I enjoyed the movie; I think for him, Shelley was just fine, it's just that Wendy's description in the book was strong enough that he had to adjust, that's all. And that momentary bump was sufficient so that, when the trailers and leadup to the TV series came along, and Dad and I were talking about watching it (no longer together, but even today we always discuss what we're listening to or watching), dad brought up Rebecca as matching the book's description of Wendy more directly.
Again, not as anything other than, "Shelley was very good but didn't look like I was imagining, Rebecca looks like we were told Wendy should". Similar to a friend telling you to go visit the museum, they've got a Rembrandt, and when you get there you find out it was really a Van Gogh. Both perfectly wonderful, but completely different, and jarring for only brief moments while you reset your expectations.
So, in my mind, I had this little bit of extra baggage on seeing Rebecca in that role, a little voice that held back out of this concern: I hope they didn't cast her just because of looks.
But that was always going to be an odd, asymmetric situation. Because Stephen's character was visually described in such a way as to be distinct from Kubrick's casting choice, and because Stephen was always going to tackle a reboot of The Shining in such a way that it was effectively rebuking Kubrick's movie, the whole dynamic was guaranteed to generate some amount of unease surrounding Wendy's role and casting choice.
For me, anyway. Loyalty to Shelley and Rebecca both, and a certain amount of discomfort with the inevitable way Hollywood could have pitted the two portrayals against each other.
All that said, Scatman's end is another story altogether. Scatman had, I think, just the right touch, especially in working with Danny (Lloyd, the actor, playing Danny Torrance, the character).
And then Kubrick did him wrong. While, though, holding to the rules of the game as they were understood at the time.
Consider: take away the status of The Shining as a novel, and its writer. Now consider Kubrick's film in isolation in the rules of the road in the 1970s.
Yeah: by the rules of the horror movie under those conditions, Dick Halloran doesn't get to the end of the film.
Futher, let's point out and acknowledge the complications associated with a black character. This is freighted territory.
But even then: Stephen had already stepped outside the usual boundaries by having Dick survive. And the book had been more than successful.
So I come back to that Kubrick did overstep and treat both Scatman and Dick Halloran badly.
At minimum that's a lesson in choosing your weapons appropriately. An axe of necessity doesn't really allow for "injured but still mobile enough to help" as in Stephen's story and the roque mallet.
Really though, I don't think Kubrick could let go of that the only murders in the story happened in the past, and while Wendy, Danny, and Dick paid a bloody toll, only Jack paid the ferryman's fee in the present day.
We get trapped in our expectations, I guess. I do think it more than a bit wild that it was Kubrick who chose the conventional, cliched path over King's more original path less traveled.
All that said, here we are back at the rules of the road bit I mentioned for Alien. Both Stephen and Kubrick present, basically, another locked room story. Both set out their rules, both recognize and give life and breathing room for incredible characters, and then both follow their rule sets to the end.
Both stories work in the functional sense, and in that creepy, brain stem level frisson that follows us ever after. Yeah, I think Kubrick completely chickened out, first in (for a famously detailed director!) ditching the roque mallet (come on, a croquet mallet would have done just fine) then in killing off Dick Halloran. But that doesn't mean I don't recognize and appreciate how the film version stands as its own thing.
I guess I just wish that Kubrick had more recognized Wendy and Dick's roles in the larger story.
So, before we move onto the homework assignments for next week....
just kidding. Have we said anything? To the degree any analysis of fiction says anything, I mean? I think so.
I mean, other than just what my personal film opinions lean to.
In that case, if there's anything here, maybe it's as simple as that how a writer or director (or audience, them too!) view a character and the world they inhabit matters. We're not looking at a diamond, or a setting.
We're looking at a ring. When setting and stone and all that work together, we move from form to function, and then hopefully on to memories for a lifetime.
