The Shining and Trauma Stories
Stanley Kubrick’s film, The Shining is a story about a place haunted by victims of past trauma and a family who is being consumed by this trauma, a trauma that has taken on a life of its own. Traumatic events are often so emotionally charged, victims often find they cannot communicate what happened. These events are communicated not with language, but through the body. Trauma stories “must work like a virus, so that people burdened with the trauma-knowledge feel a continuous and displeasing bodily echo” until they repeat them to others (Berlant, 44). In some ways, this virus works like a haunting — from haunted places to haunted bodies, the trauma finds a way to communicate its origin.
The haunting gets many names and often by medical professionals: PTSD, C-PTSD, anxiety, and depression. In order to give the haunting validity and for its victims to obtain help, the haunting must be given a name recognized by the scientific community. Otherwise, victims are in danger of being dismissed. In the ghost story narrative, ghosts often need to have their stories or tragedies heard or solved before they stop haunting houses; similarly, people who are traumatized may need to find a way to speak about their traumatic experience to exorcise the “ghost” from their minds and bodies.
But how? Most of us who have been traumatized in some way cannot remember events in a linear way, and because we are often encouraged (if not outright forced in a courtroom scenario) to tell the story in a way that makes the most sense to our audience, we cannot find healing. We cannot give voice to the experience of our stories through the courtroom or news story narrative that has come to be expected of us. One of the main criticisms of the Kavanaugh case was that Christine Ford could not remember the events in the order her audience wanted to hear them. The details she remembered were not relevant to their case; however, they were probably relevant to her survival of the event. People who have survived trauma remember how they survived and what they focused on in order to survive. The place, date, and time are not necessarily key elements of their survival.
I created this video because I saw The Shining when I was five years old, the same age as Danny, and the family dynamic closely resembled that of my parents, with me as the child between them. Many scenes in it resonated with my experience. There are some parallels between Jack and my father: both were alcoholics, both were violent, and both were boiling over with rage. My father never tried to kill any of us, but he threatened to many times, even going so far as to show us the weapons he would do it with. I didn’t want to steal from Kubrick, but I felt re-purposing his film would help me show what it was like to be a child experiencing the rage of someone like Jack. While watching these clips over and over, deciding where to edit them, and collaborating with my husband, I came to realize I wasn’t re-creating the scene of the trauma.
I was expressing what it felt like to be haunted by images and emotions from a traumatic childhood. I was creating the haunting of the trauma, rather than give an incomplete rendition of the trauma itself. This began to make certain other experiences make sense to me, experiences that professional therapists I saw years ago were never able to help me connect in this way.
At twenty-three, I was struck with a medley of bizarre and seemingly unrelated health problems that took over a decade to completely resolve. I now understand that my body was haunted with trauma. While I did have some mental health struggles, such as occassional panic attacks, nightmares or bouts of winter-time depression, I was much more prone to physical ailments. I had fragmented memories of my childhood, and some years I had forgotten almost completely. Instead, I was left with this haunting, my body as The Overlook Hotel.
The haunting of my body was not believed to be a symptom of abuse, but rather, further evidence that I was “irrational” and could not be trusted, and in writing about trauma and creating this video I hope to give credibility to other people who have felt haunted, both mentally and physically, by the traumatic events they have lived through. I also have two short clips from Doctor Sleep, the follow-up novel (and film) to The Shining. The director of Doctor Sleep said he thinks “Doctor Sleep is about recovery. In the way that addiction feels like doom and annihilation, recovery is rebirth, and recovery is salvation, in a way. I think they’re two sides of the same coin, these stories.”
Now in my forties, I don’t feel the haunting is so much a poltergiest anymore, wreaking havoc on my health and dreams. It is more of a ghost in my attic, occassionally making a little noise, and that is probably the best those of us who experienced ongoing childhood trauma can hope for.
Works Cited
Berlant, Lauren. “Trauma and Ineloquence.” Cultural Values, vol. 5, no. 1, 2001, pp. 41–58., doi:10.1080/14797580109367220.
Flanagan, Mike, director. Doctor Sleep. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2019.
Hall, Jacob. “‘Doctor Sleep’ Director Mike Flanagan on Reconciling King and Kubrick, Finding Hope in Horror, and Why His Work Is Full of Hand Injuries [Interview].” /Film, 8 Nov. 2019, www.slashfilm.com/mike-flanagan-interview/.
Kubrick, Stanley. The Shining. Warner Bros., 1980.
Verbinski, Gore, director. The Ring. MacDonald/Parkes Productions BenderSpink, Inc., 2002.
