Exhuming the Horror of Colonial Memory in “The Shining”

“The Shining” shows the violence behind comfortable American living.

A still from the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980)

America has a problem with forgetting its painful past. William Faulkner, who chronicled the harmful myths of American whiteness in his body of work, best captured this phenomenon in his story, Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even…