Josephine Decker (2020)
Where would films about writers be without writer’s block? The title character of Josephine Decker’s latest is the famed novelist and author of short stories Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss). Her husband, Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of literature at Bennington College in Vermont, invites Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman), a junior colleague hoping for tenure, and his wife, Rose (Odessa Young), to the Hymans’ home. Their housekeeper has recently quit. Mentally fragile Shirley isn’t up to managing the place on her own, and needs time to concentrate on the novel she’s struggling to get underway. As soon as the young couple arrives, Stanley proposes they move in, with Rose taking over domestic chores. The Nemsers, puzzled but flattered, agree to the proposal. They don’t realise that Rose, who is pregnant, won’t only shop and cook. By giving substance and clarity to the character of the new novel’s protagonist, she will also cure Shirley Jackson’s block.
Using real people as grist to the literary mill, regardless of how this impacts on them, is another common feature of writerly behaviour on the screen (ditto Shirley’s chain-smoking and alcohol intake). But the exploitation going on here is a bit more complicated than the norm, and nastier. Not only is Rose used as a surrogate for the heroine of the book to be written. Shirley and her husband also share an ulterior motive of destabilising the Nemsers’ marriage, and Stanley means to ensure that Fred doesn’t get tenure. At the end of Shirley, the Nemsers are vanquished, their hosts victorious. Shirley has completed her manuscript. Stanley declares it a masterpiece. He and his wife dance together – a reminder of the one they’ve led their hapless guests throughout.
Shirley first screened at Sundance this year and was released on demand in America in June. It’s due to open in UK cinemas at the end of this month and has been available to watch online as part of the London Film Festival programme. According to quotes in a Guardian review, Josephine Decker was primarily concerned, in making the film, with the ethics of the ‘artistic process’ but she has perpetrated another kind of creative abuse – the travesty of a dead artist. This may reflect the source of Sarah Gubbins’s screenplay, a 2014 book called Shirley: A Novel by Susan Scarf Merrell (which I’ve not read), but not necessarily so. There’s a difference between manipulation or invention of facts and misrepresentation of character.
Although Merrell’s story is set in 1964, two years after the publication of Jackson’s sixth and last novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, it imagines the creation of her second novel, Hangsaman, published in 1951. On the train journey to the Hymans’, Rose is reading Jackson’s notorious short story The Lottery in the New Yorker, where it appeared in 1948. Whereas Jackson was thirty-two then, Elisabeth Moss is made up to look older than her actual age of thirty-eight. Stanley Hyman was three years younger than his first wife but Michael Stuhlbarg is fifty-two. Jackson’s alleged inspiration for Hangsaman was the actual disappearance-without-trace of a Bennington sophomore called Paula Jean Welden, in 1946. The implication of Decker’s film is that Welden has disappeared quite recently.
Playing fast and loose with the actual chronology needn’t be a problem though it is easier to accept if you use a title – as Merrell does but Decker doesn’t – that virtually admits fictionalisation. Other adjustments made by Decker are more objectionable. You’d never guess from her sinister, self-absorbed partnership with Stanley and seeming disdain for Rose’s pregnancy that the real Shirley and her husband had four children of their own. Jackson suffered various physical and mental health problems in later life, largely caused by heavy drinking, smoking and reliance on prescription drugs, and died of heart disease in 1965. Decker gives her, for good measure, a humour bypass – except, that is, for Shirley’s occasional knowing smirks and dirty cackles. It’s unsurprising that this combination of childlessness and humourlessness has been criticised by Jackson’s son, Laurence Jackson Hyman (as quoted in a recent New Yorker piece by Michael Schulman).
Since I don’t know Shirley Jackson’s work I can’t be sure but Josephine Decker may also have misrepresented her gifts as a writer. The film follows Shirley: A Novel by supposedly adopting the style of one of Jackson’s ‘Gothic’ narratives – often described as hypnotic, subversive, and so on. To do this, Decker principally deploys the tropes of horror-thriller films. Tamar-kali’s score features discordant strings and eerie choirs. There’s a black cat, a Tarot reading and the consumption of death cap mushrooms (or, at least, Shirley fools Rose into thinking that’s what they are). From the outside, the Hymans’ ivy-clad house is benignly academic. Inside, it’s crepuscular and claustrophobic, and the jittery camera movements increase a sense of disorientation. (The cinematographer is Sturla Brandth Grøvlen.) This is all just what you expect from the genre territory. Shirley Jackson’s alleged originality gets lost in it.
In the opening sequence on the train, Rose, on finishing The Lottery, is shocked but enthralled – a predictive summary of her exposure to Shirley in what follows. Odessa Young overacts these feelings, and this, too, is a taste of things to come. Young is clearly a skilled actor (she was the title character in The Daughter); so, to put it mildly, are Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg. But Decker’s camera, on the occasions it calms down, scrutinises the actors at close quarters: like the audience at the very front of a theatre, we can see them preparing their facial expressions and movement.
Elisabeth Moss is well cast as (Decker’s conception of) Shirley Jackson but that’s not exactly a compliment. Moss has become an expert in presenting characters who are emotionally in extremis – she does so deliberately, strikingly and wearisomely. Michael Stuhlbarg (as he showed in Call Me by Your Name) makes a plausible don but Stanley Hyman’s menacing bonhomie is overdone. When one of their party guests labels a piece of Shirley’s writing anti-Semitic, Stanley jokes that his wife ‘was never an anti-Semite until she married me’. Decker keeps shooting dark-bearded Stuhlbarg in profile to stress Stanley’s malignity. In doing so, she also emphasises his Jewishness. This makes for a deeply uncomfortable pairing of qualities.
Stanley is satanic and satyric. He leches around Rose. His dance with younger women at a faculty party – although somewhat upstaged by Shirley’s intentionally drenching a sumptuously upholstered sofa in red wine, to the horror of the Dean’s wife (Orlagh Cassidy) – suggests the prelude to a bacchanal. It also points to what Shirley knows to be her husband’s philandering with female colleagues and students, a faculty convention into which old-hand Stanley inducts straight-arrow Fred. Even though it’s standard practice on campus, this seems to be the kiss of death on Fred’s career prospects, as well as on his short-lived marriage. Rose is appalled by her husband’s infidelity, despite the fact that, by this stage, she’s indulged in some kissing and dinner-table footsie with Shirley.
The latter’s attempted seduction appears to be motivated less by sexual desire for Rose than by a determination to release her from the subservient role to which she’ll be condemned as Fred’s wife. Shirley perceives a kinship between Rose and Paula Jean Welden. Odessa Young occasionally appears as Paula, in scenes from the novel developing inside Shirley’s head. Paula disappeared on a walk on Vermont’s Long Trail and these imagined scenes are set in wilderness: it’s as if Shirley sees the two young women as both lost and trapped. When Stanley, in one of his critical outbursts against what she’s writing, declares that Shirley knows nothing about her subject, she angrily insists that there are many American girls like Paula and she knows them well. There’s a vague kinship between Rose and Shirley, too. At one point near the end of the film, Rose, her hair grown wilder and her appearance more careless than before, looks to be turning into the woman who has dazzled and exploited her. ‘Let’s pray for a boy,’ Shirley tells Rose before her baby is born, ‘the world is too cruel to girls’. (The baby’s a girl, of course.) This feminist strand of the material is hard to ignore but it feels half-hearted beside the overworked atmospherics and the slow-motion grip of Elisabeth Moss’s acting. Whatever Josephine Decker may have intended with Shirley, the result is like a queasy spoof of an arty psychological horror movie.
10 October 2020
