By Andrea Thompson
Do we really want to know how the sausage is made? Of course we do. If it were made humanely, it wouldn't be nearly as fun. Take the creative process for instance. How much more do we enjoy watching from afar as our favorite artists gloriously destroy in the name of our most beloved works of art? Conflict is, after all, the beating heart of so many of our favorite stories, and if our artistic heroes turn out to be jackasses, so much the better. Provided we ourselves can keep a safe distance.
The question in the film “Shirley” is what happens if this terrible artist happens to be a woman. In this case, she's horror writer Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss), who is as formidable as the stories she wrote. How could this supposedly frail woman not be, given her disinterest in everything the conformist 1950s demands of her? She's everything her gender is told to reject: prickly, difficult, paranoid, agoraphobic, and merciless about prying into the lives of those around her, probing for their most vulnerable points. Even her body, wracked by depression, anxiety, and mental illness, resists being stifled by the rigid demands of the period, nearly bursting out of the attire that tries and fails to mold her into gentility.
Needless to say, newlyweds Fred (Logan Lerman) and Rose (Odessa Young) don't stand a chance. They have the kind of happiness that depends on innocence, and above all, ignorance. When they arrive in town to visit Shirley and her college professor husband Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg), they come off as intelligently as the people who willingly walk in the creepy woods the locals avoid. Then again, these locals they're benevolently smiling at look as though they'd shove them right in.
If their arrival at Stanley and Shirley's home feels like a soothing balm, filled with laughter, debate, and intellectualism, it's quickly revealed to be a Venus flytrap. Rose is a fan of Shirley's who is fascinated, then unsettled by the off-putting writer, who has little taste for social niceties and less use for another adoring fan. It makes Rose reluctant when she's recruited by the husbands to live in the Shirley's home, basically as an unpaid servant, allowing Fred to fulfill his teaching ambitions at the college, and Stanley to have another watchful eye on his unstable wife, who is struggling with writer's block on her latest novel.
But if nice girls don't say no, neither do good wives, and Rose is under more pressure than most women in her situation. Not only is she pregnant, Fred married her even though his parents disowned him for it. Guilt can go a long way in silencing women, and it leaves Rose especially vulnerable to Shirley's manipulations. In another time, their friendship might have become a nourishing love affair, but part of the gendered horror of the film is the knowledge that for the few women who managed to rise above it all and find happiness, there were so many more who fell through the cracks. The missing college girl who inspired the manuscript Shirley is struggling with is merely one example. Cruelty and madness take many forms, many of them far more subdued.
Films like “In The Cut” explored the outright violence of everyday sexism when taken to extremes, but “Shirley” more subtly, psychologically explores how women are united and divided by their oppression. Shirley may at first be envious of Rose's youth, beauty, and supposed happiness, but Rose gazes upon the even younger, lithe college coeds who cluster adoringly around both husbands with much of the same envy for them and the carefree life she's already beyond. In such ways do men create monsters.
Rose is drawn to Shirley for much the same reason these girls are drawn to their husbands, but of course there's far more to it. For all her suffering and dysfunction, Shirley represents a kind of freedom, a rejection of the social mores Rose finds so suffocating but feels powerless to fight. As their friendship intensifies, so does the void in Rose's life, as she's forced to realize how much she isn't seen, by her husband or anyone. Shirley is the one who creates a meaning that is entirely hers, and she ultimately can't respect anyone who derives all the meaning in their life from someone else's work.
If writer Sarah Gubbins nimbly navigates the slow psychological terror of women on verge of a nervous breakdown, director Josephine Decker is her partner in crime, bringing the same splintered, manic energy that was so spellbinding in “Madeline's Madeline.” That their focus is insular is to be expected, but it outright refuses to address the fact that in reality, Shirley Jackson had four children and wrote irreverent stories on the topic when the image of the perfectly coiffed, smiling housewife was at its height.
What it might come down to is simply a disinterest in family life. Tortured artists may have always been all the rage, but seldom have they been as gloriously unhinged and female, or as capable of being understood without being excused. That “Shirley” ends with its title character's triumphant laughter and confidence that her latest book will be a smash hit says just as much about us as it does about her. It came about at much personal expense, but after all, the film posits, wasn't it all in the name of art?
