Shirley (Josephine Decker, 2020) (Patreon)

By far my favorite film by @josephinejambox, although that admission makes me feel a bit guilty, I suppose, as if I am not properly standing up for Auteurs' Rights. But unlike Decker's more freeform efforts, Shirley exhibits a set of external controls that serve to make the director's quirks really sing. Where Madeline's Madeline was a film that was formally restless, casting about for an ultimate shape, Shirley possesses a framework that Decker kicks against, producing tension rather than sprawl.

Adapted from a novel by Susan Scarf Merrill, Shirley is also Decker's first feature film made from someone else's script. Sarah Gubbins wrote the movie, and also co-produced. Nevertheless, Decker's style is constantly punching its way through. The dim, blackish-yellow cinematography by Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, often works against perception, turning the screen into a murk from which voices emerge, and that only in time coalesces into a set of discernible objects. And although we are always aware of the dancing, buffoonish presence of Shirley's husband Stanley (Michael Stuhlbarg) and his live-in graduate assistant Fred (Logan Lerman), Decker consistently shoves them to the margins. 

Within the confines of the Jackson / Hyman house, it is a woman's world, and Decker slowly articulates the burgeoning relationship between Shirley (Elisabeth Moss) and Fred's wife Rose (Odessa Young). There is much to be said about this coupling, how Shirley insinuates herself into the life of this lonely, pregnant young woman who has sacrificed her own happiness for her blank mediocrity of a husband. And Shirley emphasizes the extent to which Jackson's connection with Rose is directly tied to her writing process, both in material ways (Rose cooks and cleans), and psychologically (Rose serving as a mental avatar for the missing student who is the subject of Shirley's new novel).

But Shirley maintains an impressive ambivalence regarding the question of exploitation. There are indeed moments when Shirley's insensitivity toward Rose veers into horizontal violence and class-based condescension. But Decker's approach to the material is more abstract, as she begins with the older couple / younger couple template of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and gradually extracts the female couple, setting them on a trajectory more akin to Persona. The use of obscure angles, distorted tunnel-vision lenses, and distorted color all work to smear the boundaries between the two women, the writer and the "character."

In the end, Shirley leaves Rose better than she found her, in the sense that the younger woman is now infected with the older woman's ostensible madness, which is only the clear-eyed perception of how misogyny entraps women to the point that "madness" is their only avenue of escape. One of the subtle but powerful aspects of Shirley is that it depicts Jackson as a hotheaded, at times violent but always antisocial individual whose shortcomings are supposed to be excusable because of her talent. We see men (like her husband, and the Bennington dean) acquiesce to this idea, while women young and old make fun of her. We know all the while that if it were a male artist exhibiting such behavior -- a Romantic poet, an Abstract Expressionist painter, or an 18th century Viennese composer -- no one would bat an eyelash, within the film or in the audience.

So oddly enough, the film that Shirley ultimately reminded me most of is David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. Like the Cronenberg, Decker's film is finally about the struggle of writerly creation as a slippage in subjectivity, a dip into the monstrous, and the typewriter itself as a kind of unwieldy physical appendage, a phantom limb that the body must wrestle into compliance. Creativity is hard work. Sometimes we need other people to prop us up, but we inevitably resent them for their necessary presence. We whip around, we bite, and then get confused by the appearance of blood.