Disappearing in Order to Be Found: A Review of Shirley

Shirley Jackson was a Sagittarius who knew that arsenic goes best with sugar when serving blackberries after dinner. She raised demons into children, wrote with a broomstick, could identify the Amanita phalloide — the death cup mushroom — and terrified the world when she published a short story titled “The Lottery” in late June of 1948. Jackson was the type of writer, the type of seer, who received stories in visions, saw horror in the houses she wrote herself into, and it is in my humble opinion that whatever walked in Hill House, walked with Jackson, rather than walked alone.

If it’s not already obvious, Shirley Jackson remains to be one of favorite writers — if not my favorite — and her life and her work and her memory is going through quite a renaissance these days, which is wonderful because her stories and her messages and her warnings are not only important, but necessary. When I first heard that Josephine Decker was directing a movie about Shirley — one that is based on the novel of the same name by Susan Scarf Merrell — I was beyond excited. Then I found out that Elisabeth Moss would be playing our leading lady and the magic in the air became palpable.

Shirley is a hypnotic film that, much like Jackson’s writing, seeps into our very pores, haunting the bodies we walk in. It shows the whimsy, the madness, the fear, and the absolute, groundbreaking brilliance of a woman who lived with ghosts both real and imaginable. To watch Shirley is to unlock doors and bare witness to a woman scorned, a woman betrayed, a woman possessed, someone who unleashed pain into stories about houses and traditions and allegiances, something that she herself was never privy to as she was married to a man who had constant affairs and daughter to a woman who could not have been more displeased with the woman hiding behind the page.

What I loved and appreciated about this film was the raw honesty we saw in how Moss portrayed Jackson’s character. There were scenes where she broke down crying as she tried to fit in a skirt, moments at the dinner table when she shoveled mashed potatoes into her mouth, her appetite something that she struggled with her entire life. Viewers got to see that Jackson was both Constance and Merricat Blackwood, and that the disappearances of girls, like in her novel Hangsaman, weren’t isolated instances, but rather mediations on how women everywhere were and are disappearing into woods, into motherhood, into the yellow wallpaper that lines our very homes. As a student of literature, I felt invigorated and inspired by these surreal visions matched against the brilliant soundtrack Tamar-Kali constructed, but there moments, too, when I wondered if this portrayal of our favorite daemon lover was romanticized and at times sexualized for the benefit of the viewer rather than for the honesty of the woman herself.

For those of you who have read Jackson’s work, at times there is an almost sapphic underlining to her stories, most notably seen in Hangsaman and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson, however, was adamant that these allusions weren’t something that she was intentionally putting into her work, so when I saw the subplot in the film that sexualized her relationship with Rose, it felt inauthentic to me — even if it made for good fiction. Personally, I wish we could have seen Jackson balancing writing and motherhood — because she would have had kids then — against the backdrop of her companionship with Rose and her role as the vanishing wife who after years and countless conversations about fidelity and love, couldn’t escape the cold case that had become her marriage to Stanley.

That said, the continued moments of chilling, intense, suspense and drama in this movie far outweigh the few issues I had with biographical inconsistencies. Moss did a truly brilliant portrayal of America’s Virginia Werewolf, and I found myself smiling every time Jackson’s ears perked up at the mention of cocktail hour, or when she ushered Rose into her occult library — something she was famously known for — and sat down to do a tarot reading with her.

In a lot of ways, this film directly addresses the disappearing woman both literally and metaphorically, but what it also does is show that these women can be found for they exist in all of us, something we see Jackson screaming about at one point to Stanley when he asks her what she could possibly have in common with Paula Jean Welden, the missing college girl who inspired Jackson to write Hangsaman. For viewers, and for Jackson, the bond seems obvious: women have been trained to be ghosts, to quietly and passively just disappear, and so Jackson manifested stories about how women are erased, how we are trapped, how we walk corridors, fade into hallways, into gardens, our echo a soundscape to freedom, each footstep begging for liberation, something that Merricat found in a burnt house, something that Eleanor found in a car wrapped around a tree, something that Jackson herself  found with each word she put on the page, with each story she wrote into existence.

Shirley is a film that you don’t want to miss, and Jackson is a writer who you absolutely must read. Just maybe pass on dessert when it’s served, and if you get scared, whisper melody, Gloucester, and Pegasus three times and then staple a copy of The New Yorker to a tree.

Stephanie M. Wytovich is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her work has been showcased in numerous venues such as Weird Tales, Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories, Fantastic Tales of Terror, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror: Volume 2, The Best Horror of the Year: Volume 8, as well as many others.

Wytovich is the Poetry Editor for Raw Dog Screaming Press, an adjunct at Western Connecticut State University, Southern New Hampshire University, and Point Park University, and a mentor with Crystal Lake Publishing. She is a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, an active member of the Horror Writers Association, and a graduate of Seton Hill University’s MFA program for Writing Popular Fiction. Her Bram Stoker Award-winning poetry collection, Brothel, earned a home with Raw Dog Screaming Press alongside Hysteria: A Collection of Madness, Mourning Jewelry, An Exorcism of Angels, Sheet Music to My Acoustic Nightmare, and most recently, The Apocalyptic Mannequin. Her debut novel, The Eighth, is published with Dark Regions Press.

Follow Wytovich on her blog at http://stephaniewytovich.blogspot.com/ and on twitter @SWytovich.