I’m Sorry, Ms. Jackson: “Shirley” Highlights the Low Points
There’s an old saying that goes: Don’t meet your heroes. Too bad no one told that to Rose Nemser, the fictional protagonist of Shirley (2020, Hulu and Prime Video) before she boarded a train to Vermont. Then again, from the way we’re introduced to Rose at the film’s opening — breathlessly turned on after reading the short story, “The Lottery,” — she probably wouldn’t have listened.
Shirley is a fictional story about a real-life person. Shirley Jackson (1916–1965) is probably best remembered for the aforementioned short story “The Lottery,” and for her novel “The Haunting of Hill House,” which has been adapted to both film and Netflix series. Less well known is that Jackson also penned two collections of non-fiction essays based on her domestic life with husband Stanley Hyman and their four children, including the hilariously slapstick “The Night We All Had Grippe.”
However, Jackson’s four children and wry sense of humor are set aside in Shirley to make room for a dark fantasy about obsession, depression, womanhood, and female relationships.
Rose’s new husband Fred (Logan Lerman) has been invited to work alongside Bennington College professor Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg). While in town, Rose and Fred will be staying the summer with Hyman and his wife, already-famous author Shirley Jackson (Elizabeth Moss). From the get-go, the Hyman-Jackson household seems…tense. Shirley and Stanley enjoy trading impossibly clever barbs with one another, and it’s unclear to Rose and Fred whether the older couple are putting on a show or truly hate one another. Shirley, when she can be persuaded to get out of bed, takes particular pleasure in tormenting Rose and watching the younger woman squirm. It’s not hard to figure out why: Stanley openly carries on affairs with young female students, and Rose is now a pretty, young newlywed living right under Shirley’s roof.
While Stanley takes Fred under his wing, Rose is put in charge of caring for Shirley, who suffers crippling depression that manifests in days at a time in bed, crying jags, seclusion, and a mercurial temper. As Shirley works on her novel, “Hangsaman,” she comes to realize that Rose can be an important ally in her on-again, off-again domestic war with Stanley. Shirley has an uncanny, almost Hannibal Lecter-like ability to see into Rose’s soul. Rose easily falls under Jackson’s spell and the two women go on to develop an intimate friendship. Surrounded by men who cheerfully maintain a pathological inability to fulfill their wives, Shirley and Rose find solace in one another. All kinds of solace. They become bonded by their feelings of abandonment and humiliation at the hands of their husbands, by their outcast status among the other faculty spouses, and by their suspicions that they are each much greater than their situations can ever allow them to experience. They are smart, angry women caught in a world of men, and despite Stanley’s support of Shirley’s writing career, Rose isn’t sure what, exactly, Fred appreciates about her.
Although Shirley and Stanley have their moments of something approaching marital bliss, and though he is a true fan of her writing, it’s clear from the film that his philandering and popularity eat away at Shirley’s self-esteem. She knows she’s a brilliant and gifted writer, but she’s also keenly aware of existing in her husband’s shadow. They live in a college town where most of their peers are Stanley’s fellow faculty members and their wives. As a neuro-atypical writer of dark and disturbing fiction, Shirley hardly fits in. She doesn’t really want to fit it, but the lack of an inner circle of loyal friends nevertheless takes a toll on her mental well-being. This is where Rose comes in.
As with so many other catch-22s that come with clinical depression, Shirley retreats to her home and her bed more and more often as the slings and arrows of her life rain down upon her; yet the more reclusive she becomes, the harder it is for her to function in the outside world, those few times that she does. She needs companionship, love, and support. When she sees that her houseguest won’t back down in the face of verbal nips and jabs, she finds them in Rose. But is their friendship for real, or is Rose merely a crutch Shirley can use to prop herself up just long enough to finish her novel? And what of Rose’s own sense of alienation in this insular New England town where her husband is surrounded by brilliant and beautiful young women all day?
When watching this movie it’s important to remember that it’s a fictional version of real people. As stated above, Shirley Jackson had her moments of wittiness and loved playing hostess to a houseful of guests. While it’s true that she never did fit in with the college town of Bennington, Vermont (which inspired her to write “The Lottery”), she was a loving mother and loved, in her way, her husband who loved, in his way, her right back. As far as biography goes, the movie is limited in scope and not to be taken as a biopic of Shirley’s life.
As a film about female alienation and mental health, though, Shirley works. It’s a film about women who don’t fit in to the lives that’s been handed to them, women who aren’t cut out for lives as housewives or mothers. Women who could be great if only they were allowed to step out of the shadows of men hailed as geniuses by (mostly) other men. In one dramatic scene, Stanley attempts to help Shirley through a bought of crippling writer’s block by mansplaining that she doesn’t know her own main character. Shirley goes spins on him with:
“There are dozens and dozens of girls like this, littering campuses across the country. Lonely girls who cannot make the world see them. Do not tell me I do not know this girl! Don’t you dare!”
No one in the town or at the college sees Shirley for herself. They don’t quite get her stories and they fail to engage with her as a person in her own right. She doesn’t want to play their games because their games are part of what contribute to a culture in which she is forced to be ok with an unfaithful husband who flaunts his affairs. She’s too good for them by miles, and like any other woman who doesn’t smile and make nice despite the hypocrisy and humiliation she’s subjected to by the men as well as the women around her, she’s punished for it. When Rose comes along, Shirley smells a kindred spirit and pounces on the opportunity to try and save the young woman — while simultaneously feeding on Rose’s youth and energy.
From Rose’s point of view, she’s young, newly married, pregnant, trapped in a house with a genius madwoman, bombarded by that woman’s handsy husband, and left alone by her groom so he can go socialize with his new faculty friends (and maybe others). It’s honestly amazing that Rose keeps herself together for as long as she does in the film. She tries so hard to be a good wife, mother, and friend until the strain starts to show up on her face and she begins to take after Shirley.
For anyone looking for a peek inside the mind of literary genius Shirley Jackson, this is not your movie.
But for any woman who has felt alone while surrounded by people, who knows she’s not appreciated for her mind, who has ever felt purposefully left out of the inner circles because she won’t play along, who has been stabbed in the back and betrayed, who has grit her teeth and coped with the heartbreak of infidelity, who has felt like her wings have been clipped, Shirley is here to let you know that you are seen. You are understood. And you are not alone.
