The Josephine Decker film Shirley, streaming on Hulu and available to rent on Amazon and iTunes, opens with a man and woman sitting beside each other on a train. The woman is reading Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” in a copy of the New Yorker, where it was first published. She has a bemused expression on her face. “They stone her,” she says incredulously to the man to her left. “They all stone her. The whole town.” “That’s creepy,” he says nonchalantly. “It’s terrific,” she responds, looking at him with a mischievous glint in her eyes. And with that, we know that we are no longer in our familiar, everyday world: We have entered the strange, haunted world of Shirley Jackson, one of the greatest and most underappreciated American horror writers of all time.
Shirley, produced by Martin Scorsese and based on the book by Susan Scarf Merrell, is not exactly a biopic — though like its subject, it is smart, spooky, and funny all at once. It centers on a fictional event in Jackson’s life. In the story told in the film, the aforementioned couple, Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman), are traveling up to the small college town of Bennington, Vermont, where they have received an offer of free room and board from none other than Jackson herself — or, technically, from her husband, the English professor Stanley Hyman, who is looking for someone to help with household chores after their previous housekeeper quit. Rose and Fred arrive at the door of a large Victorian house, where some kind of fraternity party seems to be taking place. They’re greeted gregariously by the bearded, bespectacled Hyman (a delightfully playful Michael Stuhlbarg) wearing a laurel wreath around his head. “You must be the professor?” Rose says to him, dropping her bags on the porch. “I profess nothing!” he says, beckoning them to come inside.
Inside the house, Jackson (a wickedly entertaining Elisabeth Moss) is holding court, a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. Rose spots her as she recounts some of her publishing exploits to a group of eager-eyed students. “And then, it hit me. The whole thing. So I sat down at my desk,” she tells them about writing “The Lottery,” “and two hours later, the most reviled story the New Yorker has ever printed.” A student offers an interpretation of the enigmatic story — it’s an anti-Semitic parable, he says, in the tradition of Isaac Babel. “Calling my wife an anti-Semite, are we?” Hyman pipes in, drink in hand. “Well, to be fair, she never hated a single Jew until she married me.” The cheerful group of students bursts into laughter.
Jackson’s real life was anything but cheerful. She was born in 1916 to a well-to-do family in the San Francisco suburbs, where she was terrorized by an emotionally and psychologically abusive mother. Jackson met Hyman in college at Syracuse University and initially saw him as a haven from her nightmarish mother. But their relationship turned out to be anything but — it grew rocky and stormy as the years progressed, clouded by bitterness, resentment, rage, and disappointment. Hyman, who failed to garner the acclaim he wanted from his intellectual endeavors, resented Jackson’s success; Jackson was often angry at Hyman’s repeated infidelities. The film plays on their tumultuous relationship and spins out of it a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf-type story for the 21st century, in which Jackson and Hyman, plied by a copious measure of alcohol, throw verbal barbs and demented Shakespearean riffs at one another as their young house guests look and listen on in horror.
It soon becomes clear that the other reason Hyman wants Fred and Rose in the house is that he wants someone to look after his agoraphobic wife, who stays in bed all day and who hasn’t done much work to speak of in some time. Fred and Rose (Rose especially) are at first uncomfortable with Jackson’s unfiltered directness. During a meal, Jackson asks Rose if the baby she’s carrying is really Fred’s. Rose wants to leave — “she’s a monster!” she complains to her husband about the mercurial, domineering Jackson — but Fred, an aspiring professor trying to climb up the ranks of the Bennington English department, talks her into staying. “It’s a big opportunity for us,” he tells her. How can they turn down a chance to spend some more time with one of the greatest writers of their generation?
Meanwhile, Jackson tells her husband she finally has an idea for a new novel. “You’re not up to it,” he tells her over dinner, trying to talk her out of it. “You haven’t been out of the house in two months. You’re barely able to put on a pair of stockings. Ease back.” She doesn’t.
Rose, for her part, eases, or tries to ease, into life in the peculiar Jackson-Hyman household. One day, she peeks into Jackson’s writing studio as Jackson tosses another crumpled draft into the corner of the room. “You want to know what a writer does?” Jackson says upon catching her. “Absolutely nothing,” she says, answering her own question by echoing a famous quote from W.H. Auden. Jackson takes out a deck of tarot cards — “didn’t anyone tell you I’m a witch?” she says to Rose — and they sit down in the living room. Jackson, who in real life was a self-described “practicing amateur witch,” pulls out a few cards and looks into Rose’s eyes. Several inexplicable apparitions flash across the screen. Jackson tells Rose about the novel she’s working on, the story of a missing Bennington college girl (a reference to the real-life Jackson’s second novel, Hangsaman), and begins soliciting Rose’s collaboration. “I might say you’re smitten with her,” Hyman says to his wife upon noticing her growing fondness for Rose. “I don’t smote,” she deadpans in response. As Jackson brings Rose further into her world, we’re taken further into Jackson’s dark, macabre, but also acerbic and deliciously funny mind. “What a lovely skirt you have,” the dean’s wife says to Jackson at a cocktail party. “What a lovely insouciant tone you have,” Jackson replies.
Toward the end of her life, Jackson was contemplating changes. She wanted to embark on a new phase of writing, moving away from horror toward a happier, funnier style of fiction, and was planning on finally leaving her husband. Her premature death in 1965 at the age of 48 prevented her from accomplishing either of those goals. Wherever her idiosyncratic soul rests now, she can take solace in the fact that when the greatest American writers of supernatural fiction are mentioned — Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King — her name is undoubtedly included among them.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer living in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
