Watching Shirley, which is a very loose adaptation of a novel called Shirley, which is itself a very loose fictionalization of the last year in the life of Shirley Jackson, and not really connecting with it
The voices are wrong. Shirley Jackson had a very distinctive voice and accent, as did her husband Stanley Hyman, and the actors are almost deliberately doing the opposite of their voices and accents? Maybe that's a choice, to highlight the artificiality of the biopic genre?
Also, I hate I hate I hate the genius jerk trope. I hate it. Why cram Shirley Jackson into it? It's true that her voice is sardonic in her memoirish writings, but I get more espirit d'escalier than the idea that she was actually needlessly cruel on all social occasions.
It probably lands worse on streaming than in a theatre, since most of the vicious things she says sound and are shot like they were meant to be laughter cues, but if you're watching alone they just come off as forced.
And it is weird that she's shot as being childless (and unhappy about it?), since her kids were such a big part of her life. I get that her children did not want to be portrayed in a movie that shows their parents this way, and that's their right, but it's disorienting.
(minor spoiler alert)

The movie posits that Jackson based her novel Hangsaman on the real-life disappearance of Bennington student Paula Welden, which did occur while she was living in Bennington. We also get a lot of speculation about Welden, much of which doesn't seem true.
The movie states as fact that she was pregnant, for example. I've never heard that, and while there's nothing wrong with being pregnant, it seems unkind to label someone who is (probably) dead that way. Pregnancy out of wedlock would have been a huge deal for her.
Jackson and her tenant's wife (the book's narrator) are now making out. This is a VERY loose adaptation of the novel, where Shirley barely even seems to notice the narrator except to occasionally use her as a sounding board.
If anyone's considering buying the novel thinking it's close to the movie in this respect, it is very much not. The narrator of the novel avers that Shirley is straight numerous times, and nothing like this comes close to happening.
Of course, a major change between the novel and the movie is the difference in time. The novel is set the year Jackson died, in the 1960s; this movie seems to be set after Jackson wrote "The Lottery" but before she wrote Hangsaman, so 1950 or so?
So while the novel makes a big deal of how the narrator (a teenager) sees the middle-aged Shirley, with her two adult daughters, as a mother figure, the movie doesn't. In 1950 Jackson was a mother IRL, but she was too young to be perceived as mother figure by another adult.
I don't know why this is annoying me, since there's no rule that biopics have to be faithful depictions of their subjects' lives, but I guess I've just had so much fictionalized history crammed down my face this year that damn it, I want some truth in my histories right now.
I want people to make an effort to show the past as it was, even though it's not really possible. If they can't do that, then they need to write a roman a clef. But none of this fake biopic folly.
There are multiple scenes showing Shirley as just being totally socially incompetent, incapable of relating to or caring about other people except as sexual prey or book fodder. From everything I've read by people who knew her, that just wasn't true of her.
People are having a way better time at this college-organized faculty party than at any faculty party I have ever attended, and this was before psychedelics. I call shenanigans.
There are a ton of scenes in this movie in which women deliberately damage surfaces and waste food and drink by throwing/pouring it on the floor. I guess this is trying to convey how liberating antisocial behavior can be for women of that era? But it's annoying me.
For one thing, THEY WERE POOR. THEY WERE ALL POOR. EGGS COST SO MUCH MONEY BACK THEN. SO MUCH. Like, why. Why would you think someone who had such a sense of price and scarcity as a 1950s housewife would do this? It doesn't make sense.
For another thing, they would know how awful all this was to clean up. Like, have you ever cleaned fucking egg off anything? It's like getting plaque off teeth. No one who has ever actually had to do anything around a house would throw eggs around. No one.
And Jackson tried so hard for domesticity, and to do what she could with the little money they had. She beat herself up about it all the time. Domesticity is a prison, yes, but this is just incredibly ahistorical.
I thiiiiiink this is a reference to a scene in the book where Jackson drops a pie in frustration because no one is paying attention to her. But here's the thing: she has to clean it up afterwards. Because no one else will.
(Having said that, "The Hated House" by Celia Fremlin, which is one of my favorite ghost stories, plays a bit on this. But it does it more skillfully than this movie.)
Jackson was actually the breadwinner during this period, which you wouldn't know from the movie, which posits her as totally dependent on her man.
(Of course, most of what she earned came from her comic pieces about being a housewife and mother, and since the movie wants to show her as someone with no sense of humor who does no housework and can't show her as someone with kids, it's hard to convey that.)
The novel all but states that Jackson was somehow responsible for a murder. The film so far is hinting at it but not nearly as directly. Probably safer legally but confusing as hell.
And the movie ends with Shirley and her husband celebrating having fed off the younger couple, which is a cheerier ending than the book's, which shows her death and damnation, but...
And finally, there's the question of physicality. Shirley Jackson was a fat woman who was brilliant and vital, and the movie, which can handle everyone throwing eggs and wine around and holding masked bonfires, can't really handle that.
Ah, Franzenism- the idea that unattractive women have so little inherent value that nothing they do matters. Edith Wharton may have won a Pulitzer Prize, but by the precepts of Franzenism, his lack of attraction to her negates her literary work as an oeuvre.
Bear in mind, this is a woman who died decades before his birth, a woman whose body now barely exists as a body. And yet it still condemns her, because female bodies exist not as functional entities, but as things to be looked upon; an image will do as well, maybe even better.
This line of thinking is why we cannot have an actress who resembles Shirley Jackson as she actually was play her in a movie- because her being a woman who looked the way she did would devalue her writing to the point that the movie would no longer have justification to exist.
Sit and think on that for a second. Charlie Chaplin, they say, came in third in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest; if Shirley Jackson were to enter a Shirley Jackson lookalike contest, the contest would be cancelled.

This is fucking Franzenism. And I am sick of it.
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