Little White Lies Issue 86: September/October 2020

For all her mastery of horror, author Shirley Jackson had a flair for arch humour that bordered on the camp. Her slender 1962 page-turner ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ ends on an exchange between the Blackwood sisters that shows a deep irreverence for the macabre events that came before, and leaves the reader smiling ruefully. There are similar tonal values to Josephine Decker’s Shirley, an adaptation of Susan Scarf Merrell’s semi-fictional novel of the same name. Elisabeth Moss channels a ghoulish pantomime energy in the title role that, from an actress of her subtlety and breadth, is a deliberate creative choice. Shirley is not so much about the writer Shirley Jackson as it is a concocted psychodrama infused by the qualities of her work, where the real and…

The 2014 rural thriller Thou Wast Mild and Lovely by Josephine Decker begins with a rush of unbridled energy and emotion. A father and daughter are play-fighting in the grass with a dead chicken. The daughter is a bit too old for this and the way they move together is too intimate. They thrust and stab each other with it. They roll around in the ground together, tossing it back and forth. The moment is uncomfortably sexual, which is further amplified by the opening narration: “For all my life, I missed my lover. I wanted my lover. I wanted to be near my lover. But the way my lover opened and closed my legs, the way my lover unfolded me into my lover’s breast… My lover knows how to love…

Somewhere between arthouse and studio picture, Shirley feels like a natural fit for Elisabeth Moss, who was catapulted to stardom on the back of performances on the small screen in Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale. In film she has tended to skew more indie: she’s a mainstay of Alex Ross Perry’s filmography, and delivered a blistering performance as a musician battling multiple demons in 2019’s Her Smell. Her penchant for playing complex, unpredictable women has made her one of the most interesting actors working today - and her wonderfully wicked performance as the objectionable, enchanting Shirley Jackson allows her to demonstrate a unique talent for being achingly vulnerable and unexpectedly acerbic in a single breath. LWLies: What was it about Sarah Gubbins’ script for Shirley that drew you in?…

The first time we see Michael Stuhlbarg in Shirley, he’s smiling broadly, slightly inebriated, and wearing a laurel wreath. To the ancient Greeks, these ornate headdresses were a symbol of strength and virility; the Romans used them to decorate commanders following a successful military campaign, garlands for great men. It’s with some irony, then, that Stuhlbarg should be adorned with one here – its glorious connotations belie the seedy nature of his character, the prominent literary critic Stanley Hyman, whose tumultuous relationship with Shirley Jackson is the subject of Josephine Decker’s sublime fifth feature. Though as Stuhlbarg explains, the real-life Stanley – and the task of playing him — was far more complicated than even the film suggests. LWLies: Whose idea was the laurel wreath? Stuhlbarg: That was mine. We…

Tamar-kali is a singer-songwriter and composer based in New York. She began writing film scores for director Dee Rees, including Pariah and Mudbound. They also collaborated on The Last Thing He Wanted, one of three scores by Tamar-kali which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2020, along with Kitty Green’s The Assistant and Josephine Decker’s Shirley. She’s currently working on a project with LA Opera and the score for Fisher Stevens’ Palmer. ON APPROACHING SHIRLEY “One of the things that struck me about the film once I initially began speaking with Josephine was that it had been kempt so uniquely. She had a very distinct taste in music – it’s very broad and open. And we talked about the female voice being a lead instrument in it, and because I’ve…

The most relatable magic mushroom sequence in all of cinema may also be the most boring, and certainly the least psychedelic. In Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, Seth Rogen’s bedraggled father-to-be and his buddy, played by Paul Rudd, escape to Las Vegas for a by-the-numbers guys’ weekend, which includes the ritual gobbling of a few caps of psilocybin. Cue the usual, sub-Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas rendering of the psychedelic experience, including Rogen freaking out at the intensity and surrealism of a Cirque du Soleil performance. The perceptive bit comes a little later, when the two dudes, tripping in their hotel, assemble a dais of their room’s different chairs. “The short one’s gawking at me,” Rogen blathers, still gripped by his bad trip. “And the short one’s being very droll.…