Recent Watching: Shirley and Kajillionaire
The first movie I would like to talk about is Shirley. Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker, describes the movie as follows:
Working with a script by Sarah Gubbins (which, in turn, is based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell), “Shirley” stars Elisabeth Moss as Shirley Jackson, in a narrowly focussed biographical episode that’s centered on the composition of her 1951 novel “Hangsaman,” the story of the disappearance of a female college student. The film suggests that Jackson based it loosely on the real-life disappearance of Paula Jean Welden, a student at Bennington College, where Jackson’s husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, taught. “Shirley” co-stars Michael Stuhlbarg as Hyman, and it dramatizes the emotional, artistic, and sexual fury that binds the couple even as it threatens to rupture their bond.
The drama is built around another character, though, a fictional one: Rose Nemser (Odessa Young), a young woman who arrives at Bennington with her husband, Fred Nemser (Logan Lerman). A newly minted Ph.D., Fred has been recruited by Stanley as a postgraduate fellow, and Rose will be a student at the college. (Unbeknownst to Fred, she’s pregnant.) Instead, through Stanley’s manipulations, Rose becomes something of a housekeeper in the Jackson-Hyman household, as well as Shirley’s unofficial research assistant, her friend, her confidante, her object of desire—and her living model for the protagonist of “Hangsaman”—as the Nemsers get drawn into the family’s vortex of emotional chaos and their marriage begins to fray. (Despite the hint of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” “Shirley” is after something else altogether—the artist’s inner life.)
There are a number of things that could be said about this movie.
First, the movie Shirley is very much an art movie. If you do not enjoy experimental movies that push the boundaries of narrative and filmmaking, this movie may not be for you.
Second, and, related to the first point, is to bear in mind that this movie is a story of fiction; it is NOT a biopic of Shirley Jackson. The young couple that are living with Shirley and Stanley -- Fred and Rose Nemser -- are entirely fictional. They are a metaphor for some of the difficulties Jackson had in writing the book that became her novel Hangsaman; they are not real people.
Third, to me, the movie illustrates one of the ideas Aristotle's concept of catharsis that he developed in his Poetics.
one way of understanding Aristotle's uses of KATHARSIS is that, by watching (or listening to or reading) a story with a character in an unpleasant situation, pity and fear are later purged or cleansed. However, one of the challenges that has driven readers of Aristotle to spill a tremendous amount of ink is the question of who these emotions are purged or cleansed from: the audience or the tragic character.
At some point toward the end of the movie, the Nemsers are quite literally expelled; they are asked to leave the house in North Bennington where Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman have invited them to live with them. The movie ends shortly after this expulsion, but I think it is fair to assume that Jackson was able to finish her manuscript shortly after the events in the movie end. Purging the Nemsers was, in some way, a metaphor for Jackson purging the challenge she was having in trying to finish the manuscript that later became Hangsaman.
I leave it to someone else to explore whether the real difficulty Jackson had in writing her novel had more to do with her husband's practice of having romantic and sexual relationships with his students at Bennington College.
There is a lot more that could be said about this movie, especially the acting, but I would like to say a bit about the fictions in the movie.
Let me make just two points.
First, Jackson had three children by the time the events in the movie take place and, at least in my opinion, was not the cruel person shown in the movie. The character shown in the movie is more like a character from one of Jackson's stories or novels.
Last night I was reading some of the posthumously published collection Let Me Tell You. Two of Jackson's children Sarah Hyman Dewitt and Laurence Jackson Hyman, edited the book and contributed some introductory material. I am inclined to believe them when they tell rather charming stories about their mother.
In addition, Jackson wrote more than one book about motherhood, but her book Life Among the Savages is a humorous look at the topic of family and children that should be ranked alongside Cheaper By the Dozen, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, and Erma Bombeck's books like The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank. So, again, remember that the movie Shirley is about a fictional character, not, exactly, the real Shirley Jackson.
Second, I have been to Bennington, North Bennington, Bennington College, and the trailhead that is shown in the movie when I stayed for two different camping trips at nearby Woodford State Park (shown above). It is obvious to me that Josephine Decker and her crew did not film on location for any of these sites. This is a minor point, but this section of Vermont is a place that I have a personal history with, so this point seemed important to me. You may disagree.
So that was the movie Shirley. Let me now move on to the other movie I watched recently, Kajilliionaire.
I have lived in five different states (Michigan, New York, Idiana, North Dakota, and, now, New Jersey) and four different countries (the United States, Poland, Bulgaria, Lebanon) and I have, over time, met some odd people, including quite a number of accused criminals after working in a large jail for six years. However I have never met anyone like the grifters in this movie: Theresa, Robert, and their daughter, Old Dolio Dyne. Kajillionaire, like Shirley, is very much a work of fiction.
The New Yorker critic Richard Brody considers Kajillionaire to be one of the best movies released in 2020, despite the fact that it was not nominated for any of the major Oscar categories. His summary.
It’s the tale of the Dyne family, a trio of desperate scammers: Theresa (Debra Winger), Robert (Richard Jenkins), and their daughter, Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), who has been raised to be a scammer along with them, and whose very name—which isn’t even heard until late in the film—is the vestige of a scam. Unable to raise the rent on their strange and sordid unofficial apartment (an empty office in a rundown factory), they pursue one more scheme, and, along the way, Theresa and Robert lure an outsider—an optician’s young assistant, named Melanie (Gina Rodriguez)—to work with them and enter the family circle, sparking Old Dolio’s jealous resentment. Old Dolio has been raised with the toughest of love, with no discernible signs of affection and no childlike frippery. (She wears style-free and mismatched sweatshirts and pants; her hair hangs loosely down, untended; and her quasi-robotic voice reflects an upbringing without emotional expression or empathetic connection.) Yet the faux warmth with which Theresa and Robert welcome Melanie arouses Old Dolio’s yearning for some authentic parental warmth—and Melanie, with authentically warm feelings toward Old Dolio, engages in some manipulative behavior of her own, in the interest of her prospective friend.
I have seen one other movie by Miranda July, Me and You and Everyone We Know. I actually saw that movie on the big screen. An experience I have not had for quite some time. Like Kajillionaire, Me and You and Everyone We Know is an experimental movie. If I can use the term experimental. Richard Brody, in his New Yorker review of Shirley, objects to the term experimental. He says "That word should be reserved for movies made by scientists in their laboratories; a better word for certain unusual movies is “non-narrative,”"
Regardless of whether the word used is experimental, non-narrative, or vacuum cleaner, Kajillionaire is an unusual movie. If you are looking for a movie that is plot driven you might view it as a heist or caper movie. Indeed, at one point one of the characters says, "I love the Ocean's Eleven movies." And, yes, there is an elaborate heist or scam in the movie. Probably more than one depending on how you count. But that is not the point of the movie; you will be disappointed if that is why you watched this movie.
If Kajillionaire is not considered a caper movie, then what sort of movie might it be?
I think it is better to think of Kajillionaire as a movie about character and family. The questions that Miranda July poses in this movie is what is a family, how does a family stay cohesive, and how should be view family and its place in our very commercially driven American society? These are big questions and there are no definitive answers given in the movie.
I would also say that the movie also poses what seems like a mundane question that is, in fact, a rather important one to a lot of people in the Covid era. How am I going to pay the rent this month? The Dyne family need $1500 to pay three months rent in their less than adequate place -- an unused office in a bubble factory. They come up with a plan to raise this money using the only tools they have available to them. They scheme and scam. What would you do to keep living with your family in a place you do not particularly like if the alternative was homelessness?
So that is Kajillionaire.
Let me end this entry with a brief word about my intellectual project this month. March is women's history month and I have made an effort to read books by and about women this month and to watch movies by and about women as well. I think that Shirley which is about an important female writer and made by Josephine Decker, a very talented female director and Kajillionaire, a movie made by Miranda July, another talented female director, are excellent movies to watch as part of women's history month. I recommend them if you have a taste for experimental or non-narrative movies.
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