This article contains mentions of self-harm, suicidal ideation, disordered eating, sexual coercion
A woman lies in her bed, both are disheveled and dirty. The curtains are drawn and she’s mostly obscured under the covers, almost as if the early evening rays of sun will set her ablaze. Her husband unceremoniously barges in demanding she rise and get dressed despite her assertions of horrible visions and a near inability to move. He rips open the curtains, placates her with a lit cigarette— like a baby with a pacifier— and promises of ribald dinner discussions. Her inability to function “normally” is ruining their careers. She’s not his equal, as he’d stated at the previous night’s Bacchanal, but simply an inconvenience— useful only when the stars align in his favor.
Shirley: Josephine Decker’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson as a person I immediately resonated with. Someone reduced to an infantilized version of herself solely because she’s obviously mentally ill. Her husband’s coworkers and their wives view her as a failure of a spouse or some dirty parlor entertainment. But she’s an intelligent woman and has an acute knowledge of where she stands in everyone’s mind. She knows she’ll be seen as some sort of taboo secret or a failure of a housewife no matter how independently successful she becomes. Her depression and agoraphobia will always be her tentpole personality traits, and she’ll always be reduced in the minds of her peers to little more than a talented toddler dependent on someone else to survive.
Ever since I landed in my first psychologist’s office at the tender age of three, I’ve had to deal with the constant infantilization that came with being visibly mentally ill. Instead of being treated like a normal three-year-old child, I was treated more like a feral cat or a circus clown depending on the situation. Panic attacks were met with physical restraint and punishment at home and with mocks and jeers at school. The fact I’d even seen a therapist was a secret between me, my mom, and the school secretary that got my occasional early release note. By the end of elementary school I’d gained the reputation of being an unstable crybaby amongst the teachers, parents, and kids; I was never really spoken to (even by my own therapist), I was simply spoken about.
Shirley’s sizing up of those she’s supposed to bond with— her husband, his coworkers and their wives, and other adults in their town— is a product of a similar environment. At first glance, it sounds like a superiority complex. She’s insistent that nobody understands her and she’s not on the same level as the spouses of her husband’s coworkers. But there’s a sliver of truth: nobody in her immediate community understands how her brain works. It’s the early 1950s— a time when psychology was still very Freudian— and she’s an unmedicated, severely mentally ill individual, so to everyone else she appears to be a dramatic toddler in a grown woman’s body. Her husband actively forces the notion that her inability to leave the house, much less her bed on bad days, affects him infinitely more than her. It forces her to apologize for her supposed slights that she has no control over. The one place she can grasp control is through her novels. Her writing mainly focuses on women going mad or being perceived as such and punished accordingly. The feeling of unending isolation in her own misfiring brain is translated into stories of forgotten girls finding themselves in less than healthy coping mechanisms.
By seventh grade I’d developed a bit of a complex about how I’d been treated: I assumed everyone talked about me and that nobody was to be trusted. If I showed any signs of irrational emotion, which boiled down to anything outside of a placid smile and polite nods, they’d be met with punishment. The real nail in the coffin was when one of my teachers said to my face, in front of the entire class, that if she’d gotten a nickel for every time I broke down in class, she’d be able to retire. But, even throughout most of high school, I still held out hope that I’d beat my god-awful reputation and become someone’s idealized version of myself: I starved myself so that I’d have the stick thin body type my dance company director craved, I’d stay up for hours studying to get straight A+s, and I let myself get coerced into sexual situations I really wasn’t interested in because this guy showed some interest in me. All that got me was disordered eating, touch aversion, even more harassment, and increased severity of whatever symptoms I was already experiencing. By senior year, leaving bed became a hardship unless some invisible switch kicked itself on in my brain and I had the urge to stick needles in my skin and experiment with NyQuil. My quite literal cries for help were met with “have positive thoughts”, “get better impulse control”, and the teacher staple of “laziness isn’t an excuse”. I simply could not prove myself so I just decided to let the tailspin take me down.
What really appears to help Shirley is her attempt at a relationship with her new housemate- turned-caretaker Rose. She finally is able to, for better or worse, stretch beyond the feeble persona she’s been stuck with for who knows how long. Sure, she’s not a good friend by any means— she’s a bit manipulative, blunt to the point where it tows the line with insults, and accidentally uses Rose as collateral in her dinnertime dramatics in the beginning— but she finally has a person to open up to; a person that sees her as a person and not a collection of symptoms. Rose and Shirley become each others’ support system as two intelligent women who are constantly overshadowed and spoken for by their husbands that view them as babies at best, and defective Stepford wives at worst. They develop a somewhat codependent bond while they’re cooped up in the house together. Shirley knows how the world, especially men, exploit vulnerable women and toss them aside when the reality of how “damaged” the girl hits them, Rose knows how to be empathetic and assert herself in a socially acceptable manner. It’s not a perfectly functional relationship, but it’s a decent enough support system for both of them to work on healing.
Until last year I didn’t have anything close to a support system. I had something resembling a friend group in high school, but it quickly fell apart when I began spiraling. Anything about me was fair game for retrospectively unfunny jokes: the debilitating test anxiety and the resulting meltdowns, the healthy albeit “cringe” coping mechanisms, and even my sexuality. The amount of predatory lesbian jokes I got my senior year would put a Lucky McKee movie to shame. I played along thus reducing myself to nothing more than a clown dancing and demeaning myself under the guise of “dark humor”. Along with that, I dated people that wanted me to be their manic pixie dream babe (my first boyfriend straight up called me his Ramona Flowers); both ended up being incredibly toxic relationships built on controlling a person terrified of disappointment. When I went to college I cut most of them off— an easy feat when you’re five hours away. The ones I do speak to were those who quite literally kept me alive. I got medication as soon as I was able and went back to therapy regularly. I found friends in people I could finally bond with over things like horror movies and weird possum photos instead of simply being in the same AP classes. Speaking to them was organic, and sharing about our mental illnesses felt like building implicit trust rather than a trap. I feel, as Shirley puts it, like I have relationships that have made me full. They care about me in the same way I care about them.
To me, Shirley is one of the only films I feel like that got me. It’s a perfect portrayal of untreated, exploited mental illness. Shirley isn’t portrayed as some charity case or a collection of symptoms in the shape of a woman, but as an imperfect character that just happens to have depression and agoraphobia that impact her life. It focuses on way more than just her lows and almost roots to see her get better. Despite the fifty-year time gap, I easily saw myself in every stage of my life through the hour and forty-seven minutes: someone scared of themselves, someone pissed at the world, someone trying to prove their worth, and someone in desperate need of a relationship to sate my soul. For better or for worse, Shirley Jackson became the first character I related to implicitly, and it truly did make me feel whole.
