In the Flesh: Shirley

Being a fat woman is an exercise in learning to love things that hate you. Your favorite art will mock your body, your lovers will quest vainly for compliments that don’t engage your actual appearance, theater seats will bruise your hips, and on, and on, and on until the grating whine of the world’s violence toward your body becomes inextricably enmeshed with every moment of real joy you’ll ever feel. Perhaps the single most important factor in the early death of horror author and fat woman Shirley Jackson was the ruinous combination of prescription amphetamines and barbiturates on which her doctors kept her for long stretches of her adult life to manage, respectively, her weight and her anxiety. That Shirley, the fictionalized 2020 biographical film about a period of roughly one year in Jackson’s life, eschews her fatness is the kind of thing for which life as a fat woman prepares you. That it has the gall to be good in a way depicting Jackson’s fatness would have elevated to greatness is, to me, beyond the pale.

Josephine Decker’s film is intensely sexy, the central romance between Jackson (Elizabeth Moss) and her houseguest, young faculty wife Rosie (Odessa Young), crackling with unhealthy chemistry. Moss is exceptional in her role, a woman fully possessed by her own arrogance and learned, conditioned helplessness, abused and controlled by her outwardly sprightly husband (the always wonderful Michael Stuhlbarg as a kind of capering, horny satyr of a man). The movie’s palette is all greens and yellows, grays and browns, Rosie’s red lipstick a dab of jam floating in a sea of decaying verdure, the house inwardly and outwardly consumed by clutter, ivy, sagging masonry and flaking paint. There’s a warmly sensual focus on the small processes of domestic life, not romantic but richly textured: a knife sliding into a half-skinned chicken breast rubbed in spices, a pleasantly prolonged dishwashing scene, crumpled sheets of paper sliding through Jackson’s typewriter.

It makes it so much worse, this intimately crafted beauty, that a true representation of Jackson’s body is absent. It also holds the film back, rendering some of its most emotionally intense moments shadows of what they might have been. In one scene Jackson struggles in a department store dressing room with ill-fitting clothes, eventually breaking down crying until Rosie slides through the curtain to help her dress. There’s a brutal tenderness to it, but imagine how much more psychologically penetrating, how much more culturally white-hot it might have been had it featured a fat actress, someone whose body is actually excluded from fashion as a matter of course. I try not to approach movies through the lens of “it would have been better IF”, but sometimes loving a thing that hates you hurts too much to go unremarked upon. Beautiful film. Pity Shirley Jackson’s not in it.