Reading, Watching, Listening 7/12/2024
A few words about Shelley Duvall
Welcome once more to my regular Friday newsletter, in which I share some more musings, along with the media and art that have affected me in the last week. I’m still finding my groove in the newsletter game, but if you’ve been enjoying the output so far, considering sharing it, subscribing, or perhaps upgrading to a paid subscription. So far, all the posts here are still free, but within the next couple weeks, some paid-only writing will appear, and I’ve got some fun stuff planned for the weeks ahead. As a struggling freelance writer in a collapsing industry, any and all help is appreciated.
“I just wanted to talk to you.”
On Thursday, the world got the sad news that Shelley Duvall had passed away at age 75. Another icon of the ‘70s gone. Much has been and will be written about Duvall’s singular screen presence and her complicated, beautiful life. My first exposure to her work was in children’s television, with reruns of the shows she created and often wrote. All of Faerie Tale Theatre is available on YouTube, and I recommend checking it out to see what a fantastic approach Duvall had toward entertaining and educating kids through the otherwise dulling medium of TV.
It only took minutes after the news broke of her death for me to see some people begin to spread, once again, a very tired narrative about Duvall. Namely, that her performance as Wendy Torrance in The Shining was the product of terrible, life-altering abuse at the hands of director Stanley Kubrick. Sarah Lukowski, a devoted fan of Duvall’s, who befriended her late in life and often kept her company all the way up to her passing, once shared a thread on Twitter dispelling longstanding legends about how the laborious, intense and often emotionally terrorizing process of filming The Shining had led to the actress’s departure from Hollywood and subsequent mental health issues. Bukowski’s exhaustive thread—along with other reporting over the years that has included Duvall’s own account of the production, including in this wonderful profile in The Hollywood Reporter, published in 2021—details the quite positive experience Duvall’s work on the film ultimately was for her, and makes clear that for however harrowing it might have been, it had nothing to do with her struggles later in life.
I’m not particularly interested in defending Kubrick or his approach to filmmaking. He may have been one of the greatest artists to ever put images and sound to film, but criticisms of his working method is entirely fair. Still, there’s an unease I feel at the way Kubrick’s alleged treatment of actors and his penchant for dozens of takes has skewed our perception of him as a filmmaker, and more importantly our understanding of his films as collaborative works. Much of the public’s concept of Duvall’s treatment on the set of The Shining comes from behind-the-scenes documentaries, often featured on home video releases, from footage captured by the director’s daughter, Vivian. In that footage we often see Kubrick and Duvall butting heads, with the actress appearing almost in a state of distress. We see her struggling with the obscene number of takes Kubrick demanded, and we see him and Nicholson seemingly collaborating to torment Duvall for the purposes of extracting the performance of a terrified housewife from her.
It’s worth thinking about the purpose of this footage and its inclusion in documentaries made, in many ways, to build a reputation around Kubrick of a very specific kind of intense, exacting auteur. It’s how you get documentaries like Room 237, about the Shining fans who imagine every single detail in the film, right down to the tiniest, least important elements of each frame, hold some kind of intentional meaning. It’s the work of a mind-bending genius, after all. Kubrick! And sure, his behaviour toward Duvall was abusive, but it served an end: the expression of his genius through her performance.
Please. Never mind that Duvall herself did not view her experience as an abusive one, it is an insult to her talent and her memory to reduce her performance in The Shining that way. Duvall gave many great performances in her time as a Hollywood actress, in the works of Robert Altman and beyond. But The Shining is something special. Her Wendy Torrance achieves the elemental. A pure distillation of domestic horror, embodied in every facet of her being. It’s there in her subtle nervousness in her first scene, and as the film’s terror and violence ramps up, her fear is physicalized to such fever pitch that one wonders how she didn’t literally explode, her eyes bulging so and her limbs shaking so.
Watch this iconic scene from the film, in which Wendy discovers the writing her husband has been “working” on all this time. It’s easy to get distracted by Nicholson’s marvellously menacing Jack, but pay attention to the way Duvall occupies the frame. See how she plays a woman whose mind and body are falling apart at the threat she faces from her deranged husband. She can’t even hold the baseball bat properly, grasping onto the weapon like she’s hugging it for dear life rather than wielding it convincingly to ward off the violence emanating her way. The pain and terror when she utters lines like, “I just want to go back to my room,” her retreat into an almost childlike vulnerability as Nicholson pushes towards her.
Duvall as Wendy is simply one of the finest, most dedicated performances anyone has ever given onscreen. It’s reminiscent of Renée Jeanne Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, another film which has spawned legends of its director, Carl Theodor Dreyer, abusing his actress to extract a convincing performance.
This idea that it took a commanding, abusive director, to get an actress to emote in a convincing, if extreme, manner is exactly the kind of silly myth making film history has been built on. The great artistic ego of the male auteur making great work from the raw material of a woman’s very real pain. It’s a convenient narrative for burnishing an individualist, patriarchal imagination of reality, but it is rarely the actual reality. In Duvall’s case, she took her role in The Shining eagerly. She understood Kubrick’s demands, and his gruelling approach to filming. Moreover, she dedicated herself wholly to the project, choosing to live on her own throughout the shoot, isolating herself in many ways within the experience of her character. She worked with Kubrick, often butting heads, but just as often engaged in lengthy conversations about scenes, in order to calibrate her performance for the camera. She had an understanding of the wide-angle lenses involved and how her face would come across through them. She took pains to put on display the physical toll of the shoot itself. All was part of that performance. Duvall’s Wendy Torrance is as holistic a work of art as anyone could ever hope to witness, and serves as the beating heart of the film.
A few months ago, I finally found the time to read Melissa Anderson’s monograph about Inland Empire. The film is a beguiling, difficult work from a master filmmaker, but Anderson, for my money the very best critic working today, eschews an analysis of David Lynch’s sensibilities or intent. Rather than focus on the director, she approaches Inland Empire as an auteurist work from its star, Laura Dern. It’s a challenging, eye-opening examination of the art of acting as authorship, and in Dern’s hands the authorship of particular kinds of women’s stories. She writes, “in the case of Dern, there is power and pleasure in performing instability, disintegration, abjection – and power and pleasure in witnessing how she paradoxically exerts such control while falling apart.” In Anderson’s reading, it’s hard not to think of Dern’s work in Inland Empire as a descendant of Duvall’s in The Shining. “A woman in trouble,” as Lynch has summarized the film. In the scope of his collaboration, Inland Empire is as much Dern’s film as it is Lynch’s. The same is true of Duvall’s work in The Shining. It’s her film.
There’s a risk, I think, in valuing a performance like that as a means unto itself. A feat of acrobatics devoid of intention other than to impress. It’s worth, then, considering a moment from that THR profile, after Duvall watches a clip from the scene I shared above, Wendy feebly fending off her mad husband. She tears up watching the scene, and the writer, Seth Abramovich asks why.
“Because we filmed that for about three weeks,” Duvall tells him. “Every day. It was very hard. Jack was so good — so damn scary. I can only imagine how many women go through this kind of thing.”
Duvall was a true artist, one of the best we had, and her Wendy Torrance is a gift.
Reading, Watching, Listening
Longlegs, the new serial killer movie from Osgood Perkins, is out this weekend, and it’s got a ton of buzz and the hype is at fever pitch. Hype can be a problem, and I don’t begrudge anyone feeling disappointed when all is said and done, but I went to a packed, late-night screening of the film, and I had a great, disturbed time with it. Scream queen Maika Monroe leads the film, as an FBI agent with unique abilities on the trail of a murderer who somehow gets his victims to do the killing themselves. That doesn’t really capture what this film is up to, though. There’s an undercurrent in it, a discordance, where pieces never quite fit together, giving the whole thing an air of twisted malevolence. If that sounds up your alley, go check it out.
Team Deakins, hosted by Roger and James Deakins, is one of my favourite podcasts, and I finally got around to listening to their recent episode speaking with Bill Bennett, a cinematographer who works on commercials. It’s a fantastic listen for anyone interested in the ins and outs of filmmaking, particularly filmmaking as a job than people do, you know, to make a living. Bennett is a cut above, having been involved in the development of Arri digital cameras and other technologies, and his expertise and experience make for an excellent interview that Roger Deakins seemed very tickled by himself.
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