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It’s no doubt that Shining Vale is a big swing; it has an optical density and curious energy that must be applauded and for once I don’t care if it fares well as a comedy or a horror.
If God has generally spoken to men, it’s the Devil that sneaks up on the women. Twinning madwomen and demonic possession is a tale as old as the literature written by nineteenth-century women. A lot has been said about the horror references in Shining Vale but the show succeeds more on another count – the other history that has been alluded to, borrowed and restyled in this new Courtney Cox-starrer. For one, it’s concerned about the long legacy of vulnerable women. In an early scene, Pat Phelps (Courtney Cox) shops for the Bell Jar, which a bookstore employee suggests she should “Enjoy.” Women’s discontent is articulated in personal terms. This show presents both the apprehensions of second-wave feminism and a response to it.
Like in a Shirley Jackson novel, evil exists in one’s own mind when women subject themselves to societal pressure. The house is an enigmatic symbol animated by the contradictory desires of wanting to escape but being too scared to leave. In Shining Vale, we see the same women become the Madonna and the Whore, the Madwoman and the heroic voice of reason. There’s Pat trying to preserve her artistic self as well as destroying her bodily vessel, a ghost who is trapped by a demon, who wants to fulfil herself perversely by helping a sister out. “I just want to be a normal family,” Pat rues, but we’re alert to her crushing disappointment.
You see, Pat is not Jack Torrance from The Shining, she’s kind of like Claire from Modern Family. She finds parenting stressful, and satisfaction lies in professional pursuits. Where Modern Family asks what makes a utopian family, where everyone plays to their competencies, Shining Vale contains a manifesto to the opposite. Family members ask what’s in it for me, are aloof to olive branches and generational trauma mixes in with a continuing cycle of hatred and pain. The show is not afraid to be utterly mean and despicable. Mrs He is killed off in passing on the backyard fence she has been asking to get fixed and her son, a member of the chastity club, whose virginity is a long-standing set-up, gives in a matter of seconds to Pat’s daughter, Gaynor. Terry (Greg Kinnear) seems to constantly get the raw end of the deal. But somewhere Terry, like Phil, gets to enjoy being sentimental and nice because it’s a role that isn’t expected of him.
I don’t think it’s enough to say that the show is a meditation on domestic challenges because of how it manipulates us to judge Pat and her priorities. The audience is in on the haunting, we’re seeing what depression is doing to Pat but we’re not sure if we’re witnessing what author and couple’s therapist Terrence Real calls toxic individuality or the brutality of a woman finding her self-esteem. The act of setting boundaries with people you care about is always a live one. Women, scholars tell us, have suffered from empathy sickness, which is knowing what other people are feeling better than what what we feel. Creator of the show, Sharon Horgan said in an interview, “What’s expected of Pat is, it is completely different but at the same time it’s still having to fulfill a role, isn’t it? And if you’re not happy in that role there’s something wrong with you. That’s what you’re made to feel. The idea of not finding motherhood easy, or not being a good wife or not being a natural homemaker.”
“Not Now!” Pat bellows as she gets closer to solving the mystery of demon/ ghost Rosemary and her husband and two children urgently need her. She also almost never moves and says things that you’d expect her to, vacillating between exhaustion and action, trying to find a median between the self and others, identity and unity, the intentional and accidental. In one scene she applies and wipes lipstick in a department store and the next she’s blurting out, “Do you know what it’s like to always be forgiven?”
Pat compares herself to the other women in the show and judges herself. She’s not as nice to her husband as Kathryn, or as decent a mother as Mrs He or as young and prolific a writer as Claire Vanderbilt. Albeit, the other women are never meaningful competition to Pat as the gravity of her own mistakes and the drama of unattended supernatural activity, tower over her personal insecurities. She also holds herself accountable for falling short. As Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor, a diagnosis of disease “assigns to the luckless ill the ultimate responsibility both for falling ill and for getting well.” We accept this responsibility as it provides an illusion of control and we would much rather give into culpability than chaos.
It’s no doubt that Shining Vale is a big swing; it has an optical density and a curious energy that must be applauded and for once I don’t care if it fares well as a comedy or a horror.
The elements that might make the show feel safe but it’s still emotionally wrought. It really goes to a place where Pat is discovered hiding the incriminating necklace of Mrs He by her dog, then her son, Gaynor and finally her husband. She can’t be bothered to explain to them or she gathers that they won’t be interested to understand and one by one she bludgeons each of them to death and buries them along with the necklace till their bodies create a noticeably large mound of fresh soil in the backyard. There are several unanswered questions and loose ends, points that seem to go nowhere and a dark resistance against softening any edges – faults I hope are mended with more time. “You thought the kids and I were dead, but you stopped to wash Roxy?” Terry retorts when Pat tells him about her nightmare, needlessly doubling down on her triple murder fantasy. I don’t even think that half the show’s insights are wholly intentional. Better shows have solved complex contingencies by being ironic or meta. Shirley Jackson wrote in her journal that it’s difficult to write about anxiety from a place of safety. Safety was probably impossible since she would never be able to completely reconstruct her mind. Both Jackson and Pat, who is also a writer, were waiting for the plot to come rushing in once the rubbish was cleared from their minds.
Shining Vale is streaming on Lionsgate Play
Eisha Nair is an independent writer-illustrator based in Mumbai. She has written on history, art, culture, education, and film for various publications. When not pursuing call to cultural critique, she is busy drawing comics.
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