April 30, 2025The Queen of Quirk Says Goodbye to Her Not-Me
You need some mothballs so you hurry down to the Dollar Tree
even though it’s about to close, and there’s just one register
open, and you’re the last person in a long line, and there’s a guy
sitting at a window waiting for the cashier to end her shift,
and just then your phone goes ba-ding and it says Shelley
Duvall just died—oh, no! The same Shelley Duvall whom
The New York Times called the Queen of Quirk
for her offbeat looks and even more offbeat performances
in some of the best movies ever made in the seventies
and eighties without ever having taken a single acting lesson
and in that way serve as a hero to everybody who
ever wanted fame and fortune without having to put in
all that hard work we were told is essential by our parents
and teachers as we proceeded from one stage in life
to the next, which group of people includes everybody,
and as you get to the register and put your mothballs
on the counter along with a couple of other things
you didn’t need but bought anyway, the guy catches
your eye, and he looks exhausted, like maybe his helper
didn’t show up and he had to unload his truck by himself,
so you ask him how he’s doing, and he shakes his head
and says It’s another day and when you say you hear
there’s one scheduled for tomorrow as well he says
Hope not. Shelley Duvall is best known for her performance
in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, in which she plays
the wife of the Jack Nicholson character who slowly becomes
unhinged and eventually tries to kill her and particularly
for the scene where Kubrick did 127 takes of Shelley Duvall
backing up some stairs and swinging a baseball bat
at Jack Nicholson. Your body does not differentiate
between a perceived threat and an actual threat
said Shelley Duvall at the time, so while Mental Shelley
knew that Jack was just playing, Corporeal Shelley was sure
he was going to bash her brains out. Emerson called
the mind the Me and the body the Not-Me in that
the one knows what to do and how to do it while
the other can barely get itself out of bed in the morning
and may do something splendid that day but is just as likely
to be lazy and stupid and will fail us in the end by becoming
slow and forgetful and maybe even incontinent and certainly
dead, as is now the case with Shelley Duvall. Why can’t we
be more like honeybees? you think. When a honeybee
colony needs to find a new hive, it sends out waves of scouts
to search for a new site, and when they return, they dance
for the other bees, each scout’s dance signaling a possible
location, and as new waves of scouts go out and return,
the new scouts align themselves with one old scout or another
until a single dance becomes the most popular, and there
you have it: follow those bees to the perfect oak or elm
and you’re all set, whereas we have to think it through,
work it out, frame it up, break it down, start again.
Later, Shelley Duvall said she realized Kubrick
was trying to bring out the complexities in her character,
and you wonder if she believed that or was just trying to make
herself feel better. Either way, it worked. You guess.
On your way home you remember you forgot to do
your pushups that day, so you go to the park even
though it’s dark now, but the Little League field is all lit up,
yet when you get to the spot where you always do
your pushups, there’s a man and a woman about to
go at it, but you figure what the hell, it’s your spot,
so even though the man is saying You done so-and-so
and the woman says I ain’t done shit you get down
and start knocking them out: twenty-three, twenty-four,
twenty-five, and the man says Hold on, how old are you
and you tell him and he says Damn! and You doing good
and you say I can’t turn back the hand of time but I figure
I can slow it down and the man points to his mind and says
I’ma keep that in my mind but at least he and the woman
aren’t fighting any more and as you head for home
you think about how when you said Have a good evening
to the guy who was waiting for the cashier he smiled
but didn’t say anything and you said Have a good evening
to the cashier and she said Have a good evening, sir
and Be careful out there and then Enjoy your mothballs.