Going Over the Line

In Josephine Decker’s new film, Shirley (and in life generally), being a muse is a trap.

- By Lila Shapiro

A DECADE AGO, ON a warm night in May, a young woman took off her dress in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art. A murmur rose from the startled crowd. For an exhilarating moment, she stood there naked. In front of her, the renowned performance artist Marina Abramovic sat in a wooden chair, her head bowed, her white dress stretching all the way from her neck to the floor. Abramovic had been sitting in that chair for two and a half months. Thousands of visitors had taken turns sitting across from her, bathing in her gaze. But the young woman would never get a chance to take part in this singular ritual. As she began to sit, a phalanx of guards surrounded her, told her to put her dress back on, and led her away. Flustered and tearful, she tried to explain herself to a documentary crew outside the exhibition. “I would have obeyed the rule if I had known,” she said. “I just wanted to be as vulnerable with her as she makes herself to everyone else.”

The woman, Josephine Decker, was a 29-year-old SAT tutor and an aspiring filmmaker. Today, she is an actress, performance artist, and one of the most daring directors in the world of independent cinema. Her four feature films have brought her a devoted following of cinephiles, including The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who has extolled her in terms that earlier generations of critics bestowed on the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky and Jean-Luc Godard. Her latest work, Shirley, stars Elisabeth Moss as the horror writer Shirley Jackson. Executive-produced by Martin Scorsese, who credited Decker with helping to expand “the language of cinema,” it will likely find a wider audience than her earlier, more experimental films. Still, the movie has about as much in common with an average biopic as Tarkovsky’s Solaris