Chapter 41: Goodbye, I’m Shelley Duvall: An Encomium
Nevele Grande Hotel (Ellenville, NY)
**NOTE: I originally wrote this as an episode for the podcast, on Thursday, July 11th, the day Shelley Duvall died. You can listen to that version here.
I rushed to the studio tonight after work to pen this encomium, this eulogy, for Shelley Duvall.
I feel like I can hear some of you sitting there, scratching your heads, asking, “Okay— but what does Shelley Duvall have to do with this multimedia travelog about abandoned buildings that I signed up for?”
A lot, actually.
It starts at the abandoned Nevele Grande Resort, which, if you already engage with All-American Ruins, you know I’ve guided you through before.
Before arsonists got to it, I visited the Nevele four or five times. I truly lost count. It was a staple, a mainstay, and access was easy. That’s changed, ever since some asshole teenager set it on fire on Snapchat.
Last fall, I took my friend Becky for her first time, to explore the abandoned 550 acres of Borscht Belt history. I always love to watch my friends experience new things that I get to introduce them to. Movies, shows, the couple times I’ve gotten to go to a Broadway play with a couple of different first-timers. It’s sweet, and it makes me feel seen, especially when they like it.
An abandoned space though? That’s a whole other ballgame. It makes that feeling even stronger, and it offers me a little bit of vicarious courage too, a reminder that it’s okay that I’m still going on childlike adventures to the ruins of America, to play pretend.
I find a lot of symbolism in the architectural wreckage of our past, and it bleeds into all sorts of buckets: social, cultural, political, spiritual, environmental, historical. In the case of the Nevele, it does give off Overlook Hotel vibes, the massive complex that’s at the center of The Shining. It’s all I could think about the first time I visited, and on my visit with Becky, again, it’s all I could think about. And as you well know if you read this blog or listen to abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast or have watched the pilot episode of the HUDSY Original series All-American Ruins, I have a deep love for Shelley Duvall, the star of Stanley Kubrick’s divisive cinematic adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining.
If I’m thinking about The Shining, undoubtedly I’m thinking about Shelley Duvall.
The first time I saw The Shining, I was 14, and I’d already seen The Exorcist, so nothing could scare me anymore. Of course, this was a lie I told myself because when I saw The Shining for the first time, I instantly felt haunted by it. I wasn’t scared of it, necessarily, but it did keep me up at night. In fact, it kept me up a lot of nights, but not because I felt fear. I just felt like it was in me, in my gut, like a phantom took a dive into my mouth and managed to set up shop in my stomach. I can’t explain it, but it was Shelley Duvall in particular who I felt so attached to.
It’s not like I was sexually attracted to her. I don’t swing that way, but I did feel… what? Spiritually attached to her character? Wendy, a deeply wounded wife and ferociously protective mother who keeps the entire hotel running all winter, all by herself — and, actually, if you don’t wanna read what happens because you haven’t seen the movie, I would skip this next paragraph.
The movie watches Wendy’s abusive husband Jack Torrance, a failed writer, slowly devolve into madness, as he types the same sentence over and over and over again, for months, until he cracks and starts talking to ghosts who convince him to kill both Wendy and her son Danny.
Because the hotel told him to do it.
I was in awe of this frail woman with big teeth and stringy black hair, frantically scurrying around the dreamlike set of the Overlook Hotel, waving a kitchen knife and sporting a periwinkle bathrobe that was almost identical to a bathrobe my mom wore when I was younger. In fact, one time, I even made a side by side comparison video of the two, and sure as shit, their outfits and hair color look almost identical.
Maybe that was part of the deep admiration I felt for Shelley Duvall at such a young age. I was and still am a pretty big fan of my mom Beth, who you met all the way back at the beginning of abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast, in episode 1, where she describes the beginning of the end of my ghostly love affair with an abandoned dairy farm, the first ruin I ever explored.
It was a place I called home, at least in my imagination. I loved playing there because I felt safe there. And again, you probably know all this. But something you don’t know is that there was more to my deep love of that abandoned dairy farm — just like I think there was more and is more to my deep love of Shelley Duvall.
Because if you dive deep enough into the internet, you can find some pretty not-so-nice things about Shelley Duvall’s past. The supposed abusive relationship she had with Stanley Kubrick, the topic of which has been the subject of controversy for years: did that happen? Did it really not happen?
The notorious, near-criminal interview she had with Dr. Phil.
And a lot of criticism. Of her looks. And her essence. You have to kinda dig to find it, but it’s there.
For some reason, I feel deeply protective of her because I know how many people have written or said things like, “Oh, Shelley Duvall is crazy, did you see that interview with her on Dr. Phil?” or “Oh, yeah, Stanley Kubrick totally abused her into Stockholm Syndrome,” or just ferociously stupid comments about how she looks (all of this on the internet, of course).
As her character Wendy spends a significant percentage of The Shining trying to save her son from the worst kind of bully of all, we see an extremely smart person who outsmarts an entire hotel of ghosts and survives the unthinkable, against all odds.
When I watch her in that film — and in any movie — I see an original, someone whose light comes from within, and it can’t help itself. Shelley Duvall couldn’t help but be Shelley Duvall, and because of it, she had a prolific career, in a host of other disciplines and ventures. She was a producer and a writer and a children’s television host and a model, and she was also a bit of a tabloid queen. Who could forget that Duvall dated and lived with Paul Simon for two years, before she introduced Simon to Carrie Fisher, soon after which Simon left Duvall… for Fisher?
At her core, however, Shelley Duvall was an American original, a cultural icon who used her own light to create an entire career that revolved around her creativity and her love of storytelling. She was, in many ways, an underdog — and in other ways, the antithesis of one. I think the real reason she came to mind any time I explored the Nevele is that I felt like I understood her, and I felt like, in a weird way, she understood me, so I talked to her, in my imagination — I talked to her ghost, and she saw me, and she made me feel safe.
Just like the abandoned dairy farm.
Just like any abandoned building where I get to go play pretend.
(Or at least, that’s what I tell myself in my imagination.)
If you’d like to experience the magic of the Nevele Grande Hotel through the fantastical eyes of All-American Ruins, you can join me at any of the upcoming film screenings of All-American Ruins: Nevele Grande Hotel, now through October:
- July 27th — Peekskill Film Festival (Peekskill, NY)
- Aug. 18th — Catskill Mountain Foundation (Hunter, NY)
- Oct. 11th-20th — Eugene Environmental Film Festival (Eugene, OR)
- Oct. 13th — Dove Block Project Short Film Festival (Geneva, NY)
You can find ticket links on my website: allamericanruins.com, or you can find more info on my Instagram page: @allamericanruins.
If you want to keep up-to-date with All-American Ruins, following that Instagram account is the best way — and you can also sign up for a Medium subscription, right here, for free.
Shelley: I hope you Rest in Prosperity.
