Misery
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Misery, by Stephen King
When I was a kid- and I mean a little kid, seven or eight tops- both my parents worked, so every day after school, and all day during the summer, I would spend time with my Aunt Cathy. Now, Cathy wasn’t exactly my aunt, more like a close friend of the family’s, somebody both my parents had known since before I was born, and she lived in the neighborhood next to ours. She ran a sort of day-care for the working mothers in the area, although I never saw more than two or three other kids there, and when we weren’t at her house, she was all by herself, no husband, no family of her own.
Which isn’t particularly unusual, despite what Hallmark cards might seem to indicate; and the arrangement itself, with money paid under the table and Aunt Cathy working a few other odd jobs here and there to keep herself going, is probably the same as that in a thousand other small towns across the country. I’m not sure how long she’d been doing this sort of thing before I arrived, but it couldn’t have been that long; or at least, I have to believe it couldn’t have been. Because there was something wrong with her, something she’d managed to keep hidden from the adults (although, let’s be honest here, affordable daycare is difficult to find, no slight on my folks, but maybe they let a few hints slide by), but something that made the walk from the bus stop to her front door a very difficult one.
She had these mood swings. No, not like regular mood swings; not like some days she smiled more than others. More like the good days were the days when she hardly said a word to us, when she stuck us in the basement with a video and a couple of old coloring books, and let us go at it. The bad days, she’d have us do her chores, and it would never be right; none of it was ever good enough, no toilet ever bright enough no floor ever vacuumed right, and on those days, if you said something, anything, and you said it at the wrong moment, she’d screech at you until you cried, and then lock you in the spare bedroom for a twenty minute time out that seemed to stretch on for hours. And the bitch of it was, you never knew what that wrong moment would be, you could never tell if you were about to cross some invisible line and turn her face red and have her grab one of the couch cushions and just squeeze it for all it was worth, and you’d know full well that what she really wanted to squeeze was your arm or your leg or your neck. That was the worst of it, not the freak-outs (which were bad) or the bedroom lock-ups (also very, very bad, especially if you had to go to the bathroom, and what little kid doesn’t have to go to the bathroom after getting screamed at), the worst was the not knowing. When you’re a kid, you don’t understand that there are situations beyond your control, that just because someone’s upset, that doesn’t mean it’s your fault; all you know is, you’ve failed somehow, and you swear you’ll be better next time, quieter, neater, more invisible, hell, you’ll start wearing the wallpaper if need be.
The tragedy is that you can never be quiet enough, never be invisible enough. When something’s that wrong with a person, even breathing can give them an excuse. On her better days, Aunt Cathy would sometimes take one of us aside (usually me, I have no idea why) and tell us (me) about her long history of mental problems, her trips to the psychiatrist, the faded scars from a suicide attempt when she was nineteen. I couldn’t process it. I just nodded. For a while, I thought the psychiatrist and the scars were directly connected, like that was a psychiatrist’s job, cutting you. I am amazed that she was able to keep it together to the outside world for as long as she did; she’d moved by the time I got old enough to tell my parents what really happened (which wasn’t for a while- memories like can hibernate for years on end), so maybe she’s dead or maybe she’s still doing it. All I know is, I am a quarter of a century old, but that little kid locked in a bedroom still hasn’t gone away. Anytime anyone’s upset, I know it’s my fault, and I can hardly bear the thought of someone coming into my apartment, because I know it will always be too messy.
Misery is, in essence, about two things: writing and abuse. When I first read the novel, it’s the writing stuff that spoke to me. Sang to me, if you want to be absurdly poetical. I’d just decided I wanted to be a writer, and this novel confirmed that decision, made it real. You could say that the first Stephen King novel I read, The Stand, suggested I write, and the second one, Misery, demanded it.
Rereading the novel for this review, however, it was the abuse stuff that hit me the hardest, and in a way, I’m amazed I never realized it before. Aunt Cathy is nowhere near as psycho as Annie Wilkes (at least, not while I knew her), and I was never subjected to the sort of physical and emotional torture that Paul Sheldon faces at the hands of his abuser, but there is a connection, in the way Paul tries to please Annie at the expense of his own dignity, in the way she cows him into viewing her as some sort of pagan goddess, a being of capricious, unending power- the way he tries his best to chart her moods, and how difficult it is by the end of the story for him to finally resist her, like he isn’t just scared for his life, he’s scared for his very soul. I was never beaten as a child, but I know some of those feelings, and it was weird as hell, reliving them in such a context. The guilt is what kills you; as much as the punishments, it’s the guilt that drives. Everything you do, you feel like you shouldn’t have, that you’ll get in trouble for it, and that you deserve to get in trouble for it.
The majority of Misery is taken up with an account of Paul Sheldon’s time at Casa Wilkes. The novel is in third person, but its told almost entirely through Sheldon’s perspective; in fact, it only makes the switch to the omniscient third person in the final few pages, the only pages that are set (outside of memory) anywhere but Annie’s house. This is an obvious choice, narrative-wise, as it forces the reader to experience Paul’s situation with claustrophobic tightness. Appropriately, we begin with Paul struggling his way up to consciousness. There is a great deal of pain in his legs, this is the first thing he’s certain of, and then he recognizes that pain comes and goes; he equates it to the tide covering a piling jutting out from the shore of a beach, an image closely tied to a childhood memory. The memory gives him his name and some of his identity, but he’s still swimming in the fog for a good while longer.
His contact with the outside world is at first minimal; someone is feeding him pills, and the pills bring the tide which covers the pain. There are also sounds (“yerrrnnn umber whunnnn fayunnnn,” an approximation of words heard through the muddling effects of a coma which I dismissed as gibberish for an embarrassingly long period of time), and one time, when he stops breathing and decides not to start it again, a mouth presses down on his and forces him back to life, filling his lungs with abhorrent, rank air. A few pages later, Sheldon comes to his senses, and almost from the moment he sees the woman who saved his life, he knows he’s in a very tight spot indeed.
I focus on these initial, short chapters as a way of examining their technique. The coma bits are, while easy to follow, full of lots of vaguely poetic lines and repetitions, which King uses to convey a sense of disconnection and unease, almost like describing an unpleasant birth. There is also a foreshadowing of things to come, from the subtle (that garbled phrase) to the more obvious. We get an impression- an impression so indeterminate that it’s difficult to pinpoint where it comes from- that while Paul’s place inside the cloud of pain isn’t a pleasant one, things are probably going to get worse when he finally wakes up. Novels are rarely this intimate in their openings, at least not popular novels; usually books this transfixed on what’s inside a character’s head are relegated to the literary side of the shelf.
Once Paul does regain consciousness, his relationship with his “savior” and the trouble that he’s in are clearly and quickly delineated. With his two shattered legs and constant, wracking pain, Paul is helpless, while Annie, who is taking care of him, is not right in the head- if the fact that she didn’t bring him to the hospital doesn’t convince Paul, her slack, her paranoia does. Another oddity for this sort of book, in that there’s no initial tomfoolery about Annie’s psychosis; we don’t wade through fifty pages waiting for the shocking reveal we already figured out on page three. This makes sense- for one thing, while Annie may have been able to fool people about her sanity (with varying degrees of success) for most of her life, it’s suggested that she’s now reaching the end of the line, and her ability to cover for her various “indiscretions” is fading rapidly. Perhaps even more importantly, why should she bother hiding in front of Paul? It’s not like he’s going to tattle on her.
So the story kicks in quickly, and it isn’t too long before we’re exposed to Annie’s terrible temper. Once Paul comes to his senses, things are uneasily calm between the two of them. Paul immediately recognizes that Annie’s messed up, and doesn’t ask her why he isn’t in a hospital for fear of what the answer might be. Then Annie takes a peak at Paul’s newly completed manuscript, Fast Cars and asks Paul if she can read it; since she’s dangling his pain medication at the time, he gives in.
The next time he sees her, she’s read the first thirty pages, and she is not pleased. The jumpiness of the narrative bothers her, as does the swearing, but really, at the heart of things, what bothers her most is that it’s not Misery (the lead character of a series of romance/adventure novels by Sheldon) that he’s writing about. See, Annie is Paul’s number one fan; she’s read all his novels, and she’s read the Misery novels two or three times. And like most obsessive people, she gets extremely upset when she doesn’t get exactly what she wants. She explodes, throws a bowl of soup into the wall, and forces Paul to wait an extra hour or two while she cleans up the mess before she’ll bring him his medication. Then she makes him drink from the bucket of dirty cleaning water to swallow down the pills.
It’s an unpleasant scene, as it not only forces Paul to endure the agonies of his legs, it’s also Annie’s way of reminding him just who has the control of the situation here. By her logic, he made her mad, and so he must be punished; she is, in her mind, doing him a favor by teaching him the true nature of justice. Meeting someone like this is unnerving, but the idea of that someone having complete control of your life and well-being is beyond the pale.
This is all just prelude, however, to the moment when Annie gets a copy of the latest Misery novel, Misery’s Child, and discovers that it’s the last Misery novel, because Misery is dead. Died during childbirth at the end of the book. Annie is not happy about this. So not happy that she leaves Paul alone for over two days, and when she returns, she demands that he burn Fast Cars and start work on a new book- Misery’s Return.
Paul isn’t too happy himself at the idea, but it’s not as though he has a choice. And in the end, it turns out that Annie might just have given him a way out, a way to get some power in the situation; because much as she may want to kill him, worried as she might be of getting caught, the need to see the new novel all the way through to the end, the need to see Misery restored and know what’s happening to her, may just be powerful enough to keep him alive for long enough to pay her back for all she’s done to him.
All of which is very interesting, and even more interesting- and this is the aspect that, in some ways, made me the man I am today- is that Paul’s writing doesn’t just keep Annie from killing him: it keeps him actually wanting to stay alive. There are a few references to Scheherazade at various points, but while the concept of keeping someone enthralled in a story you created wasn’t new to me when I first read the book, considering I’d been a compulsive reader for years, the power of writing to drive you, to give you purpose, that was new. It was just such an amazing, perfect idea all round, as though stories weren’t just words you came up with but living things that operated in a way independent of our conscious selves. To be somebody like Paul, to grab onto to something like- I no longer had a choice. This is how I had to spend the rest of my life.
It’s funny how the basic concept of Misery, an artist trapped by an obsessed fan, has become nearly a cliché by now; I even remember a “Quantum Leap” episode that had Sam Beckett as a soap opera star held captive by a crazy woman who wanted him to impregnate her. What makes this novel so much more striking than it’s various imitators is that King is willing to go all the way with the premise. Generally in thrillers, there is a certain line between kidnapper and victim that isn’t crossed; the kidnapper will kill his victim if necessary, will starve them and beat them up, but there’s still this basic unwillingness to fully exploit the possibilities of having someone completely and totally in your power.
Annie doesn’t have this unwillingness. The lengths she goes to, not only to keep Paul helpless physically but also wreck his mind and spirit, are both grotesque and shattering, enough so that no matter how many times I read the book, I never feel completely safe around it. Among the more incidental moments of abuse are three or four major set-pieces that serve to define the depths of Annie’s madness (in much the way a flashlight’s beam can define a chasm; you know the drop is there, now, but you have no idea how deep it goes), as well as scare the absolute crap out of you. One of those set-pieces, the most vicious one on the whole book, and probably one of the darkest moments in all of King’s fiction, caught me off guard this time around, if you can believe it. I knew it was coming, I knew when it would hit, but the closer I got, the more nervous I became, and that whole chapter was a surprisingly intense experience. I can’t remember what it was like the first time through; must’ve been pretty bad, though.
Perhaps even more surprising than my response to that horror was the strength of my reaction to an earlier bit that, on a surface level, doesn’t seem nearly as unpleasant: the scene when Annie, by, again, withholding his pain medication, forces Paul to burn the only copy of Fast Cars. Now, there’s no arguing that this would suck to the moon and back. You don’t even have to be a writer to realize it- everyone has things that they’ve put a lot of time and effort into and would not want to see destroyed. But as a writer (or any artist), good god, it’s nasty. I don’t know when I last read Misery, but it has to have been a few years; since then, I’ve finished a novel and started on a new one, as well as done a few short stories, and while I’ve been writing since I was twelve, this latest stuff is better- because it’s mine, because it feels like no one else could’ve written it. It took me three years to finish that novel, and while I doubt it will ever be published, the thought of destroying it makes me want to vomit. The thought of losing my current project (man, I hate that word) is even worse.
And that’s the real horror of Annie: she takes whatever she likes, she lays waste to all you believed sacrosanct, and you cannot reason with her. It is impossible to be safe when you’re in the control of a person who is utterly mad- banal and clichéd as that may sound, it’s a horror that not many novels of this ilk are truly willing to exploit. To bring it back to my interminable opening digression, Misery is one of the only stories I’ve read or seen that manages to bring me back to that sickly awful feeling I’d get every time I walked in Aunt Cathy’s front door, the way I became overly conscious of my heartbeat- too fast? too loud?- as I took off my shoes and set them neatly under the coat rack, always facing in, always with the laces under the tongue.
May not be the most pleasant memory in the world, but there’s a catharsis that comes from reliving such things in more comfortable times, as it robs the past of a little of its power. Plus, there’s the comfort of realizing there are parts of you that people like Annie (or Cathy) can’t get at no matter how much they might wish to. Cathy’s cruelty was more about the chaotic instability of her emotions than any conscious plan to destroy us, but even if she was infinitely more banal than Annie, it’s reassuring to realize that I could still have something that was mine that even her randomness couldn’t take from me.
SCREEN:
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Misery, directed by Rob Reiner
Rob Reiner, nee “Meat Head,” has directed such sweet and sunshine classics as When Harry Met Sally, The American President and the while less sunny still undeniably cheerful This Is Spinal Tap; he’s also directed a movie with a woman wielding a sledgehammer over the body of a bed-ridden crash victim. (He’s also directed a movie with Bruce Willis in a bunny suit, but no way in hell am I going there today.) There is no movie in Reiner’s oeuvre after Misery that explores that sort of horror, and there was no movie before it, either; the closest one can get is Stand By Me which, while not a thriller by any stretch of the imagination, at least comes from the same original author. (If you’re not in the know, Stand By Me is an adaptation of Stephen King’s novella, “The Body,” which was collected in Different Seasons.)
Reiner had worked with the screenwriter of today’s selection before, though, on another s-and-s classic, The Princess Bride. Take a quick look at the credits list for William Goldman and you’ll see that, while this was his first adaptation of a Stephen King novel, he did have some experience in thrillers, with The Stepford Wives, Marathon Man, and Magic. The fact that only one of them (Marathon Man) is all that great isn’t exactly a beacon of hope in the darkness, but one is better than nothing. Besides, Goldman had some great credits under his belt by the time he turned his eye to a psychotic nurse and her inappropriate tool-use, so had I been paying attention to movie press back when Misery was announced (and had there been an internet at the time for me to pay attention to), I would not have been much concerned by his attachment to the project.
Reiner, though… The man isn’t always a bad director, and had yet to get bogged down in the rut which has generated such recent tripe as The Story of Us and Alex & Emma, but his sensibilities generally ran to the commercial, uplifting, and wholly unscary. Misery is unquestionably commercial, and I personally find the ending to be quite uplifting, but unscary? That would be death for a story like this. If Annie Wilkes isn’t a figure of terror, if she doesn’t perform at least one or two acts that have you shaking in your seat, then the whole thing just becomes another made-for-TV-movie, where everything is neatly done and nobody is ever truly in danger. I hafta confess, if this movie was made now and I heard Reiner was involved, I would go the geek cliché route of bitching loudly and severely to anyone who could be bothered to listen. What if he makes it a comedy? I’d be screaming. “Meg Ryans is Annie in Misery!”
Enough to give you nightmares, really.
My fears, for the most part, would have been in vain. Misery does have some funny moments (“This is so romantic! I’m gonna go put on my Liberace records!”), but they are blackly funny, and there is never any doubt that Annie is dangerous. In fact, Reiner’s experience with comedy and Goldman’s natural talent for one-liners serve to give the movie a nice energy it might not otherwise have had; that energy, I think, was one of the big reasons the flick was the success it was, as it did great box office, earned an Academy Award for it’s lead actress, and to this day is considered to be one of the best King adaptations ever, as well as one of the best horror films to come out of the nineties.
So how’s about the acting? James Caan in the lead is- serviceable. It’s an odd sort of role for him, as Caan generally plays angry, physical men with lots of energy and inherent athleticism; to stick him in a bed or wheelchair for almost the whole running time seems a curious waste of his abilities. He doesn’t embarrass himself, but he does spend maybe a little too much time in “-the hell?” mode, as if he isn’t so much frightened at his situation as he is annoyed by the inconvenience of it all.
In a story like this, it makes sense that there wouldn’t be much in the way of supporting cast, and there isn’t; the opening credits lists nearly ever actor who gets more than a line, with only three or four left unnamed till the end. But while not all of them get enormous parts, the three secondary majors (if you follow) are good to great. Lauren Bacall has a brief bit as Paul’s agent- her big purpose is to be classy and sophisticated, and she does fine by it. Frances Sternhagen is the sheriff’s wife, and she’s funny as hell, probably getting the lion’s share of the intentionally funny one-liners. Richard Farnsworth, as Sheriff Buster, is the stand out, getting the third largest amount of screen time, and investing it with a warmth and dignity and humor that makes you wish you could spend more time with him.
By far the most important cast member, though, and the one that would most likely give a casting director absolute fits, is the actress playing Annie Wilkes, and like all movies of this type (person A is stalked/hounded/captured/tickled by person B), the whole thing rises and falls on how believable and entertaining her performance is. Kathy Bates won the Oscar for her work here, and it’s obvious why. As written, the role often veers into camp, when we are encouraged to laugh at Wilkes for her awful taste in things and her absurd unwillingness to swear while performing even the most heinous acts of violence. But as Bates plays it, when she spouts off about Liberace or uses words like “cockadoodie,” you snicker, but you feel sort of bad about it, as though you were being mean to some grade school kid whose parents couldn’t afford to get him a good haircut. The movie would’ve played all right if Annie was completely vicious and unsympathetic, but having her be occasionally normal and even sweet makes her real, and makes her relationship with Paul even more interesting.
Direction-wise, Reiner’s work is competent and professional, but never much more than that. His idea of a flourish is to cant the camera angle sidewise like from an episode of the original “Batman” show, to indicate that the situation has become badly skewed; and it works well enough. This isn’t the sort of story that demands inventive shots and elaborate blocking, although I’m sure the temptation would be there when you considered how much of it takes place in one room. Reiner doesn’t milk some suspense scenes quite as intensely as one might- the bit where Paul takes a brief trip outside his room is nicely handled, but later bits feel sorta flat- but all in all, it’s good, and it could’ve been so much worse.
COMPARE/CONTRAST:
You’ll notice that my comments on Misery the novel were a good deal longer than my comments on Misery the film, and that isn’t just because I’m lazy. (Although that’s part of it.) The movie, while it’s almost universally considered a horror classic, is that odd sort of classic that never really grabbed people’s imaginations the way really good horror flicks can. Sure, there were the parodies on TV around when the movie was released (like that “Quantum Leap” episode), but it’s never received a special edition DVD release, and when it gets mentioned in top 100 lists, it always seems like one of those placeholders which, while deserving of their position, are not the sort of movies we read these lists for.
Watching the movie again for this review, I think I figured out why. A good horror movie, in addition to scaring you while you’re in the theater watching it, should be able to ride home with you in the back seat of your car, lay under you bed while you sleep, tease the shower curtain while you bathe. In short, you should feel threatened beyond what you feel when the movie’s playing; the movies we remember most, talk about most, are the ones that gave us nightmares, haunted our lives for a time, and even to this day we’re not completely rid of. Doesn’t sound entirely pleasant, and it’s not, but there is pleasure in it; since most of us don’t experience that degree of real terror in our daily lives, there’s a delight to getting as close as possible to that emotion, and surviving it. You don’t ride a roller-coaster because you like fast moving air, you ride it for that second where you know you’re going to fall to your death, and then you don’t.
Misery doesn’t have much in the way of this sort of thing. You see it, you enjoy it, you get caught up in the suspense, but that’s it. Once it’s done, you have no need to think about it anymore, no reason to check your closet to make sure Annie Wilkes isn’t under your bed. There are two scenes that actually do manage to hit the sort of horror I’m getting at, and to be fair, both are good (one, in fact, is great), but those two scenes are not quite enough. This is a sterile sort of horror movie, where you know when the scares are coming, they’re evenly spaced, and, excluding the two I mentioned, they seem to be handled with plastic gloves on, so nobody gets contaminated.
You could argue, if you choose to ignore my fragrant hyperbole, that this sort of limited scope is built into the story itself. Since the novel is about a crazy woman who tortures an author, it doesn’t exactly scream universal danger, unless you happen to be a popular novelist (in which case, brrrrrr). While there is some truth in that, I don’t think it gets the filmmakers off the hook entirely. After all, I’ve never lived on Elm Street, but that never stopped Freddy Kruger from freaking me out. (Ditto with going to summer camp, or rather, being a counselor at a summer camp and having promiscuous sex.) Besides, the original novel is the kind of scary I’m talking about. King’s Annie is enough to give anybody nightmares, but while some of Reiner’s failure to emulate that kind of fright probably has to do with the simple fact that he’s not as good at scary stuff as King is, it’s also because of certain changes he and Goldman intentionally made to the story, changes which both tone down it’s horror and also rob it of it’s magic.
Spoiler city, from now to the end- just a warning.
There’s this anecdote running round, about how Stanley Kubrick called Stephen King in the middle of the night while Kubrick was making The Shining, and Kubrick asked King if he believed in God. King said yes, Kubrick said I thought so, I don’t, and hangs up. This is a bit King himself has told more than a few times, but even if I had no confirmation that it came from the man himself, I’d still believe that it was at least true in spirit simply by reading the source novel and watching the movie. The difference between the two philosophies is shockingly clear, from moments (the fate of the cook Halloran in both versions) to the overall impression one walks away from each version with.
While not on quite the same scale of intensity, I think it could be said that King and William Goldman have certain differences of opinion as well. Both, I think, love writing, although I think King loves it a bit more, but while King embraces his standing as a writer of popular fiction, you often get the sense from Goldman that he wishes he could’ve done something better. These days, he’s generally known for his screenplays, as well as The Princess Bride, but he’s written a number of novels besides Bride, and in fact started his career out as a novelist. He hasn’t done much in that direction for a decade or two, though, and there’s a certain bitterness to some of his later work that makes this silence not entirely surprising.
Not to say his novels are bad, mind you; I went through a month or two when I gobbled up all I could find. He has a strong sense of story values, structure, and manages to have one good twist- a twist that’s actually surprising- in every one. Unfortunately, all the books I bought, I had to buy used, as his stuff is for the most part out of print and apart from Bride, it’s doubtless that many of those novels will still be remembered after he’s gone. So maybe Goldman, while he loves writing, isn’t all that happy with it too. Maybe he always saw himself doing better, like Paul Sheldon did for a while; and maybe, unlike Paul Sheldon, he was never able to simply accept what he was doing, what he could do very well, as being good enough. True or not, it’s a simple fact that movie Paul reaches some very different conclusions than book Paul, and there’s a change made at the movie’s climax that makes that split a decisive one.
Goldman also changes Paul and Annie’s relationship, although he’s not alone in the process; Reiner no doubt had a big hand in setting the tone, and James Caan and Kathy Bates did their fair share as well. In the book, Annie is scary from the start; she keeps up a decent front, but there’s never any doubt that she’s dangerous. In the movie, there’s an attempt to keep her mental health in doubt for most of the first act- while book-Paul forgoes asking Annie why he’s in her house instead of a hospital because he’s afraid how she’ll respond, movie-Paul asks her repeatedly, forcing movie-Annie to come up with a series of increasingly less believable excuses. (They’ve also cut out the sequence where Annie throws the soup bowl, which is a shame.) While I doubt that anyone watching the movie was fooled by the subtlety (after all, you can’t market a guy-being-held-captive movie without advertising that he’s being held captive), it does make the scene where movie-Annie discovers Misery is dead a nice act break.
Some would say it also makes the interactions between the two more believable as well, but I don’t believe that. It’s more movie-believable, which is a different thing entirely. We want our logic in movies, we want to be able to understand the way characters are acting, and it makes sense for the crazy person to hide they’re crazy, and the sick person to ask about a phone. King’s scenario actually seems more real-world believable, as folks don’t generally behave in logical fashions, and they certainly don’t behave, as movie-Annie does, as though they were trying to make the audience lower their guard.
The fact that movie-Paul doesn’t immediately know something is wrong with his captor- he suspects, but doesn’t know- also points to another major change from book to movie, Annie’s very presence and her power over Paul. In the book, Annie is compared repeatedly to an evil goddess, a being of unknowable power who’s presence infest nearly every part of her captive’s life. That she’s a real person, with serious mental problems, there’s no question; but such is Paul’s utter dependence on her, and her systematic ability to break down his sense of existing outside of the room he’s trapped in, that he can’t help but view her as not just a person but a force that gives and destroys for reasons beyond understanding.
Movie-Annie is just a sad nutcase, in a long series of sad-nutcases, who hurts people when she gets upset. Due to Kathy Bates, she’s far more human than most of the psychos we see in movies, but there’s no majesty to her, no true sense of horror at her presence. In the book, the woman is very big, to the point where Paul is uncertain he could take in her a fight even in the best of health. Kathy Bates is not that big, however, and there’s no real question that James Caan could hold his own against her if he was in better health. Because of this, Caan never seems truly terrified of her. Oh, he’s worried at points, and there is that one scene where he freaks out a bit, but even after that, there’s never the sense that he’s walking on eggshells around her, frightened at giving even the slightest excuse to set her off. He’s sarcastic with her, even flips her the bird once, and that serves to lower the tension; but it’s almost worse when he’s pretending to be sincere, as he’s so bad at it, you’d think anyone with half a brain would spot the falseness. Movie Annie doesn’t, of course, which is another weird thing- she should be deeply mistrustful of everyone, always sure deep down that they’re out to get her.
As Goldman has a tendency to strip the mysticism out of stories, and Reiner would probably be more comfortable the further away from actual horror he could get, I think the blame lies firmly on their doorsteps. Probably a little more in Goldman’s direction than Reiner’s, actually; movie Annie seems to represent all that is tacky, tasteless and tone-deaf in this world, and as she is a huge fan of the kind of work movie Paul is trying to get past, it could be argued that she exists so Goldman can make the point that, if people like this are drawn to such fiction, how it could it be worth anything at all?
However, while I think the novel is far superior to the movie in regards to Annie and Paul, I can’t exactly blame the filmmakers for the changes. Time and again we’ve seen movies try to emulate the feverish tone of a King novel, and time and again we’ve see them fail miserably. It may very well be impossible to get a more faithful Annie onto the screen; or if it is possible, I don’t think these were the men to do it. Better all around that they stuck to what they know. I do think Caan was miscast, however, and that the film would’ve been much more intense, and ultimately successful, if they had been willing to be a bit more honest with the abuser/abused relationship.
A number of other changes dot the landscape… there is, of course, the infamous foot scene I’ve alluded to before. In the novel, at around the two-thirds mark, Annie discovers that Paul has been sneaking out of his room, and decides to take steps. She can’t kill him, because she wants to find out how the book he’s writing ends, so instead she hobbles him by cutting off his foot.
It’s a nasty, brutal sequence, and once you read it, you don’t forget it. Up until that point Annie has done some horrible stuff, but the amputation is above and beyond; it breaks what you had assumed the limits to be, and while the novel stays amazing for the remainder, it never quite reaches that level of shock again (although it comes close).
In the movie, we have the same sequence of events, but instead of chopping off his foot, Annie basically pulverizes Paul’s ankles with a sledgehammer. We see her swing back the sledge, and see the foot snap too far to the right when contact is made- and damn, it’s ugly. The change, I think, makes sense. While the sledgehammer blows are more low-key than the axe would’ve been, as there’s no blood, and no blowtorch (to cauterize) and no dismembered foot, it’s still as viscerally effective, and easily the most arresting sequence in the film.
The movie also spends more time outside the house than the novel does, as it watches Sheriff Buster and his wife investigate Paul’s disappearance. This is a nice touch, as it gives an additional plot-line to the film (a lot of the novel is internal, which is difficult to get on the screen without narration, and I don’t think narration would’ve been very effective), and it also gives us the sense that someone is coming to rescue Paul, that all he needs to do is hold on and Buster will eventually figure out the clues and find him. The pay-off being, when Buster eventually does find Paul, Annie blows him away with her shotgun. This serves the double duty of reminding us just how dangerous and deadly Annie is, as well as driving home the idea that if Paul wants to survive this, he’ll have to do it on his own.
There are lots of other changes, for the most part small ones, but this review has run long as it is. One last thing, though- and it’s actually the thing that made me want to write this in the first place. The climax of both of the book and the movie has Paul lighting the novel he wrote for Annie, Misery’s Return, on fire, and then beating, burning, and choking Annie to death when she tries to put the fire out. It’s a nifty final battle, as Paul finally gets his revenge for the book Annie forced him to burn earlier, and it ties in very well with the whole power of writing theme. The big difference between the book and the movie for this scene is that in the movie, Paul actually is burning the novel he wrote, while in the book, he’s just burning extra paper, and he’s hidden the real novel under the bed.
I’ve never been able to be a complete fan of the movie for this reason, although it’s hard explaining it to other people. The movie simplifies the situation too much. Annie is bad, and she thinks his new manuscript is bad, which means it must be good, especially now that it’s gone. Annie thinks Misery dying is bad, so that must be good too. And Annie thinks Misery’s Return is great, so it must not be worth anything at all. In Goldman’s screenplay, Annie is that screaming populace that forces him to do crappy, hack work while his real talents lie elsewhere. There’s no ambiguity to it, never a hint that the Misery novels could have any serious value besides a monetary one; the whole conflict between Paul and Annie is reduced to Paul having to overcome his ravening fan base one last time.
In the novel, things aren’t so simple. Paul is distraught when he has to burn Fast Cars, but when he gets into writing Misery’s Return, he is amazed to find that he actually enjoys it, that it’s involving in a way he hadn’t anticipated- and he realizes, near the end, that maybe Fast Cars and all those other attempts to win prizes and amaze critics weren’t so hot after all. The story isn’t about him trying to get past his crazed fans and get up there with the literary greats- it’s about him learning that he’d been writing for himself all along, and that there is something just as good in popular fiction as there is in the other kind.
Goldman’s screenplay is contemptuous of Misery’s Return; he changes most of it from the original, and makes Annie’s one criticism sound hollow and stupid. What’s frustrating is that her criticism- that Paul’s first attempt at resurrecting Misery, by ignoring certain events of the previous novel is a cheat- isn’t stupid, that it’s in fact perfectly justified, and in the novel, Paul realizes it. You get the sense in the movie that Paul spends a month or two typing out generic gibberish, and that’s just plain wrong. In making this change, Goldman has robbed the novel of its soul, and what he fills in the space with afterwards is, while not entirely unpleasant, hardly satisfying.
Misery is about two things, storytelling and abuse. Misery, while it deals with Paul’s desire to be a “serious” author, is more about a guy being held captive by a loon. The movie is good, but the novel is amazing, and if you’ve only experienced the former, I strongly recommend you check out the latter.
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