Better In Your Head?--MISERY

 

Spoiler Alert: it's wasted on the miserable.

THE BOOK-Written by Stephen King, released 1987

THE MOVIE-Directed by Rob Reiner, written by William Goldman, released 1990

THE STORY-Best-selling author Paul Sheldon meets his "number one fan."

MIND THE GAP-A writer writing about writing? Hot damn, hope ya like yams! 

King's never concocted a more ferociously repulsive character than prudish psycho Annie Wilkes. She's a thunderclap of a tormentor, every convalescent's nightmare. And no one besides Kathy Bates could have done the dowdily-dressed, dumpy-bodied villain truest justice. Her perma-glaze gaze is the stuff of nightmarish dead ends. Her performance alone makes Misery a must-watch.

At one point, Paulie baby must peck out a manuscript on a typewriter missing the following keys: n, t, and e. For the past two months, I've been tapping away on a MacBook with a loose t and the following non-responsive letters: i, o, u, y. *

Evil woman, man whose greater artistic ambitions are stifled by the wildly-popular series of novels he rushes out for a frenzied female fanbase, weirdo rape fantasy...yeah, I can see how Misery could be misconstrued. I also see beyond that. When Stephen King released the fantastical The Eyes Of The Dragon in 1984, fans rebelled. "Where's our horror? Wherefore art the blood-soaked this-and-that, the wrested intestines, the botched homemade facelifts, the unexplainable unstoppable?" Throw in the icy-hot grip of hard drug addiction, and along came Misery. Annie Wilkes is King's exacting fanbase crammed into one unseemly, ungainly body; Paul Sheldon, the wronged, hobbled creator, is King himself. 

Say what you will about King, he puts the "care" in "character."

Choosing notorious red-ass James Caan as a wheelchair-bound author literally writing for his life was genius. He nails every line, every beat, and at no point did I ever think, "Hey, it's Sonny Corleone!"

Two other novels featured in the "Better In Your Head?" series are mentioned in Misery.

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-King sold the film rights under the condition that Rob Reiner would produce and direct. The becapped former "Meathead" understood the dark humor in the script (another William Goldman winner) and kept the proceedings palatable for those folks who wouldn't be upset that Annie running over a cop with a lawnmower didn't make the script.

And the film's great. But whatever Hitchcockian heights Reiner reaches are undercut by his constant awareness of a hypothetical audience. The book is a tornado bearing down on a nursery. Yes, it's a self-insert piece, plenty masturbatory, excellence over coherence in spots, but it is beautifully repulsive as well--a feedback loop of fear, respect and loathing that lingers long after the last page.

*True at the time, as most of my blog posts are first written out in longhand. One month after scribbling out this lamentation, I received a new MacBook.