Misery
I just got done watching the movie “Misery,” with James Caan and Kathy Bates. Incredible. Is it just me or were there about a million parallels in that movie?
I got interested in watching the movie a month ago when I saw a clip from it on a TV special called “100 Scariest Movie Moments.” Or at least, I think that’s what it was called. They didn’t include half of the scariest movie moments, in my opinion. But the movie itself was based on a book written by Stephen King, the man notorious for writing some of the scariest novels in the world. In the film, a famous book author by the name of Paul Sheldon (James Caan) has just finished writing his latest book in a long chain of stories called the “Misery” series. On his way back from a hotel in the mountains, a blizzard comes along and hits him pretty hard. When he wakes up, he’s in a bed in a farmhouse with a broken arm and two broken legs. A nurse named Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) found him in the snow and took him back to her house.
The good news is that Paul is safe and he’s with a person who’s a big fan of his “Misery” novels. The bad news is she likes them a little bit too much. She’s one of those hardcore fans who freaks out if there’s a smidgen of something in his work that she doesn’t like. So when he let’s her read the manuscript for his latest unpublished novel, she’s in for a surprise: Misery, the title character of the book, dies at the end of this novel. Just something that Sheldon had to do because he was tired of writing the books.
Now Annie Wilkes does not like this. If Misery dies, she doesn’t have any other life to go to. Add that to the fact that she’s a crazy biatch, and you understand what happens next. Annie realizes that she now has Paul Sheldon where she wants him and she can force him to write the books the way that she wants. So she forces him to burn the manuscript because apparently “God does not like it” and write up a new book entirely from scratch.
So here’s the situation: Paul Sheldon has two busted legs and an arm that’s less than good. He’s in a farmhouse, out in the middle of nowhere and the phones apparently don’t work. He has no choice but to do the bidding of his most obsessed fan and write what she wants. This does have something to say about being famous. I wonder what happened to Stephen King that inspired him to write this story.
What do we expect from Stephen King? We expect psychological horror, visual horror, real horror and little girls asking daddy to come play with them. If a Stephen King fan was disappointed, King would most certainly feel it because he just lost a member of his fan base. That’s what happens when you get a fan base based on a formula. Someone gets disappointed if there’s one thing out of place, therefore the whole thing has to come down.
I heard once that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes books in the 19th Century, got tired of doing Sherlock Holmes and decided to have him killed off in the last book, never to be seen again. Then people got pissed off at him and he wound up having to write the Sherlock Holmes books again years later, saying that Holmes didn’t really die at the end of the last book despite the fact that he fell off a FRIGGIN’ CLIFF. This is what fans’ll do to you. They either never want you to stop or never want you to kill off a hero, despite the fact that great heroes die. This is not the only time it’s happened either. As a member of the Sonic fandom, I remember roughly eight years ago when comic book scribe Ken Penders tried to have Sally killed off. She was the lead female character in the series and everybody though she was dead for several issues. Then several nasty e-mails to Ken Penders later and they were forced to bring her back to life with a freakishly lame plot twist.
For more recent examples on how this works, remember how pissed the entire planet got about the new Star Wars movies? Even though I can see why that happened. And how about with “The Matrix?” I mean sure, the sequels weren’t as high and mighty as the first one was, but when Neo and Trinity died in the third movie, the Matrix fan base mutated into a group of flesh-eating zombies who wanted the Wachowski Brothers’ heads on a pike. I mean, come on. If Neo was supposed to be a parallel to Jesus Christ, then what did you expect?
Stephen King must have felt the same way. He probably wrote himself into a position where he could only write what the fans wanted. He WAS Paul Sheldon in other words. And his fans…just another bunch of freaked out zombies. I wonder though: as a filmmaker, what would people begin to expect of me?
I got interested in watching the movie a month ago when I saw a clip from it on a TV special called “100 Scariest Movie Moments.” Or at least, I think that’s what it was called. They didn’t include half of the scariest movie moments, in my opinion. But the movie itself was based on a book written by Stephen King, the man notorious for writing some of the scariest novels in the world. In the film, a famous book author by the name of Paul Sheldon (James Caan) has just finished writing his latest book in a long chain of stories called the “Misery” series. On his way back from a hotel in the mountains, a blizzard comes along and hits him pretty hard. When he wakes up, he’s in a bed in a farmhouse with a broken arm and two broken legs. A nurse named Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) found him in the snow and took him back to her house.
The good news is that Paul is safe and he’s with a person who’s a big fan of his “Misery” novels. The bad news is she likes them a little bit too much. She’s one of those hardcore fans who freaks out if there’s a smidgen of something in his work that she doesn’t like. So when he let’s her read the manuscript for his latest unpublished novel, she’s in for a surprise: Misery, the title character of the book, dies at the end of this novel. Just something that Sheldon had to do because he was tired of writing the books.
Now Annie Wilkes does not like this. If Misery dies, she doesn’t have any other life to go to. Add that to the fact that she’s a crazy biatch, and you understand what happens next. Annie realizes that she now has Paul Sheldon where she wants him and she can force him to write the books the way that she wants. So she forces him to burn the manuscript because apparently “God does not like it” and write up a new book entirely from scratch.
So here’s the situation: Paul Sheldon has two busted legs and an arm that’s less than good. He’s in a farmhouse, out in the middle of nowhere and the phones apparently don’t work. He has no choice but to do the bidding of his most obsessed fan and write what she wants. This does have something to say about being famous. I wonder what happened to Stephen King that inspired him to write this story.
What do we expect from Stephen King? We expect psychological horror, visual horror, real horror and little girls asking daddy to come play with them. If a Stephen King fan was disappointed, King would most certainly feel it because he just lost a member of his fan base. That’s what happens when you get a fan base based on a formula. Someone gets disappointed if there’s one thing out of place, therefore the whole thing has to come down.
I heard once that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes books in the 19th Century, got tired of doing Sherlock Holmes and decided to have him killed off in the last book, never to be seen again. Then people got pissed off at him and he wound up having to write the Sherlock Holmes books again years later, saying that Holmes didn’t really die at the end of the last book despite the fact that he fell off a FRIGGIN’ CLIFF. This is what fans’ll do to you. They either never want you to stop or never want you to kill off a hero, despite the fact that great heroes die. This is not the only time it’s happened either. As a member of the Sonic fandom, I remember roughly eight years ago when comic book scribe Ken Penders tried to have Sally killed off. She was the lead female character in the series and everybody though she was dead for several issues. Then several nasty e-mails to Ken Penders later and they were forced to bring her back to life with a freakishly lame plot twist.
For more recent examples on how this works, remember how pissed the entire planet got about the new Star Wars movies? Even though I can see why that happened. And how about with “The Matrix?” I mean sure, the sequels weren’t as high and mighty as the first one was, but when Neo and Trinity died in the third movie, the Matrix fan base mutated into a group of flesh-eating zombies who wanted the Wachowski Brothers’ heads on a pike. I mean, come on. If Neo was supposed to be a parallel to Jesus Christ, then what did you expect?
Stephen King must have felt the same way. He probably wrote himself into a position where he could only write what the fans wanted. He WAS Paul Sheldon in other words. And his fans…just another bunch of freaked out zombies. I wonder though: as a filmmaker, what would people begin to expect of me?
posted by Jaimetud at 10:55 PM
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