Creating something, regardless of your canvas of choice, is a frustrating, tumultuous process. The act requires sacrifice, both of self and ideology, resulting in something that goes out into the world and, in turn, takes on new life. And, sometimes, the creation one worked so diligently to birth, gives way to a creation of its own.
Misery (1990), based on the exquisite novel by Stephen King, is about the triangle that exists between the creator, their art and the audience who interprets it. Interpretation is a metamorphosis of sorts, a lens which can vary from individual to individual that forever alters the art through which it is being viewed. The meaning and purpose behind a creation becomes diluted and subjective— the more popular it is, the more minds digesting it, the less control the creator has over the work’s ultimate impact.
Misery presents a simple construct: an artist, Paul Sheldon, and his biggest fan, Annie Wilkes, are stuck together in a secluded cabin. The web which has united them seems simple and convenient enough at the outset, an operation of the grand workings of fate that only a writer with the proper amount of imagination and self-doubt could accept. However, as the runtime progresses, the narrative shifts and Paul can’t help but wonder if he’s found himself in a story right out of one of his novels.
The film exposes several terrifying truths about fandom, the least of which being the one-way level of intimacy that comes about in absolute, unwavering dedication. Annie Wilkes is Paul Sheldon’s biggest fan. His words pervade her every waking moment. His imagination has become her world, her escape and, in many ways, her only companion. Her life revolves around his mind.
And, yet, Paul Sheldon has never met Annie. Knows nothing about her. Is indifferent to her. He wields a power over her, her happiness, but he can’t possibly understand the magnitude of that power— nor should he have to. After all, the artist neither has a responsibility to create or to share.
This dichotomy of expectation runs through the whole of the film, flittering in and out of each of Paul and Annie’s interactions. The tension builds as Annie’s expectations of Paul become more clear. At its core, this is a movie about an artist being forced to genuflect to their audience. All Paul wants to do is be rid of the famous Misery character which his publisher wants him to write about, so he killed her. Certainly the character was a work of fiction, his fiction, but to people like Annie… Misery was real and her death can not go unanswered.
No scene better represents the shared dance that exists between the author and their readership than that where Annie confronts Paul about leaving his room. He is mending and able to get around. He has been searching for an escape. As the two converse, as Paul attempts to conceal the truth and guide his captor, Annie reveals she’s more savvy than she lets on. The true dangers of the thoughtlessness of control and childlike mixing of reality and fiction reveal themselves. Annie believes that she is shepherding Paul toward his greatest creation and that it is her responsibility to see that his endeavours are carried to fruition.
The scene is as carefully scripted as it is carried out. Simple and straightforward, leaning on the incredible performances of James Caan and Kathy Bates, the events play calmly and carefully off of the subtle tension that had been building since the moment Paul Sheldon opened his eyes to find himself in Annie Wilkes’ guest room. The moment of ‘hobbling’ serves as a creative choice in and of itself, once again reminding the viewer that artistic generation is painful and crippling, and at times controlled as much by the art’s intended audience as it is the artist themselves.
THE SCENE
Paul wakes to find Annie standing over him. She reveals that she’s aware he has been leaving his room. Paul denies the accusations but Annie continues, revealing also that she knows about the knife and bobby pin he has been storing under the mattress. She tells a story about mine workers who had been hobbled years back to ensure they could not run away, but would continue their work. Paul begs her to reconsider. Annie places a block of wood between Paul’s feet, raises a sledgehammer and breaks his ankle. He screams. She breaks the other and tells him she loves him as he continues to scream in agony.
THE SCRIPT
THE SCREEN
The scene begins as scripted with Liberace’s voice drifting in the room, annotated as a VOICE we’ve never heard in the movie before. The disembodied voice of an unknown that’s somehow familiar provides the perfect, altogether confusing tonal experience for Paul to awaken to.
Paul stirs in a close up, dazed and dreamy, smiling as though content. The script calls for him to realize that he is strapped to his bed and that He can move his arms, but that’s it. The film holds on his still sleepy face as Annie’s voice calls his name offscreen. That’s when he turns, mumbling.
The screenplay reads that Annie looks very together. It continues her eyes are bright. Too bright. Way too bright. The word choice and repetitive nature of the description suggests an unhinged awareness, a heightened state even for Annie Wilkes.
The film, on the other hand, cuts to a close up of Annie beside Paul, rather than at the foot of his bed. She is busy with something, wearing a look of determination and a steady smile. Her eyes are lit with intense purpose as she says her line as it appears in the script: Paul, I know you’ve been out.
The film cuts to a medium-wide shot of Paul, now fully conscious as he surveys the bed. Although this realization is shifted only seconds into the scene, pushing it back provides a bit of a shock and a good foundation for the dread which will slowly begin to mount in the scene. At this point, slow, sorrowful music kicks in and Paul responds to Annie, feigning ignorance.
The dialogue plays out as written, as the camera cuts back and forth between the two, Paul maintaining hapless denial and Annie pressing confidently forward. Eventually, the image cuts to a low angle, medium-wide shot from the opposite side of Paul’s bed. Annie surveys him in her matronly way, while Paul’s other hand carefully attempts to find the knife he had hidden beneath the mattress.
The dance between them is overt and crumbles as the scene plays out. The screenplay describes Paul as totally honest and sincere as if trying to convince even the reader that his motivations are as they seem. Annie gets little Action-Description devoted to her in this portion as her omniscience is obvious from the beginning and brings with it an inevitable conclusion.
The film cuts back to the same close up shot of Annie as before, wearing the same driven smile: ANNIE, as she brings the fat-hand led knife out of her skirt pocket.
The viewer never sees where she draws it from; as in the film, the knife simply appears from the bottom of the frame beside her face with a soft, dangerous swish. Her words in the script are blocked together, but the film breaks them up. For, after she says is this what you’re looking for? the image shifts back to a close up of Paul on the bed. The intercutting continues as she turns away and says the remainder of her dialogue, almost amused by the man’s antics. She even twirls the bobby pin with a devious grin as she reveals that she found his “key”.
At this point, Annie moves to the foot of the bed, something the screenplay called for at the beginning. However, the physical positioning of Annie, starting close and intimate and slowly moving further away reflects the emotional detachment she is able to employ when dealing with Paul. He is something and someone that she loves the idea of, yet a creation of her own design that she is still refining.
An unfinished work of art.
Annie delivers the next portion of dialogue with some humility, referring to what Paul might be thinking of her due to what he saw in her scrapbook. All the while, the image continues to cut back to Paul, waiting to see how his fate unfolds. He has become a passenger, his efforts to take control discovered and thwarted.
The film skips the next bit of description, opting to wait to reveal the sound of the sledgehammer and instead focus on Paul Sheldon. In the screenplay, there is simply a large block of dialogue for Annie, however the film chooses to instead visualize the deconstruction of Paul’s carefully manicured faux relationship with Annie Wilkes.
The image starts on a medium shot of Paul in the bed as Annie begins to talk. As she does so, the camera moves in on Paul. He loses some of his composure. His breathing intensifies. His comfortability wanes.
Last night it came so clear. I realize you just need more time. Eventually, you’ll come to accept the idea of being here.
Then, the film cuts to a medium close of Annie. This is where the THUMP can be heard and she continues. As with Paul, the camera moves slowly in on her. However, rather than losing composure she is building up confidence.
Paul, do you know about the early days at the Kimberly Diamond Mine? Do you know what they did to the native workers who stole diamonds?
The back and forth continues. The camera holds on Paul, struggling as Annie says, Don’t worry, they didn’t kill them. Then the image cuts back to a playful Annie as she continues offhandedly, That would be like junking a Mercedes just because it had a broken spring—
Finally, the shot lands on Paul once more. His terror is mounting, his breathing reminiscent of a dying man, face to face with death and all the unknown horrors that might entail: No, if they caught them they had to make sure they could go on working, but they also had to make sure they could never run away.
Then the image is back to a close up of Annie as she reaches the climax of her story: The operation is called hobbling.
Annie bends down and Paul attempts to raise his head, alarmed and confused as before. The shot cuts to a close up of a plank of wood being placed strategically between his feet, exactly as the script reads. Paul desperately attempts to maintain calm and care in his words, forcing his tone to be as casual as he can muster, in spite of his clear desperation:
Annie, whatever you’re thinking about, don’t do it.
The camera again cuts to a close up of Annie, raising the sledgehammer. The film does away with several blocks of dialogue, expelling Paul’s pleading and rearranging what’s written for Annie and Paul’s exchange. The flow is more natural, the awful act more disturbing as the events in the film merely allow Paul to get out Annie for God’s— before cutting him off with dialogue from a few paragraphs later in the script:
Shh darling, trust me—
Paul responds with immediacy, shedding any semblance of his act:
God’s sake!
In kind, Annie soothingly provides her comfort: It’s for the best.
The film breaks the mold of close up exchanges and cuts to a medium wide as the sledgehammer flies through the air in front of Annie. In full view, the sledgehammer makes contact with the ankle. With a sharp CRACK of breaking bone, Paul’s foot snaps hard to the right.
Again Paul appears in a close up as he releases a tormented shriek. The film cuts back to Annie, casually making her way to the other side of the bed. Her response to Paul’s ferocious anguish is delivered saccharine and sweet:
Almost done, just one more.
She raises the sledgehammer, again in a close up and swings. The same CRACK resounds as before, only this time no foot is seen bending acutely in the wrong direction. Paul screams again.
Annie appears in an extreme close up, passionate and engulfed in the heat of the moment. Out of context, one might assume this were a scene in a lurid romance. Then, her tone echoing that same rapturous devotion, she says to the man she has hobbled:
God, I love you…
Paul lies before her, a twitching, hollow shell, broken beyond recognition. Unable to reciprocate the love that has been bestowed upon him, but equally powerless to halt it.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
“The question is, what price do you pay in order to change your way in creating art?” Rob Reiner contemplated on the audio commentary for Misery found on the Scream Factory blu-ray disc (Available here). “How much pain do you have to go through in order to go away from what has been successful for you and forge a new path?”
The act of creation is fraught with dangers both internal and external. Creating art is to give a piece of one’s self to the world, to hope for acceptance and to revel in the affect of one’s voice on another. Still, buried within that process is an odd sort of relationship, one that is more often than not single sided, speaking to the raw power of creation, imagination and the ultimate resting place of artistic ideology.
What is love but the acceptance of another mind into your own? Does Annie Wilkes love Paul Sheldon? Or, rather, does it really matter if, in the end, she believes she does?
On the other hand, what is Paul Sheldon’s relationship to his readership? Does he owe them anything? They are, after all, the reason for his success. Or is his talent and creativity responsible?
Ultimately, Paul Sheldon is plagued with the same questions that the film is wrought with. Much of the movie’s runtime concerns brief, vignette-like interactions between Paul and Annie. The ease at which Paul is able to cater to her, to manipulate her and then the manner by which Annie strikes back and wrangle the situation to meet her desires.
We live in a world inundated with content. Art is everywhere. Stories abound. It is easy to fall into the world of a storyteller, to believe it to be real, to feel ownership inside of that fandom. Where that ownership take you, is a different story entirely. And how the storyteller fits into that, well, that’s for you to decide.
Still, the film is about more than the audience’s hold over the artist. More than that, as Rob Reiner pointed out, it’s about the price the artist pays for their art. Where they’re willing to go and what they’re willing to do to find motivation and break the creative mold.
Paul Sheldon wrote a series of books about a woman named Misery, two things he knew very little about. His painful spiral into the darker recesses of not only a devoted woman that loves him but the literal meaning of the word he so blindly applied as his protagonist’s moniker, ultimately leads him to a place of fertile invention— the very result he was hoping to achieve by dispatching of his series’ titular character.
Misery is an amalgam of different artistic voices. Based on a novel by Stephen King, William Goldman’s screenplay was then reworked and filmed by Rob Reiner who collaborated with Greg Nicotero and his effects team to create remote triggered hinge mechanism, gelatin legs allowing actors Kathy Bates and James Caan to bring it all to life. Nothing would have worked as well as did, evolved as much as it could have evolved, without every last one of those voices operating on the project.
Take, for example, William Goldman’s original version of the scene, modelled after Stephen King’s original version. “In my scene she cuts his feet off,” William Goldman remarks on a second commentary track found on the previously mentioned disc.
When he discovered the scene had been altered, William Goldman said he “went nuts,” but after finally seeing it play with an audience he conceded that the decision Rob Reiner spearheaded to break Paul’s ankles instead was the right call. “They would have hated us,” William Goldman remarked of the audience were they to have kept the original scene.
Ultimately, he concluded that Reiner was right and as the director pointed out in his own commentary track, the original scene had Paul Sheldon paying “too high a price.” Still, in the genial words of Rob Reiner, “I don’t think we compromised too much.”
Misery began as a singular creation, an artist’s vision, and through telling and retelling it evolved and became something altogether new. Somebody else’s, in a way and yet somehow belonging to all who toiled over its existence. No scene better embodies this notion, than the hobbling— a moment when the consumer decides to take action and turn their storyteller into a canvas of their own.
After all, creation may be painful and may require some degree of sacrifice, but when it all comes together… well, we remember why we do it in the first place, don’t we?
Misery (1990): Written by William Goldman & Directed by Rob Reiner
