Marc Olivier
*This essay has been excerpted from Marc Olivier, Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects, Indiana University Press, 2020, pp. 224-33.
You can find Household Horror at Amazon #ad or on Indiana University Press’s website.
Another hack writer snowbound in Colorado with a woman he’d like to kill, another typewriter embroiled in violent conflict over a typescript without end—Misery (1990), directed by Rob Reiner and adapted by William Goldman from Stephen King’s 1987 novel, has no haunted structure like The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, but the film shares a central preoccupation with typographic dysfunction and the problem of eternal return. Misery’s protagonist, Paul Sheldon (James Caan), is trapped by his own success as the creator of Misery Chastain, heroine of a Victorian-era series of bodice-ripper romance novels. Prisoner to his “number-one fan,” Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), Paul must type his way back to her good graces by resurrecting Misery on a defective Royal 10 typewriter—a sturdy “fifty-pound clunker” that Annie says she got for a great price “on account of it’s missing an n.” Misery, like The Shining, considers both the musicality and the violence of type through a writing project as torturously Sisyphean to Paul as “All work and no play” is to Jack or Wendy Torrance. Misery’s typewriter complicates the emancipatory narrative often associated with the machine’s invention and dramatizes the paradoxical coexistence of feminine and masculine tropes associated with its use.
Not one for subtlety, King characterizes typing as autoerotic sublimation: “You beat a typewriter instead of your meat.”[1] Paul’s survival depends on his ability to channel his energies through the keyboard, to become Misery, to play the Scheherazade to Annie’s Shahryar. King’s novel makes that comparison explicit, as Paul reflects, “Yes, he supposed he had been his own Scheherazade, just as he was his own dream-woman,” in his masturbatory fantasies.[2] Paul owes his success as a writer to his ability to transmute storytelling practices born of masturbation into something that endlessly defers climax. Scheherazade, who forestalls death through serial storytelling, is the prototype for the serial novelist or the screenwriters of Annie’s beloved childhood cliffhangers (or “chapter plays” as she calls them). Paul’s success has depended on his ability to maintain narrative stamina in order to please women, but he cannot do so without playing a woman whom he can never truly finish off, for Misery is Paul’s Scheherazade. Thus, the painfully formulaic plot twist that resurrects Misery on the clunky Royal is inseparable from social advancement—just as Scheherazade becomes queen and saves her own life through seriality, Misery’s Return begins, to Annie’s delight, with the surprise revelation of Misery’s nobility. Paul is king (Shahryar and Stephen) and queen. His life depends on the coexistence of the demanding reader and the seductive storyteller. Paul cannot “Jack (Torrance) off” alone in his room all day, for Annie will not abide so much uselessly spilled ink. Jack’s typescript is type for type’s sake, but Paul Sheldon serves at the pleasure of Annie Wilkes.
The typewriter complicates the pen-penis metaphor that has no doubt existed for as long as phallus-shaped writing implements have been placed in the hands of bored juvenile scribes. While the pen is naturally prone to comparisons with male genitalia, the typewriter, first marketed as the “machine to supersede the pen,” does not so readily accommodate sexual euphemisms.[3] The pen maintained its totemic virility (and continues to do so, if the luxury pen industry is any indicator) while the typewriter became a machine to prevent “pen paralysis.”[4] E. Remington and Sons, makers of both firearms and sewing machines, manufactured the Sholes and Glidden typewriter beginning in 1873 (later renamed the Remington No. 1) and aimed the machine initially at the male consumer, often exploiting the fear of “pen paralysis” in their advertising. Pen paralysis, a term that refers to both writer’s cramp and writer’s block, represented a threat to the chief measure of a man: his productivity. For what good is a man who can no longer wield his pen? As late as 1915, advertisements aimed at men were still playing up the fear of pen paralysis: “Pen Paralysis! Have you got it?” asks Remington in the Journal of the United States Artillery. Pen writing, the ad copy contends, creates needless waste that handicaps a man’s time and labor, “a handicap which means partial paralysis of all his energies.”[5] The implication in pen paralysis fearmongering is never that the typewriter represents virility but rather that it helps preserve a manly grip by preventing pointless expenditure of a man’s energy. The typewriter does not supersede the pen in phallic potency.
Misery‘s typewriter
In the workplace, the simultaneous acceptance of typewriters and women coincided to the point of a creating misleading conflation of woman and machine. No historian can resist mentioning that the word typewriter once referred to either the machine or the woman hired to use it—another mechanical bride for industrial man. Kittler is only slightly exaggerating when he writes, “Prior to the invention of the typewriter, all poets, secretaries, and typesetters were of the same sex.”[6] The percentage of women stenographers and typists in the United States skyrocketed from 4.5 percent in 1870 to 95.6 percent in 1930.[7] By 1890, less than two decades after the early Sholes and Glidden machines, 60 percent of all typing and stenography jobs were held by women.[8] The gender of secretaries underwent a radical shift after the invention of the typewriter, but the causal connection is often overstated.[9] If anything, the typewriter facilitated the transition of women into the office due to the machine’s lack of a gender. The argument that women were naturally suited to the typewriter thanks to superior dexterity came after women were already working as typists.[10] The Story of the Typewriter, published in 1923 for the fiftieth anniversary of the typewriter, includes a frontispiece entitled “Emancipation” and heralds (with angelic figures no less) Sholes as the man who changed women’s lives, but the emancipatory narrative is best viewed as an attempt to co-opt social and economic change after the fact.[11]
Kittler, who is quick to repeat the cum hoc fallacy that the typewriter is behind gender diversification in writing, secretarial work, and typesetting, not long thereafter credits typeface with the disappearance of “bipolar sexual differentiation.”[12] Simply put, typed words are desexualized words. “Mechanized and automatic writing refutes the phallocentrism of classical pens,” says Kittler.[13] Type replaces the steady flow of ink from the tip of a pen with a depersonalized, fragmented orchestration of writing as a musical performance. Penmanship paints words; type plays them. Each letter has its assigned part. No one has ever purchased a pen at a discount “on account of it’s missing an n.” And so that missing n is not only an opportunity to highlight the reader’s role in supplementing the text (or Annie’s role as an editor who volunteers to fill them in by hand); the missing n is also the malfunction that reveals, in the classic Heideggerian sense, the phenomenology of a tool that would have remained transparent were it not for the breakdown.
The missing key shows that the “alphabet piano” metaphor is a phenomenological reality and not just a figure of speech or a sales strategy. Early typewriter history is full of alternative keyboard layouts (and alternatives to the keyboard), various approaches to upper- and lowercase letters, and differing levels of visual engagement with the machine or with the type itself.[14] But the first tectonic shift of the modern typewriter is the fracturing of writing into keys, whatever their arrangement. That shift disrupts certain phallocentric associations (but by no means eradicates phallocentrism) and adds new musical gestures and rhythms similar to classical keyboard instruments. The Samuel W. Francis writing machine of 1857, a commercially unviable mechanism for typing made of wood, metal, and ivory keys, is the most piano-like typewriter ever built, but even the conventional four rows of black keys on the archetypal 1895 Underwood have never lost their connection to music.
“The Typewriter,” composed for typewriter and orchestra by Leroy Anderson (best known for the Christmas song “Sleigh Ride”), exemplifies the comical disjunction and uncanny correspondence between the typewriter and the piano. The piece features a soloist seated at a typewriter as if a concert pianist. The typist performs rapid keystrokes and rhythmic carriage returns accented by the “ding” of typewriter’s bell in time to the orchestra’s lively accompaniment. That novelty piece was once associated with the flamboyant showman and pianist Liberace, who, fittingly, is the only man other than Paul Sheldon that Annie Wilkes honors with a shrine her living room. “I’m going to put on my Liberace records!” exclaims Annie once Paul brings Misery back to life in the noble manner that satisfies her standards for verisimilitude. “You do like Liberace, don’t you?” Paul forces a smile and lies. We know that Paul is a sports-arena kind of guy who would not be caught dead at a Liberace concert. Thus, the subsequent typing montage set to Liberace signals acquiescence (after a failed poisoning) to Annie—an oddball coupling of her two favorite men to parallel the “oddball situation” (as Paul calls it) of the collaboration. To Annie, the pairing makes perfect sense, while to the audience, the juxtaposition is as comical as “The Typewriter” novelty piece. The montage shows Paul typing chapter after chapter of Misery’s Return, extreme close-ups of the hands and keyboard in profile and from above, arpeggio-like movements of the fingers across the keys, the occasional flourish of a raised hand, and matched shots of Paul at the machine in profile spanning days of labor, all performed in lockstep with Liberace’s overwrought rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
The Liberace/Sheldon piano/typewriter montage moves from comical to something resembling harmony. Paul appears to be writing at record pace, Annie has nothing but positive feedback, and shots of the sheriff reading one of Paul’s paperbacks complete a representation of writing, editing, publishing, and reading—acts that the typewriter brings into closer association, according to McLuhan.[15] All the while Paul is regaining strength. He and the typewriter are playing a double game. Paul lifts the typewriter above his head as if to smash it but then brings it back down, and then we realize that the old Royal 10 is rehabilitating the arm that he keeps in a sling. The device once marketed as a cure for pen paralysis is now secretly helping Paul shoulder-press his way back to full upper-body strength. After the concerto climaxes, accented by the “ding” of the typewriter bell and a clap of thunder, the mood shifts. Paul does a few shoulder presses before Annie walks in looking morose, suicidal, and probably homicidal. From this point to the end, the typewriter starts to resemble the entity that frightened Wendy Torrance with its intimate and exclusionary relationship with her husband, its endless expenditure, and its refusal to satisfy the curious reader with an anticipated narrative.
McLuhan’s vision of typing as a liberating activity is only partially convincing because, despite all the talk of emancipation, typing as a (re)generative activity has historically privileged men over women, just as McLuhan does with his examples: “The poet at the typewriter can do Njinsky leaps or Chaplin-like shuffles and wiggles. Because he is an audience for his own mechanical audacities, he never ceases to react to his own performance. Composing on the typewriter is like flying a kite”[16]—or like masturbating. The book that Paul finished before his captivity, the one Annie hates and demands that he, an “old dirty birdie,” burn in order to be cleansed, has no title and, by Paul’s own admission, no discernable plot. “What’s it about?” asks Annie. “It’s crazy, but I don’t really know,” says Paul. Of course, we know the book is a gritty, semiautobiographical tale of life in the slum, but all Annie can see is profanity. Left to his own devices, Paul’s dream project is to write about himself and about nothing, to produce untitled work for no one but himself. Not so different from Jack’s book, Untitled triggers hysteria for Annie just as Jack’s plotless reams of self-referential variations on a proverb trigger Wendy. Leaps, wiggles, and shuffles, the exuberant gestures of McLuhan’s typophilia are allowed to Annie, Wendy, and many other women at best only vicariously. In the novel, The Shining, Wendy earns money as a typist for English professors while Jack pursues his dream of being a writer.[17] As for Annie, even when she pretends to be an aspiring writer to explain the presence of a typewriter in her house to the sheriff, she does so as a failure. Annie is a consumer of type. Annie’s status as a serial killer is her one breakthrough into a male-dominated vocation, but the plight of the serial killer vis-à-vis publishing is to rely on the journalists to author the story. The serial killer is a maniacal scrapbooker, a collage artist, a clip-and-paste appropriator of memories written by others. Annie’s only book is her Memory Lane scrapbook.
Misery’s typewriter winds up Paul’s accomplice in brutal acts orchestrated as poetic justice. Paul postpones Annie’s murder-suicide pact by promising to finish the book in order to bring Misery back to the world for good. He teases Annie with the prospect of answering all the cliffhanger questions in Misery’s story, but then he refuses satisfaction, not in the pleasurable manner of Scheherazade but as a definitive power reversal. “Remember how for all those years nobody knew who Misery’s real father was, or if they’d ever be reunited? It’s all here. Does she finally marry Ian or will it be Winthorne? It’s all right here,” says Paul as he lights a match and sets fire to the pages he has doused in lighter fluid. Misery’s Return suffers the same fate as Untitled. Annie lunges toward the burning manuscript while Paul uses the opportunity to bludgeon her with the typewriter. As the fight continues, Paul grabs the smoldering pages and shoves them in her mouth. “You want it? Eat it!” In King’s novel, Paul yells, “Suck my book,” lest there be any doubt that this is an act of oral rape by text. Annie fights back but trips over Paul’s leg and falls headfirst—“ding”—onto the typewriter. A couple more blows to the head with an iron pig and Annie is dead.
“To save time is to lengthen life,” says the proverb adopted for the Remington typewriter seal. Typewriting thus imagined represents a promise to stave off death. And in a way, the typewriters in Misery and The Shining do just that: they forestall death for as long as the typing continues. Instead of looking at type through the narrative of progress, films such as Misery and The Shining allow us to sit uncomfortably with type that refuses narrative and with typewriters that record paralysis as much as they free the hand from it. Annie Wilkes is as much a victim of pen paralysis as she is a victim of the typewriter. Jack Torrance is more an explicator of type than an author. Typewriter horror allows the machine to help and to hinder, to function and to malfunction, to move fluidly between gender stereotypes, and finally to be more than a mechanical servant. A Royal 10 typewriter ad with a speech bubble coming out of the platen best expresses the sentiment of horror’s typewriter: “I’ll talk for myself.”
Notes:
[1] King, Misery, 226.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Sholes and Glidden.
[4] On the lower end of the pen spectrum, the 2012 introduction of BIC “For Her” pens was as telling as it was ill advised.
[5] Journal of the United States Artillery, vol. 43, 1915, advertising section, vii.
[6] Kittler, 184.
[7] From US census data cited in Davies, 10.
[8] Lupton, 43.
[9] See Davies, 55–56.
[10] Ibid., 55.
[11] Herkimer County Historical Society, frontispiece.
[12] Kittler, 187.
[13] Ibid., 206.
[14] See Polt for wonderfully defamiliarizing alternatives to the canonical machine.
[15] See McLuhan, 230.
[16] Ibid.
[17] See King, The Shining, 53.
Works Cited:
Davies, Margery W. Woman’s Place Is at the Typewriter: Office Work and Office Workers, 1870-1930. Temple University Press, 1982.
Herkimer County Historical Society, The Story of The Typewriter, 1873-1923. Andrew H. Kellogg Company, 1923.
King, Stephen. Misery. Viking, 1987.
—. The Shining. Pocket Books, 1977.
Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated, with an Introduction by Geoffrey Winthrope-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford University Press, 1999.
Lupton, Deborah. “‘Precious Cargo’: Foetal Subjects, Risk and Reproductive Citizenship.” Critical Public Health, vol. 22, no. 3, 2012, pp. 329-40.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New American Library, 1964.
Misery. Directed by Rob Reiner, Columbia Pictures, 1990.
Polt, Richard. “Typology: A Phenomenology of Early Typewriters.” The Classic Typewriter Page.
Sholes & Glidden. The Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer. George and Martin, 1874
