Dawn Keetley
Stephen King published Misery on June 8, 1987, and he has claimed that the novel is, first and foremost, about the compulsions of cocaine use. King was a self-confessed “heavy user” of cocaine from about 1978 to 1986, and he famously confessed in an interview with Rolling Stone that “Misery is a book about cocaine. Annie Wilkes is cocaine. She was my number-one fan.”[i] In his memoir, On Writing, King claims that the creation of Annie actually inspired him to quit drugs and alcohol: “Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer.”[ii] Like Paul Sheldon, King was able to jettison Annie from his life.
Jack Wilhelmi of Screen Rant interprets King’s equation of Annie and cocaine as highlighting not only King’s personal “struggles with addiction” but also “the seductive quality of drugs and how it can make someone feel like they can accomplish something—like writing a novel—even under duress.” It does indeed seem as if King’s comment points toward a powerful ambivalence toward cocaine, and toward Annie. He wants to “quit” Annie, but she exerts a strong pull. On the one hand, King’s Annie is undeniably violent and coercive—a force one would certainly want to overcome. She kidnaps her favorite writer, Paul Sheldon, feeds him full of drugs, leaves him to starve when she decides to take off, cuts off his foot and his thumb, and forces him to write yet another romance novel which he doesn’t want to write. On the other hand, though, Paul finds himself powerfully pulled into the novel that Annie, his nemesis, forces him to write. Indeed, he feels that it is his best novel about Misery Chastain. In other words, Annie is a double-edged sword: she is dangerous but empowering—like a drug.
It’s also telling that under the “influence” of Annie, Paul burns his “literary” novel—called Fast Cars in King’s novel—and then writes his best romance novel. The seductive power of drugs lies on the side of genre fiction not prestigious (and possibly pretentious) literary fiction. Hence the pull of drugs for a writer who is through-and-through opposed to literary pretensions. King loves and respects genre fiction and has never apologized for that: “I’ve spoken out my whole life against the idea of dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it’s ‘genre’ and therefore can’t be seen as literature.”[iii] For King, the allure of drugs seems connected with the allure of genre.
Three years after the publication of King’s novel, Rob Reiner directed his critically-acclaimed adaptation, of which King himself has said, “Misery is a great film.”[iv] Notably Kathy Bates won the Academy Award for Best Actress at the 63rd Academy Awards, making Misery the only King adaptation to have won an Academy Award.
Check out the trailer for Misery:
The film remains largely true to the novel in its presentation of events. The single significant change was in the infamous hobbling scene. Whereas in the novel, Annie cuts off Paul’s foot (and later his thumb), in the film, she crushes his ankles with a sledgehammer. Screen Rant reports that there were two factors driving this change: “One, there was concern over the level of gore that would be called for if they staged King’s original scene, and two, Rob Reiner and crew wanted Paul to emerge victorious at the end of the film, and felt that Paul losing his foot was too harsh a penalty for him to have to deal with going forward.” Indeed, in the DVD commentary for the film, Reiner explains, “We wanted Paul Sheldon at the end of this movie to emerge victorious over Annie Wilkes, and if he wound up without a foot — even if he winds up beating her and she dies — then he maybe paid too high a price for that.”[v] There’s even more to it than that, though; Yahoo news discovered that Misery’s producers had trouble keeping talent involved because of the novel’s amputation scene. George Roy Hill, originally on board to direct, pulled out because he claimed he could not imagine calling “Action!” on that scene. Both Bette Middler and Warren Beatty refused to be involved because of the amputation scene. Beatty’s point was that, while he “had no trouble losing his feet at the ankles,” he knew “that if you did that the guy would be crippled for life and would be a loser.”[vi]
The changes from novel to film occur primarily in the representation of Paul’s internal world, which takes center stage in the novel but which is vastly attenuated in the film. In Reiner’s adaptation, Paul mostly just adapts his behavior to Annie: he begs, fears, placates and, ultimately, violently fights back. In the novel, King creates a rich imaginary world for Paul that gets interwoven with numerous excerpts from the Misery novel he’s writing. The latter is set mostly in Africa, drawing on the late Victorian imperialist adventure fiction of H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines [1885] and She [1887]). As Misery is drawn into danger in strange lands with powerful gods, so too is Paul. In his mind, Annie becomes herself a powerful African idol, a goddess—one so powerful, he almost believes she can’t be killed. “You couldn’t kill the goddess,” he thinks at the end, even after she’s dead.[vii] In the novel, in general, Paul’s efforts to overcome, to master, Annie–what he thinks of her–are much clearer. And, in some ways, this cuts into his status as the almost complete victim that he is in the film.
Because the film, in particular, crystallizes the drama as a claustrophobic struggle between Annie Wilkes and Paul Sheldon, much of the criticism on the novel and its adaption has, not surprisingly, centered on this relationship. And, even though King has claimed that Annie Wilkes should be read through his own struggle with cocaine, most critics have read both the novel and the film for the ways in which they disclose the layers of gender, sexuality, and power in which its central relationship of writer and reader is inexorably embedded.
Indeed, the critical consensus about Annie is that she represents a desired, feared, and hated figure of the feminine.[viii] Douglass Keesey has argued that Annie is the castrating mother figure, the stifling and emasculating threat of dependency. He goes on to explore how Misery is “a masochistic wish-fulfillment fantasy in which a man flirts with the idea of total dependency and vulnerability only to master his fear of weakness and to prove his manhood in an act of sadistic triumph over a female body.”[ix] King’s novel abounds with images of Annie’s “rape” and castration of Paul—imagery muted in the film not least in the fact that the more obvious “castration” of the foot amputation is replaced by a hobbling. In the film, Annie leaves Paul intact; in the novel, she cuts off pieces of him; she is the exemplar of the “phallic mother” who, in her power over him “resuscitates [Paul’s] will to live.”[x] Because of Annie, Keesey claims, Paul is able to move beyond masochism, castration anxiety, and fantasies of dependency to “a sense of masculine entitlement”—although he remains haunted, even after he has killed Annie, by “renewed fears that the mother may castrate him.”[xi] In this reading, then, the novel is about Paul’s reclamation of a masculinity that nonetheless remains precarious even through his final killing of Annie.
King’s Misery is, indeed, a dark parable of the fight between the sexes predicated on sexual violence. Early in the novel, Paul remembers Annie’s rescue of him from his wrecked car as a form of rape: “she raped him full of her air again”; his first real memory, Paul thinks, was “being raped back into life by the woman’s stinking breath.”[xii] What Paul apprehends as Annie’s rape of him—which ushers him, utterly dependent, into her power—is balanced by Paul’s liberating “rape” of her in his last, desperate attempt to escape. At one point, he is lying on top of her, “like a man who means to commit rape,” and then he thinks, as he crams the wet and burned pages of his final Misery novel in her mouth, “I’m gonna rape you because all I can do is the worst I can do.”[xiii] In her intriguing reading, Kathleen Lant explores how this violent and sexualized power struggle between Paul and Annie is also about the relationship between writer and reader. She claims: “What is most appalling about King’s view of the creative enterprise is that the powerful agent in the act is male and that the passive recipient of the act is female.”[xiv] King does indeed dramatize the writer-reader relationship as an act of rape.[xv] While Rob Reiner’s film certainly renders palpable the violence between Annie and Paul, it is less obviously a sexual violence, and Paul remains more distinctly a victim than himself an antagonist.
Just like most of the extant critical work on Misery, our first cluster of essays takes up the gender politics at work in the film. In “‘Operation Hobble’: Masculine Fear versus Female Monstrosity in Misery,” Harriet Stilley locates King’s novel and Rob Reiner’s film within a backlash against second-wave feminism. Misery, Stilley, writes, exemplifies the narrative strategy of conflating the “concept of the female monster within a narrative of white masculinity perpetually in ‘crisis’.” Annie’s “monstrosity,” Stilley argues, is coded as distinctly feminine. She is the nightmare “phallic” and “castrating” mother entangled with the equally nightmarish female reader/creator. And while masculine power of all kinds (including literary) is re-asserted at the end, Annie’s disruptive and monstrous presence lingers.
Melody Blackmore, in “The Phallic Mother in Wonderland and a Fight for Masculinity,” reads the struggle for power between Paul and Annie-as-castrating mother as Paul Sheldon’s hallucination. His Annie, moreover, resonates with the unpredictable Duchess from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1885). Annie as mother (like Carroll’s Duchess) battles in Paul’s head with the law of the Father (Sherriff Buster), until he realizes he will not be saved and must re-emasculate himself.
In “Dial M for Misery: Gender Essentialism and the Hollowness of Annie Wilkes,” Avalon A. Manly moves the conversation away from the complicated gendered and sexual dynamic that binds Annie and Paul (and that is mostly centered in Paul’s psyche) and explores Annie Wilkes’ own experience of gender identity. Manly picks up on the moment when Paul discovers that Annie’s phone only looks the part: it’s actually empty, its contents hollowed out. Manly compares the phone to Annie herself—struggling to maintain a façade of impossible femininity, clinging to Misery Chastain as a substitute, a cover for her own hollowness. Annie’s desperate love of Misery, as well as her violence and rage, is about her failure to be the kind of “real woman” her society demands.
Like Manly, in “Raging Butch: Annie Wilkes, Female Masculinity, and Anger,” Beth Kattelman also explores Annie’s failure to meet the norms of femininity. Indeed, she directly tackles the fact that there have been scant attempts to explain Annie Wilkes; the overwhelming focus of criticism has been on Annie as Paul sees her. But why is Annie the way she is? Kattelman’s provocative and compelling answer gets not only at Annie’s gender but her sexuality. She argues that Annie is a “suppressed, queer, ‘butch’ woman, one whose maltreatment at the hands of society has fostered a deep-seated anger.” She does, after all, love Liberace.
AD Fredline, in “Revolution at the Wilkes Farm: Deviancy and Power Struggle in Misery,” also offers a new interpretation that removes us from Paul Sheldon’s singular and dominant perspective on Annie. Fredline considers Misery through the lens of theories of deviance, arguing that the film represents an exercise in demonstrating how power creates (and re-creates) deviance: “the struggle for power between Annie and Paul serves as a microcosm of the broader social conflict between deviant and non-deviant identities, showcasing the deviant label’s core interchangeability and instability.” In the end, Fredline argues that neither Annie nor Paul is inherently deviant, disclosing the latter to be an exclusively socially-constructed concept.
In “Bedpans and Broken Ankles: Nursing Practices in Misery,” Laura R. Kremmel offers yet another new interpretation of Annie Wilkes, focusing on her role as nurse. Misery is, Kremmel argues, an important entry in the emerging canon of “medical horror.” Kremmel describes the enormous power Annie accrues as nurse, one that is not separate from but bound up with her equally important reading practices. Annie’s profession, and her deep dedication to it, demonstrate “how easily the power with which patients entrust their doctors and nurses might become the power of a kidnapper over their hostage—a villain over their victim.”
Cody Parish and Kristen Ann Leer, in “‘I’ll be seeing you’: Trauma as Uncanny Horror in Misery,” turn the focus of this issue back to Paul, although they read beyond the sexualized dynamic binding Paul and Annie. Specifically, they turn to the after-effects of Paul’s encounter with his “number one fan.” They argue that Misery exploits the way that post-traumatic stress disorder can be a powerful source of horror in horror narratives. Trauma has the ability to “possess” its sufferers, creating the “haunting power” of traumatic memory, which recalls Sigmund Freud’s notion of “the uncanny.” As Parish and Leer argue, the uncanny in Misery “refers specifically to the blurring of the real and imaginary for the post-traumatic survivor, i.e., Paul, who has difficulty distinguishing between the two planes of perception in the months following his rescue.” Much of the weight of Parish and Leer’s argument falls on the terrifying final scenes of the film in which Paul continues to “see” Annie—or so his traumatized brain would have him believe.
If Kremmel argues that Misery reflects “medical horror,” and Parish and Leer explore the ways that the uncanny and trauma are integral to horror, Phil Hobbins-White, in “Misery: A Typical Nineties Horror?” continues the exploration of Rob Reiner’s film as horror by locating it within the terrain of 1990s US horror films. Simon Brown has pointed out that Misery “tapped into a growing generic trend away from outright horror, gore, and supernatural monsters” and “toward suspense.”[xvi] And Hobbins-White explores how Misery embodies nineties horror through the development of character (notably of the antagonists), the creation of backstory and motives, the use of thriller conventions, and the postmodernist style typical of horror in the nineties.
In “Misery’s Typewriter,” an excerpt from his book, Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects (Indiana University Press, 2020), Marc Olivier explores how Paul Sheldon’s typewriter connects Misery to the other objects of the horror film tradition, not least Jack Torrance’s famous typewriter in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). In Olivier’s reading, the typewriter adds new depth to the gendered relationship between Paul and Annie.
Fan culture has been integral to the horror tradition since its inception. Taylor Hughes, in “Misery Chastain Cannot Be Dead: Annie Wilkes and Fan Rejection of Character Death,” places Annie’s intense grief over the death of Misery Chastain—indeed, her refusal to accept that death—within a tradition of fan denial of character death that goes back at least as far as the death of Sherlock Holmes. Hughes discusses both the psychological meanings of fan grief as well as how methods of coping with it have evolved over time. Could Annie have channeled her grief (and psychotic rage) into fanfiction and online communities of support? In “Gender-flipped Toxic Fan Culture in Misery,” Sezín Koehler discusses how Reiner’s film “essentially predicted toxic fan culture, except in gender-flipped form, long before we had the internet and social media.” The only difference, Koehler argues, is that the “real-life Annie Wilkeses, who stalk, threaten, and assault tend to be men, and it is often female creatives who are their targets.” Koehler intriguingly suggests that the greater access fans have had to celebrities during COVID-19 lockdowns might actually lessen the idealization that seems to breed so much violence in fan culture.
Misery has had a long reach not only in terms of fan culture but also in its influence on subsequent horror film and television, and the three final essays in this special issue all consider the influence of Rob Reiner’s film on 21st-century horror. In “Misery, Hostel, and Torture Porn,” Eric J. Lawrence makes the argument that Misery is part of the long cinematic tradition of presenting characters in dire, constrained situations that led, in post 9/11 America, to the horror subgenre known as “torture porn.” Lawrence specifically draws some very intriguing lines of connection between Misery and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Hostel: Part II (2007) and between Annie and some of the more infamous of torturers who avail themselves of Elite Hunting’s services in Roth’s films.
In “From Misery to Sympathy: Redeeming Annie Wilkes in Castle Rock,” Kristen Ann Leer and Cody Parish explore the backstory that season two of Hulu’s original horror series Castle Rock (2019) creates for Annie Wilkes. This essay returns, at first, to the preoccupation of earlier essays like those of Harriet Stilley and Melody Blackmore. Like Stilley and Blackmore, Leer and Parish point out that Reiner’s Misery unambiguously shapes Annie as “monster”—specifically drawing on Barbara Creed’s notion of the “monstrous-feminine.” In Hulu’s Castle Rock, however, Annie’s history is humanized, depicted in ways that encourage sympathy in viewers. Castle Rock gives Annie a traumatic childhood and a daughter, transforming her into a nurturing rather than a monstrous mother figure—although, even in Castle Rock, there is nothing uncomplicated about Annie’s mothering.
Finally, in “Misery’s Influence: Race and Blumhouse’s Delivered,” Dawn Keetley reads how Delivered (Emma Tammi, 2020), one of the features in Blumhouse’s original Into the Dark horror anthology series for Hulu, tells a different incarnation of Misery’s story—one that is about race in the 21st-century US. Also influenced by 1990s interloper films such as Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992) and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (Curtis Hanson, 1992), Delivered features a disturbed white woman who insinuates herself into the life of the pregnant Black protagonist, Valerie (Natalie Paul). Drawing on multiple elements of Misery, Delivered tells the story of a different kind of captivity than the one Paul Sheldon endured. Valerie is captive to a ubiquitous whiteness that erases her experience, a captivity that Delivered suggests is on a continuum with slavery.
We hope you enjoy these essays celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Misery’s release—and we hope the conversation about the film continues. Certainly, it seems clear that its influence on the horror tradition is still going strong.
[i] Greene.
[ii] King, On Writing, 98.
[iii] Greene.
[iv] Greene.
[v] Watkins.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] King, Misery, 348.
[viii] See Keesey, Lant, Robinson, and Sudan.
[ix] Keesey, 56-7.
[x] Keesey, 59.
[xi] Keesey, 64, 67.
[xii] King, Misery, 5, 7.
[xiii] King, 329.
[xiv] Lant, 96.
[xv] Ibid., 99.
[xvi] Brown, 102-3.
Works Cited:
Brown, Simon. Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and Television. University of Texas Press, 2018.
Greene, Andy. “Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, 31 Oct. 2014.
Keesey, Douglas. “‘Your Legs Must Be Singing Grand Opera’: Masculinity, Masochism, and Stephen King’s Misery.” American Imago: Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences, vol. 59, no. 1, 2002, pp. 53–71.
Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Rape of Constant Reader: Stephen King’s Construction of the Female Reader and Violation of the Female Body in Misery.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 30, no. 4, 1997, pp. 89-115.
King, Stephen. Misery. 1987. Scribner, 2016.
—. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. 2000. Scribner, 2020.
Misery. Directed by Rob Reiner, Columbia Pictures, 1990.
Robinson, Sally, “Traumas of Embodiment: White Male Authorship in Crisis.” Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis, by Sally Robinson, Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 87–127.
Sudan, Rajani. “Company Loves Misery.” Camera Obscura, vol. 10, no. 3 (30), 1992, pp. 58-75.
Watkins, Gwynne. “The Gruesome Inside Story of ‘Misery’s’ Terrifying Ankle-Bashing Scene.” Yahoo! 22 Oct. 2015.
Wilhelmi, Jack. “How Stephen King’s Real Life Inspired Misery in Surprising Ways.” Screen Rant, 4 May 2020.
