Avalon A. Manly
There is a moment in the rising action of 1990’s Misery when protagonist Paul Sheldon (James Caan), trapped and tortured by “number-one fan” Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), breaks out of his room and finds, to his great relief, a phone on the living room table. It’s an old-fashioned rotary phone, with solid black casing, and Paul dials eagerly – only to realize that not only is it not connected, it’s empty. Entirely empty. The phone contains no wires, no machinery, no inner workings; it’s just a relic of a bygone era, a hollow black box in the shape of something useful.
Annie’s hollow phone
Apart from spurring Paul to more desperate measures in his quest for escape, the empty phone also gives us a helpful conceit to parse Annie’s twisted conceptions of femininity and womanhood throughout the film. Misery presents a woman overcome with a desperate need for control over her life: she has never been able to be the kind of woman that she – and society – believes she ought to be, and her reaction is to lash out, violently. (Extra-cannonical stories like Castle Rock suggest that her first foray into murder was as a young teen, around puberty.) Annie Wilkes is a manifestation of the ubiquity of gender essentialism in American storytelling – that is, the presumption that, because she is a woman, Annie should have certain traits, markers, or qualities that render her appropriately feminine, and that not being feminine in those exact ways is inherently an aberration.
So what happens when Annie Wilkes does not fit the mold? She, like the phone, is empty: she works to present a facade of a womanhood so unattainable it drives her mad. Her gender is performative in the same way the phone casing is: both play at a function impossible for either to execute. Annie’s ideas of what it means to be a woman are, ultimately, hollow, and her story defies stereotypes in both genre and convention. It is perhaps this gendered subversion, alongside Bates’ chilling portrayal of Annie Wilkes, to which the film owes its lasting success.
To understand Annie, we must first understand the genre to which her story belongs. Perhaps the principal trope of horror is that of the Final Girl–the protagonist who suffers, struggles, and ultimately survives whatever brutalities the narrative throws at her. In Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol Clover points out that, in struggling and surviving, the Final Girl often takes upon herself stereotypically masculine behaviors, like perpetrating violence, and thereby invites viewers to identify with a looser category of femininity–one that is simultaneously masculine and feminine. Horror has long occupied this liminal space, wherein gender is both essentialized and deconstructed in a narrative that becomes a vehicle of cultural examination. To survive, the Final Girl must be pure and violent; her womanhood is unstitched from traditional femininity in pursuit of outlasting monsters, most of whom present as masculine.
Misery, though, turns this trope on its head: Annie Wilkes is a female monster, not a Final Girl, and her femininity is compromised by Paul Sheldon’s role as protagonist. She is not the hero of this story, and so her version of femininity is not one that invites us, as Clover describes it, to sympathize with expanded categories of womanhood. Despite this, Annie is a feminine character in many ways: a caretaker and former nurse, clad in dresses throughout the film, and with a strong–one might say obsessive–affinity for romance novels. She is also unhinged in her violence and need for control. Annie is feminine and she is monstrous. She is also desperate in her inner life for a kind of femininity that she cannot achieve–that of Misery Chastain, Paul Sheldon’s fictional creation.
Annie and Misery the pig in a show of devotion to Paul’s books: “She just makes me smile so”
Throughout the film, audiences are met with Annie’s obsession with Paul’s books – specifically, the Misery series about a Victorian woman and the romances that punctuate her adventures. In fact, Annie is so deeply attached to the Misery novels that she patterns her conceptions of womanhood after the titular character and attempts to live a facsimile of Misery’s life: she maintains her small farm, provides (in her own terrifying way) for Paul, doesn’t swear, and cultivates a detached, alien Victorian sensibility in a house cluttered with tchotchkes and scored by Liberache. She has named her pet pig Misery, and claims that “everything changed” after she brought both the sow and Misery’s portrayal of womanhood into her life.
Annie’s conception of Misery Chastain haunts her because, while she tries, she cannot live it. She becomes obsessed with Paul’s fictionalized version of womanhood because her own, lived reality does not align with what she believes it means to be feminine–and when Misery is threatened, she reacts as if it were her own life in jeopardy: “I don’t want her spirit!” she yells at Paul upon learning of the character’s death, “I want her, and you murdered her!” Annie cannot conceive of Misery dying, because she rejects every version of Paul’s storytelling that is not squarely centered on Misery–on Misery as the woman that Annie strives to be. She wears Misery’s stories like a veil between her and the world; if she can continue to consume Misery’s narrative, perhaps Annie never has to face the reality that she is neither Misery nor a woman like her. Annie is not the soft, romanticized kind of woman that Misery is – at one point she even declares that she is “not a movie-star type,” something we must note as ironic, as a stereotypically slender “movie-star type,” or a Victorian woman like Misery, would likely not have been able to do many of the things that Annie actually does throughout her narrative, including fireman-carrying a fully-grown man up a hill in a blizzard. Importantly, she also cannot be Misery, because Misery and the womanhood that Misery represents is not and never was real.
Annie revels in Misery’s stories explicitly because she desires to be like her, and is tormented by the reality that she can never be
But it is not necessarily maddening that Annie aspires to a life like Misery’s. Lots of fans adopt personality traits or quirks of their favorite fictional characters. What is maddening–part of what drives Annie into the wilderness of her own mind–is that Misery’s existence is entirely unattainable for a woman in the real world. Not only does she belong to a fictional century dead and gone, but Misery is also a fictional conception of what it means to be a woman, authored by not one but two men–the fictional Paul Sheldon and the actual Stephen King. Annie is trapped in a house of cards; she wants to be and cannot be Misery, and she requires Paul to feed that fantasy as she continues to internalize her inarticulate frustration at not being Misery. On some level, she knows that her love for Misery is a fantasy into which she escapes from a reality that fails to align neatly with Misery’s: “Misery made me so happy, made me forget all my problems…”
In his book Ghostland, Colin Dickey provides a concise example of the way gender essentialism like Misery’s and Annie’s can haunt in its own right: Merchant’s House Museum in Manhattan was once home to Gertrude Tredwell, Seabury Tredwell’s youngest daughter. She never married and “lived out her life in the house on Fourth Street, her siblings dying one by one until only she remained” (4). The house is preserved today precisely as it was in the years that Tredwell aged alone within its walls. In what is now a museum, people routinely claim to see her specter. Gertrude Tredwell has become an enduring New York ghost story, and Dickey believes he knows why: “Tredwell embodies a set of ideas – and anxieties – about women, domesticity, and modernity.” Annie Wilkes, like Tredwell, “frustrates our assumptions” about how women “should act” (6). Tredwell did not embody or express womanhood in the way her society believed she should, and so she haunts the place where she was never appropriately feminine; similarly, Annie cannot meet the impossible standard of womanhood set forth by Misery Chastain, and instead of haunting those around her, she lashes out monstrously, with spectacular violence. Misery may not be a ghost story, but she, and her captive Paul Sheldon, are haunted by gender essentialism in American storytelling.
We get only one glimpse of Annie that may suggest that she knows as well as we do that her mannerisms are an inauthentic projection of who she wishes she could be. It’s brief, incongruous, and belies the persona she works to project to Paul and the world: in it, we find Annie laying in her bed, eating Cheetos from the bag, an open two-liter bottle of Coke beside her, watching a dating reality TV show. In this brief shot, Annie is suddenly more complex; she is more than an obsessed fan or a delusional would-be Misery: she is also a person, living in the late twentieth century, consuming its media and its flavors with glee. While she snacks on Cheetos, she feeds Paul a balanced, home cooked meal; in this moment, Annie is not a quintessential, homegrown Victorian romance protagonist–she is just a person, preserving her cultivated image to Paul while taking off her costume in private.
Annie alone, for the moment not performing Misery, seems entirely herself for just these few moments of the film
Annie Wilkes is not only a stand-in for the obsession and madness of a woman who cannot actualize herself according to the standards of femininity that society (and Paul Sheldon and Misery) puts forth. She is also a vicious and menacing stand-in for the author’s own struggle with substance abuse. In a Halloween day interview with Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene in 2014, Stephen King speaks about his history of addiction and says, “Misery is a book about cocaine. Annie Wilkes is cocaine. She was my number-one fan.” We can see King’s metaphor in Annie’s obsessive, manic, violent reactionism; we see it also in her frenzied desperation for control over her circumstances and Misery’s story. We see it in the story of Annie’s life: she was a good student and landed a successful job, where she was promoted with honors–until her inability to manage that life surfaces in a string of murders. We see it, also, in the way the story almost revels in Paul Sheldon’s pain–the masochism of an author processing regret in a way that Annie never quite accomplishes.
When Paul finds the phone in the living room and discovers that it is hollowed out, he mutters to himself that Annie is a “crazy bitch.” She, like the phone, is a nonfunctioning symbol of function: the phone should work. It ought to fulfill its design, but it can’t, because it’s empty. Annie, too, cannot function, because all the bits and pieces that would make her whole–a stable identity that does not depend on a fictional romance protagonist, for instance–are missing. She cannot be a person, let alone whatever it might mean to be a “real” woman, and so she succumbs to the monster within. That she finally explodes in a show of physical (read: traditionally masculine) violence, covered in blood and choking on the ashes of Misery’s Return, is therefore not without a certain dark poetry.
Works Cited:
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton University Press, 1992.
Dickey, Colin. Ghostland: an American History in Haunted Places. Viking, 2017.
Greene, Andy. “Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, 25 June 2018.
