MISERY 1990lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2016/11/misery-1990.html

In a verbose, exasperated correspondence, a reader once expressed to me his intriguedbewilderment at how my otherwise—to use his words—“perceptive and aware” observationson the toxicity of idol worship and fame culture (per my essays on Maps To The Stars, TheDay of The Locust, Come Back To The 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean Jimmy Dean, The Fan, andFor Your Consideration) stood in frustrating contrast to my parallel tendency to lapse intoperiodic bouts of unapologetic fandom, shameless name-dropping, and displays ofphilography (autograph collecting). Once the feeling of being terribly flattered that my writing could actually exasperatesomeone passed; I understood his point. I could see how my expressed disdain for thehollow distractions of fame culture and celebrity-worship perhaps suggested to the readerthat I place no value on “fandom” at all, in any of its forms. In which case my attendantessays subjectively praising actors whose work I admire, upon whom I harbor crushes, orwho I’ve met (cue the autograph scans); must have come across as paradoxical at best,hypocritical at worst.

But that falls under the heading of reading the content while misunderstanding the context.The truth of the matter is that if I do indeed possess any insight into the phenomenon offame culture, it’s insight born of firsthand experience, not academic observance. I’ve been a

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film fan my entire life, even owing my 30-year career as a dancer to film fandom (I fell in lovewith that irresistible 1980 roller-disco glowstick, Xanadu), so I've come to recognize that notall fandom is created equal.“Healthy fandom,” as I call it, is when the admiration for and appreciation of the artisticaccomplishments of others serves as a kind of balm to uplift the spirits and enhance qualityof life. This type of artist-identification has the ability to inspire, broaden horizons, andawaken within individuals an awareness of one's potential and life's possibilities throughexposure to the creative arts. Fan worship when channeled into role-modeling can fosterself-discovery, self-actualization, and the cultivation of one's own artistic gifts. When itcomes to fame culture, I think there's nothing wrong with looking outside of oneself if, bydoing so, one becomes motivated to look within.

Then there’s what I call “toxic fandom.” That’s when one focuses on the life andachievements of others, not as a means of finding oneself, but for the sole purpose of losingoneself. Toxic fandom doesn’t look to the arts for ways to cope and engage with reality, itlooks to the arts to escape from it.Because the toxic fan seizes upon a personality, film, TV series, or Broadway show with asingularity of focus more appropriate to a religious totem or fetish object; the actual talent ormerit isn’t a requirement (cue the Kardashians). Fame can be worshipped for fame’s sakealone. With all that is good, happy, and beautiful in the world projected onto a single subjectof worship, said “object of affection” doesn’t bring the toxic fan happiness, it representshappiness itself.Certainly qualifying as the absolute worst-case scenario of toxic fandom gone terrifyingly offthe rails is Stephen King's brilliant Misery. Brought to chilling and unforgettable life on thebig screen by director Rob Reiner and screenwriter William Goldman (The Stepford Wives,Magic).

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James Caan as Paul Sheldon

Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes

Richard Farnsworth as Buster

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Frances Sternhagen as Virginia

Lauren Bacall as Marcia Sindell

Prolific author Stephen King is the master of Le Cauchemar Banal—the banal nightmare:high-concept thrillers in which ordinary characters in workaday settings find themselvesthrust into unimaginably horrific circumstances. Whether it be “bullied high school teen killsentire class,” “dysfunctional family driven insane by haunted hotel,” “rabid dog terrorizestoddler” or, in the case of Misery, “deranged fan imprisons favorite author”; King’s particularliterary gift is his ability to mine the darkest, most relatable phobias lurking behind ostensiblycommonplace conflicts. The best of the films adapted from his novels (Carrie, The Shining,The Dead Zone) shore up King’s solid storytelling by giving emphasis to his almostBiblical/Freudian take on human nature. I can’t think of a work of Stephen King’s whichdoesn’t in some way confront matters of sin, redemption, guilt, evil, fate, transformation,loss, and desperation. Sometimes all at once!

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The Wilkes farmhouseJust the kind of creepy-cozy place you'd imagine a serial killer would live

Adapted from King’s 1987 bestseller, Misery is a two-character, single-location twist on theScheherazade folk tale (wherein a princess forestalls her execution through the spinning ofcaptivating stories), pitting deranged superfan Annie Wilkes (Bates) against popular romancenovelist Paul Sheldon (Caan).After a Colorado mountain blizzard results in Paul Sheldon crashing his car off of a snowybluff, he wakes to find himself nursing two broken legs and a dislocated shoulder in thefarmhouse of “number one fan” Annie Wilkes. How Paul’s status shifts from patient toprisoner is revealed through character (retired nurse Annie Wilkes is batshit crazy) and thedevelopment of the story’s central (and might I say, ingenious) conflict:

Annie would like nothing more than for Paul Sheldon to continue churning out Misery books—a series of historical romance novels chronicling the adventures of heroine MiseryChastain—until his dying day (which threatens to be sooner than Paul would like if hedoesn’t get with the Wilkes program).Paul, on the other hand, after writing eight financially successful but spiritually cripplingMisery novels (do I foreshadow much?), would like nothing more than to put Misery out ofher misery, move on, and, via his just-completed profanity-laced crime novel FastCars, pursue a career of literary legitimacy.

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Misery's tense melodrama is an macabre exaggeration of the possessive/regressive side of celebrity-worship.Creative growth may be a fundamental part of being an artist, but an equally dominant characteristic of fandom is

the wish for a favorite star to keep repeating past successes.

The close-quarters confinement of two people with such fiercely cross-purpose objectivesgenerates considerable dramatic tension, but Goldman’s taut screenplay, which opens upKing’s novel to include rescue-effort sequences involving the local sheriff (Fransworth), hisdeputy/wife (Sternhagen), and Paul’s literary agent (Bacall), nicely replicates the novel’sescalating sense of dread born of having the true nature of Paul’s rescuer and biggest fanrevealed to us exclusively from Paul’s limited perspective. In both appearance and personality, Annie Wilkes amusingly plays into the suppositionsmany of us hold regarding the kind of people who read romance novels or give themselvesover to obsessive fandom. But as Annie’s fangirl eccentricities reveal themselves to besymptoms of a larger mental instability; Paul’s mounting anxiety becomes our own asAnnie’s irrational outbursts and mercurial mood swings hurls Misery into violent chaos.

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Scenes played for black comedy invite us to share Paul's incredulous amusement at Annie'sparochial prudishness, Midwest drabness, ignorance ("Dome Pear-igg-non"), and fondness for pop-culture

kitsch. But the laughs catch in our throat as we come to understand that the earnestness of Annie's beliefs arerooted in rigid dogma

Lacking the novel's built-in identification factor (the story is told from Paul's perspective), thefilm nevertheless does a great job of getting us to experience Annie's rageaholic outburstsand sudden bursts of irrational violence with the same sense of alarm as our hero. So muchso that, in effect, Rob Reiner becomes our tormentor; the male Annie Wilkes at whosemercy we suddenly find ourselves. In these instances, we (unlike Paul) can escape, but thecompelling nature of the story holds us captive in our seats, no more willing to leave beforefirst learning how things turn out than Scheherazade's king.

MISERY AS FAME-CULTURE METAPHOR

I read Misery many years after having seen the film. And while the movie is a very faithful tothe book, as with many adaptations, the changes necessary to mold the descriptive libertiesof the written word to fit the specific hyper-reality of the screen can shift a story's narrativeemphasis in ways interesting and unexpected. Misery the novel, with its stressed emphasison Paul's point-of-view read very much to me like one man's internal struggle. Paul Sheldonwaging a war with the creative process, his life-altering encounter with Annie Wilkes servingas a kind of baptism by fire through which his creative spark is reborn and over which hiseventual artistic maturity triumphs. (This falls in line with Stephen King's Rolling Stoneinterview in which he stated he was Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes was his cocaineaddiction.)

The film version, with the necessary excision of Paul's nonstop internal monologues andlengthy passages relating to the content of Misery's Return, subtly shifts the dynamics of theconflict. Since we no longer share the inner workings of his mind and are left to merelyobserve his behavior, Paul Sheldon may remain the story's central character, but his role init is has become more reactive. Conversely, Annie, who is depicted in the book in almostone-dimensional terms (a monster comprehensible only in as far as Paul is able to make

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sense of her erratic behavior), is made the more dynamic character in the film because heractions and desires propel the plot. Deprived of his character-illuminating inner monologues,Paul Sheldon's goals become simplified: survival/escape. Annie, depicted in more complexterms, has fragmented, nonlinear goals that intensify in direct proportion to the deteriorationof her mental state.

Kathy Bates' unforgettable, Academy Award-winning performance humanizes the monster that is Annie Wilkes.Playing a frightening character more pathetic than sympathetic, Bates somehow never surrenders Annie's

humanity, even when her behavior is at its most indefensibly psychotic.

The depth given to the character of Annie Wilkes in the film (which I credit to Kathy Bates100%) makes her Misery's "dominant focus": the most dramatically compelling element of amovie. Since interest IN a character can feel distressingly like sympathy FOR a character toour subconscious, in thrillers this contributes to creating an overall sense of unease for theviewer (think Hitchcock tricking us into identifying with Norman Bates in Psycho). We identifywith Paul Sheldon's left-at-the-mercy-of-a-madwoman vulnerability; but since more of usknow what it's like to be a fan than to be a celebrity, a tiny part of us can also relate toAnnie. And we hate ourselves for it.

ANNIE WILKES: THE ULTIMATE THE TOXIC FAN If, as someone once said, success is the natural killer of creativity, to that dictum I’d also

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add: fans are the assassins of artistic exploration.One of showbiz’s most enduring clichés is the artist who, upon achieving mainstreamsuccess, longs for artistic credibility: The Gidget who wants to be a dramatic actress (SallyField), the stand-up comic who wants to be Ingmar Bergman (Woody Allen); the purveyor ofpop-music candy floss who wants to be taken seriously (Madonna).Some stars have been able to reinvent themselves without alienating fans or losingpopularity (Robin Williams, Tom Hanks), but in most instances, attempts to abandon apopular commercial brand are met with resistance, if not outright hostility, by the artist'sfanbase.The terrifying relationship between Paul and Annie depicted in Misery is fascinating whenviewed as a meta commentary on the co-dependent love/hate relationship celebrities havewith their fans.

“I love you Paul. Your mind...your creativity. That’s all I meant.”

Toxic fandom has at its core, a one-sided inequity of intimacy: the fan knows everythingabout their favorite celebrity, said celebrity doesn't know they exist. Love for an artist's workcan be fulfilling, for it at least has the potential to feed the soul. Even intermingled feelingsfor the artist themselves when channeled into an appreciation of an artist's work at leastholds the potential for fulfillment. But when the line gets blurred between love of art and loveof artist, you're pretty much staring into the eye of an emotional one-way street.

“You just better start showing me a little more appreciation around here, Mister Man!”

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Sooner or later the healthy fan learns that it's not possible to prop someone atop a pedestalwithout eventually realizing they've left themselves somewhere down on the ground. Thisrealization inevitably leads to resentment. A constant complaint of celebrities today(especially among those who hate being reminded of the very real debt they DO owe to theirfans) is what they see as the pushy entitlement of fans. These fans carry with them anattitude of "You owe your success to me!" or worse, the embittered "You think you're betterthan me?"—sadly, an epithet often hurled by a fan moments after treating said celebrity asthough they were precisely that. Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust is a work aboutthe deep wellsprings of envy and resentment that can lie beneath fan culture.

“You and I were meant to be together forever.”

From Presley devotees who refuse to acknowledge Fat Elvis, to Liza Minnelli concert goerswho boo if she doesn't sing Cabaret; the symbiotic, vaguely contentious relationshipbetween toxic fan and artist is always a struggle against stasis. Being a creative artistmeans development and growth, but being a fan frequently means latching onto somefavored moment, digging in one's heels, and refusing to accept the fact that everythingmoves on. The toxic fan wants fan and celebrity to remain together forever, frozen in aspic.

There! Look there! See what you made me do?”

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Ever notice how many online fan sites, chat rooms, and movie tribute pages are rife with themost vitriolic bullying and harassment imaginable? Intense self-identification with a celebrity,movie, or TV series often makes the toxic fan (usually a person with a vague sense of selffrom the start) feel so special, they tend to grow protective and proprietary over time.Separating themselves from the herd by the bestowal of meaningless titles and rank uponthemselves (number one fan, biggest fan, most devoted fan), fandom becomes less aboutthe personal joy one derives from the appreciation of a particular subject, and more aboutappointing oneself its combative gatekeeper.Given that the seeds of fandom so often take root in adolescence—when individuals turn tothe arts as a means of coping with the pain of loneliness, bullying, or feeling like an outsider—it's the height of irony that in so many cases the bullied grow to become the biggestbullies.

“You’ll never know the fear of losing someone like you if you’re someone like me.”

With its combined elements of genres ranging from horror to crime drama, Misery is a veryeffective suspense thriller (so much so that to this day I can’t watch the famous “hobbling”sequence, nor can I watch that final, bloody skirmish). James Caan and Kathy Bates areboth super, handling the drama and black comedy with equal skill. (Although it's amusing tothink that the athletic Caan, in this and 1979s Chapter Two, is Hollywood's idea of what awriter looks like.)The first time I saw it in 1990, I came away with the feeling of having enjoyed a real thrill-ride

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of a movie. I've had the opportunity to rewatch it many times since then, and it has become afavorite. Now a quaint little timepiece, what with its rotary phones, typewriters, phonographrecords, and bottles of Liquid Paper, what has remained as fresh as the first viewing are thefilm's characters.Annie Wilkes may represent the crippling dominance of addiction to Stephen King, but tome, Misery is a searing horror fable (cautionary tale?) about how fame culture can promoteemotional displacement through toxic fandom. Culturally speaking, what can be scarier thanthat?

Do any of you know or have had a run-in with a toxic fan? Better still, a toxic celebrityencounter? Would love to hear about it!

BONUS MATERIALIn 2008 Kathy Bates appeared as Annie Wilkes in a commercial for DirectTV. Watch itHERE.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

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