Misery

Has everyone seen the movie MISERY by Stephen King?

I shied away from it for years but a couple of weeks ago, I checked it out of the library and watched it.

This is a summation of the plot: SPOILER ALERT: A writer is holed up in the snow, finishing a manuscript. Through a phone conversation with his agent, we learn he's been writing about a character named MISERY for many years. The public so loves this character that's she's all he writes about now and he's sick of her. In this book, he claims independence by killing her off.

He starts home in the snow and ends up in an awful accident. He's rescued from sure death by a woman who's a nurse and for awhile, it seems, he's one lucky guy even if he can't walk because his legs are broken. The rescuer recognizes him from the picture on his book covers (she's read them all over and over again) and claims she is his "number one fan. " As she managed to rescue his latest manuscript as well, she asks if she can read it. He says yes.

Bad mistake. This woman is nuts and when she reads that he kills off MISERY, she goes ballistic. In the scene that prompted this blog, she brings a small BBQ into his sickroom, a can of lighter fluid and a match. She opens the lid of the BBQ and there is his book. She tells him he can't do this to MISERY and demands he burn this terrible manuscript. As the demand is made by a crazy woman, he is forced to comply and destroys the book he has just written.

What a scene this is. Her offering his latest work, the culmination of a series of books and months of agony, like a sacrificial lamb because it doesn't fit her idea of his character's destiny.

She then claims God came to her and explained His purpose in having the writer under her roof. The writer must write a new book for the Misery character and this time, make it happy. The crazy woman eagerly reads the pages as the writer feverishly creates the new book. During this time, he is also escaping his room when she leaves the house, and now knows what a homicidal maniac she really is. He has to get out there.

Eventually, he's got the new book all the way to the last chapter where MISERY is going to make the choice of which man she will marry. The maniac is agog with lust to find out the answer as this character is more real to her than the man she has tortured and confined. In a brilliant turn around, he presents her with the last chapter only to destroy it before she can read it. She comes unglued, they battle, THE END.

As a writer the two most poignant scenes for me was him being forced to destroy his manuscript on the eve of delivering it to his agent, and him taking back the power by thwarting his "public" and denying them the happy ever after he'd been forced to create. (This would seem to be more a problem for the Stephen Kings of the world than the Alice Sharpes, but there you go.)

Have you seen this movie? I talked to my family about it the next day. I mentioned the two scenes I just described and the unexpected murder of a third character that broke my heart and everyone else looked at me like I was nuts. They talked about the scene where the maniac rebroke the writer's ankles to keep him chained to his bed (and his typewriter.) That was the worst scene for them and I suddenly realized that the endless parodies of that scene had been what kept me from watching this movie for so long. Yet in the end, it barely registered while the vision of that BBQ with a perfect lily white manuscript set squarely in the middle and the author's hand poised to send it up in smoke still lingers in my mind.

My point: writers are crazy, reader's are crazier.

We make stories, but once they hit the world, they belong to whomever reads them to take them into their heart and mind or trash them at will, to remember them forever and yearn for more, for it never to end, or to disown the writer because the writer has disappointed them, has spoiled things for them.

I am a reader every bit as much as I am a writer and I have felt this way. There are books in my life that are part of me, that belong to me, that speak to me, that I read and reread. Books that I seldom, if ever, think about the author or the process because it's the story that matters, the people they created are a million times more real than they are--afterall, they are just a name on the front cover or a picture on the back. The writer, in my reader's mind, is little more than the vessel through which MY story comes to me.

Annie Wilkes, move over.

What do you think?