I had a dream about you,
We shared a house and your sweet tooth,
Caught hold of me, now Misery,
Won’t set me free.

I had a dream about you,
Old Mother Nature showed up too,
And in her rage, she left me,
Crippled, burned and bruised.

I had a dream about you,
Redemption pounding down,
Such cold abuse,
And in the text, we missed the clues,
We bought the ruse,

I had a dream about you,
Helpless children dying on the news,
Such an unnatural subversion,
Of the rules,

Tell me a story,
And make it good,
An accidental author with a,
Detrimental taste for blood,
Annie’s claiming violence as a
feminine trait,
Let’s ditch compliance,
We’re not constrained to fate,

So tonight I’ll be Liberace for you,
Please show me all that you can do,
Let’s rip the pages from this paperback,
It’s our story too.

***

Misery (1990). Directed by Rob Reiner. USA: Castle Rock.
Kathy Bates (Annie Wilkes), Best Actress in a Leading Role Oscar, 1991.


“Misery is alive! Misery is alive! Oh, this whole house is going to be full of romance, Oooh, I am going to put on my Liberace records!”
-Annie Wilkes

The line "Annie's claiming violence as a feminine trait" is adapted from a line by Izzy Jarvis (www.izzyjarvis.com).

The reason I like Misery a little more than I perhaps should is that I find it really interesting on a meta-level. It was released in 1990, a time where women were breaking many of the mainstream barriers that had long since been insurmountable. The Hollywood boys club was obviously nervous about this. In some ways Annie Wilkes can be seen as a projection of male insecurity at the inroads women had been making, particularly in the creative industries. How awful, for the lead character to be told to rewrite his story to please this overbearing female audience. Annie ticks so many boxes of ‘femininity-gone-wrong’ that it’s difficult to view it outside of the prism of gender.
What we have is a sane, rational, male protagonist, held captive and tortured (emotionally and physically) by a woman. The woman in question is also held captive, but by her own emotional irrationality, so much so that she does the most abominable things under the guise of ‘caring’ (her former victims include young children). It’s a typical horror trope: women are ‘supposed’ to give life, not take it away. She is also a spinster, and apparently childless; as well as being ‘ugly’ in a Hollywood sense (that is, middle aged and overweight). How fitting that she should love Liberace, the flipside of the femininity-gone-wrong coin- a man so effeminate, that his name became short-hand for ‘rampant homosexuality’ in right-wing circles.
Of course, you can look at it from a broader perspective and read it as meta-narrative about the dangers of trying to do something original after having great success doing something bland and generic. Or it could be a comment on studio executives meddling in the creative process of storytelling. Whichever way you read it, it’s pretty interesting. At least I think so.