![]() Not one for subtlety, King characterizes typing as autoerotic sublimation: “You beat a typewriter instead of your meat.” Paul’s survival depends on his ability to channel his energies through the keyboard, to become Misery, to play the Scheherazade to Annie’s Shahryar. ![]() Misery’s typewriter complicates the emancipatory narrative often associated with the machine’s invention and dramatizes the paradoxical coexistence of feminine and masculine tropes associated with its use. Prisoner to his “number-one fan,” Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates), Paul must type his way back to her good graces by resurrecting Misery on a defective Royal 10 typewriter-a sturdy “fifty-pound clunker” that Annie says she got for a great price “on account of it’s missing an n.” Misery, like The Shining, considers both the musicality and the violence of type through a writing project as torturously Sisyphean to Paul as “All work and no play” is to Jack or Wendy Torrance. ![]() ![]() Misery’s protagonist, Paul Sheldon (James Caan), is trapped by his own success as the creator of Misery Chastain, heroine of a Victorian-era series of bodice-ripper romance novels. You can find Household Horror at Amazon #ad or on Indiana University Press’s website.Īnother hack writer snowbound in Colorado with a woman he’d like to kill, another typewriter embroiled in violent conflict over a typescript without end- Misery (1990), directed by Rob Reiner and adapted by William Goldman from Stephen King’s 1987 novel, has no haunted structure like The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, but the film shares a central preoccupation with typographic dysfunction and the problem of eternal return. *This essay has been excerpted from Marc Olivier, Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects, Indiana University Press, 2020, pp. ![]()
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