Fatal Attraction – Bitch Flicks

Domestic Terrorism: Feminized Violence in ‘Misery’

Annie is a human being, dangerous not because of an evil supernatural force, but rather a severe and untreated mental illness. Although Annie is not given an official diagnosis in the film or the novel, an interview with a forensic psychologist on the special edition DVD characterizes her as displaying symptoms of several different conditions, including borderline personality disorder (BPD).

This guest post by Tessa Racked appears as part of our theme week on Violent Women.

Content Note: This essay contains discussion of physical and emotional abuse.

Misery, directed by Rob Reiner, is the 1990 film adaptation of the 1987 Stephen King novel of the same name. The scenario is as chilling as it is simple: romance novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan) is saved from a car accident during a blizzard by Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates). He is trapped in her house due to his injuries; she has an unhealthy obsession with his novels and violent temper. Paul’s latest novel, on the verge of being published, ends with the death of her favorite character, the titular Misery. Annie is widely considered Kathy Bates’ breakout role; she won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her portrayal, and Annie is listed as 17th on American Film Institute’s list of top 100 villains.

King has explicitly stated that Misery is about his personal battle against addiction: “Annie was my drug problem, and she was my number-one fan. God, she never wanted to leave,” he said in an interview with The Paris Review. It also expresses King’s frustration with his career, feeling trapped in the horror genre. (Similarly, the film adaptation was a departure genre-wise for Reiner, who had until this point made more comedic, sentimental fare like The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally…) The bulk of the story is the conflict between Paul, who wants to move on from writing the Misery series, and Annie, who forces Paul to languish in that stage of his life due to her unwavering fixation with both the series and her own idea of who he is as an author. A flashback scene between Paul and his agent (Lauren Bacall) foreshadows his ordeal, as he explains his decision to end his popular romance novel series by killing off the protagonist: “if I hadn’t gotten rid of her now, I would end up writing her forever.” Annie’s prison from which Paul must escape is her home; the violence she enacts is twisted versions of caregiving and romance. Not only is the antagonist of Misery a woman, but her modes of terror are coded distinctly as feminine.

Misery is a departure from much of King’s earlier work (and the resulting film adaptations), as it is not a work of speculative fiction. Annie is a human being, dangerous not because of an evil supernatural force, but rather a severe and untreated mental illness. Although Annie is not given an official diagnosis in the film or the novel, an interview with a forensic psychologist on the special edition DVD characterizes her as displaying symptoms of several different conditions, including borderline personality disorder (BPD). BPD is commonly thought of as a mental illness that primarily affects women, who make up 75 percent of the diagnoses in the United States. However, this trend may be caused by gender biases in the mental health field for various reasons; some symptoms of BPD are similarly feminized (eg. a frequent co-occurence with eating disorders), while others are considered “normal” male behavior and therefore more pathologized in women (eg. promiscuity).

Misery is not the only thriller that dramatizes symptoms of BPD to create a female antagonist who becomes obsessed with someone she desires and terrorizes that person with emotional outbursts and impulsive, violent behavior. Consider Alex (Glenn Close) in Fatal Attraction (the highest grossing film of 1987), Hedy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in Single White Female, or Evelyn (Jessica Walter) in Play Misty for Me, all of whom have been described as having BPD. Although they resemble each other as far as the threat they present their films’ protagonists, Annie is a markedly different sort of woman; in her own words, she is “not a movie star type.” Her clothing is plain and modest. She is older and larger-bodied than the other female villains. One of her most memorable characteristics is her frequent use of bowdlerized profanity, such as “dirty birdy” and “cockadoodie.” She is a hopeless romantic, but in short, she lacks sex appeal. Annie is also different in that she is coded as working class and rural. She lives by herself on a farm. She pays tribute to Paul by naming her sow after the literary heroine he’s created. (Misery is one cute pig, to be fair, but her captive seems less than flattered.) Her idea of a fancy dinner is making meatloaf with SPAM added in, and she mispronounces Dom Perignon. She contrasts sharply with, for instance, Fatal Attraction’s Alex, a sophisticated book editor who lives in New York City. Unlike Alex, Annie isn’t positioned as an exciting temptress, or an embodied punishment for lustful transgression. Rather, she is a smothering maternal figure, forcing Paul into an arrested state of mediocrity as a creative and infantilizing him as the helpless prisoner in her guest bedroom.

Although Annie talks about Paul both as the object of her romantic love and her literary idol, their relationship as portrayed in the film more closely resembles that of a mother and child. In their first interaction, Annie extracts an unconscious Paul from the wreck of his car, administers CPR, and carries him back to her home. In the next scene, we meet Annie as she gently reassures Paul that she is his “number-one fan” and that he’s going to be all right. Annie giving Paul life, bringing him into her home, and reinforcing to him that she is there to care for him because she loves him more than anyone else is strikingly similar to a basic narrative of a woman giving birth. Even the way the audience sees who she is for the first time is through visual and auditory tropes often used to convey a newborn baby: the scene is shot from Paul’s point of view, initially blurry and echoing, then coming into focus and resting on a low angle shot of Annie’s face. These low angle shots of Annie from Paul’s point of view are a recurring image in the film, often used when she spiraling out in an angry rant that hints at (or culminates in) the violence she is capable of enacting.

Annie’s treatment of Paul is nothing short of abusive, but also reinforces the maternal quality of her control over him. The harmful aspects of her caregiving are one of the main sources of horror in the film. She proudly shows off her nursing skills through the homemade braces she’s fashioned for his broken legs, as the camera pans down the horrific sight of his severe injuries that would normally be covered by casts. An early suggestion of menace comes when she coyly admits that she made pilgrimages to the lodge where he was working on his latest novel and would stand under his window, as she shaves him with a straight razor: “Like a baby!” she pronounces upon finishing both her task and her description of stalking him. This scene is followed by our first glimpse of her temper. She chastises Paul for his use of profanity in the manuscript he has allowed her to read– his first novel outside of the Misery series to be published– and her indignancy quickly grows into anger. She yells and spills the soup she is holding. “Look what you made me do!” she cries, showing both a mother’s frustration with a child making a mess and an abuser’s displacement of blame for their own actions.

Although she seems to be a simple person at first, her awareness of the situation’s dynamic is made abundantly clear after she flies into a rage over Paul’s latest published work, Misery’s Child, in which the main character dies. Not only is she distraught over losing Misery, but she is angry at Paul for defying her perception of him as an ever-obliging font of “genius” romance novels, or, as she describes it, being a “lying old dirty birdy.” She just barely prevents herself from smashing an end table over Paul’s head. Instead, she wields his dependency, and the potential removal of her love and care, as a threat: “don’t even think about anybody coming for you… nobody knows you’re here, and you better hope nothing happens to me, because if I die, you die.” Annie’s violent mothering reaches its summit in the dramatic reveal of her past: Paul discovers, through a remarkably convenient scrapbook that she keeps in her living room, that her nursing career was fraught with the mysterious deaths of infants in her care.

Although Annie enacts her relationship with Paul through caregiving, she is motivated by romance. It is evident from her perspective that she sees their relationship as a budding love story: when she is calm, she often talks to him in a shy, girlish manner, in awe of his “genius.” Once she manages to coerce him into writing a satisfactory retcon of Misery’s death, she celebrates by blasting Liberace records, as she considers his music to be very romantic. The subsequent montage of Paul feverishly working on Misery’s Return is set to Liberace’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s dramatic “Piano Concerto Number 1.” Paul tries to escape by playing along with her, even suggesting they have a candlelit dinner together so that he will have an opportunity to drug her wineglass (which she clumsily knocks over during his toast, being unused to navigating a romantic setting like their dinner in the real world). After she murders the sheriff (Richard Farnsworth) investigating Paul’s disappearance, she informs her prisoner that their only option is a murder-suicide. However, she does so in rapturous tones, using language that could be lifted from a darker version of Paul’s own novels: “You and I are meant to be together forever. But now our time in this world must end.”

The relationship Annie wants to have with Paul is toxic, as it is based on her preventing him from growing/healing, from being his own person. She prevents him from physically walking away from her home, and she prevents him from professionally walking away from the Misery series. The infamous “hobbling” scene is a perfect illustration of how she objectifies Paul. Setting up the grisly procedure, she explains that it was how workers “in the early days of the Kimberley Diamond Mines” were punished for stealing, and how she will punish him for leaving his room. As she prepares to break his ankles with a sledgehammer, she blithely compares the victims of this procedure to cars and tells him that it’s “for the best,” dehumanizing him and denying the pain that she is about to put him through. The scene ends with the camera zooming in on her gazing down at the agonized Paul as she whispers, “God, I love you.”

In most horror films, the threat that the villain poses is annihilation: their aim is to maim and kill the protagonist. Annie’s goal is different. She too uses violence, but it is a tool that she wields to enforce a much different threat: inertia. She embodies this threat by adopting roles that are closely tied with femininity: she is the nurse who refuses to let her patient heal, the “mother” who prevents her “child” from gaining independence, the muse who forces her author to continue writing long after the story has concluded. The inability to grow is an obstacle that confronts people of all genders– after all, empowering women to transcend confining social roles is a ubiquitous concern among feminists– but Misery is an expression of this conflict as a potential threat that women pose men.

Recommended Reading:

“Borderline Personality Disorder- a Feminist Critique”

Tessa Racked lives in Chicago. They write essays about fat characters in cinema at Consistent Panda Bear Shape and make condensed observations about a variety of subjects @tessa_racked. Tessa celebrates the completion of every tweet with a cigarette and a glass of Dom Perignon.

You May Meet Alex and Hedy As You Progress Through Life

Though we might sympathize, mostly we reflect on them, after escaping them, with awe and terror. They are not good. They are not our lovers nor our friends; they do not have our best interests at heart.

This is a guest post by Stephanie Brown.

“‘I won’t be ignored, Dan.'”

As a new friend and I got to know each other during the past couple of years, this became our shorthand joke. We’d say it when we worried we were calling or texting too often. We used that line because the character Alex Forrest, who says the line (actually “I’m not going to be ignored, Dan!”) in the film Fatal Attraction is the symbol for a person who doesn’t take a hint, let alone an outright declaration that a person doesn’t want an involvement. She’s a person who becomes a stalker because she’s delusions about her relationship with a married man. She becomes as destructive and vengeful as a witch in a fairy tale.

No one wants to be the person who has no common sense about other people. No one wants to be Alex Forrest, or Hedra “Hedy” Carlson in Single White Female, another film that gave us a character so needy and envious, she puts Snow White’s stepmother to shame. When someone “goes all Single White Female” on you, you know you’re dealing with someone who can suck the life out of you by copying your moves and destroying you in the process. Viewers, like the victims who surround an evil witch in a fairy tale, learn that it’s almost impossible to outwit these two, as their nasty feelings manifest into destructive actions, but outwit them we must.

Both films are misogynistic. They depict women we hate and would hate to be like. If we knew more about them we’d probably feel compassion for what made them so evil–but like figures in fairy tales, the backstory is irrelevant to the action and to the victims facing their wrath. Alex and Hedy are symbols for those hatable people who are normal-on-the-surface-but-crazy-underneath. They are hatable because they are impossible to like once you get to know them. Their big, destructive personalities can be glimpsed in people we know, as we can glimpse Snow White and her stepmother, Cinderella, and her sisters, or Jack-in-the-Beanstalk’s father-son rivalry in families we know. Male screenwriters and directors developed these characters, and they can be dismissed as depictions of exaggerated, baseless male fears. But hatable women exist, be they one’s partner, relative, or friend. Like fairytale archetypes, Alex and Hedy harken back to significant relationships–and by being sort of preposterous they are kept at a safe remove. Alex is not our own wife or nightmare ex, she is only a one-night stand who lied to us and herself about having sex with no strings attached. Hedy is not the mother, sister or co-worker who envies us, she is someone we randomly met to share expenses on an apartment. We can displace our hatred on the fictional character, while we might not be able to admit hatred for those we are close to due to fate or necessity.

I saw Fatal Attraction by myself when I was living by myself, an SFW (single white female, in the shorthand of classified seeking-roommate ads of the day) in Oakland, Calif. The theater was packed and the audience’s shout-outs to the screen funny and raucous as Alex’s behavior became increasingly bizarre.

By the climax–where she is shot in the bathtub by the wife, Beth Gallagher–I was laughing out loud. The movie seemed ludicrous to me. Soon after seeing it, I tuned into the end of a radio show. The person speaking was animated about her subject, the movie Fatal Attraction, which she said was a hot conversation topic between men and women because the story reflected anxieties about feminism and working women. To me it seemed to be a cautionary tale for men about how the wages of sin (adultery) can lead them to ruin, but it was hard for me to believe that a person like Alex could even exist. But then, I lived alone (and was lonely) and had no one to really talk to about the movie, whether it was ludicrous or should be taken seriously, or about feminism or anything else.

What I did know about living alone was that it might make you go crazy. You forget how much you have been with your own thoughts when you finally talk to someone. Not having a romantic partner made me unhappy and disappointed with life, which are probably the feelings Alex and Hedy had, being alone in the world, looking for a connection. Why they did not have connections is only hinted at, and we can only guess why. I was in my 20s when I saw these films, the time of life when most people have temporary living arrangements, like the characters in Single White Female. I had lived in five different places by the time I was 26. You took chances on roommates and places and living alone in safe or unsafe neighborhoods. I had lived anonymously in two large cities. Like city dwellers Dan and Allie, in a city one has to take a person at her word when looking for a living arrangement or when meeting in the workplace. You don’t have a small town’s generational history to inform you that someone has been damaged by their childhood or was outcast by everyone. That’s also the reason why the city appeals to people–it’s a place to reinvent oneself, where no one really knows you, and where most relationships are friendly but safely superficial. This is the same in the large workplace, where one can observe another’s eccentric or charming or moody behavior at a distance. You only know what someone is really like by working closely with them. It’s amazing how personality deficits and disorders are revealed when one is in daily contact with someone else in the workplace. In all cases, your relationships are left mostly to chance.

At that time I still kept in touch with childhood friends and still felt close to them. Though we only saw each other a few times a year, we talked on the phone for hours sometimes, at long-distance expense, which I budgeted for; it felt so necessary to me. However, every time we got together I could feel us drifting apart.

The friend I was closest to called me soon after Fatal Attraction was released, and asked me what I thought of it. It had really struck a chord with her. She saw it by herself and then took her boyfriend to see it, because she wanted him to see her resemblance to Alex; she thought it would help him understand her better. In particular, the scene where Alex sits alone in her apartment and turns the light on and off is what she wanted him to see. She wanted him to understand how she felt–I suppose how she felt when she felt desperate? They were not in a cheating relationship and were not married, but she related to the character’s personality. I don’t remember if I told her this, but I found that very disturbing. I could not imagine relating to Alex at all, and I still don’t. Had I not known her for as long as I had, I would have dropped the friendship then and there. As it was, our friendship did not last and for me is was because of coming behaviors that did indeed evoke Alex’s. I also knew by that time that I ought not to live alone with few connections. It might make me into an Alex or a Hedy. I also knew that I had the capacity to be like Allie or Dan, using people and expecting them to not care, and I knew I had experienced envy from others, and I did not like how it felt.

These films were released within a few years of each other: Fatal Attraction in 1987, Single White Female in 1992. They are sometimes seen as mirrors of the era, especially as responses to ascending feminism. But to me, feminism had already ascended and was accepted–I suppose I was naive, but to me they were about women with damaged psyches whose gigantic wells of neediness and envy were so mythic they created tragedies because they did not know how to do anything else. In the 30 years or so since these films were released, I’ve come to know many women like both of these women–not that they’ve come to bloody conclusions, but they have created nightmares, migraines and heart attacks, for instance, as well as fear and anxiety and frustration. I wish we had had the characters’ back stories in the films. In the years since, I’ve become fascinated by what breaks people and makes them behave in such ways. I have learned compassion for them while still keeping them at arms’ length. The stories’ plots, however, depend upon us identifying with Dan in Fatal Attraction and Allie in Single White Female. It is possible to find yourself at a point in life where you must obtain a restraining order against someone. At that point, it is not hard to identify with these victims.

People like Alex and Hedy are people who feel dead and empty and hopeless; they can’t be helped, they push too hard, they want the impossible and don’t give up when they should. Someone who seems fun and lovely at first but who is impossible once the mask is taken off her face. We saw a few glimpses of Alex’s scrapbook in the film, but were not given enough to speculate about her background or what made her the way she was. We don’t know why they lack connections with others.

But maybe that is beside the point: the Alexes and Hedys I’ve known have few connections because everyone has left them behind and wants nothing to do with them. No one can stand them for very long. It’s hard to believe, because when you meet them, they are friendly and fun and have good heads on their shoulders. But after a while the mask slips and one finds oneself growing annoyed at giving the same advice to their requests for advice, or hearing the same complaints about the same person again and again, or finding out something that makes the hair stand up at the back of your neck: that the person was let go from a job because, you’re now told, the principal of the school did not understand how to discipline kids properly, the way she did. When your work acquaintance becomes your boss and you discover she yells and screams until you feel like you are living with an abusive mother in a tiny house where you are never fed or looked after, you know why she has gotten stuck at this particular rung in their career, and why you are likely to pass her as she drifts downward. People like her fake it by using buzzwords and speaking aggressively and sounding smart, while there is no substance to back it up. To mask their incompetence, they need to steal your ideas, block your ideas, exhaust your ears, or take on your mannerisms and demeanor because they see how others have a positive response.

Fairytales tell us how to make practical choices when faced with another’s envy or wrath. Children are instructed on what to do when faced with Snow White’s envy (leave home) or Cinderella’s sisters (wait it out–they will destroy themselves) or how to fell a jealous father-giant (be clever and nimble and you will cut him down eventually). There are people who wish us ill and mean us harm. There are people so envious and angry of those around them (usually those who are competent, gifted or kindhearted) that their satisfaction comes from seeing the envied fail and flail. As Jeanette Winterson wrote of her mother in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, a book that uses fairytales tropes as a way to understand a destructive, cold mother: “She filled the phone box. She was out of scale, larger than life. She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable. She loomed up. She expanded. Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself.” [1]

When we’ve escaped from an Alex or Hedy, we can look back and see how someone who destroys others is sad or desperate or lonely or feels small. I think Winterson is right–destructive women loom large, change size, extend themselves by loud voice, by taking things from you, by holding weapons because they feel small and overlooked. Though we might sympathize, mostly we reflect on them, after escaping them, with awe and terror. They are not good. They are not our lovers nor our friends; they do not have our best interests at heart.

Because I’ve known them, I value my new friend all the more, the one with whom I can use a shorthand joke from Fatal Attraction. She also has known these kinds of people, who actually may be men or women.

1. Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, p. 2-3. New York: Knopf, 2011.

Stephanie Brown is the author of two collections of poetry, Domestic Interior and Allegory of the Supermarket. She’s published work in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry series. She was awarded an NEA Fellowship in 2001 and a Breadloaf Fellowship in 2009. She has taught at UC Irvine and the University of Redlands and is a regional branch manager for OC Public Libraries in southern California.