Misery · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

On the table beside Paul Sheldon's sickbed sits a small ceramic penguin, and it always faces due south. Paul notices this. Flat on his back with two shattered legs in a stranger's spare room, noticing is the only thing left to him — and once he starts wheeling himself through the house while Annie is out, that penguin becomes the most dangerous object in Colorado. Turn it a few degrees and she will know that someone touched her world.

Deleuze, borrowing a vocabulary from the logician Peirce, has a name for an object like that penguin: a mark. A mark means nothing on its own; it means by its habitual place in a chain. "The penguin faces south, therefore no one has been in the room." Disturb it and it flips into a demark — the anomaly that breaks the habit and forces somebody to read the room. Almost every good scare in Misery is built from marks and demarks: a manuscript page squared to the desk, a hairpin, the exact angle of the wheelchair against a doorjamb. This is what Deleuze calls the relation-image, meaning that lives not inside any single shot but in the relations the audience carries between shots. Reiner and his editor Robert Leighton wring the suspense not from what happens but from what we know. We watch Paul memorize the geography of a room, and then we sweat the reassembly.

Which points to the stranger thing the film does with its hero. For most of its length, a thriller denies Paul the one asset a thriller protagonist is supposed to have: a body that can act. Deleuze's word for a character reduced to looking and listening is the seer, the voyant, and the traps that hold such a character he calls pure optical and sound situations — opsigns and sonsigns. Normally these belong to the modern cinema of the time-image, the world of Antonioni and Rossellini where action fails and people simply watch and endure. Misery quotes that condition directly. Like Jeffries in Rear Window, Paul is welded to a wheelchair and can only perceive. But where the art films let action dissolve, this film weaponizes perception. Paul's survival depends, literally, on hearing the engine of Annie's truck grinding up the mountain before she reaches the door. The soundtrack is his only weapon.

That is the argument for watching Misery through Deleuze at all. His account of classical cinema — the movement-image — rests on what he calls the sensory-motor link: I perceive a situation, and I act to change it. Snap that link and you fall into the time-image. Misery snaps it in the first act, gives us a man who can do nothing but lie there and see, and then spends two hours screwing the link back together joint by joint, until Paul can finally commit the one violent act the film has withheld the whole time. This is why the hobbling sits at the cruel center. It re-breaks the link at the exact moment Paul had nearly restored it, and it does so through rhythm and elision, the horror carried by what the cut refuses to show.

The engine underneath is a duel. Annie against Paul, will against will — the pure force-against-force structure Deleuze calls the binomial, the heart of the action-image. It is a lopsided duel: her body free and sudden, his body broken and cunning, so the whole contest is fought on a fixed board of bed, door, window, and staircase. That board is itself a character. The snowbound house, chintz curdling into a cell, is the encompassing situation Deleuze names the synsign — the milieu that presses on everyone inside it until someone acts.

And then there is Kathy Bates's face. The affection-image, for Deleuze, is the close-up: a feeling caught in the instant before it discharges into action. Annie's face is a special case of it. Not a still icon of a single quality but a threshold, a run of micro-movements sliding from maternal sweetness to fury and back within one shot. Deleuze calls this the potisign, the icon of power, a face that is a series of intensities crossing a line. The terror is not that Annie wears a mask. It is that we can see the hinge working between two Annies who are equally sincere.

One last turn, the one the whole allegory rides on. Paul is a novelist forced to burn a manuscript and resurrect a heroine he had killed off. Deleuze has a figure for the artist who makes truth rather than reports it — the forger, le faussaire, who operates by the powers of the false. Paul must forge Misery Chastain back to life to keep himself alive; fiction stops being a job and becomes a survival organ. The book he finally writes, the real one, is the book that kills her.

The craft debts are legible in every frame. The immobilized watcher comes from Rear Window; the domestic-gothic caretaker whose mothering curdles into control comes from Psycho; the survival-by-performance two-hander comes from The Collector and Baby Jane. What Misery added to the discourse was the collapse of the celebrated author into his own captive audience. It proved a mainstream suspense film could run on two people, one room, and a face, and it made the number-one fan the monster. Watch it again and keep your eye on the penguin. You will see a thriller quietly assembling a body that can act, one held breath at a time.