The origin of the word fan comes from fanatic, and the etymology should serve as a caution. Often, fans want you to stay put, stuck on the flypaper of their narrow imagination. Just ask Bob Dylan about his fans at the Newport Folk Festival or Neil Young when he went rockabilly in the ‘80s. Fans aren’t always the smartest fans of your work. But they tend to know everything about you, remembering facts you have long since forgotten.
Stephen King’s novel Misery found horror in the perversity of fandom. Director Rob Reiner adapted it into a capable thriller, staring James Caan as best-selling novelist Paul Sheldon and Kathy Bates as Annie Wilks, his self-professed “number one fan.” The 1990 movie is out now on Blu-ray disc.
Sheldon’s characteristics have appeared often among King’s protagonists. A one-time aspirant to literature, he has settled into a highly paid career as a popular hack writer, penning a series of historical romances based on a heroine called Misery. Driving recklessly in his ‘65 Mustang down a snowy road in a thickening blizzard, Junior Walker blaring from his stereo, Sheldon skids off the embankment, his precipitous fall cushioned by a snow bank. Even so, he might have died of his injuries in the icy cold if not for the timely intervention of his number one fan.
While nursing him back from death, Wilks has no intention of allowing her hero to walk away. His legs broken, she holds him prisoner in order to write the next episode of Misery according to her lights. She is upset that Sheldon allowed his heroine to die at the series’ climax, and explodes upon reading the manuscript of his next novel she saved from the car wreck, a grittier, more self-consciously literate work. She will have none of it. While professing her love for Sheldon, Wilks tortures and browbeats him into beginning work on a novel in which Misery returns.
As the ultimate fanatic, she is seriously deranged, obsessed by her identification with the unreal person Sheldon created—a frumpy, unhappy woman with a history of playing with life and death. Love crosses easily into hatred and admiration into censorship, in fiction as in life.
