![]() ![]() ![]() The film tells the story of best-selling author Paul Sheldon, famous for his romance books featuring Victorian heroine Misery Chastain, heading home from Silver Creek after finishing a new book as a means to leave Misery behind and move on to a different chapter of his career. ![]() Misery focuses predominantly on the phallic stage and the male fear of the aggressive female and her threat of castration. The stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) are crucial to personality development and assist with controlling the id in socially accepted ways. It was Freud (1905) who elaborated the importance of child psychosexual stages as a source of both pleasure and tension. In Reiner’s Misery, Annie Wilkes is placed as castrating mother and Paul Sheldon as regressed needy child in this exploration of phallic power and male dominance. Barbara Creed argues that the horror film shows the “terror of self disintegration, of losing oneself or ego, often represented cinematically by a screen which becomes black, signifying obliteration of self.” Horror films and psychoanalysis go well together for this very reason: psychoanalysis provides a means of understanding the cultural roles and anxieties represented in the monstrous assumption of power in horror. Rob Reiner’s film adaptation of the classic Stephen King novel Misery sees an obsessed violent woman terrorize a harmless man, yet this tale is not all that it seems, with a non-traditional female role played by Kathy Bates in her momentous performance as the monstrous madwoman, Annie Wilkes.įilms often represent females, especially the mother, negatively, positioning them as the abject in the socio-cultural and patriarchal arena. “the horror film stages and re-stages a constant repudiation of the maternal figure” – Barbara Creed ![]()
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