Similar Products - Misery Characters

Misery, based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Stephen King, is about a writer called Paul Sheldon. After finishing his latest novel he goes out for a drive but crashes where upon he is rescued by Annie Wilkes. Annie is an ex-nurse who looks after Paul whilst he gets better. It transpires that Annie is not really looking after Paul for the good of his health, but because she is in love with his novels and seems to be obsessed with Paul himself. The film is then about Paul trying to escape and Annie forcing him to rewrite the novel that he had finished at the beginning of the film because she isn’t like the foul language and the fact that Paul kills off Misery, the main character.
When Paul finishes the new Misery book, as a celebration, he asks Annie for a cigarette and a match, as is his normal routine after finishing a book. He uses the match to seemingly light his manuscript on fire, but actually sets fire to a stack of notes with the Misery title page on top.
This then leads to a fight between the two main characters, ending with Paul killing Annie.
At the end of the film although Paul is alive and well he is not over the trauma inflicted upon him as he hallucinates, seeing Annie wherever he goes.

Key Character Traits

Annie Wilkes

In the beginning of the film Annie comes across as a kind and caring woman who is deeply religious. She rescues Paul from the snow and seems to be taking care of him. After reading his new book she turns nasty and violent, which is a very sudden change of persona. Perhaps from this we can assume that the nice person image is just a façade. She is clearly suffering from mental illness which could have been induced by living alone for so long and is then used to having things her own way, except taken to extremes.  

I would suggest that Annie is suffering from Münchhausen by proxy syndrome,which is where one purposefully makes another person, often somebody close to person suffering from Münchhausen's,ill/helpless so they can then care for them. Disabling Paul is clearly a sign that she is a sufferer of Münchhausen's as he is then less likely to escape her and she will then have to care for him forever. 

She is obsessive which is shown throughout the film. She is completely devoted to Paul’s Misery series; she even calls her pet pig Misery after the main character in the novel! She is so in love with the character and her story that she appears to have forgotten that the novel is just a work of fiction and when she finds out that Paul has killed of Misery she appears to take it as a personal insult and forces Paul to rewrite the novel.
During an escape attempt, Paul finds a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about his disappearance and Annie's past, discovering that she was suspected and tried for several infants' deaths. This shows herobsessive tendencies as she has gone through newspapers and saved articles about the people she's killed. She is clearly mentally unsound and is a danger both to herself and to others around her and really she ought to be sectioned.

Strong willed. Annie certainly knows what she wants and she will stop at nothing to achieve her aims. She wants Paul to rewrite his book; so she burns the old copy and forces him to rewrite it. She wants Paul to stay with her forever; so she disables him, and so on and so forth. This makes her particularly dangerous as she would resort to murder if that was the only option left, as indeed she does at the end of the film when she attempts to kill Paul so that they can be together forever.

As with most antagonists in the thriller genre, Annie is powerful. She has control over Paul as he cannot escape from her house and s previously stated she will stop at nothing to achieve her ends. Her ability to act like a nice and caring person means that she can fool the authorities into thinking that she lives alone and knows nothing about Paul or his disappearance when they come looking. The combination of these two traits makes Annie a very sinister character.

Morality appears to have eluded Annie as she pretends to be a devote christian but then has no qualms about murder which don't really go together. I think that her mental illness is what makes her lack morality and perhaps if she were able to combat the illness her sense of morality would be restored to that of an ordinary human being.

• Obsessive
• Psychotic
• Aggressive
• Selfish 
• Lonely
• Powerful

Paul Sheldon

Paul is a very calm person and handles the highly stressful situation of being held captive by Annie with a very level head. He plots his escape attempts carefully and is often compliant with Annie's wishes which shows his intelligence. Had he have been less intelligent he may have been less subtle about his escape plans and Annie may have killed him. 

Paul is a generally nice and good person as in the beginning although he is clearly a bit disturbed by Annie's obsessive behaviour (she tells him that she's his number one fan very excitedly) he is nice to her and offers her his completed manuscript to read. This is a nice gesture showing that he is polite as under ordinary circumstances, offering a fan a chance to read his latest novel before it was published would have been a wonderful thing to do!

Like Annie, Paul is also a very strong minded person. He never gives up as resigns to his fate as Annie's hostage, he is always trying to find some way to escape her clutches. From this we could then perhaps assume that Paul is an optimistic person as he must believe there is a chance for him to escape or else it would be unlikely that he would keep trying to do so.

I think Paul holds the same general morals as any average person, in that, he would never dream of, nor wish to, kill another human being but when put in a situation of kill or be killed Paul chooses the former, as I'm sure  would most people.

• Calm
• Polite
• Intelligent
• Morally Good
• Strong Willed
• Optimistic
• Resourceful - In that he does not have much to work with but he manages to create a lock pick for himself, amongst other things.