Secret Window
I’ve seen four movie adaptations of Stephen King books that have writers as heroes–The Shining (1980), Misery (1990), The Dark Half (1993), and now Secret Window–and I know of a few others. This isn’t necessarily self-indulgent on King’s part. An author this prolific would eventually run out of material if he didn’t use his own experience as a writer, and besides I happen to prefer the plotlines of The Shining and Misery to those of other King stories I know. He understands what it means to be a writer driven crazy by his own demons (in The Shining) as well as by some version of his public (in Misery), and even though he makes the heroes in both cases fairly dislikable, we wind up ensnarled in their dilemmas anyway. He also seems to have an astute take on writer’s block, suggesting that writing too much and repeating oneself can be as much a form of creative blockage as writing too little.
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Secret Window, which addresses this paradox more directly than The Shining, comes from a novella called Secret Window, Secret Garden. The plot certainly has possibilities, but far too many of them are botched by writer-director David Koepp, who’s a better writer than director. As a writer he’s been associated with everything from Apartment Zero to Death Becomes Her to Panic Room to Spider-Man and with directors such as Brian De Palma (Mission: Impossible, Carlito’s Way, Snake Eyes) and Steven Spielberg (Jurassic Park). But as a director he’s much less experienced, and it shows.
As written and as played by Turturro, Shooter is a preposterous character, unconvincing on just about every level, from his fake southern accent to his Amish hat. But this flaw in the second story retroactively becomes a virtue in the first–because Shooter turns out to be a figment of Rainey’s tortured imagination, existing to meet only his psychic needs and not anyone’s notions of credibility. Maybe this creation suggests that Rainey isn’t as blocked as he thinks, but the flimsiness of the character implies the kind of creative impediment alluded to earlier–that of a pulp writer who’s written too much and whose imagination is exhausted. There are also gaps in the exposition, such as a reference to an earlier plagiarism incident, that are only belatedly given minimal justification.
