The Duck Speaks

Mort Rainey’s got a bad case of the blues. His marriage has been over since he found his wife in bed with another man, he can’t seem to write anything new that’s worth a damn- and now some crazy fella has shown up at his door, claiming Rainey stole his story. John Shooter’s the fella’s name, and when Mort reluctantly investigates further, he finds that Shooter might be crazier then he first thought. Even worse, though, is just how far Shooter is willing to go to prove his point…

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“Secret Window, Secret Garden,” by Stephen King
You know what? I really hate reprints. Not in theory, of course; reprints are pretty much the only way I would’ve been able to read have the stuff I’ve read. But the practice, specifically the practice of changing the cover for each new edition, drives me bonkers. Mainly because these reprint covers nearly always suck. The new Signet editions all have this weird Art Deco neon sign look, which is just plain not scary at all. The original paperback of Four Past Midnight had an eerie sundial, with a crack down the middle showing an evil, awful glow. Perhaps vaguely reminiscent of Dianetics, but still effectively creepy. The new one? Well, there’s the movie tie-in, with Johnny Depp grimacing on the cover; and then there’s the Signet version, with it’s glowing skeleton arms reaching through clock gears. Trust me, it looks way crappier than it sounds.

If you don’t know, “Secret Window, Secret Garden” is the second of four (duh) novellas collected in Four Past Midnight. Four was King’s second collection of novellas; the first was Different Seasons, which featured three “straight” pieces by King and one horror piece. Interestingly enough, that horror piece, “The Breathing Method,” is the only one in the collection which hasn’t been adapted into a movie yet.

Novellas are an interesting breed; as King goes into in his DS introduction, they’re damnably hard to get published, being too long for most magazines and too short to stand on their own. Fortunately, by the time DS was published, King was famous enough that, as the old joke goes, he could’ve published his laundry list and still had a guaranteed best seller. DS was actually a decent sized success, even apart from the movie adaptations, but it wasn’t till eight years later that King came out with a similar collection. This time, though, the spread was all horror.

“The Langoliers,” the first story (I’m going to use story and novella interchangeably here, okay? Just know everything I talk about in this review is a novella, unless I say otherwise) in Four Past Midnight, is a fairly typical “Twillight Zone”-ish tale, made distinct primarily by its characters and freaky added touches. It was adapted into a sluggish tv miniseries a few years back, which I’m sure I’ll get around to covering someday (lucky me). “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” comes second; following that is the excellent “The Library Policeman,” which is very nearly a novel in its own right, and “The Sun Dog,” about a ghostly cur and a nasty camera. That last one scared the absolute crap out of me, and it continually amazes me that no one’s tried to put it to screen yet.

But back to “SW, SG.” Anyone whose read more than a few of Stephen King’s stories knows the man is extremely interested in writing about writers, some would say exhaustively so. On those grounds, it’s understandable that you might approach “SW, SG” with some moderate degree of trepidation. After all, the hero is- gah!- a writer, and the plot centers on the idea of plagiarism, not exactly a hot topic for those not interested in the trade. Sure, in a lot of ways stealing a man’s work is the same as stealing a man’s car; but where car thieves usually mean car chases, the best we can hope for here is a careful study of copyright law.

However, if you let that keep you away, you’ll be missing a compelling piece of storytelling. Perhaps it’s because I’m a writer myself, but I found this novella to be as suspenseful as all get out, and in the final estimation creepy as hell. For one thing, there’s murder and infidelity and madness, and for another, the writing parts are fascinating, being, as they are, a reflection of all of the above. Plus, since it’s a novella, there’s little of King’s late period bloat to suffer through; all told it runs under two hundred pages, and I reread it for this review in an afternoon.

The beginning is a tad rough, though. Conceptually, the opening is very sound; we come in just as Shooter is making his initial accusation to a nap-hungover Rainey on the latter’s front porch. This is cool, because in essence those two characters are created for us at the exact same moment, something which becomes extremely important by the story’s end. Plus, we jump in already on the run, which is always a terrific way to begin.

Unfortunately, the running doesn’t go so smoothly at first; “SW, SG” starts in those opening pages like a car on a particularly cold morning. King keeps getting distracted by tangents which distract from the important thing, ie the interaction between Shooter and Rainey. Their conversation takes maybe five minutes real time, but it runs nearly six pages, and it’s frustrating to read because most of the digressions don’t add anything. A lot of stories open like this in rough draft form, as a writer tries to feel his way into the world he’s creating, but the dead ends should have been edited out further down the road. I could, I suppose, make some justification for them- Mort’s trying to shake off the sleepies so his mind’s still wandering, maybe- but in the end, they simply get in the way.

Fortunately, things get better soon enough. Whether this has more to do with the writing changing or my getting involved in the story, I can’t say for certain, but I can tell you that once it hits its stride, the story moves on at a good clip. Even more importantly, you want to keep moving with it, as there is always an unresolved issue you want to see taken care off: both the over-plot, trying to appease Shooter, and the more immediate bits, like trying to find the story, remember past events, trying to get outside help. The reason I read it in an afternoon is that I was good and hooked after ten pages- which is funny when you consider I already knew how it ended.

What fascinated me most this time around was the thematic convergence of the two basic themes: there’s the plagiarism stuff, and the ex-wife stuff, and the connection between the two is evident from the moment Mort reads the story Shooter hands him. It’s called (surprise), “Secret Window, Secret Garden,” and it closely follows the plot and prose of Mort’s story, “Sowing Season.” Even more interesting, both stories are about killing your wife. Here’s the open paragraph of Shooter’s story:

Todd Downey thought that a woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had was not much of a woman. He therefore decided to kill her. He would do it in the deep corner formed where the house and barn came together at an extreme angle- he would do it where his wife kept her garden.

Just for giggles, here’s the opening paragraph of Mort’s:

A woman who would steal your love when your love was all you had wasn’t much of a woman- that, at least, was Tommy Havelock’s opinion. He decided to kill her. He even knew the place he would do it, the exact place; the little patch of garden she kept in the extreme angle formed where the house and the barn came together.

I like that. The similarities are there, but it’s just different enough that you can imagine two people writing it. Kinda like a parallel universe X-Men comic.

The point I’m making is that clearly, both those paragraphs can be said to relate to Mort’s current situation, what with the whole infidelity/divorce thing going down. There’s something immediately off about that. Even more off is the subtle implication that Mort is thinking about killing his own wife Amy, and her new lover Ted. (We even learn later on that Mort had a gun with him when he confronted them at the motel, a gun he swears over and over wasn’t loaded.) To have this piece of writing come back into his life at such an inopportune time is just asking for trouble.

So the story-stealing thread and the wife-losing thread intersect with one another, even if the reason for this isn’t immediately apparent. Seeing the connections, and watching them bounce off each other is what gives the story it’s psychological depth; Mort thought his love was the only thing he had, but now that’s gone and suddenly someone’s trying to take away all he’s got left, the thing which has been the most important aspect of his life, the thing which most likely led to the divorce- his writing.

Of course, “Sowing Season” is his. It is; he has the copyright date and Shooter’s slip of the tongue to prove it. However, nagging guilt keeps gnawing at him, an over-defensive-ness that can’t entirely be explained by his current depression. When he reads Shooter’s story for the first time, he freaks out, as if the idea that anyone could simply look at somebody else’s writing and type it out with slight variations never occurred to him. And as the story progresses, he becomes more and more insistent that he has to solve all of this himself, even after things get a great deal more intense…

There’s stuff going on beneath the surface here, but I’d rather not get into it right now as it is heavy duty spoiler material; I’m gonna save that for the end. Suffice to say, most things aren’t what they seem in this one.

However, even disregarding the ending, there’s an idea worth looking at here, one that King has touched on an awful lot over the course of his work: just where the hell do writers get their ideas? It’s a question which has been asked so many times that mocking it has become standard practice, but for King it is always one that bears looking into, most obviously in “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” and The Dark Half, a novel which King admits has strong connections with “SW, SG.” In all of these writings, there is a sense of the horrifically absurd when it comes to the stories a writer creates- an attempt to explain a complex psychological system through the use of a variety of baroque supernatural conceits. The plagiarism is just one more wrinkle, and an inevitable one at that; if you don’t know where you stories really come from, how can you prove they didn’t come from somebody else?

What else… well, long time King fans might be interested to note that part of the story takes place in Derry. No clown references, though, which probably for the best.

SCREEN:

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Secret Window, directed by David Koepp
Well, since nearly every review I’ve read of this movie starts on the same note, who am I to buck the trend: Johnny Depp rocks. He just does; I haven’t seen all of his movies, but I’ve seen most of ‘em, and the only mediocre performance I’ve seen him give was as the heavy in The Astronaut’s Wife. Frankly, that movie blew so hard you can’t really blame him- but then, what’s surprising about the actor is that, while he generally works in A-list projects, even when he takes on a script that isn’t of any particular interest, he usually manages to find some odd quirk to make the whole thing shine (see: The Pirates of the Caribbean). There are very few pictures he’s done where he’s not one of the best, if not the best, actor on screen, and as he gets older, he just seems to be getting better.

His work in Secret Window just confirms how fun he is to watch. We’re not talking Oscar-worthy or anything, the material doesn’t merit it (although that didn’t stop the Jack Sparrow nom, so what do I know), but he turns a moderately generic protagonist into a compelling, biting basket-case, the sort of misanthrope that always gets my sympathies. As his character loses part of his grip on reality, as his situation grows more and more untenable, Depp does an excellent job of both keeping our sympathies and losing our trust; and while things do go off the rails by the end, it’s still obvious that Depp is making strong choices, and that in another movie, those choices most likely would have worked very well.

As for the movie surrounding him… Well. It certainly starts off like gangbusters, I’ll give it that. We open with a close up of Mort (Depp) in his jeep, parked somewhere with the engine running and snow falling outside. There’s a voice-over of his thoughts, and it just keeps saying, “Turn around. Don’t do this. Turn around.” So Mort does, only it doesn’t exactly take, since he ends up wheeling around to the same spot he was before, a spot we now discover, as the camera pulls away, to be a motel parking lot. He runs into the front office, which is deserted, grabs a room key and runs off just as somebody comes out to see what’s going on. Mort gets back into his car and books it to the other side of the motel, so fast that for a moment you think he might not stop, might just keep going and plow through a wall- the dude is seriously pissed off. But he does stop, and unlocking a door, bursts into one of the rooms where we see a man and a woman on the bed, and well it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s happening here, and all of a sudden we’re in this weird echoy slow motion and everybody’s screaming but we can’t make out what they’re saying, and then it stops.

There isn’t much dialogue, and more importantly, there doesn’t need to be; nearly every important piece of information is conveyed by action. There’s a dark feel to it as well that gives the scene its own personality- it’s like watching a really good slasher movie where the slasher is unable to kill anyone. And when the credits are done rolling, and we find Mort sleeping in his bathrobe on a couch, with the line “Six months later” underneath, we know exactly what happened. Not five minutes into the picture and already one of the central conflicts, Mort and Amy (Maria Bello) and Ted (Timothy Hutton), has been established.

And in the next five minutes, the other central conflict comes to play, because Mort is wakened from his slumber to the incessant poundings of John Shooter (John Turturro), here to tell our hero that “You stole my story.” Shooter makes an odd figure, with his Amish hat and hick accent, but he is dangerously implacable. Mort brushes him off, but of course we haven’t seen the last of him. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a movie.

Mort’s in a bad spot; and not only did his wife cheat on him, not only is some whackjob accusing him of plagiarism, he also can’t seem to write anything new. Every time he tries, he ends up with a few lame sentences which are far too close to his own life. To be honest, Mort doesn’t even seem that bothered by it. His biggest concern at this point, aside from sniping at Ted and getting Shooter off his back, is to sleep- and not in a bed. Always on the couch. Couch sleeping is pure escapism all the way, something Mort’s been wanting a lot lately.

That need for sleep is one of the more convincing aspects of movie. I’ve spent a good portion of my life suffering through some depression or another, and napping is often the only way I could think of to get away from the rest of the world that was hurting so much. Clearly, Mort’s going through something similar here- he’s a man who has been abruptly ejected from the world he knew, and he can’t seem to get back to what he should be doing. So he sleeps, and there are some very nice time loss sequences here, including a brief dream that gives a moderate clue as to what’s coming in the future.

However, he can’t escape forever. Amy wants the divorce papers signed, and keeps calling to see how he’s doing. It’s extremely easy to sympathize with Mort’s annoyance the first time this happens. So, she broke your heart after over a decade’s worth of marriage, she’s thrown you out of your home, it’s probably her fault you can’t write anything worth a damn, and now she wants to call because she’s “concerned you’re not doing so well?” Make sure you’re doing okay, because she had one of her “feelings.” Little late for that, isn’t it? Yet even if we are on Mort’s side, Amy never seems anything less than sympathetic, which is interesting when you consider that, marriage break-up wise, her affair with Ted is the only openly negative thing shown for most of the movie. Near the end, Amy accuses him of never being there for her, even when he was at home, of always being so wrapped up in his writing that it was like she wasn’t even there. We as an audience never get any direct proof of this- but fortunately, by that point in the story, Mort’s cracks have begun to show enough that we have no difficulty believing he might not have been the most attentive of husbands.

Still, Mort does have our sympathies from the start, inspired partly by the opening scene, but even more by his wit- the movie ain’t filled with one-liners, but there are enough good ones coming out of his mouth to win us over, especially his zingers directed at Ted. Bitter misanthropy can be fun, provided it’s funny. It’s a good thing this stuff is, and Depp has the timing and the willingness to go all the way with it, because the movie lives and dies on our willingness to be involved in Mort’s world, and our commitment to trusting his views on that world.

But I’ve already said my piece on Depp, how about the other actors? Maria Bello does well enough, in a role that isn’t all the challenging; Amy doesn’t have much in the way of character traits, aside from wanting everybody to be happy and worrying about Mort. I enjoyed Timothy Hutton a lot- Ted is a fairly unsympathetic character, as such invaders usually are, but the more we see of him, the more we reluctantly like him. He clearly cares a great deal for Amy, which is worth some points. Charles Dutton makes an appearance as Mort’s lawyer friend who comes to town to help him sort out the whole Shooter thing. He’s cool, and has the sort of vaguely threatening/reassuring presence the role requires. And this is probably just a personal thing, but it always makes me happy to see Len Cariou on screen, here as the quirky sheriff Dave Newsome. Cariou originated the role of Sweeney Todd in Sondheim’s classic musical, and, aside from his obvious acting chops, I just get a thrill hearing his voice.

And then there’s John Turturro. Usually, I dig Turturro. Character-actor wise, he’s on the line between Depp and Steve Buscemi, not quite hot enough to score mainstream roles, but still normal looking enough to get a lot of second player work. He is as good as Depp at varying his performances, and he always takes interesting work; hell, just watch enough Cohen brothers movies, you’ll see what I mean. (He’ll always be Barton Fink to me.) Here, though, I dunno. It’s very hard for me to judge his performance with any degree of objectivity because his physical presence alone is so intensely different from the character in the novel. Yes, he is threatening and suitably disturbed enough to be believable in context- but I did not once believe him as Shooter, nor did I find him particularly frightening. Others have, and they were folks who hadn’t read the novella, so I’m most likely biased, but he never seemed a strong enough presence to be the driving force of the narrative.

This might have been a choice on the director/screenwriter’s part, though, and here we come to the nub of it. I have some major problems with the movie, but those problems rest almost entirely on the ending, and the changes made to the source material to achieve that ending. Turturro is just a small part of that. But even without having read the novella, I think that ending would have given me fits. It marks a fairly drastic change in tone for the movie, and turns a moderately interesting set-up into one of the hoariest clichés in the Book O’ Plots. It’s like an episode of “Night Gallery” spread out to an hour and a half, and the “twist” utterly squandered whatever good will the movie had earned with me up to that point. Hell, prior to the final five minutes or so, I was pretty gung ho about this one. It wasn’t genius, but it was solid, and the acting was enough to pull over the rough spots; but coming out of the theater, I was mentally shaking my fist at all involved.

That, however, is a subject for the next section. There’s little more to mention here, other than some cool directorial tricks (our intro to Rainey’s lake house is a long tracking shot that ends by literally taking us through a mirror- a rather nifty, if obvious, metaphor for what is to come) and some less than cool directorial tricks (let’s just say, some of those obvious metaphors get a lot too obvious by the end), and a perfectly acceptable score. Oh, and I really wish I had that couch.

COMPARE/CONTRAST:
While Secret Window is in many ways a faithful adaptation of “SW, SG,” there are some major changes, and it should come as no surprise at this point that the biggest of those changes occur at the end. However, to talk about those, we have to talk spoilers- serious spoilers- so before we go that far, might as well get out some of the minor changes to begin with.

The novella and the movie begin at two separate points. I can’t honestly decide which I prefer; aside from the stuttering, King’s opening is very nice, but then so is the movie’s. What should be noted is that each one gives you an idea of what the rest of the story is going to be about. King tells you right of the bat that this is a struggle between two writers over one story; we find out a few pages in that one of those writers, our protagonist, is divorced, but that’s secondary information. Contrast that with the movie, where we don’t even know Mort’s a writer until after the credits, but where the entire opening is devoted to showing us a jilted husband. Clearly, the storytellers at work here, while telling mostly the same story, have different goals in mind.

The location has been changed; while the movie is set on Tashmore Lake for the most part, this Tashmore Lake is in upstate New York, while King’s is in Maine. This allows for a trip to the city which wasn’t possible in the novella, but not much else, as Tashmore Lake itself is relatively unchanged. I suppose the writer simply felt more comfortable working with NY.

Some basic character alterations are made- the lawyer Charles Dutton plays isn’t even in the book; there is a character who serves a similar purpose, Greg Carstairs, but he isn’t nearly as threatening, nor does he have as close a relationship with Mort. Fred Evans, the insurance investigator in the novella, is now Fran Evans, and where Fred was extremely competent and had a hand in the novella’s conclusion, Fran is a bit of a ditz, and only appears in one scene.

There’s other, minor stuff, like some timing issues, and the fact that Mr. Bump the cat is now Chico the dog (maybe cause dogs are easier to work with? I dunno), but nothing really meaty which can be talked about with revealing (gasp) too much. Which means, I suppose, that it’s time for:

Spoilers!

Okay, here goes. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The first sign that the endings of “SW, SG” and Secret Window are going to be vastly different happens during the initial phone conversation between Mort and his wife. Shooter has already made an appearance, and Mort lets slip about this to her, telling her the situation. In the story, Amy’s mildly concerned, but in the movie she immediately asks, “Did you steal it?” Mort reacts with obvious derision, and she responds with, “So it was only the one time?”

One of the big secrets of the novella is that Mort really did steal a story from someone at one point; only not the story Shooter claims is plagiarized, and it happened back during his college years. Mort majored in creative writing at Bates (which, in an not-so-interesting coincidence, just happens to be the college where I currently work- isn’t life funny?), and during one of his classes met a writer who was, horror of horrors, a good deal better than he was. This drove Mort nearly to distraction, because it had never happened to him before. Mort tries to talk with John, the writer, but (in a Salieri-ish twist) John is nearly incapable of communicating with others, especially not with the degree of fluency he shows in his written work. This seems like the end of it; only some time later, when Mort is going through his old papers, he finds a copy of one of John’s stories, “Crowfoot Mile.” Telling himself it’s a practical joke, he changes the name of the author to his own, and mails the story to a literary magazine he’s been struggling to crack for a couple of years.

Lo and behold, they publish it.

Mort freaks, which is understandable, but he doesn’t tell anyone, which is also understandable, if not exactly excusable. He spends the next few years in agony that he’ll be discovered, but when he isn’t, he eventually puts it out of his mind and continues his own career, earning his own successes. He tells no one about any of this.

I’ll repeat that: he tells no one. We don’t learn about it till over two thirds of the way through the novella; there are a few hints, but nothing to tip the hand. The revelation is a crucial one, as it puts a new light on Mort’s relationship with Shooter- especially when we find out just who and what Shooter really is.

In the movie, however, it seems like everyone knows about it. Amy, the lawyer- okay, that’s it, so really not everybody. But it’s still a crucial distinction, because it changes a long repressed skeleton in the closet to a minor sin which has been confessed and exculpated quite sufficiently. This becomes even more apparent when we find that not only do all these people know about Mort’s little indiscretion; the cheated writer himself even discovered it, and came to Mort for recompense. Which was promptly given. And that’s that. In three bits of dialogue, the screenwriter has successfully removed one of the underpinnings of King’s novella. But then, having seen the new ending, this stands to reason; because the adaptation is concerned not at all with the process of writing and submerged guilt, but with repressed rage and divorce.

I’m gonna try and sum up the two endings as quick as possible so I can point some stuff out. (Hey, if I say spoilers, I want to give a good bang for your buck.)

“SW, SG:” fifteen or so pages before the end, Mort Rainey learns the truth. There never was a John Shooter, not from the start, and all the destruction which he thought Shooter caused (dead cat, burned house, two murders) could only be laid at the feet of one man: Mort himself. Due to his guilt over the long ago theft, and his impotent, directionless fury at the loss of his wife, Mort has suffered a deep schism of the psyche, a schism which has driven him to violent acts he would not have believed himself capable of. The signs are all too clear- he may be mad, but he’s also a writer, and when he creates an alternative personality, he’s really creating a new character. Shooter is filled with all sorts of little hints and clues to his non-existence, the sort of in jokes one finds in any novelists work: John is the first name of the student Mort stole from, and Mort’s wife’s boyfriend comes from Shooter’s Knob.

As soon as Mort figures this out, he feels Shooter taking over; he sees his wife pull into the driveway and tries to scream at her to get away- because he’s now realized that, while he himself could never kill Amy, Shooter could. In fact, that is most likely the very reason Mort created Shooter: to do what Mort secretly wished to do, but could not.

Darkness slides down over Mort’s eyes, which is very creepy; but even creepier is that we switch to Amy’s perspective as she enters the house. She finds the place is a mess, which is a shock since we were never told that earlier on, and then she finds Mort- only Mort is gone, and Shooter’s in control. There’s a struggle, a pair of scissors into Amy’s legs, and the two end up out on the porch, where Mort is promptly shot dead by Fred Evans.

In the Pyscho-ish epilogue, Amy and Ted, now married, go to see Fred. Fred explains that he’d grown suspicious of Mort before his death, and had followed Amy down to the house on the lake to make sure everything went alright. He and Ted are both convinced that Mort just suffered your standard issue nervous breakdown and this time snapped for good.

Amy is not so sure. She tells Fred that she learned some information about one of the men who Mort killed, a man who had seen Mort while he was standing with Shooter. It turns out that as he drove by, this man saw only Mort, and waved to him; but once he was past, in his rearview mirror he could see a truck and another man with Mort- only he could see right through both of them.

Amy also had her own weird occurrence: when she was cleaning up the house, she threw the creepy Amish hat Mort had been wearing into the trash. When she came back to the trash a few minutes later, the hat was in a different position, and pinned to it was a note which said, in essence, sorry for the troubles, but I got the story I wanted, “Crowfoot Mile,” and I’ll be going now. The signature was John Shooter, and the handwriting was absolutely nothing like Mort’s.

Amy believes that Shooter was a character Mort created- and created so well that he became real.

Contrast that with the ending of Secret Window. Once again, Mort figures out Shooter isn’t real, which instigates a pretty damn absurd scene where Depp argues with himself through the magic of CGI. Amy shows up when Mort loses it, just like in the novella, although this time Mort doesn’t have a moment of horror when he realizes what’s about to happen- which follows with what happens next.

Amy comes in, sees the place is a mess, and finds Mort/Shooter upstairs, and the chase ensues, all the same as before. Only, when Mort/Shooter and Amy get outside and somebody else shows up, it’s Ted who plays cavalry this time around- and a woefully inept cavalry at that, as Mort/Shooter dispatches with him with little trouble at all. Then he turns around and kills Amy.

Yup, that’s a little different.

I have failed to mention that one of the other differences between the novella and the book is that, in the novella, Shooter wants Mort to write a new story for him, but in the movie, Shooter wants Mort to “fix” the ending of the short story he claims Mort stole from him. You know, the short story about killing one’s wife. This new ending gets repeated about six times before the movie’s done, three of those times in the last ten minutes, just in case you don’t get it; it’s all about burying the wife in her garden, then eating the crop that grows up to get rid of the “evidence.”

Which sounds a lot like a Roald Dahl story, now that I think about it.

Anyway, after the deaths of Amy and Ted, we jump forward a year or so. Mort goes into town on an errand, and everyone gives him the cold shoulder- he’s sort of normal, only a little to chipper to be sane. Back at his house, Sheriff Newsome comes by to tell Mort to stop coming into town. We see the house is completely cleaned up, there’s even a home gym in the living room, and also, there’s corn. Lots and lots of corn. Mort’s actually eating some when Newsome finds him. Newsome tells him that they know what he did, and that they’ll get him eventually; Mort is utterly unconcerned, though, and only goes on about how important an ending is, and how he’s finished his story. There’s a shot of corn growing in the “secret garden” out back, to drive the point home, and that’s pretty much it.

Okay, now that I’ve completely blown both stories wide open for you, let’s see if we can’t make some sense of all this.

The crux, I think, lies in Shooter and how he is created in both versions. In the novella, Amy is right: Shooter really is a character who became real. In the movie, though, there’s nothing supernatural at all. Shooter is entirely a figment of Mort’s psychosis. But why is that? And what do we lose by that?

Second part first, because it’s easier; we lose what makes the story really interesting in the first place. The movie, while clever and entertaining in spots, is in the end just another “Wow! He was crazy all along!” type movies that we’ve seen a thousand times before; even the ending where fiction and reality attempt to merge is trite and predictable, because it lacks any subtlety whatsoever. The screenwriter became so enamored of the “Get the ending right” gag that he hit it far too hard. Plus, there is an apparent attempt to downplay the Shooter aspects of the story, which is odd; aside from the miscasting of Turturro as a writer’s imagined version of a hick from Mississippi, it’s like the movie is trying to focus more on Depp’s relationship with his wife, to get to the stinger ending more quickly. I almost forgot he was even there at all a few times.

But what is the movie about with that sort of ending? A guy killing his wife and her lover. That’s it. There are no real themes, no resonance or unusual ideas. Nothing that has us thinking on our way out the theater, other than “Golly, Johnny Depp kicks ass.” So it’s a movie that isn’t very scary, with an unsurprising surprise ending, and only one decent characterization which falls apart at the end.

“SW, SG,” however, is about more than just killing one’s wife. By the end, it becomes about how the accumulation of trauma over the course of a man’s lifetime, primarily the plagiary and the divorce, can drive him to extraordinary lengths; and how the nature of writing itself can augment those lengths in unexpected directions.

Which brings us back to how Shooter was created, and why I find him so much more interesting in the novella. Since the novella is as much about writing as it is about anything, King makes a point of mentioning what I mentioned earlier; how there are all sorts of things that writers put into characters to make them their own. Mort did this when he created Shooter, because he couldn’t help doing it, and even though he wrote the psycho Southerner so he could kill his wife, he also put in the one great guilt of his life, the thing which had driven him to a nervous breakdown when someone even implied he might have done it again; stealing “Crowfoot Mile.” Because he used that, because he combined those two intense passions, he did something extraordinary- he made the ghost of a man who never existed, a ghost whose purpose was a much his own his destruction as his wife’s.

After all, his infidelity, secret as it may be, is just as bad.

That ghost just creeps me out, frankly. Because I’ve often written characters who seem exceedingly real to me, and I’ve often seen or read characters who a part of me was convinced truly did exist, and it makes you wonder: where do they come from? And how do they get that power?

End Spoilers!

Dear lord, this one went on a bit long didn’t it. I apologize for those of you who haven’t read or seen either work and behaved admirably in avoiding the spoiler section, as it sort of dominated this review. But then, that should give you all the more impetus to seek out both on your own, so you can come back here and see just how wrong I was. And for those of you who sneaked a peek, well, you should at least try reading the novella. I’m sure you’re take on it will be far different from mine. Plus, the other three parts in Four Past are solid reading in their own right.

As for the movie? Worth a rental, for Depp’s work at least. (Hell, you’ll probably get a kick out of Turturro as well, he certainly is fun to watch.) Just don’t be too surprised if the good feeling you get going in isn’t the same as the feeling you get while you rewind the tape.

SOURCE: QQQ.5
SCREEN: QQ.5
Timothy Hutton rules!