Misery the Rhetor for a

Misery The rhetor for a literary work may be the author, not present in the work itself, but clearly the voice that the reader "hears" through the characters, the situation, the descriptions, and every other element in the work. A character might be presented as a rhetor in the structure of the story, but the author is the primary rhetor.

A film is usually thought of as the product of the director rather than the screenwriter, and the rhetor would thus be the director, to whom is ascribed the various elements of the film and the meaning they are meant to convey.

However, the rhetorical situation for a film can be more complex, and this is especially true of a film made from a best-selling novel, where the author of the original work can still be considered the rhetor when that figure is strong enough to still speak through the material and to communicate with the audience more directly.

Stephen King is such an author not because his writing is so powerful that it cannot be distorted and not because his works are so clearly formed as to have a life of their own but because King's audience is loyal, follows him from one medium to another, and indeed goes to a given film precisely because it is from a work by King. King shapes the communication and reaches an audience even when he is not present himself.

The audience attends a King movie because it is a King movie and so experiences a communication event with King as rhetor and themselves as audience. This can be illustrated with reference to the film Misery, based on King's book of the same name.

Lloyd Bitzer describes what he calls the "Rhetorical Situation" and defines the rhetorical situation as "a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence" which can be completely or partially altered if human discourse is such that it can "bring about the significant modification of the exigence." (Bitzer 3). Bitzer states that rhetoric is situational and that the rhetorical situation always has at least one controlling exigence functioning as the organizing principle, specifying the audience to be addressed and the change to be effected.

A second constituent is the audience, and a rhetorical audience consists only of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change. Every rhetorical situation also contains a set of constraints made up of persons, events, objects, and relations that are part of the situation because they have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence. Standard sources of constraint include attitudes, beliefs, interests, motives, images, and similar elements.

Bitzer writes: These three constituents -- exigence, audience, constraints -- comprise everything relevant in a rhetorical situation. When the orator, invited by situation, enters it and creates and presents discourse, then both he and his speech are additional constituents. (Bitzer 8) In the film Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990), based on the novel by Stephen King, a novelist is noted for one particular character, Misery Chastain, a character he has killed off in his most recent but as yet unpublished book.

He is traveling through the mountains in the dead of winter and has a traffic accident, driving his car off the road where it is not likely to be seen. He is found by a woman named Annie Wilkes, his number one fan, who recognizes him immediately. She is a former nurse and takes him to her remote home, where she undertakes to nurse him back to health while at the same time regaling him with praise for the books he has written.

Her effusion is excessive and makes him uncomfortable, and he would like to make a call to tell others where he is. She will not allow this, making excuses. In time, he comes to accept her adoration of his work and lets her read his latest manuscript. When she finds that he has killed off her favorite character, Misery, she turns savage, torturing him, making him completely dependent on her, and preventing others from finding him.

She is revealed to be a woman who has previously been accused of killing patients in a hospital where she worked as a nurse. Ultimately, the man must fight back and destroy her in order to get back to civilization. The character displays elements of the borderline personality as well as obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

Annie Wilkes is presented as an obsessive-compulsive personality in the way she keeps her home, in the way she becomes dedicated so thoroughly to this writer and his works (and especially to the one character of Misery, with whom she identifies so closely), and in the expectations she has placed in the past on her patients and now on this particular patient. Davison and Neale identify the obsessive-compulsive personality as a perfectionist, preoccupied with details, rules, schedules, and so on.

They state that such people are also work rather than pleasure oriented. They are inflexible, and their interpersonal relationships suffer as a result (Davison and Neale 269-270). Annie Wilkes is seen as obsessive-compulsive in the way everything has to be just so, from the books she reads to the way her house is kept. She has a variety of knick-knacks everywhere, and each must be in its proper place. She wants every element in life to be in its proper place, and she becomes incensed when it is not so.

She expects the Misery books to be part of her life always, and her reaction to the news that this will no longer be so is violent and shows how dependent her personality is upon the imposed order of these novels. Her captive is expected to live up to all her idealized images of him as a writer, as a human being, and as a patient, and any deviation from the norm she sets is met with violent confrontation.

Presumably she was also disappointed in the reality of the patients she killed -- they failed to live up to her expectations of them as patients and did not do as well in treatment as required, so to restore order she killed them. When she encourages her captive to write, she is obsessive about providing him with precisely the tools needed, from a typewriter to the proper paper and pencils.

She is also obsessive in assuring herself that every piece of paper is used, that every pencil is returned, that every element in the room is kept in precise order. She controls the situation completely, both in and out of the house, and.