Let’s do one more Stephen King adaptation this October. I know I watched Secret Window once before (probably around 2005 or 2006 when it would have been played on TV), but I remember not being all that impressed with it. Not that it’s a full out bad film, just that I didn’t feel like I really needed to hold onto it in my memory or ever watch it again. Yet here I am, watching it again.
Since this is another based on a Stephen King short story about a writer - it is very much a movie about writing. Johnny Depp plays Mort Rainey, a depressed novelist who is in the midst of a divorce and writing a book based on his experiences of his wife (Maria Bello) cheating on him. He decides to do this in a remote cabin by a lake. So imagine his surprise when a man dressed like an Amish reject shows up at his door claiming that Rainey “stole his story”. Mort ignores the man named John Shooter (John Turturro), yet does end up reading the original manuscript and realizes it’s almost identical to something he wrote called “Secret Window”.
Shooter starts to terrorize Mort and Mort starts collecting evidence that he wrote the story first. However, Shooter continues to threaten him with murders and arson, wanting Mort to republish the story with Shooter ending and name. All of this causes Mort to constantly flashback to the time leading up to his wife’s infidelity and lose his grip on reality. There is also some guilt there being pushed down by a haze of cigarette smoke and Doritos. Mmm. Product placement.
Oh! I remember why I blocked this movie out! IMPORTANT SPOILER ALERT: The dog dies! The cute, personality-full dog dies!
Other SPOILER ALERT: Shooter and Mort are the same person. Oh come on! This movie came out in 2004. You can’t tell me someone didn’t spoil the ending by now. But I’m bringing it up for a reason. The best scene is when the audience discovers that when Mort talks to himself, it’s a moral version trying to get him to admit to doing wrong and protect people. That Mort apparently is the weakest of his personalities because when Shooter shows up, everything becomes a full blown horror story. It all stems back to Mort’s anger at his wife, his own writer’s block, and the fact that he actually DID plagiarize a story early in his career (this is hinted at throughout the movie, but stated outright in the original King story). If anxiety ever caused me to have Dissociative Identity Disorder, I would hope my other personality would have a better accent.
I do like the scenes where Mort is actually trying to write. He talk to himself the way we all do (admit it, you do) with the usual distractions around him like a slinky and comfy couch. I especially like when he re-reads a paragraph and tells himself, “Bad writing”. He then deletes the little bit he’s actually written. I can’t help agreeing with him on this. I’m constantly told that the important part is to get it on the page then go back and edit, but that drives me insane! Clearly (SPOILER ALERT), it was something else that drove Mort insane in the film, but maybe bad writing was a factor.
Okay, let’s talk about the John Turturro - shaped elephant in the room - plagiarism. King’s story is actually based on the unfounded accusations that he stole some of his story ideas. Here’s the problem: some authors get so hung up on the nit-picks of plot development and character creation that they forget that time their English teacher told them that there are finite types of stories. Look at Shakespeare! He was a great wordsmith, but all of his plots came from mythology and history. What drives me nuts are the writers who try to copyright a common word, a phrase, or a genre. You can’t stop people from having ideas and coincidences happen. Even King found out after he published Under the Dome that it was the plot of The Simpsons Movie.
