THE DOUBLE IN FICTION: A REVIEW OF THE MOVIE “SECRET WINDOW” BY DAVID KOEPP
INTRODUCTION
Secret Window is a psychological thriller released in 2004 and adapted from a Stephen King novella, “Secret Window, Secret Garden”. It stars Johnny Depp as Mort Rainey, a successful mystery writer who is suffering from a serious case of writer’s block primarily caused by an unfortunate divorce from his wife, Amy, whom he caught cheating with her new boyfriend Ted Milner. Mort retreats to a lakeside cabin trying to finish a novel despite his lack of inspiration and growing resentment for his wife. Mort’s solitary life in the woods is disturbed when a mysterious man named John Shooter appears on his doorstep accusing him of plagiarism by claiming that Mort has word-for-word stolen a story he had written years before, and published it in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. The identical stories were Mort’s “Secret Window” and Shooter’s “Sowing Season” (). Shooter demands to Mort, “Fix it. Make it right!” in a Southern accent and proposed to rework the ending of the story. The intruder sends increasingly persuasive signals that he means business, first putting a screwdriver through Mort’s dog, then burning down the New York home where Amy lives with her new partner before progressing to brutal murder (). The movie ends when Mort realizes that Shooter is only a figment of his imagination, reveals this to his wife, and later kills her and her lover with a shovel and buries them in a garden where he later plants a crop of corn ().
THESIS
In the film Secret Window, directed by David Koepp, the theme of the double is used to represent the protagonist’s “dark side.” This was realized through the portrayal of Shooter as stalker and the use of two different kinds of hats, Mort’s depression from the divorce, and the ending in Mort’s story Secret Window.
Rooney claimed that “the story is a chronicle of a man becoming steadily disturbed, engaged in a bickering dialogue with himself and increasingly ruled by the demons in his head”. Mort’s emotional trauma from the divorce robbed him off his inspiration and put him in a state of a worst writer’s block. His negative feelings formed an evil-like alter-ego, in the person of Shooter, which overshadowed his real persona. Shooter was part of himself as displayed by his behaviors in the movie. First, Shooter seemed to appear at bad times, to know everything about Mort’s life and to make his quest for the magazine harder. Shooter accused that Mort copied a story he has written a few years back and demanded that Mort fix it. Mort promised to get a copy of the magazine where the story was published to prove his innocence. However, Shooter was a violent, impatient man, stalking Mort and making increasingly worse things happen as the magazine failed to arrive ( 1). Mort eventually located the magazine that would have proven he published Secret Window before Shooter wrote Sowing Season but the story had been cut out. Second, there were two hats used in the film. One was Mort’s knit hat and the other was Shooter’s tall brimmed hat. The hats represented different personas. Whenever Mort got up from his couch of depression to do something he put on his going-out knit hat. Shooter’s hat was kept at a distance at first but began to close in on Mort as the story progressed. When he actually placed the hat on his own head, the dark inner workings of his soul were revealed ().
The use of Shooter also demonstrated the high cost of marital infidelity and the kind of evil that can be unleashed when one person chooses to follow his sinful desires. It presented the aftermath of divorce and the kind of nightmare that it brings. Mort’s fascination with unending naps and liquor, as well as his tendency to walk around in his wife’s tattered bathrobe and sport a weird hairdo revealed longing for his wife (). Also, Mort’s work Secret Window which Shooter claimed as plagiarized narrated the experience of a man who is betrayed by his wife, and decides to kill her and bury her in her beloved garden (). When Mort finally realized that Shooter was only a fabrication of his imagination brought so vividly to life through undetected dissociative identity disorder to commit acts that Mort himself felt he could not commit, his concerned ex-wife tried to help him but Mort was already overpowered by Shooter. He killed his wife and her lover with a shovel and buried them in a garden where he later planted with corn ().
The movie’s ending was highlighted by Mort’s line, “The only thing that matters is the ending…and this one’s perfect” (). The finale showed that the evil has won. The local sheriff told Mort that he knew about the murder and as soon as the bodies were found, Mort would pay for the crime. Mort nonchalantly ignored the threat because he knew that the ending of his story would be an impeccable culmination. His decision to plant, grow and consume corn from the garden where his ex-wife and her lover were buried meant that he was actually destroying all the evidence needed to implicate him with the crime ().
CONCLUSION
The movie Secret Window was a creation that aspired to arouse psychological inquiry as well as portray the dilemma within human nature which is the battle between good and evil. The plot of the movie was a subtle journey from the lead character’s emotional and psychological stresses caused by two most common traumas in human experience – infidelity and betrayal. Mort’s hatred towards his wife’s cheating consumed his creativity and left him in a state of severe incapability to even come up with a single line for a story. These negative emotional factors brought into life a dark alter-ego Shooter, who became his companion in a sinister of events that led him to realizing that his stalker was actually a fiction of his mind. Koepp’s movie was helpful in portraying that a person’s self can actually be his greatest enemy. As humans experience life and its varying degrees of complexities and stresses, a person has to deal with letting go of the past and moving on with the present to have a renewed view of the future. It is a narration of how a person writes his personal story by making important decisions. Mort had a hard time doing this. The book of his life started with chaos and he ended it by choosing evil, which was basically more chaotic.
REFERENCES
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