“Secret Window”, despite a lively, teeth-gnashing performance by Johnny Depp, never rises above the ordinary. The big surprise, that Shooter is a figment of the Author’s imagination and that it was himself all along who done all them nasty things, is a plot twist that has been done many times, and usually better – it is hard to think of a surprise twist along these lines that falls as flat as in “Secret Window”.

Arguably, the big surprise is also telegraphed. I’m not sure how obvious it would have been had I not seen the trailer for the film, but the trailer virtually gives the whole thing away – it certainly throws up the question of whether Shooter is imaginary or not, and that is all that is necessary to make the twist obvious. Without the trailer, I suspect it would still be easy to guess. The tone of the story is wrong for a stalker movie: Shooter is too crazy, too quickly, and we are given ample hints that not all is right with our Author’s mind, right from the prologue.

To address these problems, we have a two-fold task. Firstly, we have to find the persons responsible for the trailer, and get a big shovel, and… well, no, that’s tasks number three and four, the auxiliary tasks: do a trailer that doesn’t give away the ending of the film; and also, make an ending that has people reeling with its nastiness, instead of feeling just disgruntled and mildly annoyed. We want “The Usual Suspects” or “Being John Malkovich”, not “Hannibal”.

Anyway, the first task is to make the twist worthwhile. A revelation should be surprising; it should logically follow from the behavior and character of the protagonists; and it should explain the goings-on during the course of the film, preferably throwing them into a new light so that the audience going away from the film are struck by several “But of course!” moments on their way home, preferably causing them to pull their cars over by the roadside and laugh, cry, or throw up, and preferably all three.

The pleasures of “Secret Window”s revelation don’t quite do that. We are explicitly shown most of what really happened in flashbacks: to the murders, to what really happened in the motel room at the beginning, to him talking to himself. These are certainly part of other films with surprise twists (Fight Club and Angel Heart come to mind, particularly Angel Heart) but there are no moments I can think of (and I will confess, I have only seen the film once, so I could be wrong here) that take on whole new and delicious meanings once the film ends.

There are some things that are certainly puzzling at the end. Although Shooter says that the Author did the ending wrong, we don’t ever actually see it – we only see Shooter’s ending. Part of the plot hinges on us not having the original story to compare. So just what was the ending of the original story? It would have been nice to see it, for the differences and reasons for them to be made more explicit. Perhaps that particular story was written when the Author suspected his wife of cheating on him. Perhaps the original ending was originally going to be something much darker, something really profoundly nasty, and he changed it to make the story more commercial. There’s an implication that the author is at least sometimes a horror writer, simply because Stephen King, the author of the short story on which the film is based, is primarily a horror writer. (As a side note, this is one of three stories in which Stephen King has an Author as protagonist – Secret Window has the author as the psycho, Misery has the fan as the psycho, and The Dark Half has the novel as the psycho.)

The character of Shooter, then, is partially the Author’s desire to be true to the story, to the rage he was feeling as he suspected his wife of cheating on him. These themes could be brought out near the conclusion, as the original ending is revealed, and we see the real impetus for the change – the fact that his wife is reading over his shoulder as he writes the conclusion, and that he suppresses himself in a way he wouldn’t have to if the story were purely about an imaginary character.

The second task is to make the twist less obvious. Right from the beginning, Shooter is shown to have creepy, almost supernatural, powers. We are lead to the possibility that he may be supernatural, which is of course not the direction of thinking we want the audience to take, because it leads directly to the possibility that he’s in the Author’s imagination. Far better to root Shooter solidly in reality, to ensure that we never doubt him as an external force. As I mentioned earlier, if we want the film to look like a stalker film, we should have a slower build-up. The dog should not be killed until later, and Shooter’s ability to get around without being seen should at least have retrospective explanations.

In truth, the two tasks of making the twist less obvious, and more rewarding, are closely linked. One way of fixing both might be to make Shooter a real person. That is, the character of Shooter, the psychopath, is drawn from the Author’s imagination – but the appearance, the slowness and accent of speech, and the name, are taken from a real person. Perhaps the Author has even written about Shooter, in a story that he doesn’t remember writing: the real “Secret Window” story, quite different from the “nice” one that the author remembers writing.

So, Shooter is an innocent, a real person, a common-or-garden variety crazy person who first visits the Author insisting that he knows him, and that the Author stole his story – not literally the plot, but the character of Shooter. This, then, triggers off the Author’s psychosis, the things he was going through when writing “Secret Window”.

The existence of a real Shooter gives us a patsy as well, a person whom the police can suspect of the murder of the Author’s wife and lover. It does feel a little ridiculous that at the end, the police can have known the Author was responsible for the murders, and yet not have investigated any freshly dug earth.

With Shooter a real person, we can change the tone of the film. No longer is Shooter psychopathic from the start. He is sometimes reasonable, sometimes less so; a closer riff on the standard “Fatal Attraction” style stalker. We can show the real, reasonable Shooter interacting with other characters in public places, thus confirming that it isn’t all happening in the Author’s head. And the contrast of Shooter’s behaviours should provide interesting “But of course!” material for when the audience are driving home.

The conclusion virtually rewrites itself. The gradual build-up of stalkerishness culminates with the Author, Shooter, and the Author’s wife and her lover. Shooter, however, is doing it all wrong – this is the real Shooter, confused and scared by the Author’s delusions, and he doesn’t want to kill them. So we have a confrontation and a revelation: the Author shows Shooter what he should be doing, by killing his wife and her lover, and then reverts to his normal self, thinks that Shooter has just done it, and kills Shooter. The police are convinced by the Author’s story, at least at first, and there we have it: an ending that is a little more nasty and surprising that the one that we saw. We may not have them retching in the street, but we’re on our way.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 27th, 2004 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Horror, S, Thriller, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.