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Popular Culture Review
In Secret Window, written by David Koepp, it is, again, both a marriage
and a mind that unravel. Taken from a short story by Stephen King entitled
“Secret Window, Secret Garden,-’ the film opens with Mort Rainey (Depp)
leaving a motel in which his wife Amy Rainey (Maria Bello) and Ted Milner
(Timothy Hutton) are making love. As the wipers thump across the windshield
and snow falls, Rainey argues with himself: "Don’t go back. Do not go back
there.” The cacophony of voices begins, but we do not yet understand its
significance. We learn later that Rainey’s voices are evidence of separate
identities that are beginning to manifest themselves as he goes slowly and
privately insane. He ignores his own warning, takes a key from the front desk,
enters the couple’s room, points a gun at them, screams, and leaves.
Six months later Rainey is sitting in his cabin on the coast of New
York. He is accosted by a man who introduces himself as John Shooter (John
Turturro) and is accused of having stolen his story: "When two writers show up
at the same story, it’s all about who wrote the words first,” Shooter says.
"Wouldn’t you say that's true?” This statement is, of course, as compelling as
the way in which stories—however disconcerting—give a frame to our
existence. In Shooter’s statement lies an acknowledgement that no story is
uniquely ours, although its expression might be. Shooter tells Rainey he wrote
the story seven years before and asks, “How in the hell did a big money
scribbling asshole like you get down to a little shit-splat town in Mississippi and
steal my goddam story?”
Before the viewer learns the answer, Rainey’s dog Chico will be killed;
the home he shared with Amy in Riverdale, N.Y., will bum down; and a
detective and townsperson will be killed. As Amy (and the viewer) understand
for the first time the extent of Rainey’s madness, the word “Shooter” (“Shoot
Her”) becomes clear moments before she and her lover are killed. It is John
Shooter who demands that Mort Rainey “fix the story.” To “fix” the story, Amy
and Ted must die. The end of the story reads: “I know I can do it, [he] said,
helping himself to another ear of com from the steaming bowl. I’m sure that in
time her death will be a mystery, even to me.”
As in Swimming Pool, mirrors are used in Secret Window to suggest the
differences between real life and fiction, between sanity and madness.
Characters tell Rainey, "I don’t think you’re really all that well” and “You really
don’t look well at all.” But Rainey continues his dialogue with himself, even
when Shooter tells him that if he’s wrong about the author of his story, he’ll turn
himself over to authorities: “Then I’d turn myself in. But I’d take care of myself
before a trial, Mr. Rainey, because if things turn out that way then I suppose I
am crazy. And that kind of crazy man has no reason or excuse to live.”
The relationship between authors and their characters is hinted at when
the voices take over Mort Rainey’s mind. One voice says, "There is no John
Shooter. There never has been. You invented him.” Rainey yells back: “Leave
me alone!” The voice says, "You are alone.” Wearing John Shooter’s 10-gallon
hat, Rainey gazes at himself in the mirror and asks, "What is happening to me?”