The Devil and Annie Wilkes

 

Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her portrayal of Annie Wilkes. She laments in an interview of her difficulties with the role. Stephen King left her no “backstory.” She and director Rob Reiner had to make one up. They agreed that Wilkes must have been abused by her father.

In fact, through the device of a scrapbook, King gives an extensive backstory for Annie Wilkes: details of her career as a nurse, a former marriage, previous homes, and a series of murders. What more could any reader ask?

Backstory here is a euphemism. What Bates means is that she needed some moral justification for Wilkes’s narcissistic behaviour. Some reason it wasn’t her fault.

I think any perceptive reader can immediately see why King did not include this idea of having been abused by her father. To any perceptive reader it would not have rung true.

King should not have included a justification for Wilkes’s narcissism, because there is none. King, at least, understands human psychology. Narcissism is a choice. It is the choice Lucifer made in the Biblical account. He would make himself God. It is the choice Eve made in eating the apple: she and Adam might become “as gods, knowing good and evil.”

To suppose instead that Annie Wilkes was “mentally ill,” through no fault of her own, and had no choice but to behave as she did, is untenable for several reasons. 

First, it introduces an infinite regression, a logical impossibility. Then why did her father behave as he did? Because of his parents? Why did they behave as they did? And so on to infinity. Occam’s Razor: someone must be responsible for their own actions, and if anyone is, all are.

Second, it is self-evident to all of us that we have free will. We could not function for a moment without this understanding. This is a prime example of a self-evident truth. Therefore, if she is human, Annie Wilkes too has free will.

To assume that Annie Wilkes or anyone else—including Hitler or Charles Manson—killed because they were mentally ill is to dehumanize them. It reduces them to robots.

Finally, to ascribe evil to mental illness is the worst sort of slander against the genuinely mentally ill. It is like ascribing evil to someone because they have a hunchback.

Why the desperate need, not just on the part of Kathy Bates and Rob Reiner, but of so many people, to turn their faces away and refuse to admit the existence of human evil? Often, to actually blame and punish anyone who points it out—as, for example, “judgmental”?

It is transparently to avoid their own consciences. They are aware of sins of their own, and do not want to think about it. It is in effect an admission of guilt, and, worse, a refusal to take responsibility and repent.

This looks like the sin against the Holy Spirit. 

If so, such people—it looks like a good many, perhaps most, people—are hellbent and hellbound.

A sobering thought. But hardly an unbiblical one, or one that violates the traditional religious understanding of the world.