In the film Misery, based on a novel by Stephen King, a novelist is noted for one particular character, Misery Chastain, a character he has killed off in his most recent but as yet unpublished book. He is traveling through the mountains in the dead of winter and has a traffic accident, driving his car off the road where it is not likely to be seen. He is found by a woman named Annie Wilkes, his number one fan, who recognizes him immediately. She is a former nurse and takes him to her remote home, where she undertakes to nurse him back to health while at the same time regaling him with praise for the books he has written. Her effusion is excessive and makes him uncomfortable, and he would like to make a call to tell others where he is. She will not allow this, making excuses. In time, he comes to accept her adoration of his work and lets her read his latest manuscript. When she finds that he has killed off her favorite character, Misery, she turns savage, torturing him, making him completely dependent on her, and preventing others from finding him. She is revealed to be a woman who has previously been accused of killing patients in a hospital where she worked as a nurse. Ultimately, the man must fight back and destroy her in order to get back to civilization.
The character displays elements of the borderline personality as well as obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Annie Wilkes is presented as an obsessive-compulsive personality in the way she keeps her home, in the way she becomes dedicated so thoroughly to this writer and his works (and especially to the one character of Misery, with whom she identifies so closely), and in the expectations she has placed in the past on her patients and now on this particular patient. Davison and Neale (1994) identify the obsessive-compulsive personality as a perfectionist, preoccupied with details, rules, schedules, and so on. They state that such people are also work rather t...