In “The Laughing Place,” Castle Rock’s fifth episode of the second season, a long flashback shows us Annie Wilkes’ origin story. Young Annie’s moral compass is unsophisticated, stifled by her mother’s black-and-white teachings, but she has a strong sense of story. Stronger than Castle Rock’s.
“This is your new story?” four-year-old Annie Wilkes (Madison Johnson) asks her father on her last day of of school. Her dismay and shame at her expulsion (or removal) turns to delight as he shows her the attic that will be her home-school—and the first typed page of the transcription job that will eat up her childhood, one key at a time.
A decade later, when teenage Annie’s new tutor picks up a page from Carl’s ever-evolving manuscript, his daughter snaps at her. (Snaps at her; Annie doesn’t just plain snap until later.) “You can’t just start in the middle. It’s a really big story.”
But a big story doesn’t have to be an unwieldy story, just as a flashback doesn’t have to be a laborious exercise and an origin story doesn’t have to be a big bag of rock salt. As Annie’s demanding mother, Robin Weigert is as incisive, decisive, and efficient as Mrs. Wilkes picking with professional precision over her daughter’s teeth. “Nothing on earth dirtier than the human mouth, Annie,” Mama tells her, scraping and flossing away with patient, pitiless rigor. But to Mama Wilkes, the whole world is dirty, a morass of dirty birds and bad men conspiring to keep Annie down. They want you “low and close to the ground,” she croaks calmly, “so they can snatch whatever they want whenever they want it, just like your father did to me when I was barely a woman.” With her minced oaths, her Christmas!es and cockadoody!s, and her unwavering belief in the sullying touch of the world, this Mrs. Wilkes is a more secular version of Margaret White.
According to Misery’s scrapbook, Annie’s mother is Nancy Wilkes, a name with the same rhythm as Annie’s, but no one in “The Laughing Place” calls her that. Maybe in Annie’s memory, like the goddess in King’s book within a book, her mother looms larger than a name, too large to be anyone but Mama. Through the episode, Weigert’s performance flits easily, broodily, from fastidious control to a rich interior dread. It’s an abbreviated version of Annie’s own peaks and fugues, briefer than Caplan’s performance, but just as biting.
Annie’s bloody-faced specter is revealed to be her aspiring-author father Carl, presumably to no one’s surprise. John Hoogenakker’s portrayal wavers tensely between a doting, somewhat dependent dad and something more sinister. The half-converted attic (never finished over the decade Carl devotes to it, and to his daughter’s education), with its wash of off-white, its diffused light, its soft futons and yielding piles of pillows, manages to feel both like a retreat from the airless downstairs and, potentially, a trap for a girl who gets too comfortable. After many scenes of Annie and her father alone in that attic, thrilling as they read his historical romance to each other, the cuts to them in the garden as he fidgets with his garden hose, and given the mystery around Joy’s parentage, I was frankly relieved to see Rita (Sarah Gadon) show up.
The relief Annie feels (shown in a fuzzy, feel-good montage of reading sessions and goof-around evenings, of steadily improving comprehensive and steadily climbing confidence) is short-lived. Doggedly sipping vodka, Mrs. Wilkes laments to her girl about the dirty old world, Weigert’s face sometimes hard as flint, sometimes soft as a crumpled petal as she contemplates her daughter’s presumed fragility. When the mother and daughter, returning from her community college tour, pull into a scenic stop on a secluded riverbank, we know Mrs. Wilkes’ impulse before she knows it herself.
Like “New Jerusalem,” “The Laughing Place” lets us see the moment as it’s born. The near-absence of dialogue lets Weigert’s intensity, and her sudden peace, carry the scene, as Mrs. Wilkes sees the answer that the camera presented us with in the establishing shot. “I see it now,” she says, brushing from her fingertips the feathers floating in this airy, open riverside, this innocent fluff that represents the filth of this greedy world. “How to make it right. How to get away clean.” Locking Annie into her seat, she plunges the car into the river, letting the water close above them both.
The action escalates from there, Annie sunk into despair and untreated illness as surely as her mother sank them in that river. Ruby Cruz is persuasive as Annie slides into her first major episode, her choppy speech nicely mirroring Caplan’s cadence without mimicking it, and her affect getting more and more distant.
Her old friend and tutor now a de facto stepmother, her father’s faithlessness revealed, Annie isn’t immersed in misery until the last blow: her father’s novel, the story she’s shepherded and shaped for most of her life, is entirely rewritten, its end changed, its dedication not to the daughter who helped craft it, but to to the new love who eclipsed her mother. And, as a final slap in the face, he takes their shared phrase, one they reclaimed from her childhood trauma, and claims it instead as a dedication for Rita.“Your laughing place is anywhere you say it is,” Carl once comforted his crying daughter. But now Rita is his Laughing Place.
Castle Rock has always been bold, even cheeky, about plucking references from all over the King universe. (Rita’s role in the Wilkes family is at first reminiscent of The Dead Zone’s Johnny Smith’s sojourn in Kittery, tutoring Chuck Chatsworth past his reading blocks.) Even Carl’s death is a nod to the original Annie’s MO, as covered in her scrapbook. But those allusions and echoes aren’t always earned, or even appropriate. The Wilkes’ immaculate, stuffy 1970s living room in Bakersfield (with all that patterned velour, with the brown and the beige and the brown) is a more suburban version of Annie’s living room from Misery. But that style made a lot more sense for middle-aged Annie in 1980-something than it makes for Annie’s mother in 1994.
Like Carl Wilkes leaving his wife (and leaving his daughter alone with her), Castle Rock needs to take some time to figure out its place in this world. Carl’s gruesome death would be at home in either the pulpy slush of the first episode or as a tragic centerpiece of a character-driven chapter. But like too many of Castle Rock’s inhabitants, Annie’s father is a sketch, as flat as his own fictional characters, and as ineffectual. So his Christlike posture in death is neither heartbreaking nor darkly comic, but merely lurid. As Annie lifts his body from its place of impalement on the flimsy banister in a gory Pietà, Carl keeps murmuring “It’s going to be just fine,” and it should be either devastating or cruelly gutting to hear a dying man reassure the daughter whose shove killed him. Instead, it’s just grisly.
Given their doorstop size, it can feel laughable to talk about economy in King’s books. But whatever overwrought, extended metaphors they employ, whatever sometimes clunky dialogue his characters spout, King knows how to make us care about characters and about the horrors he visits on them. Castle Rock could use some of that magic.
But “The Laughing Place” has its strengths, especially in Weigert, and in the thoughtful, inventive direction from Anne Sewitsky. The ending is strong, too, bringing us right back where the season started: at river’s edge, ready for the next chapter. Annie Wilkes learned one unintended lesson from her mother. She learned how to get away clean, at least for the moment. You start at the river.
Stray observations
- Sarah Gadon gives Rita some of the evanescent, elastic quality she showed in True Detective: sometimes sympathetic, often incisive, and so quick to anticipate an obstacle or objection that she can seem a little slippery.
- While her father confronts, then warms up to, his daughter’s tutor, Annie is seen through the window, her shirt the same color as the back-yard tetherball, stuck in place but still getting knocked around at the end of a string.
- In the background of their dreary kitchen conversation, Mrs. Wilkes’ radio plays Carly Simon. Not the thrumming anthem of the premiere, but the resigned “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be.”
- If someone described my decade-in-the-making manuscript as “All this, it has promise,” I would not take that as a flirtation, Carl.
23 Comments
Been planning to, but I haven’t started Castle Rock yet. Robin Wiegert is great, I didn’t know she was in it.
She’s in it for just this one episode.
Joy was always going to be a stolen baby, but the mother being alive is at least a twist. Still, it’s a baggy one. We’re halfway through the season already, and with enough plot threads that the introduction of a character with a clear, uncomplicated, sympathetic bent almost certainly won’t have room to fulfill its potential. It just highlights this show’s misplaced priorities and structural issues. What all do we have in these ten episodes? (a) Annie getting spurned by Joy, (b) Pop’s cancer and strained relationship with his adoptive daughter, (c) Ace and his bodysnatcher infiltration of Castle Rock’s social centers [church, bar, police, gov’t, losers club, etc], (d) A burgeoning gang war between Pop’s goons [?] and his adoptive son’s Somali mafia in the next town over, (e) Joy’s burgeoning crush on a soft butch lesbian, and now (f) Rita coming to Castle Rock, presumably.The show would likely be an overstuffed mess even with a better structure, but that’s neither here nor there. The real question is, why is (a) the heart of this season. Why is the tagline for this season literally “the story of Annie Wilkes”? I ask not because Misery is an awkward fit into the Castle Rock mythology (though it really is), but because nearly all of those other plots are easier to care about.Now that we know that Annie is literally a psycho killer who (attempts to) murder a mother with her baby in the room, what ground is left for us to hold in terms of investing in her desire to win over Joy? Are we supposed to want Annie to get what she wants? Because that’s the whole point of a protagonist, for them to want something, and for the reader / viewer to want to see them get it.Lizzy Caplan is a good actress but not so good that she can sell this stuff. I have no investment in Annie whatsoever. Her (frankly exploitative and overly pulpy) psychosis makes her motives suspect. Now we’re halfway into the show and we’re getting a character whose motives will be pure, and I fully expect that Rita is either going to be killed by Annie or absorbed into the bodysnatcher faction, thereby putting Joy into play for a gross and atonal reunion with Annie.
The thing is really that this season is doing what prestige dramas (and literature) are nominally supposed to do – revolve around central themes / questions / concerns on several levels- but it doesn’t have the juice to do them justice. This episode fell down especially, I felt, in this sort of meta-commentary on Annie’s character. There is ripe irony in Annie being violently unable to accept complicated characters in fiction or real life, and then essentially asking Joy to accept Annie as a complicated but ultimately loving person. But that irony is only effective on paper. In practice it just doesn’t land. How are we supposed to react to Annie being unceremoniously refused and kicked out of the car by Joy? Are we supposed to feel for her? Are we supposed to see Joy as being shortsighted or cruel? Are we supposed to see this as a relationship that cries out for repair?Annie makes a poor protagonist for a King property in that his heroes are nominally flawed, but never in a way that is all that complicating or ambivalence-provoking. They are good ‘ol boys or housewives or kids but they always have hearts of gold. I think perhaps Castle Rock has higher aspirations than King, in his sentimentality and use of author inserts, rarely aims for.
What part of the last five episodes have made you think we’re meant to view Annie as a hero? She’s literally one of King’s most famous villains.
….of course you’re not supposed to want Annie to get what she wants.
Yeah, anyone watching this season and thinking that Annie is the protagonist is either watching the season wrong, or has other issues.
I see some of your points, but I actually found last season WAY more overstuffed with various story threads and felt that this year they consciously were trying to limit that *shrug*
I thought it was the best episode this season yet, the path of succumbing to untreated mental illness is all too realistic and scarier than the zombie monsters
No mention of the murder board behind current day Rita that clearly shows she’s been following Annie’s travels?
Oooooooh….I had to go back and pause to spot that one! Nice catch.
This is a really lazy and weirdly biased review. Did you even watch it? Annie was definitely not 4 years old at the beginning of this episode. This season has major trigger potential on many levels. I still expect professionalism from trusted sources reviewing it.This was some of the best writing and performing I’ve seen in the King small screen universe. Assign this series to someone else please. It’s either an unsafe space for Emily or she lacks the ability to discern a preschooler from a 2nd grader which seems a pretty heavy influence on Annie’s backstory and the entire point of this episode.
I have such a crush on Sarah Gadon.
Yes! She starred in the JFK Hulu series 11.22.63, and is simply a vision.
My mom just finished reading 11/22/63 and I am rereading it. I had paused on a perfect picture of Rita and I said to Mom, “Wouldn’t she make a great Sadie?” Then I thought, “She looks familiar, I’m going to look her up.” Well, duh, she played Sadie! I had totally forgotten.
Well, I disagree completely. I thought the episode was fascinating. I didn’t find the scene with Annie’s father comforting her and trying to take the responsibility for what she had done away from her to be “lurid”—I found it to an explanation of why Annie is able to keep going after she commits such horrible murders. She was taught her whole life that bad people need to be punished—but she isn’t one of the bad ones and nothing she does is her fault.
Same. I was wholly engrossed in this episode and found the turn of events effectively tragic.
STEEPPPHHEENS! (A nod to Sims’ Seinfeld reviews).I liked this episode a lot more than you did. Carl was sketched just enough, and a character study of him wasn’t the point of the episode. We didn’t need to know his story, just that Annie loved him and he loved her. If the writers wanted to give him more traits, they would have.
It was fascinating picking on how the parents’ traits influenced Annie’s. I liked that Ruth introduced the idea of redemption to Annie, who proceeded to do just that raising Ruth’s daughter as her own (in a nice quasi-Chinatown twist). The episode was pretty well directed. What the episode didn’t explicitly cite was Annie’s possible guilt for bringing the woman into their lives who would make her mother kill herself. If she didn’t have the reading disability, Ruth wouldn’t have shown up. There s should be a self-loathing to the character. I also want to know how an 18 year old evades the authorities for so long. And why the ghost of her father would want her to kill her “daughter”. I think we’ll get answers to those questions in future episodes.
I’m with you on this. I didn’t find this episode particularly surprising, nor was it entirely obvious. Seeing how Annie literally has a personality informed by both parents (and how both parents, like her dad says, have good and bad in them) was more interesting than not, especially given the (perhaps inevitable, in hindsight) relationship building between her dad and Rita. I think we’re supposed to see the tragic good in Annie, and that (even though her current life started with a terrible deed) she ultimately does what’s best for Joy (itself a terrible irony) and isn’t above accepting help (from the doctor). Do I want to see Annie ultimately “win”? Not really, but I do want to see her particular brand of warped righteousness turned against whatever darkness Ace Merrill is rising in Castle Rock? Oh, yes.
“her father’s novel, the story she’s shepherded and shaped for most of her life,
is entirely rewritten, its end changed, its dedication not to the
daughter who helped craft it, but to to the new love who eclipsed her
mother”
Wait–was the novel’s entirely rewritten with a changed ending? I only read what was flashed on screen but it certainly still ended with the same final sentence (about the horizon, etc) that her dad already told Annie and she said she loved. I mean this is hardly important but I thought she was fine with the novel until reading the final dedication.
The original ending had McCall dead and buried, Anabell’s choice clear…the new ending was left open with both waiting for her decision.
Ah thanks for the catch!
For a purple-prosed work twelve years in the making, it sure was short.