Gerald’s Game: Netflix Movie Vs. Book

***SPOILERS***

The Dog:

In both the movie and the book or story starts out with a married couple (Gerald and Jessie) going to their lake house in the off-season. This is where the game begins.
In the film we are introduced to the dog as the couple is driving to the lake house and again when Jessie feeds him the “Kobe rib eye, from Kobe”. In the book the dog is first heard rather than seen off in the distance when Jesse is already cuffed to the bed.

The Handcuffs and Voices:
This brings us to our next subject, in the Netflix rendition we are meant to believe that this is the first time the handcuffs have been brought into the marriage bed but that Jessie has known Gerald has needed to use Viagra to get it up for sometime now. In the book however there is never any mention of Viagra or the little blue pills, but we are led to understand that Jessie is used to being subjected to her specially bought handcuffs. The plot for both mediums are strikingly similar in most aspects except for one in Netflix’s version Jessie has a sort of mental break after the dog comes in and starts to bite off and eat pieces of her now deceased husband (and who could blame her). When this happens she imagines Gerald getting up off the floor and starting to talk to her, and ridiculing her (also making a Cujo reference). Then she materializes another version of herself to both defend her and be the voice of reason. If the movie had followed closer to the book it might not have played out so smoothly and it certainly would’ve been longer. In King’s book the voices didn’t appear after the mental break on the bed because they were already with Jessie. They had been with her since the day the sun went out, the day of the eclipse on Dark Score Lake. Each was a woman’s voice, each with its own name and personality some even being Jessie at different stages of her life. Each voice is named after a person in Jessie‘s life or given her own childhood nickname. These are some of the voices:

• Ruth Neary: This voice is named after Jessie‘s college roommate, the voice is blunt and tells it how it is no matter how cringe worthy the topic. Ruth was always a person in Jessie‘s life who pushed her to open up but when Jessie wasn’t ready to open up about Dark square Lake she moved out never telling Ruth anything not even why she left.

• Nora Callahan: Named after Jessie‘s therapist who she stopped seeing another person who pushed to find out what happened at dark score lake.

• Goody Burlingame: The voice of the dutiful wife, she often shames Jessie when she is not lady like and blames the situation that Jessie ends up in on the fact that she wouldn’t just lay down and take it like a good woman. In small moments she becomes a voice of reason but she is often being told to shut up.

• Punkin: This is a younger version of Jessie. The Jessie that was, on the day of the eclipse on Dark Score Lake. The voice is given the nickname that Jessie‘s father had given her. She tells Jessie to look back on the day that the sun went out to find what she needs to escape from her handcuffs now. This is also a voice that we get to see materialized in the movie when Jesse talks to her in her head out on the swing by the lake and whom Jesse writes the letter to the end of the movie.

• The Young Girl: This voice is never really given a name it could be Punkin but we’re not told for sure it’s a voice that screams out for Jessie’s needs such as water and if I remember correctly it is only heard once or twice.

• UFO’s: There are several different voices that Jesse her self identifies as UFO voices they pop up every now and then and when they do they sometimes complement Jessie on how well she’s doing and handling her situation and other times they present a cold truth about what could happen to Jesse, of what her future could be. Like the imagined Gerald and Jesse in the movie the voices in Jessie‘s head guide her through her days coverage to the bed both convincing her to fight and belittling her.

The Dreams:

There are two different kinds of dreams that occur. The first are simply suppressed memories coming back to Jessie, memories from Dark Score Lake (these are the only ones shown in the movie), memories of when Jessie went with Ruth Neary to a support group in college where girls were sharing their sexual assault experiences and Jessie ran away and had a meltdown because she began to remember her own. The other dreams where feverish nightmares that mixed Jessie’s past and present all into one.

The Dolores Claiborne tie-in:

Anyone familiar with Kings books knows that they all connect somewhere, even when he's writing under his pen name. The books Gerald's Game and Dolores Claiborne share a celestial event, an eclipse. I have not yet read Dolores Claiborne though I plan to VERY soon I know that both books revolve around the events that both women lived through on the day of the eclipse in Maine on Saturday July 20th, 1963. The picture to the right is a photo of the map that can be found at the front of both books. It is a map of Maine where King's books take place and shows us the path of totality of the eclipse on that fateful day.

There is one very distinct scene in both the movie and the book that connects these two stories, but once we hear about them they are dropped and the scenes are never really mentioned again. Perhaps there is more on this encounter in the Dolores Claiborne book since it was published directly after Gerald's Game but I won't know until I read it. If it ends up being a big thing for me when I do, it will possibly Get its own post. Mostly because I don't really have anyone to go into depth on King books with, but back to the topic at hand. In the movie Jessie tells us "I had a dream, that night at the lake house. There was a woman standing over a deep well, looking down into the blackness. And I'm in the well looking up at her. The sky was so dark behind her, the eclipse burning overhead...she was standing there in her red dress, looking right at me." this is very similar to what happens in the book however it is not a dream! This encounter between childhood Jessie and Dolores Claiborne happens directly after the incident with Jessie's father on the swing when he sends her inside so that she can clean herself up. Its more of a vision, as Jessie walks into the hallway of the lake house she looks up to see pretty much what is described to us in the movie. We are never told how or why this has happened, and I NEED to know more.
Like with the voices, I understand why this scene had to be changed for the movie. It would have been extremely out of place to just be like, 'oh ya she randomly sees a portal on her ceiling that shows her a woman looking down a well somewhere else in Maine who has also lived through some crazy shit during the eclipse. BUT we aren't going to explain how or why because we probably won't make the movie for that book...'. Some things are better revised because they wont transfer well or will take additional explaining that will ultimately take you out of the movie and that's understandable. When reading the books your more open to this because well its a Stephen King book, and it ain't King without some weird ass crazy/scary shit going on, which is also why we never really question the voices or the moonlight man. Face it its the truth its why we keep picking up the books he pops out every year. We like that crazy/scary shit, and there is no shame in that.

 The Moonlight man:

Jessie called him by several names in the book some of which being the Space Cowboy, Dr. Doom, Monster of Love, and Death but the most screwed up of all of them is probably who she believes him to be when she first sees him, her own father. She thinks that he’s come back from the dead as a living corpse to take what he wanted on that day at Dark Score Lake and she is ready if it means everything is over. As time goes on she realizes that it couldn’t possibly be her father which leads her to the other names mentioned above. Jessie sees the moonlight man twice the first time after thinking he’s her father then realizing he isn’t she passes out from fear after he shows her his box filled with jewelry and bones. The second is when Jessie escapes her cuffs and is fleeing from the house and Throwing him her ring as she leaves as a sort of payment for her life and then later hallucinates him in the backseat of her vehicle because of loss of blood. This is similar in both the book and movie scenes and so is what she finds out much later that he was not death nor anything made from her own imagination but a living man named Raymond Andrew Joubert. We found out all of this when Jessie writes her letter.

The letter:
As mentioned before in the Netflix movie Jessie writes the letter to herself, her younger self, explaining what she’s doing now so that what happen to them can be used to help others. However in the book the letter is being written to Ruth Neary, Jessie‘s college friend. After so many long years Jessie is finally reaching out to tell Ruth why she ran away, what happened to her at dark score lake, what happened to her at the lake house with the handcuffs, her voices who had helped her escape, about the moonlight man and how Jesse had gone to face him to prove to herself that he was just a man and that she didn’t have to go on being afraid of the night.

Quotes from the book:

“It had all been a little too bright to be real,like things seen through a fever which is not quite high enough to be life threatening”

“He had been able to face her with his lies; it was the truth which had made him finally look away.”

Fun Side Notes:

It was brought to my attention recently that in Netflix’s movie Jessie does in fact have an IPhone and the movie could have ended much sooner if Jessie had said one little sentence “Hey Siri, call 911”.

Questions:

Was there any differences between the movie that you liked or didn’t like?

Do you wish they had done the extra work to get into Jessie’s voices or do you think it was a good idea to change it up for the movie?

How do you feel about the References to some of kings other works, and do you know how many are in both the book and movie?

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