Christine
SOURCE:
Christine, by Stephen King
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I didn’t own a car till I was in my twenties, but my two closest friends in high school had their own wheels by junior year. Both cars were clunkers, but Dave’s was the worst, I think–apart from the toxic waste in the back seat (you had to be very, very careful about where you put your feet, especially if you wanted your sneakers back), part of the bumper was held together with duct tape and there was something wrong with the engine. Whenever he started it up, the car screeched like a dying mule.
I went on a lot of rides in that car, and whatever its imperfections, I was always glad to see (and hear) it coming; as much as he bitched about it, I think Dave loved that hunk of crap even more. Because when you’re a teenager, what you really want to grow up and be is an adult. You can’t do that sitting in your bedroom listening to Dad vacuum and Mom swearing at the television. You need to get gone, to get away from them; you need the illusion that you can go anywhere you want whenever you want. And for that, you need a car.
The first time we see Arnie Cunningham–in fact, the first true moment of story, after a portentous prologue–he’s riding home from work with his best friend Dennis Guilder. They’re in Dennis’s car, and the more we learn of Arnie, the more we learn that, up until now, he’s always been more comfortable as a passenger than as a driver. But then he sees Christine and is instantly smitten. Christine’s a 1958 cherry red Plymouth Fury, and she’s in terrible, terrible shape; but Arnie immediately decides to buy her, in spite of Dennis’s strong misgivings. When Arnie gets home and tells his parents, they’re furious. Instead of backing down as he normally would, Arnie stands up for himself, even going so far as to rage against his mother for her constant need to run his life. In the end, Arnie finds a place for Christine at Darnell’s Garage, a storage space and front for Darnell’s criminal enterprises. It’s a compromise, but it gives Arnie a chance to fix up the Fury; but when he starts working on her, she improves at a pace beyond miraculous. In fact, the repair work Arnie does isn’t just great–it’s flat out impossible. But since none of the people who see the car ever compare notes, they all dismiss whatever uneasy suspicions they might have. After all, what else could it be? It’s not like the car is actually fixing herself.
As Christine improves, so does Arnie: he loses the acne that’s haunted him since the onset of puberty, and gets enough confidence to ask out Leigh Cabot, a transfer student who until then had been dodging any and all comers. Arnie starts working for Darnell at the junkyard to earn some money, and some of the stuff he does for Darnell isn’t exactly legal. But whatever he’s doing, he seems much happier now. For the first time in his miserable life, Arnie’s no longer losing.
Only–Christine. Something’s not quite right about Christine, even beyond the miracle repairs. The car creeps Leigh out, throwing a wet blanket over their necking and a confusing shadow over their relationship; even worse, something is happening to Arnie himself. His personality is changing, and while his increased aggressiveness is making life a little easier, it’s also threatening to destroy the decency that made him such a good guy at heart.
The situation worsens. Some punks from school wreck Christine, driving Arnie half-mad with rage and grief; but while anybody with any knowledge of automobiles considers the damage lethal, Arnie gets her running again in no time at all. And then, the punks get killed in shockingly violent hit and run accidents. No witnesses. Arnie has a convenient alibi for each death, but that doesn’t stop the police from getting suspicious. And it doesn’t stop Leigh and Dennis, who finds himself falling in love with his best friend’s girl, from drawing their own horrible conclusions…
In many ways, the plot of Christine is standard issue horror stuff: you have a disempowered loser who finds something that makes him powerful, he starts revenging himself on his enemies, and then it all comes crashing down when the loser finds out he can no longer control the power he’s unleashed. I call it “geek tragedy,” and there have been hundreds of movies, books, and television shows that run along the same lines. It’s a story pattern so archetypal that you don’t even acknowledge how familiar it is. There’s the scene where the loser is shown powerless in the face of bullies, there’s his gradually growing self-esteem, there’s the cute girl who shows interest in the ungeeked geek, there’s the worry that things are going too far, the inner turmoil, etc. Shelley’s Frankenstein serves as an antecedent of sorts, but modern versions have changed the gothic anti-hero of Victor Frankenstein into a long line of shuffling, snot-nosed social outcasts, whose only source of power is in obscure scientific or supernatural sources. Victor was punished because he tried to play God, but with characters like Arnie, God isn’t involved; we are asked to mourn them even as we shudder in fear at their attempts to break free from the social shackles into which they were born.
So, it’s been done, and it will probably keep getting done from now till doomsday. Most genre novels run down familiar, deeply worn ruts; what distinguishes successes from failures is the quality of the execution, like how well-drawn the characters are, how effectively seductive and horrifying the eventual threat turns out to be, and the myriad other small details that make up the parts of the narrative that aren’t, strictly, plot.
The characters in Christine are a mixed bunch. Arnie is the sort of outcast King excels at sketching in, a more likeable version of Harold Lauder in The Stand or Carrie. Unlike those two, Arnie is mostly free from the undercurrent of self-loathing that King generally invests his geeks with; which isn’t to say that Arnie is all that fond of himself, but we never get the feeling that the author is wrestling between compassion and contempt in writing him. This makes Arnie easier to like, but it also takes some of the tension and honesty out of characterization–one of the reasons Harold Lauder is so compelling in The Stand is that he’s never watered down to be more appealing. He has all sorts of icky sexual fantasies, he’s annoying, he’s ugly. While these traits may serve to push the reader away, they also lend a realism to Lauder that many of the heroes of that novel lack; he’s memorable, and his eventual fate is all the more moving because you weren’t manipulated into pitying him. You aren’t particularly manipulated into pitying Arnie, either, but he’s more generic than he should be, and because of this, it’s difficult to find the emotional center of the story.
The novel’s sometimes narrator, Dennis, doesn’t make it any easier. He’s likeable, but not much else–we know he plays football, that he has a family with the requisite comedy sibling, that he’s Arnie’s best friend, and that’s about it. Sure, a third or more of the book is from his point of view, but most of his observations are the sort of observations any narrator would give us, and there’s nothing that makes him stand out as an individual apart from his presence in the story he’s telling. Probably the most interesting thing about him is his friendship with Arnie; the scenes where that friendship contrasts against the person Arnie is slowly becoming are excellent. On his own, though, Dennis is just a generic hero, no more, no less. Nothing particularly wrong with that–genre novels are full of his ilk, and King makes him more appealing than John Saul would’ve–but it’s indicative of a larger problem. There’s very little spark to the story, and what little there is, while nice enough, doesn’t raise the whole thing to more than a slightly-better-than-average piece of disposable entertainment.
The other major character in the novel, Leigh Cabot, is far blander than her male counterparts; she’s in the book for two reasons, to show us how Arnie is becoming “cooler” after buying Christine, and to give Dennis a way to betray his best friend and bring on the final confrontation. There are a few chapters from her perspective, but she’s mostly just horny and scared; and whenever we see her through someone else’s eyes–like, say, Dennis’s–that narrative pauses so we can get a paragraph or two about how incredibly hot she is. It eventually becomes unpleasant to read, because she seems less a character than an object lust after. It’s understandable that Dennis would view her through the haze of teenage hormones, but we never really get sense of her as an actual person. We’re supposed to value her because she’s young and attractive and pure, and that’s about it.
The secondary characters fare a bit better. Will Darnell, the crooked garage owner, is a colorful scoundrel who proves to be too clever for his own good. He’s crafty, vulgar and just as memorable as he needs to be. Dennis’s family fade into the woodwork, despite some occasional conversations with Dad and the bratty younger sister–they suffer from the same basic disease as Dennis himself, “generic attributitus.” Archie’s parents, though, are real winners, and it’s with them that another common theme of King’s comes to the forefront: controlling, tyrannical motherhood. Arnie’s mom, Regina, is the very picture of an upper-middle class emasculating viper, having spent the entirety of her marriage dictating the lives of both her husband and her son. Arnie’s father, Michael, takes this as par for the course, and Arnie had accepted it as well, at least until Christine came along; but once he has his car, he’s starts fighting back on increasingly venomous terms.
It’s hard to know where you’re supposed to feel pity or contempt for the adult Cunninghams. Dennis himself is split between the two, and there are more than a few swipes at the sort of college educated ivy league elitists that they’re supposed to represent. On their own, Regina and Michael are compelling enough, and it’s easy to believe that someone like Arnie came from such a household. But viewed in the context of the novel’s other female characters, Regina becomes somewhat troubling. Leight Cabot, as mentioned, serves largely as the clichéd target of young male hormones–she accomplishes little, beyond worrying and forcing other people to rescue her. Dennis’s mom is, while sweet, basically a joke–she spends her time at creative writing courses, crafting elegant tales of intellect like, “Did Jesus Have a Dog?” Ultimately, the only woman of any real initiative is Regina. While she’s not entire loathsome, it is odd that the only human female with any personality is such a raging bitch.
Whether or not this is a problem is really up to the reader. Stereotypically, automobile obsession is a male concern, and the dearth of well-crafted, sympathetic women here just brings more attention to the novel’s most powerful, if voiceless, female presence: Christine herself. Arnie’s relationship with Christine is in many ways much more profound than his relationship with his girlfriend. While he professes to love Leigh, Christine is the one he always goes back to, and in her twisted way, she’s the only one who can give him the unconditional acceptance he so desperately craves. The more society turns its back on you, the stronger the desire to find someone, anyone, who will welcome you no matter how ugly you might be; and if the cost turns out to be all you have, you’re willing to pay because it’s all your worth.
As the novel’s main horror, Christine (and her former owner Ronald LeBay), is effective, perhaps inordinately so. Her powers are never specifically defined for us; apart from LeBay’s brother who appears only to give us some colorful backstory and dark hints, there’s no older, wiser character to cite precedent and help our heroes determine how to save themselves. This makes sense–if some wizened used car salesman appeared spouting tales of killer automobiles, the absurdity that lurks behind the concept would be even harder to ignore. The Plymouth Fury with a grudge against the world is a unique occurrence in this particular fictional universe, and if you can accept that, you won’t have much trouble suspending your disbelief for anything else in the book.
Unfortunately, this lack of demarcation means that Christine herself is damn near omnipotent, able to track and slaughter her prey in any environment and to recover almost instantaneously from damage that would cripple a tank. This makes her an especially enticing tool of vengeance, but diminishes her presence for the reader. An invulnerable threat isn’t all that exciting after it’s first few kills, because every attack sequence becomes a simple matter of watching the target’s shock turn into terror turn into, well, being dead. In order for a threat to be effectively terrifying, it has to reveal a weakness; at some point in the narrative, there needs to at least be the hope that the threat can be defeated or delayed, otherwise, you stop caring about the characters because they’re no hope for them. Short stories can get away with unstoppable monsters, but in a novel, it gets old, especially when the monster in question just keeps doing the same damn thing over and over again. By the end of the novel, Christine is stopped (or, at the very least slowed down), but it would’ve been nice if the struggle between her and her targets had been a bit less one-sided.
One more thing before we move on; it’s worth noting that the narration of Christine is split into two halves. The first half, which constitutes the opening and closing sections, are first person from Dennis’s perspective. The middle section, the longest of the three, is entirely third person narration, allowing us to see what’s going on in Arnie, Leigh, Will, and everybody else’s minds. While the viewpoint shift is an oddity, it doesn’t serve much purpose. Apart from a few half-hearted lines from Dennis in the third section which try and attribute the third-person stuff to him, King never bothers explaining it, which is just as well. Switching perspectives mid-stream is a trick for writers like Nabakov, who enjoy playing games with the nature of novels; King is a storyteller, and if going from first to third to first was the only way he he could keep telling his story, so be it.
Ultimately, Christine falls firmly in the lesser part of King’s canon, better than Insomnia, worse than The Dark Half. It has some enjoyably creepy moments (some of which I’ll be discussing more in depth below), and a decent villain, but the story never comes together as powerfully as it should, and the most effective moments are pale echoes of sequences from his other, stronger novels.
SCREEN:
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Christine, directed by John Carpenter
If your knowledge of cinematic history gets a bit spotty beyond the past decade, it’s entirely possible that you have no idea who John Carpenter is. Since the mid-90’s, he’s been on one of those deeply mediocre-to-awful runs that seem to strike all horror directors after they become Established Auteurs, churning out forgettable crap like Vampires and Ghosts of Mars, both of which, at their best, serve only to remind us of earlier successes. Those successes were terrific, though, and when Carpenter’s on his game, he’s capable of entertaining, well-crafted movies which rely on intellect and black humor as much as gore for their scares. His most famous film, Halloween, is considered a forerunner of the modern slasher picture, but don’t hold that against it; it’s status as a classic is well deserved, and unlike the many clumsy, hackneyed follow-ups, it turned an economy of plot and blood into an effectively primal bedtime story.
Christine isn’t anywhere near that level, but it’s also a hell of a lot better than, say, Village of the Damned. Carpenter has more or less disowned the picture these days, claiming that the concept was a non-starter from the beginning, and it’s true that, ultimately, the movie fails to deliver on the promised collaboration between two acknowledged masters of the genre. But by no means is it an embarrassment. There are enough solid performances and well-shot sequences to give it a passing grade from any reasonable critic.
Acting wise, the best work comes from Keith Gordon, as the doomed Arnie. As an actor, Gordon’s most famous for his work as Angie Dickenson’s tech-obsessed son in Dressed to Kill, as well as playing second banana to Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School; between those movies and this one, I’d say Arnie is his best role, if only because it allows him to show a wider range than the other two films. The changes the character goes through over course of the story are major, and serve to create what moderate tragedy there is; it was crucial to cast someone who could be convincingly pathetic (but still likeable) at the beginning, and would be equally adept at the gradual transformation from self-hating loser to bitter, vindictive prick. Gordon is excellent at this. He’s very convincing as a nerd–perhaps slightly Hollywoodized, but still managing to convey the frustration and agonizing loneliness that makes him such an easy target for Christine. He’s just as believable as the more self-assured asshole. The changes are clear, but never over-the-top, and you can see occasional hints of the person he used to be trying to figure out what’s going on. Without his performance, the movie would lose a lot of its pathos; he’s the human face you remember when you forget about the scares. Gordon has since gone on to director some of his own movies (his version of Mother Night is one of the best Vonnegut movie adaptations I’ve seen).
The rest of the cast is competent, if unremarkable. John Stockwell (another director!) is fine as Dennis, and his friendship with Arnie works well enough. Alexandra Paul, a future “Baywatch” lifeguard, is breathy and pretty as Leigh, but you get even less of a sense of who she is than you did in the book. It is fun seeing character actors like Robert Prosky and Roberts Blossom in smaller roles, as Will Darnel and George Lebay, respectively, and Harry Dean Stanton is always a welcome presence in film; he made Jenkins, the only police officer who comes even close to figuring out what’s going on, surprisingly memorable for the small amount of screen time he gets.
Really, though, the movie belongs to Arnie and his car, a 1958 cherry red Plymouth Fury. Car enthusiasts were apparently outraged by the number of rare vehicles destroyed in the filming, but man, it looks cool on-screen. Carpenter does his best to give Christine her own personality, relying on camera angles and well-placed music cues (as in the book, there’s a lot of fifties rock and roll), and while she never quite takes on a life of her own, she’s definitely memorable. The scenes where she mows down her targets are fun, if not particularly frightening. For my money, the best bits are when she regenerates whatever damage she’s taken; it’s all practical effects, and no the less convincing for it.
As with any competently made movie that somehow fails to make a lasting impact on its audience, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong here- or, really, if anything did go wrong at all. I vaguely remember liking the first half, and then reaching a certain point and deciding, “Well, I guess this is only so-so after all,” but for the life of me, I can’t remember what that point was. Which sums up the problem better than any specific plot concerns could; this is a movie I’ve seen at least three times, and yet I remember barely anything about it. That’s probably its most damning crime–it kills an hour and forty minutes and accomplishes hardly anything at all. Even Arnie’s eventual doom comes of more as a shoulder shrug, and while Christine is fun to watch, she certainly won’t haunt your dreams.
Of course, it’s not like the killer car genre is exactly overflowing with classics…
COMPARE/CONTRAST:
There are the usual cosmetic alterations here, most minor, a few more noticeable. While Christine opens, after a brief prologue, with Arnie first setting eyes on the car, the movie, after its own brief prologue (where we see Christine back on the assembly line in 1958, where she cuts off one guy’s fingers and kills another engineer outright), takes us through a Day in the Life series of scenes to show us Arnie and Dennis are, and just how frustratingly inept Arnie is at nearly everything. In the novel, the boys are still on summer vacation when Arnie buys his car, but in the movie, school has started, and Arnie is just as much an outcast as ever. It’s handled well, bits of pseudo-slapstick mixed with bullying: Arnie dumps garbage on the driveway when he’s trying to take it to the curb, Arnie can’t get his locker open till Dennis helps and then still can’t open it himself, etc.. It’s funny, but in a painful way, and in a few minutes, Carpenter gets the audience firmly on the side of his anti-hero. The climax is Arnie’s run-in with Buddy Reperton, a fight which occurs in the novel a few weeks after Christine is bought and paid for; it shows Arnie at his most helpless and his most stubborn.
By the end of this sequence, you know exactly who Arnie is, and as the movie progresses, it’s easy to look back on those opening moments and see why Arnie fell in love with Christine as quickly as he did. Both the novel and the film’s approach to his characterization work well enough, but the changes make sense when you consider the different requirements of prose and visual storytelling. Especially with Carpenter at the helm. Carpenter’s a traditionalist when it comes to structure, and, after the initial sting to get the viewer’s interest, usually likes to establish character before getting into the meat of the plot.
This brisk, straightforward approach probably explains the biggest change from the source novel, the elimination of Christine’s original owner. In the novel, Arnie buys his car from Roland LeBay, a veteran with a filthy back-brace and a nasty temper. During those scenes, Lebay comes off as nothing worse than a creepy old man, and when he dies a few chapters later, you expect that he’s gone for good. Instead, he becomes the unseen force behind Arnie’s transformation, with Arnie adopting phrases and curses LeBay had used in his brief appearance, as well as developing an overall cynicism and bitterness not in keeping with his normal, basically decent self. Arnie begins to see visions of LeBay’s rotted corpse riding shotgun with him, and as Dennis learns from George Lebay, Rolands relationship with his car while he was alive was far from healthy. Christine was involved in the deaths of Rollie’s infant child and his wife, in ways which eventually echo into the present. The car, it seems, was the most perfect extension and expression of Roland LeBay’s endless fury against life, a fury that became even more potent with the man’s death. (In fact, there are a few hints that Roland was waiting for Arnie to come by the day he did; that he somehow knew someone who’d be susceptible to Christine would be driving by, and because he was going to die soon, he let the car go for a brief period in order to get another shot at life in the body of a much younger man.)
In the movie version, Arnie buys his car from George Lebay, who, instead of being a mild-mannered teacher from the mid-west, is basically Roland as seen in those first few chapters. Once the car gets sold, apart from a brief scene about the fate of the car’s last owner, he’s no longer a presence in the story; Arnie still copies some of the same phrases, but it’s more indicative of a general personality change than it is of someone taking him over. Christine is entirely her own monster, a fact which is set-up from that opening scene in the factory.
So, what’s the big deal? Christine the novel often feels like a collection of spare parts that were never fit together into a believable whole. It’s not a terrible read, but most of the pleasure to be found in it lies in examining each of its disparate pieces for anything of interest. The Roland LeBay subplot is the most compelling of all these misappropriated bits, lending the nuts and bolts killer car plot a nasty edge it wouldn’t otherwise have. The brief descriptions we get of his life, mostly anecdotes about his contempt for anyone he came across, are memorable through their absolutism, and by the end, that uncompromising rage dominates the rest of the book. It’s the only thing in the story that seems truly frightening, and the only thing that really sticks with you afterwards.
By eliminating the more outré elements of the novel, Carpenter streamlines the story and sands off its rougher edges. As I said, this falls naturally into his basic approach to filmmaking; Carpenter cites John Ford and Howard Hawks as major influences on his work, and some of their clipped, economical approach is evident in nearly all his classic films. (In the Mouth of Madness is a bit of an anomaly, I suppose, but since that movie relies on its subversion of expectations for effect, it makes sense that it would work differently from the rest of his work.) While this approach generally works well for him, giving even his weaker movies at least a basic veneer of solid professionalism, with Christine, it just manages to make an unremarkable piece of work even less remarkable. By editing out Roland and his rage, he removes the unpleasantness. Stephen King, in defending/celebrating some of the more offensive aspects in his story “On Dedication,” said that, as a horror writer, he never wanted his readers to feel entirely safe; even if he’d become a mainstream icon, people should never forget that he was capable of biting, and biting hard, should the occasion demand it. Roland LeBay is the bite in Christine. By taking that out, Carpenter made the novel easier to adapt, but ensured that the end results would be toothless and forgettable.
SOURCE: QQ.5
SCREEN: QQ.5
Still, pretty funny last line.