Christine (1983)

Rated R for a lot of cursing, sexual references, and gore that involves people getting mowed down by a killer car.  There's also a bit of sex stuff in it, but there is no nudity. I remember being kind of aghast at one thing that didn't age well, but for the life of me I can't remember it right now.  Still, it is a horror movie adapted from a Stephen King novel.  It's going to have inappropriate content in it.

DIRECTOR:  John Carpenter

Okay, this is going to be a secret book review along with being a movie blog.  You got it?  I'm not trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes.  I just read the book and I went directly into the movie after that.  I think I might not be alone out there when I say that I had a healthy skepticism about the premise of Christine.  There's a Family Guy bit about Stephen King implying that he just looks at objects and makes them spooky.  In the case of the clip, it was a lamp.  But that criticism comes from the notion that you could write a novel about a killer car and somehow make it compelling.  Well, he did it.  Christine, as a novel, is a banger.  But the more insane thing is that John Carpenter adapted that novel at the peak of John Carpenter's work and made a banger out of that novel.  I don't know how it is possible, but both the book and the movie shouldn't work, yet they absolutely do.

I have a theory about it.  Actually, I have two theories and they both, somehow, may be true.  Let's go with the dumber theory first.  Christine almost works in the exact same way that Jaws does.  We know the shark is out there.  We know it's going to kill anyone that it is coming across.  But because the car is barely in the movie, it makes it so much scarier and more compelling to care about the people who aren't cars in the movie.  (The good news is that very few people in this movie are cars.) Because Christine in either medium barely shows up (not no-time, but sparingly), this is a story about character, which leads me to my second theory.

If Christine is scary because it barely shows its monster, much like Jaws, then the story works because of its allegory that Spider-Man also embraced.  I rarely read King novels looking for allegory or deeper meaning.  As an English teacher, that's a bit blasphemous, also considering that I believe that all art should be saying something.  I'm sure that many of the King novels have a ton to say that might be deeper than what I initially gleaned.  I oddly shut my brain off for King because I find him just so gosh-darned readable.   I know that King, to some extent or another, has been influenced by Marvel Comics.  If you read his Dark Tower novels, he straight up makes in-universe Doombots villains in one of the books.  Now, I don't know what is going on in Stephen King's head when he's writing Christine.  From what I can glean, this is one of those pillars of the King canon that was probably influenced heavily by enough drugs to make King potentially forget that he wrote this.  I don't know.  That's me speculating.  I doubt that he was reading Spider-Man and thinking that he was going to write the horror version of the same allegory.

This is me trying to dig myself out of being too abstact and cryptic.  Stan Lee infamously created his characters as allegories for what his readership was potentially going through.  With Peter Parker / Spider-Man, Peter's gaining of powers is allegory for puberty.  I know, right?  The guy is a huge nerd.  He's overlooked by everyone until one day everything changes.  He notices physical changes in himself.  He can't just be pushed around anymore.  He starts making weird moral choices until he makes a big enough mistake that he has to re-evaluate his life, eventually forcing him to take up his uncle's mantra, "With great power, there must also come great responsibility." (I really hope someone calls me on that mantra so I can cite page and line of Spider-Man's canonical origin story.) 

Christine is also a metaphor for puberty.  But because it is a horror where we can't have our central figure simply will himself out of a problem, we actually get a much more in-depth breakdown of what it means to go through puberty.  Arnie is Peter Parker.  Mind you, because Stan Lee was writing for children, Peter's nicknames weren't as vulgar as Arnie's were.  When Arnie decides to buy Christine off of LeBay, it's his first real form of independence.  But in that independence, there is the companion of rebellion.  Arnie's parents initially aren't angry at the car itself, but in the fact that Arnie made a unilateral decision without consulting them.  He's the baby bird leaving the nest and it is incredibly sudden.  Coupled with that is that Arnie, in a desperate attempt to grow up on his own and quickly, pays way too much for the car.  Everyone is aware that Christine, in the way that LeBay sells her, is not even worth $50.  But Arnie needs her.  He is sick of being Arnie the child.  A car represents a major step in the coming of age story.  

And when he buys her, he loses his acne.  The character of Arnie becomes a far more confident version of himself.  In the novel, that physical transformation becomes literally LeBay, the old racist who sells him the car.  The movie just makes Arnie a handsomer, more confident version of himself, mostly from the removal of his glasses.  With the novel, that possession by LeBay is actually far more upsetting because --if we're treating this as an allegory --modeling adulthood after LeBay seems like an attempt to be anything that his parents aren't.  His parents are obsessed with education and liberal politics.  His mother wields that liberal arts education violently, causing Arnie to mirror the polar antithesis.  As much as the car scares all the people around it, it is more haunting that Arnie keeps defending the car sooner than defending the humans in his life.  If you take all the supernatural bits out of it, it is Arnie hurting the people around him because he turns his back on the things that made him innocent.  In the process of growing up to be a man, he has to destroy everything that was representative of his old life.

But now I should talk about the movie?  I mean, I got some pretty fun moments in there from an English teacher's perspective.  I don't know why John Carpenter was such a good match for this movie.  Honestly, I'm surprised that the two didn't work together more.  King infamously tends to hate adaptations of his works, especially the ones made by auteurs.  I kind of get that he doesn't like The Shining, but that's because Kubrick distanced himself from the novel quite a few times.  While Carpenter isn't bonded to the novel, a lot of the written word made its way to the screen.  The first half of the movie especially is oddly close to how the book played out.  There are moments that are rearranged for clarity, considering that two-thirds of the novel is told in first person, meaning that much of Dennis's inner thoughts would be lost when adapted to the screen.  But I really felt like I was watching a direct adaptation, which is weird considering that I feel like John Carpenter himself has such a powerful voice.

Maybe King is too close to his own work.  Carpenter did something pretty smart in his adaptation.  There are some things that I wouldn't have hated closer to the book, but I really like that the movie downplays Darnell's control over Arnie.  As much as that element works in the novel, showing Arnie's obsession with self-sabotage, it almost feels like a distraction from the relationship between Arnie and Dennis (who may be a bit cooler than I realized based on the movie).  

But the thing that would have frustrated me if I was Stephen King is the origins of Christine herself.  What I like about the book is that the silliest part of the whole mythos --a killer car --is actually more of a weapon in the hand of a ghost. Okay, that might be silly too...but I like it better.   I oddly find the notion that a car just kills people...like in the introduction to this movie.  It's coming off the assembly line and it injures one dude and kills another.  I like the notion that a real life racist bled off malice into the car.  That's a far more interesting dynamic, especially when we tie that notion that Arnie is just mirroring the adults he knows as he grows up.

Also, does Carpenter keep Dennis and Leigh apart as a couple because it makes Dennis unsympathetic?  From a film perspective, it keeps Dennis as the protagonist of the film and doesn't muddy the friendship between Arnie and Dennis.  But push-comes-to-shove, I actually really ship Dennis and Leigh as a couple.  Maybe the movie is a little rushed, but I also really get that some of these beats just don't work without an internal monologue to justify these actions.  Or you need to add another hour to the film and I don't think that would have helped it one bit.

As I close up, I do also want to stress something.  Christine works beyond its messaging. It's not scary-scary. It's scary-cool-scary.  Okay, there's barely any coherence in this, but I think that when John Carpenter is firing on all-cylanders (pun intended), he cooks.  This is additional evidence that John Carpenter had a streak going for a long time because Christine is way better than it has any right to be.