Part 1: Chapters 14 & 15
The school year is about to start up again, and the Cunningham’s head out-of-state for a long weekend vacation. Michael asks Dennis to look in on Christine while they are gone, to see how Arnie is faring in his restoration efforts. Dennis agrees, because he is as curious as Arnie’s father.
At Darnell’s Garage, Dennis finds that Christine’s complexion, like Arnie’s, is clearing, but in a rather haphazard, sloppy way. The radio antenna is brand new and the back seat cover has been replaced, but only one half of the front grill has been fixed. There are new windshield wipers on a car that is far from ready to drive in the rain. Arnie, who Dennis knows to be a very methodical thinker, seems to be working in a scattershot manner.
Dennis’s investigation is cut short by Darnell who demands that he hit the bricks. Darnell’s tune changes when Dennis says that he is Kenneth Guilder’s son. Darnell invites Dennis into his office, and there he shares his own misgivings about the way Arnie is restoring Christine. He also admits to recognizing the car, but he can’t remember where. Dennis informs him that Arnie bought it from Roland D. LeBay, and Darnell is stopped dead in his tracks. Darnell knows all about LeBay and Christine and the fate of LeBay’s wife.
School starts. Arnie is busy with Christine; Dennis is busy losing football games with the Libertyville High Terriers. The few times that he and Arnie get together he notices that his friend has picked up a back injury somewhere…
Looks like Arnie and Christine are reaping the benefits of the pow-pow-power of Clearasil!
In his 1980 history of horror, Danse Macabre, Stephen King talks about “‘the “myth-pool’ — that body of fictive literature in which all of us, even the nonreaders and those who do not go to films, have communally bathed” (50). For King, the most powerful and singular inhabitants of the myth-pool and the works of art that fixed them in our collective consciousness are The Vampire (Bram Stoker’s Dracula), The Werewolf (Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and The Thing Without a Name (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein).
(King admits that The Ghost is another important member of the myth-pool, but that there is no singular work of art that fixes it in our minds the way that the works of Stoker et al. do. That’s debatable…)
What are we dealing with in Christine? What is the central metaphor of this book, and which classic monster fits the bill?
In Salem’s Lot, the King Vamp, Barlow, gets younger and more beautiful the more he feeds on the inhabitants of the Lot. Perhaps Christine is a vampire? But then shouldn’t Arnie be aging or getting worse acne than usual?
In Oscar Wilde’s 1890 Gothic horror, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the titular character is kept young because his portrait is the one who ages. Is Christine like Dorian Gray? Then that would make Arnie the portrait. Perhaps, his bad back (so much like LeBay’s) has something to do with Christine’s reincarnation?
The Werewolf is another possibility, especially in the form of Jekyll and Hyde. They were (spoiler alert!) one and the same person, however. They were also completely different temperament-wise — Jekyll the kindly doctor, Hyde the monstrous brute. Arnie seemed like a kindly kid before the brutish LeBay sold him the monstrous wrecked car.
We will talk more about the myth-pool, its inhabitants, and which ones King is playing with in Christine as the month progresses. There is one text that I feel King returns to often in his work, but it isn’t as powerfully set in the public’s collective unconsciousness. I’ll be sure to point it out when it rears its head… or should I say its “brain”? (Heh-heh-heh!)
Another aspect about both Arnie and Christine’s clearing complexions goes back to what we talked about when I brought up the return of the 1950s in the 1980s. It seemed that no matter what you encountered — be it a rock’n’roll group’s song on the radio or a politician’s speech on the TV — if you scratched beneath the surface of said song/speech you would find a call to the return to fundamentals. What was punk rock if not a call to return to the angsty, simple, 4/4 beat, 3-chord shuffle of artists like Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and The Big Bopper?
When Dennis goes to Darnell’s to check up on Arnie’s progress with Christine, he is struck by how his friend’s repairs are like scratching beneath the surface of the car:
“I had looked at that new tire on that old car and thought it was as if a little bit of the old car had been scratched away and that the new car — fresh, resplendent, just off the assembly line in a year when Ike had been President and Batista had still been in charge of Cuba — was peeking through.” (122)
I don’t think it is an accident that Dennis brings forth historical figures when discussing what lies under Christine’s surface. Everything exists in a historical context. The forces that were at work when Christine drove off the assembly line were much more than the union line worker who built her. Ike and Batista were just as much a part of her construction. It is impossible to divorce an object from its historical context. When you pull something — a rock’n’roll song or a political speech — out of the past, the past doesn’t remain behind. It comes with that object, whether you want it to or not. Christine is a novel about the dangers of allowing an unexamined past to return to the present. There is always something just beneath the surface waiting to take advantage and return to life.
All right, all right… that’s enough fancy talk and hooptedoodle for one day.
There is no town near Pittsburgh called Philadelphia City. Why on Earth would there be? There have been several race tracks in the Pittsburgh area, but none have been called “Philly Plains.” These are just more examples of King either being lazy or completely unaware of geography. Either way, it makes my teeth itch.
And don’t get me started on Arnie and Dennis watching another Phillies baseball game together…
If you want to talk real car racing and the Steel City, then I wholeheartedly recommend checking out the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix. It’s held every summer in Schenley Park, which is a large municipal park bordering both University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Schenley Park is also home to Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, which, in turn, is home to a corpse flower named after Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero!
The Vintage Grand Prix offers many individual races throughout the event based on vehicle type and historical era. (My personal favorites are the “Preservation and Pre-War” cars.) Don’t want to stand behind the hay bales and watch the old timey cars zip past your nose? Then walk around the Bob O’Connor Golf Course and check out the thousands of cars — both old and new — on display. Maybe you’ll see a 1958 Plymouth Fury. Or a Volkswagen Thing — like the one Adrienne Barbeau drove in John Carpenter’s The Fog! Either way, it’s a great time.
If you need further incentive, then just know that you are breathing in all that carbon monoxide for a good cause: since 1983 the Vintage Grand Prix has donated nearly $7 million to autistic and developmentally disabled individuals throughout the Pittsburgh region.
If anything, it will make you forget “Philadelphia City” and “Philly Plains” for a little while.
I think that’s all for today, Blog-o-weeners. I got to blather about the myth-pool and the Return of the Repressed, and I got to engage in a little hometown civic boosterism — all in all, a pretty good day. Tomorrow, please read Part 1: Chapters 16 & 17. We will meet up again with that friend of the downtrodden, Buddy Repperton. But his reappearance will be balanced by our first look at another major player in our story, the lovely Leigh Cabot.
I wonder what character from the literary or cinematic myth-pool best represents me? Could it be the tragically romantic Erik from Phantom of the Opera? Or maybe the hyper-rational and logical Sherlock Holmes? What’s that? I’m more like Fats from the movie Magic? Well, laugh it up, Blog-o-weeners, the joke is on you, because…
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