Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 4

Free Day:

Those Terrific Teens

and their Hot Rod Machines

As I’ve already mentioned during Blog-o-weens past and present, I’m from Western Pennsylvania. More specifically, I’m from a small, rural area twenty-five miles to the north of Pittsburgh. I hesitate to use the term “town” to describe where I’m from. There is no Main Street, no town hall, no center around which everything else revolves.

I’ve used the narration from Robert Persons’s 2009 documentary/poem General Orders No. 9 in Blog-o-weens past. Persons’s film, a Chris Marker-esque rumination on the State (and state) of Georgia, is about the loss of identity and innocence as life moves from the rural to the urban, or as Persons’s says in the film as “deer trail becomes Indian trail becomes county road becomes interstate.” The narration for the film has been transcribed as a poem here, and there are a few stanza’s at its beginning that describe the sense of place I am trying to capture:

Where the roads of the county intersect, there is a town.


The town is at the center of the county.


From the center, the town extends 
for one mile in every direction.

It’s a pattern, a pattern of point and periphery, 
star and satellite, being and witness.

The courthouse is at the center of the town.


It’s a brick building on a granite foundation.


It has a clock tower and a weather vane.


The clock tower has four faces 
addressing each of the principle directions,
 and the weather vane is high above, 
brutal in its aspect and high in the air.

The building stands in the middle of the square 
and the square is formed by four streets 
running north and south, east and west.


Here, there is a sense of order 
from above and below, from within and without.


This shall be the center post of the world,
 the pillar of Heaven.

This is exactly what Economy Borough, PA, is missing: a sense of order, a center, a pattern. Other areas of Beaver County had that “courthouse in the center of town,” but not us. We had farmland, mobile home parks, and auto garages spread out over eighteen square miles. If we wanted Person’s sense of centering and meaning (or James Joyce’s sense of “omphalos”), we had to go elsewhere. And that meant having access to a car.

(You were wondering where I was going with all that, weren’t you? Not to worry, Blog-o-weeners, I have a graduate degree in English, so I know how to bloviate. I mean… who the hell else is gonna use the term “omphalos” when discussing Stephen King’s Christine, hmmm?)

Unlike Dennis and Arnie, I never had my own car as a kid. In fact, I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was eighteen years old. I never felt that drive (pun intended!) for freedom and escape. I was also not a “gearhead.” I was not (and am still not) the type of person to drop a wad of dough on some used junker and spend my time (and more money) fixing it up. The inner workings of a car were (and still are) a complete mystery to me.

So how did I, like the good American teenager that I was, explore the world outside the confines of my hometown? Well, I had friends with their own licenses and permission to borrow their parents’ cars who were happy to swing by and pick me up on the way to the mall or the movies or the local Eat’n Park or (if we were feeling particularly daring) the big city of Pittsburgh. (Not to worry… I chipped in for gas!) In that way, we were no different than the generations of American teenagers that had come before us: we used the mobility of the car to push against the boundaries (and sometimes the envelope) of what we were used to. The car was like a spaceship that gave us access to new, undiscovered worlds.

Not only was a car the gateway to the world without, it also allowed us to get in touch with the world within. The car was our internet chatroom. Imagine four or five teenagers piled into a Nissan Sentra, radio blaring, talking incessantly about school, girls, work, girls, the future, and… well… girls. The car allowed us to cement the bonds of friendship, as well as to define what that friendship was. It set boundaries around our friend group — there was “us” in the car and “them” outside of it.

The car was the key to economic freedom. Having access to a car meant getting to a job on time and making money that could be spent at the mall, the movies, etc. It allowed us to purchase our own clothes, which in turn allowed us to better tell the rest of the world who we were.

For some, the car was also the key to sexual freedom, too. You could pick up a date, head off to the nearest drive-in theater, jump in the backseat (or the front seat — a lot of cars still had bench seating), and get a heavy petting session in while E.T. was phoning home. Didn’t have the money for the drive-in? There were plenty of out-of-the-way places in rural southwestern Pennsylvania to go “parking.” The car was a roving bedroom on wheels.

The teenager qua “Teenager” didn’t really come into existence until the early 20th Century, when mandatory schooling removed young people from the workforce. Instead of becoming socialized to adults at a factory, they socialized with one another in another factory of sorts — the local high school. This allowed young people to develop their own rituals and customs and norms outside of the family. With the post-war economic boom in the 1950s, car ownership was within reach of teens. The used cars of the 1930 and 1940s could be purchased and fixed up easily. And those fixed up hot rods could, in turn, be used to defend American values from evils such as giant gila monsters, ghosts, and teenage werewolves.

My teenaged experiences with cars in the 1980s were essentially no different from millions of other kids over the previous thirty or forty years. Thanks to mass media (like Christine), I think the connection between teens and cars is a more or less universal one. You may never have owned a car in your life, you may not even be from the United States, but thanks to movies like American Graffiti or Van Nuys Blvd. just about everyone understands what the car means to a teenager.

I think Stephen King is playing with these teenaged tropes in Christine. Sometimes he plays them straight and other times he tips them on their ear. One of the things I’d ask you to keep track of is how Christine, instead of acting as a lifeline to freedom for Arnie, is actually alienating him — from his parents, from Dennis, from Leigh, and from himself.

Well, that’s enough of that. Time to hit the books again, Blog-o-weeners. For tomorrow, why don’t you read Part 1: Chapters 8, 9, & 10. I think you’ll dig ‘em. We get our first look at a staple of Stephen King novels. I think you know who I’m talkin’ about: the high school bully with a chip on his shoulder, a switchblade in his mitts, and not a thought in his head.

But, hey, let’s not be too hard on the high school bully. Let’s try to understand where they are coming from. After all…