Stephen King and Morality
I started reading Stephen King when I was very young. Sometimes I got special permission to get the books for “older kids” at the school book fairs, even before I started using the adult portion of the school and public library. I owned a lot of his books, but I also borrowed some from the library and got some others second hand. He was definitely a big part of my life in the ‘90s when you consider how many books of his I had read, and how many movies based on them I had seen. In my twenties, I remember picking up a copy of his nonfiction book, “On Writing,” from a bookstore in Pittsburgh.
A film is a different sort of art form, and a different interpretation of the source material, at times. Just this week, I watched The Dead Zone (the movie with Christopher Walken, I have also watched the series starring Anthony Michael Hall), and The Dark Half, which stars Timothy Hutton in two roles and works like medieval morality play where a teratoma grows up to be an evil twin to the main character.
The older I get, the more I appreciate Stephen King, in all his forms and interpretations, even the ones he doesn’t like. The cool, edgy, badass character makes witty quips, but in the end, he’s a destructive force, not a creative and positive one. Here, King shows us that evil can be seductive, but to what end? There is only destruction and violence. The awkward guy with the typewriter wins in the end.
Is the pen mightier than the sword? Sometimes. But people have to read for this to be the case. I like the cheesiness of “The Dark Half,” George Stark has some lines like a Freddy Krueger type of character might have, “What’s going on?” “Murder. Do you want some?”
Image: Timothy Hutton in The Dark Half, which is free to watch online on YouTube as of this writing
Having worked as a translator for some years, which is a type of writing job, I am biased towards these types of characters, too , I suppose. Stephen King was writing about what he knew and creating entertaining allegorical situations, which is what horror is often about.
I had a horror movie review website in the late nineties and early 2000s, when people used to get online to read movie reviews. We reviewed books as well.
The Dark Half was also directed by local legend George A. Romero, so I appreciated that Timothy Hutton’s character is shopping at a CoGo’s convenience store. I worked at one when I was 20 or so years old in Pittsburgh, but not the one in the movie.
As a horror fan, I’ve been told that horror is weird and promoting violence. It is not, in most cases. They are just modern fairy tales and I appreciate that Stephen King makes up a part of American culture with these sorts of things. Nietzsche said, “ Wir haben die Kunst, damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zu Grunde gehen.” Roughly, “we have art so we don’t perish from reality.”
Your own “comfort movies” may vary from mine, of course, due to personal taste, but I like to revisit some of the movies based on King’s books sometimes. I generally watch the movie after having read the book, though. You miss out on a lot when you haven’t read the book.
I think also of Ozzy Osbourne, and people calling Black Sabbath “satanic” back in the day, rather than actually listening to the lyrics, which tended to have some religious content but were actually anti-war, for example. Literacy and lack thereof has been a problem for a while.
Many people don’t even seem to know their own religion very well, as I have seen people say online that they don’t read the Bible, but they listen to their pastor reading it. Well, he’s picking and choosing what parts to read, and inserting his own interpretation (hopefully not ChatGPT’s interpretation) and over a lifetime, there is time to read the whole thing yourself. I took an online philosophy course on the gospels a few years ago to refresh my knowledge of these things, though I am not a practicing Catholic. Morality predates modern religions, though. It is only one way of getting morality to the people. Other ways are through films, and novels, or studying philosophy (not through memes, through the entire books, so that you have the appropriate context for things).
But if you are literate, it’s always good to promote such things, I suppose, which is why i post about how much I like some of Stephen King’s work and horror in general, and why I return to it in times of great turbulence in the world.