Kontextmaschine

3rd October 2021

Link reblogged from "I don't want any trouble. Where do you want to go?" with 125 notes

It (2017) review: a superb movie less about clowns than real-world evil - Vox →

fireleaptfromhousetohouse:

dagny-hashtaggart:

kontextmaschine:

This is at least one notch better than the usual “everything in culture is actually about Trump and his eeevil” hogwash.

(“Hogwash” means “shit”. You know, what hogs roll about in, as if to bathe?)

More than that tho, it moves me to put on my kontextgoggles and look at Stephen King in relation to his period of American culture.

King’s work always reflected on the culture around it, if only by the print era pulp-prolific tactic of filling pages by shoehorning every stray thought you have into whatever you’re writing at the time (Colin @spacetwinks reports his latter-day works are full of transparent, charmingly Maine-centric axe-grinding).

But his “golden age”, say, Carrie to Needful Things, was in the 70s-80s period that, if my cyclical understanding of history holds (it does) resembled the one we’re currently going through, so it’s particularly worth considering now.

One significant thing – as the cities were emptying out, to the point of memory-holing that the US had been a predominantly urban country since the 1930s, King’s work focused on rural small town life, often about outsiders moving into said. Pet Sematary, for example, it’s very significant that the narrator moved out to the sticks – long driveway off a truck route, charming local historic ruins, undeveloped enough to still show traces of precolonial life – to raise a family.

(A thing to do would be to contrast King’s use of of rural New England with Hawthorne and Lovecraft’s, but tbh I don’t know them that well)

Similarly, I occasionally hear guffaws that Cujo has a whole subplot about cereal branding, but it just serves to remind that Vic is a yuppie who moved out of NYC to protect his young family only to confront the fact that the countryside is actually uncivilized and bestial too. There is some woo “reincarnated spirit of evil” in there, but all the fundamental threats to his family – unreliable transportation and sparse services, unmanaged wildlife, irresponsible white trash neighbors – are real rural dangers.

There’s a lot of stuff about gender relations and changing expectations of marriage. In Sematary, the narrator’s wife grows alienated, channeling her attentions away to others; before Gage he revives her cat. For fear of abandonment he goes further and further to hold on to a family – embittered wife, bad seed child, evil cat – the last generation’s men might have abandoned themselves. In Cujo, there’s lingering issues with recent infidelity.

(You laugh about how 50s-80s High Literature was so obsessed with adultery, but if not “orienting your life to duty, purpose, order vs. orienting it to animal sensation and personal satisfaction”, I dunno what period art should’ve been concerned with.)

The Shining is very much about a guy born into the old dispensation – that men create and carouse and mount their genius to chase their passion while women tend the home fires – dealing with new expectations that he be an emotional provider to his wife and child, that he act as a supporting character in their life-plots rather than the reverse.

What else? It, and more grounded companion piece The Body (known in adaptation as Stand by Me) honestly strike me most as a exploration of the Boomer-era “generation gap”, how the culture of the previous generation may have brought about the “broad middle class” ‘50s but was unsuited to address the problems encountered there.

“To beat this evil clown, we’ve gotta gangbang our chick friend” seems weird as hell, but “to progress, we’ve got to create a New Adulthood that doesn’t define itself against childhood but instead adds sex” is pretty much the Boomer story.

(Also, people who live in group houses shouldn’t throw stones.)

Carrie is very much about the ‘70s reintegration of a long-isolated religious fundamentalism to a mainstream that had only grown more secularized and libertine (appreciably more so than in the “family values”, “bourgeois bohemian” 80s-90s, which was the synthesis of this opposition) since. Particularly, it layers the discrepancy in mores – showing your dirtypillows vs. not, say – over an even deeper gap in worldviews, between bucket-of-blood materialism and a numinous, supernatural world.

And that’s just the stuff I dignify as serious. Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, and I guess The Stand all focus on psychic/telekinetic kids, which is a reminder that the 70s were full of woo, ESP was a serious topic, and the idea of the “gifted child” started out a lot closer to today’s “indigo child”.

(I like to think that Bill Murray’s researcher in the stylistically thrownback The Royal Tenenbaums was a callback to Venkman’s “negative reinforcement” introduction from Ghostbusters, like “back in the day we went looking for psychics but instead we just discovered autism")

I’m in kind of the opposite position, having read most of Lovecraft’s works, but only a couple of King’s.

Regarding Lovecraft’s relationship to rural New England: while a lot has been made of Lovecraft’s longing for an idealized New England aristocracy, it’s worth noting that this was a specifically urban aristocracy. His scenes of comfort and remembered glory are full of gambrel roofs and collegiate libraries, not the plantations of the Southern Gothic authors. Celephais and Kadath, the chief loci of longing in Lovecraft’s fiction, are both envisioned as supernatural cities.

By contrast, his treatment of rural settings and their inhabitants ranges from disdain to terror. The rural poor in Lovecraft’s stories are generally nice enough people, but also a bit on the too dumb to live side. Rural elites, meanwhile, are among Lovecraft’s most common villains: examples include Wilbur Whateley in The Dunwich Horror, the Marsh and Waite families of Innsmouth, and the twisted descendants of the Martense clan in The Lurking Fear. There’s also some fear of the untamed corners of the natural world evident in Lovecraft’s work, though it doesn’t show up as clearly and strongly as in some of Lovecraft’s predecessors, like Arthur Machen.

One of the central concerns in Lovecraft’s writing is the pollution of blood and the degeneration of human genetic stock. Commentators have mostly noted this with regard to fears of race-mixing and exogamy, and they’re right to note these things, but Lovecraft was equally concerned with excessive endogamy. The Lurking Fear, which centers around a seemingly abandoned mansion full of the man-eating, semi-simian descendants of a wealthy rural family that became so inbred over the course of centuries as to no longer be recognizably human in body or mind, is the starkest example of this. As far as I can recall, incest isn’t brought up as an explicit plot point in his other fiction set in rural New England, but it’s strongly implied in many of these stories, including The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and The Thing on the Doorstep.

In short, Lovecraft generally viewed rural New England (and probably rural areas more generally) as frightening and dangerous, and a potential corrupting influence on the virtuous urban elite that supplied most of his protagonists and sympathetic characters.

Outside the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.

Ignatius Reilly out of A Confederacy Of Dunces can’t possibly have been meant as a Lovecraft pastiche, but it’s got to be one of the biggest happy little accidents in literary history. It’s not just the urban insularity, either - consider:

- Overwrought prose style
- Classicists with suitably antiquated values
- Overbearing mothers
- Racism so deep-seated and old-timey it doesn’t even resemble the racism of their contemporaries
- Hatred and fear of sex (and most other vices too)
- Greatest love affairs, against all odds, being with Jewish women

The only difference, really, is that Lovecraft wasn’t overweight. And of course it would have boiled Lovecraft’s blood that he didn’t get into university but anyone in the world named Reilly did.