And now for something completely different

On Stephen King's "Christine"

This probably isn’t how you promote a book: by talking about your next one? But what can I say, this newsletter is where I try out ideas, talk about ongoing writing projects, go down my favorite rabbit holes. And that means I probably need to talk not just about the book I just published (please buy The Cancel Culture Panic), but also the as-yet-nameless follow up I hope to publish in two years.

This book will be all about the car. About the world cars make and the kind of world we make trying to accommodate ourselves to cars. About the violence cars do to individuals, cities and societies, and the violence that they normalize in those societies. The hierarchies they create, cement and make seem natural. I’m conceiving it at the moment as a comparative project, much like The Cancel Culture Panic. My sense is that many postwar societies became constitutively blind to the brutality of car culture — that indeed their blindness to their own brutality was largely car-shaped — but that no two postwar societies did this exactly the same way. Whether it’s the US, Italy, Germany or Japan: the car became a normalized aspect of how these societies distributed risk, how these countries understood citizenship, and how their legal systems decided which people and bodies could be maimed and terrorized, and whose were the state’s to protect.

I want to tell that story as much through cultural products — novels, films, ads, songs, etc. — as through urban planning, engineering, local politics, policing, etc. And to start my work I’m teaching a class on German car culture in its international context, drawing largely on literature and film, with journalism and urban planning intermixed throughout.

As part of my research I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen King, who I think of as America’s poet laureate of car-based mayhem — crashing cars, getting run over by cars, running over things in your car. I’ll have more to say about him in later installments, but for this installment I thought I’d talk about Christine, King’s 1983 novel (made into a pretty gorgeous, if a bit empty, 1983 film by John Carpenter).

Christine is the most on-the-nose of King’s works about cars and the violence they visit, enable, or make invisible in US society, seeing as it’s about a murderous vintage car wreaking havoc in a Pittsburgh suburb in the fall of 1978. It’s a book by a man clearly deeply frightened of cars, who would — two decades after Christine — almost get killed by a driver while walking along a busy road in Maine. Earlier this month I spoke with Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed of the amazing films-podcast You Are Good about the novel and the adaptation (the episode should be out sometime before Halloween). In typing up my notes and thoughts, I realized there was a story in Christine of post-WWII US car dependency as a kind of possession. A demonic possession? A possession by ancestral spirits? A possession by great uncaring gods slumbering under our deserts and in the deep oceans? So I kept writing and taking notes.

Christine, for those of you who aren’t up on the killer-everyday-objects subgenre of King’s output (Christine, Cujo, “The Mangler”): Christine tells the story of two high school seniors in suburban Pennsylvania — except that neither of them is really the main character. That honor belongs to Christine, the beat-up 1958 Plymouth Fury, whom Arnie Cunningham spots on the side of the road while hanging out the passenger side of his best friend’s ride. Arnie is immediately smitten with Christine, whom she calls “she” even before finding out her name. And his best friend, jock Dennis Guilder, almost immediately feels protective towards his friend, distrustful of the car, thinking his buddy could do better. King is not subtle in positing Christine as a girlfriend stand-in, well before an, er, rather J.G. Ballard-esque sequence in a junk yard. As so often in King’s fiction (I’ve written about my longterm admiration for It a while back), the novel is terrific in subtly amplifying the notes of horror in things that we accept as a part of life’s course. In this case: the horror of realizing that the years after childhood will largely alienate you from the world you’ve known before, will make it strange and disappointing to you. That friendships, dreams, memories will all be wiped from your sense of who you are. Christine appears — leaking oil and rolling coal — as a marker of this process of alienation. Then, of course, she starts killing people.

First, though, Arnie becomes obsessed with Christine and seems to transform through her. The car, a disgusting, spiteful wreck when he drives her home to his horrified parents, proves miraculously easy to restore — almost as though she were doing it herself and he were simply her helpmeet. And Arnie becomes … well, before long he will turn into the man who sold them the car — another disgusting, spiteful wreck named Roland D. LeBay. But before that he turns into — I think? — into the person LeBay thought he might turn into behind the wheel of the car. A late 50s greaser, his acne cleared, his hair fully American Graffiti’d. The Plymouth Fury is the past of 1958 reaching out for the book’s present of 1978; but more to the point, she represents an image of what the world could be like through the car, preserved in time and thereby rendered malignant. Before long, Christine — defaced and brutalized by a bunch of high school thugs — goes on a rampage.

The metaphors here are pretty rough — it’s a rape revenge fantasy on some level —, but it’s noticeable that it’s not Arnie’s revenge. Arnie is an accessory to Christine’s — pardon the pun — fury, which turns out to be an extension of LeBay’s nearly unlimited fury of his own. A boiling resentment, an all-American shittiness so strong and petty it transcends time itself. Christine is a commentary on the fact that you become someone new behind the wheel of a car, but it puts the new spin on it: that you become someone old; that you either make someone else your mark or else become someone’s mark. I’m pretty sure King was riffing on H.P. Lovecraft: in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward this is how the demonic slaver and necromancer Joseph Curwen contrives to live forever – taking possession of his descendant, the titular Charles Dexter Ward, through books. In King, this happens through the car, another way the old subjugate the young by luring them with the illusion of self-reliance, maturation and independence.

King’s cars are Lovecraftian horrors, and dripping, belching, clanging Christine is prime among them. They channel chthonian forces, namely the ones people are forced to constantly pump into their massive tanks. This is a point King makes most obviously at the end of “Trucks”, where the remaining humans work themselves to death dispensing fuel to now-autonomous cars, until either their life force, or the cars’ runs out. But in Christine too, the young may be slaves of their own cars, but they are of course also slaves to the substance that they are forced to feed their cars. True, King’s novel doesn’t have Lovecraft’s prehistoric gods, the Great Old Ones slumbering underneath the human world for millennia. Christine has a prehistoric substance, a substrate of forests and swamps older than memory, whose zombified remains reach into the present with an uncaring, cosmic coldness that Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu would find hard to match.

And they are — this is the central conceit of both “Trucks” and Christine — directly in league with the machine, no human intercession necessary. The thing that most terrifies those who witness Christine’s mayhem is the fact that — as each of her victims realizes at some point — she is driving herself. There’s something darkly comic reading that emphatic statement again and again in San Francisco, a city where self-driving cars roam the streets and have for so long that the only people paying them any mind are the children and the tourists. But, as in so many of King’s books, the specifics of the characters’ various terrors are less salient than the terror behind their terror. The parts of their predicament that, even as their minds and instincts rebel against the uncanny abilities and terrifying hatred bound up in Christine, they accept unquestioned.

The most haunting of Christine’s kills in this regard may be her last — Arnie’s father, Mr. Cunningham, who appears to have suffocated in the car. We are given to understand that the demonic car (or the evil man whose spirit has moved into her) has lured him into committing suicide by exhaust hose in the car. By a car that, for the entire novel, he didn’t permit in his garage, a car he mistrusted and hated, a car he was explicitly warned away from by our narrator, Dennis Guilder. Sometimes boneheaded decisions in horror films can be annoying; in others the somnambulism with which characters meet their fate has a haunting quality. It strikes me how often people commit suicide through suffocation in their cars in history and fiction, and it strikes me that I have not heard of anyone dying this way in decades. There is research into the way gas stopped being an effective means for killing yourself — some of this appears to be due to the introduction of the catalytic converter. But around the same time, people apparently stopped using their ovens this way. So this is a cultural shift as well as a technological one, a shift in the zeitgeist. As people became aware that possibly our carbon emissions were killing us all slowly, and might one day extinguish the species, we no longer did them the favor of ending our own individual lives through them.

There is something dreamlike about the pas-de-deux between killer car and victim in this final kill, a demented logic they both are locked in. And Christine is, I think, not a book about a killer car so much as a book about how a killer car is the most logical and inevitable thing in the world the novel describes. Sure, there’s something drug-like in Arnie’s dependency on Christine — the novel (written by a man in the throes of several addictions) is not coy about the fact that Arnie is a Christine-junkie. But of course there’s also simply something, well, car-like to Arnie’s dependency. Suburban teenagers were — and are — simply dependent on cars for their independence, their sense of self, their dignity. That’s the uncanniness of their world — that drugs and cars are in it objectively analogous.

In one of the rare chapters narrated from Arnie’s point of view, we learn that he is aware that someone else is taking over his mind, and we learn that he feels free only when LeBay is elsewhere — when Christine kills, which always happens when Arnie is nowhere near Christine. This, too, seems to me a mere intensification of the uncanny arrangements that characterize suburban teenagerdom. The car — and the rituals of risk-taking and bad decisionmaking around them, starting with the mere fact of getting one — has this other side, this nightmare side. But you can feel free only when it is not around, when you repress it, when the car is killing without you in it. When she’s out there hunting down your enemies and you’re enjoying your last few moments as mom and dad’s little prince.

Libertyville, we learn, is a Pittsburgh suburb, and this is significant. Many of King’s most famous stories and novels — and almost all of his car-centered ones — take place in exurban space. Derry, Maine in IT, Sidewinder, Colorado in Misery, Castle Rock (and Joe Camber’s garage) in Cujo, State Route 15 in Pet Sematary, Haven, Maine in Tommyknockers. But Libertyville is, by 1978, a mosquito in amber, a world that is starting to be historic even though of course it is still with us today in 2024. It is suburban space at the moment of its irreversible curdling. “But we made them,” the girl remarks in King’s short story “Trucks” (published in Night Shift and turned into a famously troubled movie version as Maximum Overdrive) when the tankers, flatbeds and buses turn on the humans. Christine is about that same moment where the space human beings have made for themselves, and which has centered them to an extent few other spaces really have, turns on its creators.

Christine is an intergenerational story of parents and their children: the generation that built the picket fenced houses, that created the rhythms and anxieties of suburban life, which is of course also the generation that bought the cars. This is the generation of Roland LeBay, the foul-mouthed, deformed, racist old man who has kept his prized 1958 Pontiac Fury in his garage for decades and in the fall of 1978 puts it out on his lawn — like a Venus fly trap, the novel at one point remarks — where it catches the eye of high school dweeb Arnie Cunningham. The second generation is the one that has to live in the world the older generation built and the one that has to beg for the car keys. That has to live by their rhythms. The indignity of being a carless adolescent is part of those rhythms, maybe it is their secret principle. Arnie’s domineering mother forces him to park Christine out by the airport, where he has to go by bus if he wants to go shopping, show off, or go on a date with his girlfriend. And the first thing LeBay makes Arnie do is a horror still so closely associated with late adolescent car ownership: go into debt. Christine — the oil-leaking, gas guzzling “dinosaur” he purchases from LeBay — is his first step into adulthood; but that adulthood is defined by owing stuff to older men. LeBay, his parents (to whom he promises grades and going to the college they want for him), and to local shady businessman Will Darnell.

Christine witnesses and accompanies the wholesale transformation of American rural space — the space from which King, like many American horror writers, wrings so much dread . Rural space suburbanized within a generation, with the old slumbering under freshly laid asphalt, still stirring and bent on revenge. Christine’s shiny “acres of hood” bear witness to the glittering surfaces, the expansive cleanliness of the space. And after the 1960s, when she disappears into LeBay’s garage and later appears a disgusting derelict slowly poising the grass on his front lawn, she becomes a first oozing portent of the inevitable corrosion of this parbuilt world. 

Christine herself is a malignant leftover. Like the oil she keeps oozing, she is a geologic deposit from an earlier era. Its environmental sins, for one: the novel is set in the wake of the oil crisis and everyone keeps remarking on Christine’s excess, her immense thirst for fuel, anachronistic and intemperate even in the gas guzzling late seventies. But she’s also a leftover of suburban promise: the car, the nice house that you get to buy, the family you get to have, in spite of the fact that you’re not actually a very nice person, a real son of a bitch in fact. And as a relic she has registered the climate change that has enveloped the new developments: the accidents, the suicides, the alcoholism, the fights. Many of them, we find out in the course of the novel, have played out in her.

She has also traced the way the cars that had once opened up this dream have come to dominate the landscape and control human lives. When Arnie and his parents have their second drag-out fight about the car he has bought, they do so in the privacy of their home, but nevertheless watched-over: outside “cars cruised by, indistinct, their headlight like yellow eyes.” As in “Trucks”, the infrastructure has come to life, and it domineers and terrorizes its ostensible builders and users. And as in Pet Sematary, the car starts eating into the life of families, because it recognizes no space that isn’t its own. When car runs down one of the local ruffians, the entire street, any street, becomes the car’s hunting ground: "The onsite wheels jumped up on the pavement and it ran at Moochie that way, offside wheels down, onside wheels up over the curb, canted at an angle. The undercarriage scraped and shrieked and shot off a swirling flicker of sparks."

Well before Christine crashes through Will Darnell’s bay windows and hunts him in his own home, The Car — as an idea, as a force — has invaded the domestic space that once constituted itself by being shielded from it.

Dennis from the first distrusts the car. King is not subtle in suggesting that Dennis’s rejection of the car is steeped in misogyny. But the way he endlessly dwells on her physical deformities, disgusting effluvia and off-putting noises, is about more than just the fact that the jock treats the car like an interloping girlfriend. Christine refuses the specific economy that, by 1978, hitches adolescence to automobility. Christine is overweeningly physical, she offends people as she drives by. Everyone assumes Arnie will never be able to drive her. She is not a means to an end — escape, food, companionship, sex. She is an end in herself, and this alone makes her obscene in Dennis’s eyes. At one point, he notes with satisfaction, that the Fury has been “demoted, back to her proper place, as an it, a means of transportation.” Of course, she refuses to be anything of the sort.

Stephen King is deeply attuned to the way vehicular carnage combines brutality and amnesia. Arnie is in a literal way unconscious of what Christine does; and Christine’s victims become imprints of brutality of which she bears none. The horrifying exactitude with which the book walks us step by step through Christine’s first kill, local hoodlum Moochie Welsh, is compounded by the paragraph immediately after. As Moochie lies bleeding out along a JFK Drive, it is he who becomes an “it”: “The thing in the street no longer looked like a human being. It looked like a bundle of rags.” Christine, by contrast, regenerates and reverses all the damage a pedestrian collision also does to a car.

As her fender twists outwards, her headlights steady, the muffler reattaches, Moochie’s blood runs off her hood, his “deathmask” disappears. “Inside on the instrument panel, the odometer continued to run backward, as if Christine were somehow slipping back into time, leaving not only the scene of the hit-and-run behind but the actual fact of the hit-and-run.” The idea that cars can snuff you out in one instant is part of the horror of the scene. But its true horror is that it will mean nothing to them. Christine can — and she has — done this countless times, and she can do it countless more. The car in Christine is the hood ornament of a world of unremitting coldness, a piece of cosmic horror that we have, for some truly insane reason, decided to park in our garage, waiting — one way or the other — to be devoured by it.