A new documentary presents the popular author’s cult of private and political superstitions.
The most revealing aspect of King on Screen, the new documentary about Stephen King, the popular author of potboiler horror, shows the youthful enthusiasm of the middle-aged filmmakers (all men) who dedicated their careers to making movies and TV shows out of the writer’s books. They come across as likeable blue-collar sorts who escaped the terrors of high school where they were probably nerdy outsiders: comic-book collectors, video-game enthusiasts, goth-rock loners, or white long-haired stoners — very much like King’s adolescent characters — who yet never became narcissistic Hollywood kingpins. They’re still fanboys.
Director Daphné Baiwir gathers these guys — more than 20, it’s a convocation — and clips from their handiwork to build a monument to King’s importance. Few of these testimonies address King’s literary quality, only his cultural impact (from Cujo and Stand by Me to Needful Things, which spawned the non-King streaming series Stranger Things). Baiwir correctly begins with irony: King’s literary reputation comes from movie adaptations. “It all started with Carrie,” says Mick Garris (the TV adept who directed small-screen versions of Bag of Bones, Desperation, Sleepwalkers, The Stand, and The Shining). “The book was not well known until [Brian] De Palma’s movie came out. The movie blew me away. It was so great.” Frank Darabont concurs: “It was the movie that really brought a lot of attention to Steve’s work.”
The success of Carrie in 1976 owes to its perfectly twisted Cinderella story, updated to include all-American high-school mythology, menarche, and both sexual and religious hysteria (featuring Jekyll/Hyde personality shifts). De Palma achieved a cinematically fluent masterpiece — and with a youthful pop ethos Hitchcock never had.
Carrie staked King as a source for Hollywood material, and, in 1980, Stanley Kubrick’s film version of The Shining legitimized the claim. The Kubrick imprimatur caused ambivalence: King as art, even though the bard himself publicly hated the film. Yet fans took it to heart and established their own sub-cult. “It’s a really good Stanley Kubrick movie, but it’s a terrible Stephen King movie,” Darabont reasons. Garris notes, “The creative personalities are very different: King is a very warm and human and emotional writer, Kubrick is a very cool and intellectualized filmmaker. His calculating manner is in contrast to what King’s story is about.” (Kubrick’s hit-or-miss denunciation of America — it was his first U.S.-set film since Dr. Strangelove — now seems closer to King’s recent political grievances.) Garris eventually made the TV miniseries of The Shining (“We ignored the Kubrick film”), and Darabont became King’s prime interpreter with the widely beloved The Shawshank Redemption, then The Green Mile and The Mist (the best of Darabont’s trilogy).
King’s popularity straddles both film and literature and has done so for a long time. (Scott Hicks raves, “He’s like the Charles Dickens of the 20th and 21st century.”) This could be the basis for a good argument in favor of democratic art — folklore made by Maine’s most famous author — although Baiwir’s opening sequence foolishly imitates a film set in “King world,” where backwoods eccentrics drink “American Grain” whiskey, referring, I guess, to William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain. It’s a stretch, and Baiwir’s strained pretense eventually snaps. No one at the convocation remembers Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, or Flannery O’Connor. Instead, the most worshipful filmmakers indulge King’s own real-world politics — especially when paying tribute to The Dead Zone and Children of the Corn.
Encomiums start with “he loved common people, folksy people, he’s got that down pat.” They go on: “He doesn’t condescend to middle America, and I think that’s very important. In many ways he’s a man of the people.” But they fall for King’s junkiness: Ignoring how the warring duo of Misery resembles a feminist-revenge version of Robert Aldrich’s mature, complex What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? It gets worse when The Dead Zone appeals to their current political paranoia: “Nations go insane.” They equate King’s anti-religious fantasies (It, The Stand) to George Romero’s racial zombie allegory in Night of the Living Dead. The fanboys make typical Hollywood-liberal partisan analogies, decrying Donald Trump’s populism, then hysterically anoint King as a political visionary: “Like Bob Dylan, [he] is a dreamer of America. He contains the entirety of it and sort of dreams in the language of the chaos of America.” Garris warns, “When you apply fear — paranoia, aggression happens. The veneer of civilization gets ripped away very quickly.” He praises The Stand as “a counter myth to the Rapture.” Tod Williams crowns King “prophet of the apocalypse.”
It’s silly, yet appalling, that schlockmeister King, always threatening to be taken seriously, should be seriously regarded by unserious, unthinking people. King on Screen platforms naïve fanboys who embellish their own childish superstitions.
