CHRISTINE Unleashes A Demonic Fury
By Jay Carr
For years we've been reading about how cars have displaced women as America's real sex objects. Stephen King, who specializes in porting the mundane into the horrific, picks this idea up and runs with it in CHRISTINE, his novel about a demonic Plymouth Fury that was born bad on a Detroit assembly line in 1957. Beneath her tall fins and sensuous curves, CHRISTINE is a femme fatale with a throaty roar. CHRISTINE is also more fun than any Stephen King movie since CARRIE. It revels , as CARRIE did, in a power trip unleashed by a teen scapegoat with supernatural help.
Once wimpy Arnie (Keith Gordon) buys the scruffy 20-year-old Plymouth, bullies stop kicking sand in his face. He goes from bespectacled runt to cold smoothie, looking cadaverous and seeming more metallic than his lovingly restored car. But CHRISTINE is possessive. The car crunches four high school bullies, and gets back at the oppressive adult world by putting the squeeze on the slob (Robert Prosky) who owns the garage where it's kept. But it also tries to kill Arnie's girlfriend in a fit of jealousy. And there's no stopping it.
Carpenter expertly picks up on the velvety darkness that DePalma (aping Hitchcock) exploited so patently in CARRIE. The Plymouth, with its cherry-red body and white top, isn't blinding. It's glossy. It's body seems made of skin. Even it's chrome seems sloft, but we know the car means murder when it's brights glare on. We don't even have to hear the '50s rock that blares from the radio when blood lust is upon it.
John Stockwell is sympathetic as Gordon's friend, the link to the goodness of the real world. Gordon, who suggests a '50's objet d' art, is amusingly right as the increasingly steely Arnie. But the star of CHRISTINE is rightly the cherry-red Fury, especially when special effects expert Roy Arbegast convinces us it's indestructible. Every time it gets smashed, the car regenerates itself into a sleek, gleaming new one. One orgasmic undulation of it's curvaceous body and dents disappear as shattered lights pop back into place. Carpenter and Arbegast make the car seem sexy and temperamental. But no car that fixes itself can be considered satanic. My own cars have been much more diabolical, trying to break my will with unending repairs. I wish I could introduce CHRISTINE to a 1973 Econoline van, or a 1949 Ford station wagon named Heartburn. I think poor sensitive CHRISTINE is misunderstood.
