In my estimation, there’s something unique to the films of John Carpenter. From the socio-political horror of They Live (1988) to his science fiction terror masterpiece, The Thing (1982), Carpenter is a master of tension— using a sparse style of cinematography and music scoring that adds intense depth to his films. While his body of work is incredible, with nearly every film worth watching, I am particularly enamored with his adaptation of Stephen King’s Christine (1983). I’ve seen it more times than any of his other films. Something about its dark mood, the lead performance of Keith Gordon as Arnie, and the idea of a killer car that pulled me in. Yet, despite my love for the film, I hadn’t ever read the novel. In some respects, I enjoyed the film so much that I didn’t want to spoil its place in my cinematic memory by reading the work it was based on. Nevertheless, I finally read Christine last fall, and it is a great work in its own right. The novel is classic Stephen King, with all the themes that you’d expect from his best stories: an inanimate object coming to life, the complications of youth, and the death of American innocence.
Arnie Cunningham, the novel’s protagonist/antagonist, is a “born loser” high school kid, with a pimply face and no luck with the ladies. His best friend is Dennis Guilder, who sticks up for him when no one else would. They live in the town of Libertyville, Pennsylvania (this is changed to California in the film), a classic Anywhere, U.S.A. with all the ensuing parochialism you’d expect. Arnie’s life is a constant barrage of bullies, rejection, and adolescent disappointment— until he sees a beat up 1958 Plymouth Fury in the front yard of a decrepit house. Its owner, Roland LeBay, is a misanthropic old man whose crudity and slovenly appearance don’t dissuade Arnie from wanting the car. Everything in his life becomes about that car, named Christine, and he devotes all his spare time on restoring it to its former glory.
As his luck with Christine improves, so, too, does his luck with girls. He eventually starts dating the prettiest girl in school, Leigh Cabot, likely due to his newfound confidence and clearer complexion. He’s even making money through Darnell’s garage, which he puts back into Christine with ever-increasing vigor. When it seems that everything is going well, the car is trashed by local bullies, seemingly beyond repair. When the car is good as new within a few days, and said bullies end up dead in mysterious circumstances, Arnie’s life with Christine starts to unravel.
What makes the novel and film so compelling are its exploration of obsession and desire, which takes the form of a strange love affair between a young man and his car. Arnie’s intense devotion to Christine ultimately destroys him, ruining his relationships, his college prospects, and even a shot at love. This devotion strikes me as quintessentially American. The United States’ car culture is unmatched anywhere in the world. Americans, unless you live in a major city, have to drive nearly everywhere to get around. And for youth in America, a car is the personification of freedom; it allows them to throw off the shackles of childhood and race headlong into adulthood, with all the benefits that come with it. But, as with any form of freedom, it comes with responsibilities. Cars take a lot of time and money to maintain, which leads some in “freedom’s land” to meticulously monitor their vehicles to the detriment of everything else in their lives. This compulsion to care for a machine more than people is at the heart of Christine, except in real life cars usually don’t go around killing people without someone behind the wheel.
The best scene in the film, that underscores this obsession, is one glossed over in the novel. On New Year’s Eve, Arnie and Dennis get together for a couple of beers and to reconnect, as Arnie has spent the last few months crazily working on Christine or dating Leigh. In the novel, the car ride from Arnie’s house to Dennis’ is rather short and perfunctory, only showing the reader that Christine really has a life of her own. By strong contrast, the film has Arnie take Dennis out on the highway to show him Christine's powers. Keith Gordon shines in this scene; the lighting, makeup, and Gordon’s performance morph him into a living ghost, an adolescent spectre haunting the highway behind the wheel of Christine.
John Stockwell’s performance as Dennis is also excellent; he genuinely looks like he’s scared of his friend and the car that took him over. Their dialogue gives the viewer a chillingly accurate thesis for the film:
Arnie: Let me tell you a little something about love, Dennis. It has a voracious appetite. It eats everything— friendship, family. It kills me how much it eats. But I’ll tell you something else. You feed it right and it can be a beautiful thing, and that’s what we have. You know, when someone believes in you, man, you can do anything, any fucking thing in the entire universe, and when you believe right back in that someone, then watch out world, ‘cause nobody can stop you, that nobody, ever!
Dennis: And you feel this way about Leigh?
Arnie: What?! Fuck no! I’m talking about Christine, man! No shitter ever came between me and Christine.
Dennis, who expected his friend’s soliloquy to be about Leigh, discovers that Arnie’s true obsession is Christine. At the same time, Arnie appears torn about this state of affairs (“It kills me how much it eats.”) but ultimately subjects himself to his obsession, Christine.
The other element of Christine that embodies Arnie as a character is desire, a desire where the line between sex and horror is very narrow indeed. The fact the car is named Christine, that she becomes the object of adoration and obsession for Arnie, that he torpedoes a real, intimate relationship with a girl to keep Christine happy, makes for a bizarre love triangle that nearly everyone gets annihilated by. The male gaze, which can turn women (or other men) into nothing but sex objects, also operates on coveted objects like cars. I think of Queen’s song, “I’m in Love with My Car,” written by drummer Roger Taylor, as the emblematic expression of this manic move between sexual and vehicular gratification. Yet, at the same time, desire is ultimately not satisfying. As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek has remarked (echoing Lacan), “We don’t really want what we think we desire.” While Arnie superficially wants a relationship with Leigh (or any woman) and to be successful, his real desire becomes a symbiotic relationship with Christine, which undermines his supposed desire of love and success. Christine, an object which should facilitate desires, becomes the desired itself.
The best film adaptations of novels don’t change things dramatically so much as omit details that work better in prose, and Christine is no exception. King’s novel and Carpenter’s adaptation are fairly close, but Carpenter makes a fundamental omission that makes his movie more haunting than the book. In the novel, Christine comes to life and kills people as a result of the ghost of its evil owner, Roland LeBay. LeBay appears in the novel as a grotesque phantom behind the wheel, providing the elan vital for Christine’s rampages against those who’ve wronged Arnie, and by implication, LeBay. The movie omits all of this, opting to present Christine as a murderous car from the start (the opening sequence has her kill at least one person behind the wheel at the assembly plant where she’s made) and kills Arnie’s enemies while no one is behind the wheel. According to cultural theorist Mark Fisher,”“The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something.” The lack of a driver, the absence of an agent, the eternal evil that possesses the car, makes the film far more eerie and unsettling than if it had been driven by a ghost.
It was disappointing to learn that King didn’t like the adaptation, saying of Christine and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, “[they] should have been good but just... well, they just aren't. They're actually sort of boring. Speaking for myself, I'd rather have bad than boring.” I think King is completely wrong. What makes the film adaptations of Christine and The Shining so compelling is their restraint. John Carpenter and Stanley Kubrick use tighter storytelling in the service of excellent setpieces and character development often lacking in King’s novels. In particular, the Arnie in the film is a much more interesting character than the Arnie in the book, who is a central character but isn’t the central character. In the novel, Dennis is the central character, narrating the first and third sections of the book (the second section is written in the third person, likely because the events of that section were unknown to Dennis). While that works well in a novel, as Dennis wrote the manuscript for processing his trauma, it doesn’t work well in a movie adaptation, as the main character is, and always should have been, Arnie.
Carpenter’s adaptation streamlines the story and even provides a more satisfying ending than King. In the novel, the final battle between Dennis/Leigh and Christine at the junkyard happens without Arnie present, who is actually killed “off-screen” with his mother in a car accident caused by the ghost of LeBay. The film jettisons this and has Arnie in the thick of the action, dying by the wreckage of Christine, a poignant final symbol of his obsession killing him. King’s version is more convoluted and passive while Carpenter’s version is direct and active, which underscores the benefits of subtraction on a film adaptation.
As I’ve read a few more of his books, I get the sense that King intensely considers the mechanics of a story. In Christine, King spends a lot of time explaining how the spirit of Roland LeBay takes over the car and uses it to exact revenge on all those “shitters” that have wronged him or Arnie. You see his mangled body, you smell the putrid stench of his decaying flesh, you see him driving the car to kill the bully Buddy Repperton, the garage owner, Arnie’s parents. As someone who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, I don’t find any of this particularly frightening; sometimes, it’s actually funny. In my estimation, it is massively more terrifying if the car is born evil and does all of this on its own, without any spiritual guide. That’s what Carpenter decided to showcase in his adaptation, to its benefit.
Orson Welles reputedly said to filmmaker Henry Jaglom that “the enemy of art is the absence of limitation.” Whether Welles actually said this is up for debate, but nevertheless the statement rings true. John Carpenter, like Stanley Kubrick and Welles himself, epitomizes this maxim as a filmmaker, especially with Christine. He removes so much of the unnecessary fluff of King’s novel to get to the heart of the story, which is that an unhealthy obsession can kill us all. No object of desire, whether it be inanimate or human, makes us whole. Only our own inner life and the meaningful connections we make with others completes our humanity. Arnie represents the perennially broken soul in post-war America, placating his own limitations through an object of adoration. However, in the end, the adored object obliterates him. The world is not full of spiritual phantoms, but human ones— the refuse of unfulfilled dreams. We don’t need ghosts to make the world scary; it’s haunting enough as it is.