She'll burn you to the ground.
The month of September 2018 was a dark time for many, and while every person struggling during that period had their own reasons, their own stories to tell, I was grappling to put an easy label on my own, to get down to the marrow of it and figure out once and for all: Why did the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination and subsequent hearings bother me so much? I didn't personally know the guy. I didn't know Christine Blasey Ford. But the whole sordid affair was still somehow familiar, anyway, slimy and reeking with a musty stench from the past, so much so that I spent many of my waking moments of free time thinking about it, reading about it, and trying to get to the core of it, to the dark part of me that reacted so strongly to this particular moment in US history.
Once the assault allegation was made public, the testimony given, the details laid bare, it was impossible not to contextualize the events that transpired in the summer of 1982 with my own memories of that time. E.T. was the big summer movie that year, but that summer also saw the release of such teen-scene classics as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Last American Virgin, and (shudder) Zapped!; a slippery slope of angst-hijinks-sexcapades of varying levels of Cringe and Shame. Brett and Christine met in a adolescent world steeped in the lowball culture of under-aged partying, peer-endorsed grab ass, and Porky's.
In 1982, women were considered liberated enough to become professionals beyond secretaries or teachers, chain smoke Virginia Slims, take the pill, and have premarital sex if they so dared, but they were also under the threat of being branded with obligatory neon letter-A. Instead of banishment from town, such progressive women could hope to at least be labeled flirty, fun, a good time girl, but she could just as likely expect to be called a hussy or whore behind her back, if not directly, and unapologetically, to her face. These liberated choices belonged to women of age, of course, while girls teetered on the precipice between modernity and tradition, inundated with ads for Barbie, Strawberry Shortcake, Jem if you were "edgy." Unicorns, rainbows, and Lisa Frank aesthetics were all the rage. In 1982 (and some would argue even now) a girl's potential might include non-domestic ambitions, like being a teacher or even a doctor, but the conditioning always included the roles of Wife and Mother. It was never either/or, it was always either/and.
Part of that conditioning required deference to men, obedience to men, gleaning some sliver of validation from men. If you were lucky, Prince Charming would recognize what a shiny little diamond you were, treat you accordingly, run the ramparts with you against the world happily ever after. Perhaps he would buy you a two-story home with a chef's kitchen and a master bedroom. Unfortunately, receiving reverence barely earned can create little monsters who take that doting deference for granted.
When Kavanaugh cried during his testimony, recounting his daughter's words that they "should pray for the woman," in my heart I knew this man. The multifaceted hypocrisy of the man who could easily have been the boy Christine Blasey Ford was pinned under almost forty years ago, terrified and suffocating. There are, after all, so many like him. The nasty boy who hid behind his "faith" all while behaving like a depraved lunatic on Friday and Saturday nights. The president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes cracking jokes about the fat girls in gym, which girls he'd "do" only with a bag over her head, which girls gave the best head. The boy who was "owed" that deference, whose moral center slid effortlessly in whichever direction allowed him to behave in whatever way he saw fit. The boy, if ever called out for his bad behavior, who cried immediate foul, the boy who was always "just kidding around," even if the people he left in his wake were crying, avoiding school, developing eating disorders, practicing lethal knots.
Sure, I'd met him before, plenty of boys just like him, during my own harrowing journey through adolescence just a few years after those fateful events in the summer of 1982. We all had. There's at least one pack of them, if not several, sniggering their way through the bitterly long days of school, the hazy, daze-y nights of shooting pool, cruising, partying.
Do I not believe that an act of pure Christian kindness could move Brett Kavanaugh to tears? I do believe it. But I also believe the testimony that brought him to tears was a calculated maneuver to bolster his character. I believe Brett Kavanaugh was overwhelmed with a lot of other emotions that day, and all the days leading up to his testimony, most of which would have easily led to tears, fury, and childish outbursts. He was frustrated, incensed. He believed a great injustice was afoot. And I believe he cried because he got called to task for something that was once the status quo. The slap and tickle, the chase, Russian hands and Roman fingers, just bros being bros. Hardy har har. They were just kidding around.
How could Brett Kavanaugh be held to account for something he did in the panty-raid days of the early 80s? It was, to him, an outrage. I believe this in my bones.
And this is where I settled in to the memories, let the incidents rack up, one by one, the petty little indignities, the outright assaults. I was alive in that same timeline. I went to parties, gatherings, witnessed the immaturity, the infantile games, and saw how fast "fun" could turn ugly and sour. And I'm alive now, alive and furious, but also basking in the glow of the new generations of women who witnessed the lazy sexism, the glowering fat-baby puling of men no longer allowed to treat women like objects, moving predictably from crying spoil sport to NOT ALL MEN, and said, unequivocally, Fuck that. It's glorious. A true balm on the burn, salve for the scars.
But the wounds break open when these 1982 "bad boys" rear their sneering little preppy heads, as the privileged so often do, first when their rich, spray-tanned Cool Dad got elected president of the United States . . . then when their Bro-in-Chief got nominated to the Supreme Court . . . only to be outrageously held accountable for alleged horseplay when he was but a wee, church-going lad. As so many of us watched the Kavanaugh hearings play out from the sidelines, we shook our heads, reliving our own memories, remembered the clamoring trolls of our youth. I set my eyes on that frown line between Kavanaugh's brows and could almost hear the echo chamber of every animal house in America through the decades: not fair, not fair, not fair . . .
It would almost be funny . . . if it wasn't. Ask a woman if that neon letter-A fades as life evolves, relationships catch fire and fizzle . . . marriages, children, careers. Is it a club stamp from a regrettable night that soon disappears? Or is it embroidered into the skin of your chest, the bloody scabs breaking open as you howl? And even as women's rights in this modern world seem better now than they've ever been, the branding remains. Don't forget the PTSD, baby, the things you thought you dealt with but didn't really, the memories you thought you scrubbed still slinking around the shadows to jump out and give you a real scare when you least expect it, the moments in American history where people who have no connection to you are testifying to events that happened almost forty years ago still you find yourself sitting in your car listening to CNN with a crawling stomachache and just the slightest tremble in your hands, scarlet letter-A burning a hole through your chest.
Because it isn't just women who are held to a specific standard--be lady like, cross your ankles, smile--it's teenagers, too. It's preteens, too. It's little girls, too. It's babies with a pink bow tied to the only lock of hair they have on their bald little heads. The coding starts immediately, to be of service to others, to please and be pleasant, to smile without prompting, to submit to innocent hugs, kisses, pinches, the lighthearted "flirting" from grown men at picnics, church, the grocery store, be nice to the stranger who's a "friend of the family." In the new age of body autonomy, parents are thankfully beginning to better understand how a lack of boundaries can be scarring and may pave the way to a child being abused, a teen being raped, a woman being locked in an abusive marriage for years, decades, a lifetime. Nevertheless, the traditions persist, forcing kids to hug Uncle Bob and kiss Aunt May, shaming and punishing children for resisting--trying to set boundaries--and grooming them for potential violation later on.
As a kid, I was pinched, hugged, tickled, and relentlessly evaluated over every physical attribute and change. My apple cheeks, chubby cheeks, pretty hair, unruly hair, beautiful eyes, "bedroom" eyes, lovely smile, buck teeth, long legs, chicken legs, pretty face, pimple face, lean arms, hairy arms, big ass, stupid walk, lose some weight, wear some make up, too much make up, be quiet, slim down, stop taking up space. I was poked, prodded, kissed, grabbed, tickled, shaken, yanked, and hugged. I got labelled "the Dragon Lady" by my family for being impudent, so by the time I was a teen and put a stop to all that touching nonsense, I figured they could just stay mad about it forever since my own kin thought I was a raging dragon bitch, anyway. But it was too late. The damage was done.
I didn't learn that it was okay to set boundaries until I was well into my thirties. My thirties. This is also when I finally understood that it was wrong to be made to feel guilty for withholding hugs and kisses. Unfortunately, I did not escape childhood without those boundaries being violated far beyond "innocent" displays of affection. I did nothing wrong and did not deserve it, but I blamed myself for decades. This is how the mind works when your boundaries are soft to non-existent and all the anger and helplessness you feel gets directed back on yourself. And this is why I felt so furious and sick listening to the Kavanaugh testimony, the conservative politicians, the witless pundits. Very much like Firestarter's Charlie McGee, I wanted to incinerate the lot of them with my absolute, concentrated rage.
We were blue collar, at the best time (literally 1982-84) lower middle class and just barely, but for the most part poor to poor plus. If growing out of clothes was an Olympic sport, I would have at least medalled, especially in middle school. You say "slutty," I say "no fucking money, honey," because that's literally what was happening. I would live and die for those brief periods of galvanic joy when there was cash for clothes: new, fresh, nice-fitting clothes. I wasn't zipping up my old Jordache's with pliers because I was fat; I was eeling into them because we had no fucking moneyyyy, honeyyyy. In the middle of puberty, no less.
When I turned eleven, the catcalling from strangers began. At the mall, the gas station, just walking down the street. There were scary incidents with rowdy men in trucks, sleazy men in hotels, grown-ass men baring down on me for existing in their world with my faded Duran Duran t-shirt pulling tight against my chest and my second-skin jeans which I roll-pegged to hide the fact that they were also high-waters. I didn't shake my ass, give them leering, come-on looks, tie a cherry stem in my mouth while leaning provocatively against an ice machine. Still they hissed and tsk-ed, made wet kissing noises and hey babied me up one Quick Trip and down to Dillons. I kept my head low, walked like a shuffling robot, and flushed red with humiliation. It was gross, embarrassing, and more often than not, made me physically sick to my stomach.
But I was told that this is what every woman endures so I should just suck it up. Family, friends, even the shitty counselor at my school all parroted the same thing. Stop whining, let it go, this too shall pass. Yet another lesson in weak boundaries. I was a thing to be treated in whatever way any random man decided I deserved. I was told to be grateful that men found me attractive at all, that not all girls got that kind of attention. People I trusted actually said that to my face. On multiple occasions. What a lucky thing to be complaining about. How lucky I was. So ungrateful for my luck.
Oh millennial girls, gen z girls, thank God for you. You are burning this entire patriarchy to the ground and I am LOVING IT.
Underneath that blanket status of womanhood, the one that grants half the population the right to act upon you in whatever fashion they see fit while you are expected to smile demurely or, I don't know, bend over(??) . . . there is that other layer, the deeper, black-slimy layer, the one where someone, somewhere has to finally admit that poor girls are less than, even if they are innocent and "pure." Poor girls, by virtue of their scrubby, fast-food existence, truly do "deserve" whatever they get. Poor girls are never really pure. I won't even get into racial Othering--first, because I can speak only from my own experience, but more so second, because it should be fucking KNOWN by now. And if you don't know, you need to know.
People feel entitled to cross your boundaries, to cut you down to your marketable parts, to stamp you generic and sell you wholesale. Just look at working-class victims of serial killers and marvel at the lengths people would go to create distance between themselves and the women murdered. They were too trusting, too exposed, they were drunk, stoned, provocatively dressed. They were at the wrong place at the wrong time. They were peripheral people living dead end lives. In some way, they must have had it coming.
It is demeaning, infuriating, and entirely societally contrived. We see what happens even to good, upstanding, well-off girls when they dare stand up against the "harmless fun" of meanmouthed boys. We saw it unfold, in all its insidious, black stinking ichor, from the mouths of politicians, pundits, and the Honorable Horndog himself over the summer and fall of 2018 . . . with my own entirely shameless translations and comments in parentheses, bold is mine.
"This has been a drive-by shooting when it comes to Kavanaugh . . . I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close." - Lindsey Graham (Little lady can say what she wants, but he's getting confirmed.)
"I am not questioning that Dr. Ford may have been sexually assaulted by some person in some place at some time, but I’ve never done that to her or to anyone. Dr. Ford’s allegations stems from a party that she alleges occurred during the summer of 1982. 36 years ago." - Brett Kavanagh (So long ago, how could anyone remember, so long ago, why should it matter now, so long ago . . . )
"She and I did not travel in the same social circles. It is possible that we met at some point at some events, although I do not recall that." - Brett Kavanaugh (She wasn't one of us.)
"Some have noticed that I didn’t have church on Sundays on my calendars. I also didn’t list brushing my teeth and for me going to church on Sundays was like brushing my teeth. Automatic. Still is." - Brett Kavanaugh (I go to church and am therefore unimpeachable.)
"One feature of my life that has remained true to the present day is that I’ve always had a lot of close female friends. I’m not talking about girlfriends. I’m talking about friends who are women. That started in high school. Maybe it was because I’m an only child and had no sisters. But anyway, we had no social media or text or email and we talked on the phone. I remember talking almost every night, it seemed, to my friends Amy or Julie or Kristen or Karen or Suzanne or Maura or Megan or Nicky." - Brett Kavanaugh (I cannot be a racist because I have many black friends.)
"There is a bright line between drinking beer, which I gladly do and which I fully embrace, and sexually assaulting someone, which is a violent crime. If every American who drinks beer or every American who drank beer in high school is suddenly presumed guilty of sexual assault, it will be an ugly new place in this country. I never committed sexual assault. As high-school students, we sometimes did goofy or stupid things." - Brett Kavanaugh (Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, but nice try. By the way, the "stupid things" comment is as close as you will ever get to the truth of what Kavanaugh may have done to Christine Blasey Ford . . . or any other incidents, like say shoving his penis in someone's face. Boys will be boys.)
"I never had sexual intercourse or anything close to it during high school or for many years after that. In some crowds I was probably a little outwardly shy about my inexperience. I tried to hide that. At the same time, I was also inwardly proud of it. For me and the girls who I was friends with, that lack of major or rampant sexual activity in high school was a matter of faith and respect and caution." - Brett Kavanaugh (I was an inexperienced teen boy who went to church so therefore could never had done anything wrong, i.e. more fallacies in logic.)
"The committee has a letter from 65 women who knew me in high school. They said that I always treated them with dignity and respect. That letter came together in one night 35 years after graduation while a sexual-assault allegation was pending against me in a very fraught and public situation where they knew—they knew they’d be vilified if they defended me. Think about that. They put themselves on the line for me. Those are some awesome women, and I love all of them. You also have a letter from women who knew me in college. Most were varsity athletes. They described that I treated them as friends and equals and supported them in their sports at a time when women’s sports was emerging in the wake of Title IX. I thank all of them for all of their texts and their emails and their support. One of those women friends from college, a self-described liberal and feminist, sent me a text last night that said, quote, 'Deep breaths, you’re a good man, a good man, a good man.' A text yesterday from another one of those good women friends from college that said, quote, 'Brett, be strong. Pulling for you from my core.' A third text yesterday from yet another of those women I’m friends with from college said, 'I’m holding you in the light of God.'" - Brett Kavanaugh (Some of my best friends are black.)
"How did you get home? I don't remember. How'd you get there? I don't remember. Where is the place? I don't remember. How many years ago was it? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. What neighborhood was it in? I don't know. Where's the house? I don't know. Upstairs, downstairs -- where was it? I don't know -- but I had one beer. That's the only thing I remember." - Donald Trump ("Locker Room Talk" Aficionado)
"When you see Sotomayor and Kagan, tell them that Lindsey said hello to them, because I voted for them. I would never do to them what you’ve done to this guy! This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics, and if you really wanted to know the truth, you sure as hell wouldn’t have done what you have done to this guy." - Lindsey Graham (I voted for you womyns and look what they're doing to our boy.)
"I don't think she's uncredible . . . I think she's an attractive, good witness. . . . In other words, she's pleasing." - Orrin Hatch ( . . . )
"I know I am a single white male from South Carolina and I am told I should shut up, but I will not shut up if that's okay. Because I got here the same way everybody else did. The people in South Carolina voted for me and senator Scott to be their voice, men and women, and I'm going to try to be their voice today." - Lindsey Graham (Letting women and POC speak is exactly equal to telling me to shut up.)
"Now all of us know from human experience that if someone is a sexual predator, if someone is committing the kind of actions that have been alleged, that it is very rare that they're a one time offender. That if someone is carrying out this kind of conduct, they typically have a pattern of doing so over and over and over again." - Ted Cruz (fuck u zodiac killer)
The pundits were worse. But that last quote from Ted "Not Bundy" Cruz is perfect example of something that we all struggle to recognize. You've no doubt heard it stated somewhere: people can be more than one thing.* It is a logical fallacy to pretend as though "bad guys" lurk through the deviant years of their lives doing ever more dastardly deeds as time progresses. On shows like Criminal Minds, profilers often say serial killers won't stop until they're imprisoned or dead . . . but they absolutely do. Hometown freak of nature BTK is a prime example. President of his church council, even. Simultaneously a serial killer, even though he went to church. Religiously. Imagine.
People are not either / or. They are heterogeneous. They are multifaceted. Sometimes they are Legion. At one point in the shitshow hearing to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, Lindsey Graham said, "Are you a gang rapist?" which Kavanaugh easily denied. As if that was the beginning and end of it, as if that had anything to do with the allegations in question. Kavanaugh would have passed that question on a polygraph, too. But with that one act of diversion, the perspective shifts, doesn't it? Because people feel safer in a binary world . . . at least until their own indiscretions are brought into the light. Then we're all complex little snowflakes, aren't we?
It is easier on our societal projections if we believe that Brett Kavanaugh could never have pinned Christine Blasey Ford to a bed, snorting beastly laughter with his bud in a drunken melee of Will They or Won't They because he is a churchgoing, married, father of two. Because he graduated from Yale and Yale Law. Because he served as a US Circuit Judge. And now because he's a Supreme Court justice. The mind resists the correlation, insists it can't possibly be true. Especially when you don't want it to be true.
It's funny, then, that Blasey Ford's testimony failed to compel a meaningful shift in the Senate's partisan vote to confirm Kavanaugh. She was a girl who benefited from a well-off upbringing. She earned advanced degrees in psychology and epidemiology from Pepperdine, USC, and Stanford. She was a professor at Stanford and Palo Alto University (1). It still didn't matter. Once Christine Blasey Ford dared to cross that line, making accusations against the upstanding judge at the pinnacle of his career, she became "the woman." Against this lauded justice's unshakable recall and scrawled notations from his diaries ("36 years ago"), the woman's memory was simply "mixed up." And we should feel sorry for this woman, pray for this woman, have pity for her confused recollection of a night that never happened.
Even Christine Blasey Ford is reduced to a misguided, broken nothing, who is either tragically wrong or a complicit Democrat grenade (they never decided on which, so she was somehow both). If someone like Christine Blasey Ford can't get justice, if she is not a valid witness, then what hope do the rest of us have? When you dare to stand up to the patriarchy, especially the politically powerful patriarchy, they will tear you down to the ground. Welcome to the scarlet letter club, babe, we're wearing red every-fuckin-day.
One of the things Christine learned as a young girl who just suffered a world-tilting shock was to immediately suppress her humiliation, negate the gravity of the situation, and never, ever confess her sin to anyone. After all, she was drinking, underage, with boys . . . she managed to get herself cornered by two of them . . . her body, her weakness, something about her invited those boys to set upon her like two clambering, immature trolls, so clearly she was at least equally to blame. I can tell you from experience that those self-defeating thoughts do not spring up from nowhere in a victim's mind. It's cultivated, tenderly cared for, and shoots up through the soft earth of her soul, thick stemmed and vining, pegged with curved thorns, and tended by every invalidation of her boundaries, devaluation of her worth. It's misted in petty, throwaway comments, enriched to the root by every involuntary touch.
The Kavanaugh hearings took me by the neck, those vines of bad touch and self hatred, and I was yanked rudely back to the bad ol' days, much the same way as post-election night. And as much as people who refuse to empathize might try, I wasn't looking for it, I wasn't asking for it, and it just fucking happened. When you see a man and a woman with similar backgrounds and impeccable credentials play out "He Said, She Said" in front of the whole world and everyone knows that the man will come out ahead even if people admit they believe her (that it happened, maybe, but not with him, oh no), it's hard not to take it like a crack to the jaw and just cave inward. First, a president. Now, a Supreme Court justice. It's vile.
Which leads me, finally [MASSIVE SIGH], to Stephen King's Firestarter. You wondered if I forgot what the hell I was supposed to be writing about, didn't you? Alas.
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| This was the exact same edition I owned since high school. It was so cool to find a scanned copy on the Internet Archive! |
I never found the story particularly interesting, sort of a different riff on the whole Carrie idea, but I usually like to re-experience all of my King books. Some more than others, but those I've abandoned are usually well remembered as to the reasons why, like hating Salem's Lot for the hokeyness and the boring, over-tread vampire thing. I remembered the basic plot of Firestarter but not much else. What was it? Had I just avoided Firestarter because of the retreaded premise?
It turns out: No. Nnnnooo. It just sucks. So hard. There are little blips and bits that resonate, but I mostly found the writing laborious and the characters offensively flat. Not a lot of heterogeneity going on in Firestarter. And while I've always understood why many critics of King's early work take him to task on his female characters, it's almost a relief to finally realize that THIS is the one they were probably thinking of most. It has to be. The women are just . . . terrible.
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| I can smell this book through the screen. Mmm decaying paper. |
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| I would blame this breathless adulation on publicist necromancy or the drooling fanaticism of simpler times, but I am in the minority when it comes to Firestarter. Lots of people love it. It's probably best not to chase that rabbit. Might get bit. |
The most grotesque assessment of Charlie filters through the character John Rainbird, an operative of The Shop, a secret governmental agency devoted to psychological and pharmaceutical experiments to perfect modern warfare. Rainbird is duplicitous from the start, first secretly tranquilizing Charlie at her grandfather's cabin in order for The Shop to safely kidnap her and her father, later pretending to be her orderly when she is imprisoned at The Shop's headquarters. Upon first learning of Charlie, Rainbird is immediately intrigued by the possibility of her alleged power and muses over "what it would be like to kill a child" (King, 134). Rainbird, a veteran assassin, has made it a practice to look into the eyes of the person he's killing, apparently to find some truth about death that continues to elude him. In the conclusion of his thoughts about this girl and her pyrokinetic powers, "[h]e felt very tender about her, very protective. . . . the girl would be his" (King, 135).
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| The copyright page says the first Signet (paperback) edition printed in August of 1981 and, if the crite page follows the same logic our publisher did, this would have been the twenty-first reprint. I'd imagine SK reprints were far bigger than any I've ever done (thousands!) so the math tracks with the paperback of The Tommyknockers included on the order form page (1987 hardcover pub, so maybe 88 for the paperback?) - gotta love those prices, though. |
When Rainbird lays down his ultimatum to the man in charge, Captain Hollister (Cap), he insists he be given Charlie "'for disposal'" once The Shop is done with her and further elucidates, "'I want to know her intimately'" (King, 194-5). When Cap reacts the way any normal (albeit morally and ethically deficient) person might--with horror--Rainbird dismisses his reaction and clarifies "'[n]ot in the biblical sense'" (King, 196). When pressed to explain why, Rainbird, in peak killer-creepy pedo fashion fondles a picture of Charlie, looking at it "almost tenderly," and says, "'She is very beautiful. . . . And very young. Yet inside her is your Z factor. The power of the gods. She and I will be close. . . . Yes, we will be very close'" (King, 197-8).
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| Simple copyright page and dedication page. |
Before Rainbird can "have" Charlie, he must convince her to submit to The Shop's tests. They are fairly certain she has pyrokinetic powers, but they don't know how strong they are or whether she can control them. Charlie refuses to speak to The Shop's agents, mother stand-ins, and other functionaries, but as a lowly "orderly," Rainbird has an advantage. Once their friendship in kindled during the night of the thunderstorm, Rainbird starts to work on Charlie, gently, co-conspiratorially, coolly focused. At one point he realizes that if The Shop's intuition that Charlie's psychic talents might expand much further than simple pyrokinesis (mind reading, perhaps), he might find himself in mortal trouble. In Rainbird's mind "[i]t added a certain spice to the proceedings . . . a spice that had been missing for too long" (King, 261).
But Charlie isn't just a disposable salt and pepper packet, or promising key to Rainbird's death puzzle, she is also a sexy baby (TM), akin to those pedo-provocative Love's Baby Soft commercials from the 1970s--the same decade that King put this creepfest to paper--because, don't you know, "innocence is sexier than you think." It gets predictably problematic when they are alone together. In the midst of the mind games, he's waxing the floor while she's standing at the refrigerator "pretending to linger over her selection of a snack"
One clean, pink foot was cocked behind the other so he could see the sole--a pose that he found curiously evocative of mid-childhood. It was somehow preerotic, almost mystic. His heart went out to her again. (King, 262)
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| This is the best line from that whole book. Sorry, Ray Bradbury. Everything after it is a big, slobbery snnnnorrrre. I said what I said. |
This whole scene is borderline at best--the horse is a known symbol, both in terms of freedom, generically, and power, sexual or otherwise, whether bridled (controlled) or unbridled (wild, out of control). She's nude, which in the context of the dream could be seen as both free and vulnerable, though she cannot "tell where her her thighs ended and Necromancer's sides began . . . they were one, fused" (King, 301). While it's certainly clear that the dream is meant to evoke breaking free, the feeling of power, and the looming threat of an (un)known aggressor, there is no way--IN HELL--that a reader isn't going to pick up on the sexy baby subtext and wonder, Like, what the Fuck, Steve?
There is a point in the dream sequence when Charlie and Necromancer come upon a deadfall and things get decidedly un-subtext-y:
Wild with lunatic joy, she kicked at Necromancer lightly with her bare heels and felt his hindquarters bunch. They leapt it, for moment floating in the air. Her head was back; her hands held horsehair and she screamed--not in fear but simply because not to scream, to hold in, might cause her to explode. Free, free, free . . . Necromancer, I love you. (King, 301)
It does not help that the word "faster" is repeated with ever increasing urgency twelve times throughout this two-page scene. It helps even less that I re-experienced Firestarter not in book or e-book format, but via audiobook, my very first. Seriously not a good start, audiobook realm. Not a good start at all.
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| I love the title page after the full title page, especially since there's sort of a preliminary title page in the praise pages. This is Firestarter. Did I mention this was Firestarter. Look, Firestarter. |
From a childhood spent conditioned to believe my pain was my own fault, either by my own actions or because I was "too sensitive," I've also acquired a solid knack for denial. Surely I'm not seeing this, that can't be what he means, I must be overreacting . . . and so on. I've had years of therapy now. Once the dream sequence was done, so was I. Fuck this book. Let Rage stand and ban this motherfucker, Steve. Firestarter ssssuuuucks.
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| The last page and inside cover of the paperback reprint of Firestarter, c. 1987, maybe 88, featuring a big ad and order form for the audiobook(!) editions of The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three. Cassette tapes! Read by the author! Thirty-five freaking dollars?! And that's the cheapest of all the options, though limited edition signed audiobooks in cassette form have to be worth something now, right? More than $125, I hope. But who could listen to them? Do tape decks even exist anymore? They're not going to come raging back like vinyl, I guarantee you that. Oh I miss how you have to rewind and fast forward a hundred times to find the start of a song. Oh remember that delightful snapping feedback? Oh and the teeny tiny liners with every lyric written in 1 pt. font??? They did smell good, though. Like sweet, sweet electrified music chemicals. |
The rest of the book plays out as you'd expect. Dad and girl conspire to escape, plans get thwarted, Rainbird gets his bitchass incinerated and good riddance. Dad dies, Charlie gets away. Eventually she makes her way to New York City and the main library where a 26-year-old male librarian sees her smile and "[f]or a moment . . . was almost in love" (King, 400) -- naturally. Puke. He sends her on her way to a trusted news organization (Rolling Stone, it turns out), where she's going to tell her story and perhaps burn all surviving minions The Shop down to the ground alongside its smoldering headquarters.
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| I saw the movie way before reading the book, so Charlie has always been Drew Barrymore to me. That likely intensifies my hostility toward the source material. I doubt I'm the only one from my generation who feels protective of Barrymore, from her dear beginnings in E.T., her early successes in Irreconcilable Differences and Firestarter, to her shocking early addictions and growing up far too fast. Her (semi) normal life and wonderful work since then has been a delight to watch over the past few decades. GO DREW, a true firestarter. |
Do I believe Stephen King is a perv for writing Firestarter? No. Wait until we get to It, foolios. Even if it could be argued that the pedo-razor's edge innuendo was relegated to the Rainbird point of view alone (it wasn't), I would still say King was a product (and perhaps victim) of the times, just like everyone else. Love's Baby Soft ads may have been the outermost of provocation, where even the people within the time period were like not groovy, man, but the subversive sexualization of little girls was going on way before the free loving 60s and the dirty birdy 70s. Eventually, people started talking about the dark things they wished never happened. By the time the 80s rolled around, the milk carton kids had come to town, rumbling in on a haunted old milk truck, their innocent faces grinning gap-toothed from the last pictures they would ever take. People's heads were finally, begrudgingly, being pulled out of the sand. Serial killers hunted young women, good girls, bad girls, all girls. They took all children, did unspeakable things, buried them unsanctified and lost forever, and porch lights lit across the land like fireflies, exponential, keening stars, left to burn day and night for weeks, years, decades.
And maybe it was because some of the people started to understand that "innocence is sexier than you think" wasn't just falling on like-minded ears, where we all stand shaking our heads and laughing uneasily because that's inappropriate and I can't believe they got away with it. And maybe some of those people figured out that every bogeyman wasn't some dark figure in a trench coat skulking round the garden with a boner and a butcher's knife. And maybe some of those people realized that objectifying young girls, teen girls, young women wasn't really doing them any favors except setting unrealistic expectations, at best, and, at the very worst, planting a bullseye on their backs. And NOT because those girls are weak, stupid, too trusting, too vulnerable. The age of blaming the victim must end.
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| Internet archive audiobook! Despite my unfortunate experience, I'm tempted to try again with Cujo . . . |
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| . . . because this time around I looked up the person who read the Cujo audiobook and I'm more than a little intrigued to hear it. Who didn't love Drag Me to Hell? The reader is Lorna Raver, the terrifying old lady who doesn't get a mortgage extension and hexes the loan officer. She's so good . . . I can't imagine what she'd do with Cujo! |
* People can be more than one thing. I've searched in vain for the reference, but cannot find it despite using every iteration of the gist. Perhaps it is more ubiquitous than I previously thought, though I swore there was a gripping, very recent study of it in some form of entertainment, either a movie or tv show. If you know what I'm trying to remember, drop it in the comments!
Grade: D
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 2. The scariest thing about Firestarter is the depthless evil of The Shop and, by extension, the American government. Considering that I am writing this in early May of 2020, in arguably the worst era of American cynicism and depravity in the midst of the global, Covid 19 pandemic, the straightforwardness of The Shop's bad acts is almost . . . endearing. Charlie's pyrokinetic talents are more impressive than terrifying, though there is a moment when she sort of offhandedly considers that she could do something to the sun if she really tried which is, I will admit, thoroughly chilling. Otherwise, the scariest thing about Firestarter is the objectification of Charlie, a CHILD, which is a horror story of its own.
Warnings: Yay, the n-word is back. Worse yet, it's used by the primary antagonist, Rainbird, to describe himself. Take note that he is also a disfigured Native American veteran, none of which I could bear to get into since I wasn't about to spend one more minute thinking about this mess. Paper women abound.
It's odd that this is the very first time I've listened to an audiobook, considering how long they've been around, but I liked how freeing it was, leaving my hands and eyes open to play videogames, sketch, do chores. The flip side is that you're stuck with the voice provided and it can (and did) make it very hard to get into the flow of the story. Every time poor Dennis Boutsikaris would say "Daddy" in that baby voice I would just about DIE. Charlie says "Daddy" a lot.
One of the first things I hated about ebooks was the lack of Bookness. Sure, they're techysexycool, little buttons, realpaper screens, etc., but they read like shit. There are no "real" pages since it all depends on the settings . . . and those early ebooks were so badly formatted sometimes. Woof. It's completely contrived, but there's more than just weight and depth to the artifact of a book, that spicy smell, the glint of the pulp, the idiosyncrasies of the printing. A book in your hand is real, it is authored, typeset, and printed. It is legitimized by it's very existence. An ebook is a nebulous inconstant. It can conjure every single vampire book imaginable, from the boring to the criminally boring, or Moby Dick, or the complete works of Shakespeare, or Taken By Swarm: Seduced By Werebees. It can make itself into literally anything. But the heft of the machine never changes. Which is amazing, of course . . . but you lose something. I suppose this is why I found the scanned books on Internet Archive such a delight. You get to see the book as it was, with all the weird ad pages and order forms necessary in an age gone by, the yellowing edges, the turgid type beaten into the grain. The next best thing would be the book itself, but at least they've got the visual remnants, if not the tactile embodiment.
