Let's Get Weird: Love and Cars

Christine is a cautionary tale. A cautionary tale about what? That depends on how you read it. Falling in love with inanimate objects, for one. Which quickly leads to commentary on American consumerism. It is also a cautionary tale of letting feelings of vengeance consume you. Before later, those same feelings that kept you company in your lowest moments will animate each and every part of your life. They won’t just consume you, they will consume everything around you. More than a cautionary tale though, it’s also just a lovingly bonkers movie about a car that kills people with little motivation.

The weirdest part of this movie isn’t necessarily the central thrust of it – high school kid falls in love a killer car. It’s the tenderness with which Carpenter’s camera captures that story unfolding. With each successive scene, I was certain that I was misinterpreting what I was seeing. The moment when Arnie is getting beat up in shop class and Dennis steps in is an example. It reads like many other ‘jock befriends the nerd and is stuck defending him from bullies time and again’ scenes in coming-of-age movies. (Is Christine a coming-of-age movie?). But with each moment that Dennis and Arnie spend together, it’s revealed that friendship runs much deeper than that. It is not predicated on that protectiveness that Dennis feels. It’s not based on the pity that he feels for Arnie. Carpenter astutely tethers his film to this. When a girl approaches Dennis in school to ask him if he is playing football in the upcoming year, Arnie stands behind her making lewd gestures. Later on, when Arnie’s boss is giving him a hard time, Dennis is behind his boss’ back similarly making lewd gestures. Moments like that don’t just establish that friendship as the nucleus of the film, but it attaches the audience to the characters and cements the impact of the horror that will eventually ensue.

Christine also wonderfully brings together some of the most idiosyncratic and, at times, cringeworthy aspects of Stephen King stories. The movie (Arnie in particular) insists on trying to make “shitter” an insult that people regularly use. I don’t know that that insult has ever been used outside the context of this movie. He also says with the same tenor and cadence that I imagine Holden Caulfield saying “phony,” which does make it even more enjoyable.

Stephen King adaptations frequently have third act problems. Whenever the story is supposed to hit its crescendo is often when character motivations, relationships, and dialogue struggle to hold up to that pressure (Pet Sematary is quite a good example of this). Christine doesn’t have this problem. When the final showdown comes, Bill Phillips screenplay has laid more than enough of a foundation for Carpenter to take over. As is the case with many of his movies (Halloween in particular), there is no wasted moment. The fat’s cut and what we are left with is the absurd giving way to the terrifying and the satisfying. If those two seem incongruous, watch even more Carpenter. He holds them in the same hand more often than not.

Christine is ostensibly a horror movie. It is also definitively a John Carpenter movie. That the driving force that successfully brings Stephen King’s novel to life on the screen. It’s the character work from King (adapted by Phillips) that hooks the audience, but it’s Carpenter’s magic that makes the film unforgettably felt.