![]() I suspect, but I cannot prove, that McConaughey knows this, too. Cheat, in other words-on God, on our fellow man, ultimately, on ourselves. Get a thrill, get off a lucky shot, take home a trophy, put it up in a secret chamber of our heart. Sometimes, although we would hate to admit it, we think we can hunt evil for sport, like a hillbilly, not for salvation, like a vampire-killer. Sometimes evil must jeer at us from life’s alleys, “beckoning like a pimp,” as one character puts it when Flagg comes to him in a dream.īut sometimes we go evil hunting. Yet, rushing through life as we do, we can be hard to pin down even for “the Imp of Satan,” as The Stand’s heroine, 108-year-old Mother Abigail, calls Flagg. However we strain to distract ourselves, our consciousness of death heightens our awareness of evil. For the occasional shock and awe of mortality, there is day after day of creeping awareness, a sense that however long a person or a culture or a system can run, it cannot hide from the End. Our awareness of death is strangely sharper now than even on 9/11 we have come to realize how death can so often contentedly wait, time on its side. However immature, we have not failed to age. Now, deep into the golden age of TV dramas grittier and lengthier than the pretty-good ’94 miniseries take on The Stand, we, like McConaughey, have grown gaunter, more haunted, and much less romantic. Since the ‘70s, that problem has threatened to define and destroy both romantic fantasy (ahem, Led Zeppelin) and romantic comedy (cough cough, Grease). No matter its epic grandeur and ultimate spiritual themes, the Rings/Hobbit juggernaut could not-like last decade’s Failure to Launch-era McConaughey-escape the gravitational weight of its own indulgent, and self-indulgent, cheese. If the past decade turned out to be a good time for the Lord of the Rings franchise, this decade is all but begging to revisit The Stand. “Sometimes,” he is fond of telling the press, “the target draws the arrow.” So it is right and proper that he has been tipped to star as Randall Flagg, The Stand’s diabolical all-American villain, the hovering Walkin’ Dude with the evil Eye, in what appears to be a full-blown big-screen adaptation greenlit by Warner Brothers. And I think Matthew McConaughey does too. Could we be a writer? Or worse still, an actor? We might be anyone from a sociologist to a rock musician to the oldest woman in the world-just a few of The Stand’s many heroes. There, so taken, caught in the act, flat-footed, we are obliged to make our stand. But in the 1970s, our best decade (with good reason) for apocalyptic literature, King set out to write “a fantasy epic like The Lord of the Rings, only with an American setting.” He discovered no goblins or orcs are necessary-just us humans, and the all-too-familiar supernatural powers that take us where they find us. Tolkien, channeling something similar, conjured the Eye of Sauron. Looking.” A “hot presence,” a “dreadful red Eye.” It knows. ![]() “Turning,” King writes, “in the darkness. And from that outside-place, hovering in the night, “you” turn…slowly…out toward the world, across the elevated city or the empty fields or the shadowed bedroom window. ![]() With the change of tempo that turns ordinary dreams into uncontrollable nightmares, you pause, seeing yourself…from a standpoint somewhere outside yourself. The next-well, the next moment is different. One moment, you’re going along, sinning as humans do. You must have felt-maybe once in your life, maybe last night maybe right now-the awful slow-motion instant when you realize that evil has found you. But to feel the book invade you, in the way of the greatest and worst of books, more than the presence of the Lord is required. You do not have to be a Christian to be gripped, shaken, jolted, and kept up at night by The Stand-Stephen King’s “long tale of dark Christianity,” as he called it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |