Stephen King is Cultural

I enjoyed reading The Dead Zone as a teenager, and I’ve always wanted to read The Shining, but never got around to it. I may have started “Pet Sematary”, but I don’t remember. In all the years that Stephen King has inflicted his pulpy supernatural foolishness on us, I never remembered him being a smarmy know-it-all about culture and world affairs. That is, until now. After all, he’s been hanging out with John Mellencamp!

Time Magazine has a very enlightening piece about him in its current issue, where we FINALLY get to read where he stands on such issues as waterboarding Jenna Bush (he’s for it), Lindsay Lohan (thinks, sardonically, she should be Time’s Person of the year with Britney), and the difference between his own missteps in his young career and those of the aforementioned young starlets (”The difference is that Britney is now famous for being famous”).

I’d just like to take a moment to analyze some of Mr. King’s comments for our edification. The self-proclaimed “news junkie” (which explains volumes, doesn’t it?) has a devastating idea to determine whether waterboarding constitutes torture.

“Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said [to "the Nightline guy"], I didn’t think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture.”

Truly, an idea so fiendishly clever - so IRONIC - that it could only spring from the mind of the author of Sleepwalkers. Of course, people usually don’t volunteer for torture, which explains why a reporter did. And, last I checked, Jenna’s been otherwise occupied teaching kids, in the hell that is Jamaica, rather than plotting the murder of innocents. By the by, did anyone ever suggest bombing Chelsea Clinton from 1000 miles away

Another item to pique the popular author’s interest is the place of Ms. Lohan and Ms. Spears within the cultural landscape.

“I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We’ve switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics — trying to play a serious part in the world — to a culture that’s really entertainment-based…And the guy says to me — the Nightline guy — I didn’t get the guy’s name… ‘If we didn’t cover cultural things, we wouldn’t be covering you and The Mist, and promoting the movie.’ And I’m like, ‘Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan aren’t cultural.’ They aren’t political. They’re economic only in the mildest sense of the word. In fact, if I had to pick somebody, some celebrity who has had some impact this year, some sort of echo in the larger American life, I would say Hannah Montana… But Britney? Britney Spears is just trailer trash.”

He’s the whole package, huh? Charming and charitable. Don’t you love when folks, with a bee in their bonnet about some “low” aspect of society they find unappealing, pronounce that “really smart people” ought to let us know whether this or that cultural phenomenon is “healthy”? It’s like saying “I want Mom and Dad to make the other kids stop doing that, for their own good!” Oh, sure, we could decide for OURSELVES what we want to consume, and encourage others to be thoughtful as well, but a ruling by an “authority” would give permission to justify any corrective measures the complainer deemed appropriate. You simply can’t count on the unwashed masses to know what’s good for them.

It’s also a little hard to take complaints about “celebrity culture” from a guy making pronouncements on politics and society, whose only reason for being interviewed in the first place is that he’s got a horror movie out. But I just love his reaction when this is pointed out to him by the “Nightline guy”. Contrasting his own artistic significance to that of B.S. and L.L., he astutely notes that they “aren’t cultural. They aren’t political.” Truly, Mr. King’s societal contributions give him significant cultural and political weight to make such sociological judgments. Just look at his latest work, a play developed with The Artist Formerly Known as Cougar:

“It’s called Ghost Brothers of Darkland County. It’s a musical.”

Ooh, sounds scary!! Ghosts, who are Brothers, from a county with Dark in the name! And A MUSICAL!! TERRIFYING, SUBTLE GENIUS!!! Do tell us more!

“[Mellencamp] had bought a place in Indiana by a lake, and he said that the person had told him the place was haunted… [Apparently], there was some kind of tragedy that involved two brothers and a girl in the fifties — one of the brothers shot the other one apparently in some kind of a drunken game. Killed him. So the other brother and the girl jumped in the car to take the kid to the hospital… They ran into a tree and they were both killed. So apparently the ghosts haunted the place. So John asked me, ‘Do you think we could turn this into a play?’”

How could you NOT turn this into a play!?!?! What are your prospects of opening in New York?!?!

“It probably will. We’re a bit radioactive, because it has a subtext about homosexuality and it’s set in the fifties so they bandy about a lot of pejorative words that were common coinage back then. But, Tennessee Williams got away with it.”

What courage!! An unflinching portrayal of bigoted America…50 years ago. Rehashing issues that actual playwrights tackled…50 years ago. Gosh, how will they EVER get a play like this produced in New York, dealing with homosexuality and using pejorative words? The theater world will never go for that!

“…common coinage back then“, indeed.

Lets leave being a smarmy know-it-all to the people who do it best: bloggers.