My Pandemic of Preference: Two

A Lynchline Special, Part 2 of 4: January 30, 2023

You could spend years arguing about why Stephen King made such a dent in the popular consciousness, particularly the American popular consciousness, so early in his career. Setting aside the element of luck (which includes a sequence of striking and successful film/TV adaptations) and even the element of skill, if I had to participate in such an argument I would highlight two specific factors in King’s chosen approach.

One, if you look at the first decade or so of his ever-lengthening bibliography, emphasizing the novels, there’s a distinct absence of period pieces or far-off settings. Certainly, The Gunslinger and The Eyes of the Dragon are otherworldly fantasies but both had limited, specialized print runs for their first public appearances and didn’t really fit into (or disrupt) the pattern of his commercial successes. Each of those successes interfaced with the modern American landscape in some way, and even flashbacks tended to be flashbacks to the 50s and 60s, the recently-lived experience of people King’s own age. No deep-sea expeditions, no journeys to other planets, no haunted house historicals; King wrote about the world of suburbs and mortgages, high schools and automobiles, radios and computers and highways and landfills. No matter how strange his dark plot devices were, they lived in the same world his readers did.

Two, and quite relatedly, while King moved into financial comfort as quickly as he moved into national fame, he has never set aside his memories of or sympathy for the experience of being financially uncomfortable. According to his assorted autobiographical natterings, he knew his family was perilously close to the wire at several points before Carrie was sold, and the surreal whiplash of going from toiling in an industrial laundry to cashing six-figure checks peeks out from nearly everything he wrote for years afterward. Nobody in King’s stories is haunted by vampires, werewolves, psychic phenomena, etc. without also being haunted by bills and tight schedules and shitty bosses and stalled dreams. Even his more affluent characters tend to suffer or at least note the pressures of the rat race. King’s career-defining stories didn’t just take place in a known American landscape, they grappled with the familiar American experience of slow-boiling desperation.

The Stand, despite its eventual transition to a haunted post-apocalypse, is no different. The survivors lived in a world ruled by bank examiners and debt collectors. From that they stagger directly into an existence in which there will never again be credit ratings or charge cards or stock markets or waiting in hope/dread while someone “runs a few forms through the computer”— at least not in their lifetimes. None of our protagonists are survivalists eager and equipped for a life of heroic battle; most of them have just had every life skill they possess rendered obsolete. Simultaneously, of course, every debt weighing them down has evaporated, and the resulting sense of ambivalence and displacement is crucial to The Stand’s unique power. Most of its cast were dead-enders or fuck-ups in the Before Times, either running from something or trapped in place. None of them ever had the words Most Likely to Succeed printed beneath their picture in a high school yearbook, which is part of why putting the fate of the human race in their hands is so interesting.

Now, let’s put a pin in those thoughts. I’ll return to them later when I discuss the 2020 adaptation of The Stand, and why I thought it was, to get highly technical, something of a fucky-wucky whoopsy-doodle car crash. But back in 1994, the transitional period is ending. The bodies have hit the floor, the liminal space is narrowing, and our cast of survivors now has to deal with…

II. THE DREAMS

In Maine, Frannie stitches her father up in canvas and plans to bury him in the back yard. Harold reappears just in time to help her lug the body, and to later segue from “so your boyfriend is dead” to “maybe I could—” which leads immediately to one of the harshest “we’ll always be friends” in the history of human fiction. Ordinarily I detest the term “friendzone” as toxic, falsely entitled minimization of the concept of actual friendship but, uh, in Harold’s case I’m willing to allow it. Harold has absolutely been sent to the Friendzone (Frandzone?) like a fantasy adventurer banished to some sort of pocket dimension for pissing off a wizard. Harold, my dude, there is no saving throw from this facial expression:

Despite that memorable moment, this scene is eleven gallons of awkward in a ten-gallon hat, because once again for some reason this adaptation is pitching Fran’s behavioral affect as quite a few years under Ringwald’s visible age. While skimming The Stand in preparation for this little project I was struck by how few lines King takes to establish Frannie as a grown woman with adult concerns. None of that shows up here— no wariness, no calculation, no sense of personal power. Even generously allowing for the effect of grief and disbelief on the character, even with dad freshly interred in his garden, there’s just nothing going on with this girl/woman yet.

Frannie does, however, kick off this episode’s musical opening by diegetically playing Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream it’s Over,” which then slips out of the frame and plays over a montage of deserted places, empty streets, and unmoving corpses. As with “Don’t Fear the Reaper” it’s not a subtle choice, and as before it friggin’ rocks. There’s nothing flashy to this series of bleak minimalist shots, and once again I find myself impressed by the confidence and cleverness of the economy on display. Once the rights to “Don’t Dream it’s Over” were paid for, the rest of the sequence must have cost about five bucks, and it delivers its message perfectly.

In New York City, the enemy of perfect continues to be “Larry Underwood.” Larry wanders Central Park looking like a man who has lost all of his undershirts and picked a hell of a week to quit sniffing glue. He meets Nadine Cross (Laura San Giacomo), who is nervously sharing a park bench with a loaded gun. Larry assures her that he’s harmless, then immediately undercuts this declaration by sitting next to her and rhapsodizing that “he can smell her perfume.” Larry, my dude, there is very much a saving throw against this facial expression:

This scene is awkward, too, but at least it’s an adult awkward. Larry and Nadine are both about one loud noise away from leaping out of their own cheekbones. Storke continues to impress with his array of tics and nuances, while San Giacomo is alternately quirky and brittle but always seeming to push something off the conversational table. Larry eventually confesses to Nadine that he’s been having dreams about an old black woman in Nebraska; he’s nonplussed when he discovers that she hasn’t, while she seems deeply uncomfortable to be discussing dreams at all. In his short life, Larry has no doubt struck out several times when hitting on women who “played for the other team,” but Larry, sweetheart, this time you have finally met a woman who is literally playing for the other team.

In Arizona, we continue this theme by checking up on Lloyd Henreid, who is the only soul left alive in a maximum-security cell block. Wincing, Lloyd checks on a dead rat he has stashed under his mattress. He has no sense of optimism about the way his week is turning out.

In fictional Powtanville Hills, Indiana we meet the Trashcan Man (Matt Frewer) for the first time, and there are… issues. The miniseries continues to try making “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” happen by having assorted characters sing it badly as a sort of running gag—these are Trash’s first lines— but as the song was never great to begin with one might wish they had been less whimsical and more won’t-sical.

Also, this is not Indiana. It might be fucking Wales, but it sure isn’t Indiana.

Frewer, probably most famous as the embodiment of Max Headroom, is an interesting choice for the role of Trash but portrays him as a sort of Manic Pixie Dream Bomber, a few twitches too theatrical for the surly menace and vulnerability of the character as originally written. Frewer is expressive and entertaining, and there are moments where he lets something special shine through (his wordless scenes are much more interesting than the ones where he is giggling or muttering) but generally speaking the impression he gives is that a live-action roleplaying game somewhere is missing one of its Malkavians.*

Frewer is also significantly older than the novel Trash; overage Trash in this respect becomes an odd reflection of overage Frannie. Trash is distracted to the point of debilitation by his memories of people mocking him for his history of arson, and most of the voices we hear are kids. All of Trash’s traumas, as presented onscreen, are childhood traumas, unchanged from the book. This lines up nicely when the guy is about twenty, but this version seems to imply fifteen more years of life to fill, and simply doesn’t fill them. No use is made of the age difference to add anything interesting to the character and the result is off-putting, perhaps not so much a deficiency of performance as a conspicuous missed opportunity.

What isn’t off-putting is that the Dark Man, the Walkin’ Dude, the Hardcase, has actually begun to speak to his people. We first hear him in a glimpse of Nadine’s dreams, and then we hear him speaking directly to Trash to banish the voices that still torment him. “There’s nobody there, Trash. They can’t hurt you now. They’re all dead.” This is a fabulous little bit. Trashcan Man has never had a real protector before, and in a way, this scene is strangely touching. It’s a sinister, manipulative support the Dark Man offers, but it’s support nonetheless.

It’s interesting to reflect on how the Dark Man is shown handling his people; Nadine and Trash get nudged and whispered at, but Lloyd Henreid, slowly starving in his locked cell, doesn’t get a peep. Is it that the Dark Man thinks Lloyd can get along just fine without pep talks, or that letting unrelieved reality grind him down for a few days will make him a more eager convert when the time comes? Or is it simply that Lloyd’s situation is only psychologically interesting as long as he doesn’t know help is on the way? Sometimes symbolism is just a fancied-up term for the author’s fingers on the keys.

In Hemingford Home, Nebraska we spend a few low-key minutes with Mother Abigail, whose running conversation with the Lord God Almighty commences with gruff appreciation for the prunes that have just moved her centenarian bowels. Bringing Abigail down out of the clouds for a moment is affecting; we are reminded that while she is a paragon of a supernatural power she is also a tired, grumpy old woman who has to keep house, feed herself, and occasionally excrete. The contrast to the Dark Man is intriguing— evil strolls around at will, having fun, breaking rules. If Randall Flagg shits it’s purely because he wants to; if he so desired he could teleport his waste from his butt to Poughkeepsie with the snap of his fingers. Good remains tethered to responsibility, voluntarily demonstrating limits. Flagg exerts raw power at a distance, even killing people, while Abigail sends the psychic equivalent of encouraging e-mails.

Abigail continues her monologue with God, mentioning how the doctor told her to cut out coffee. Then she laughs, takes a sip, and notes that he’s dead and she’s still alive. We stan an absolute queen.

Abigail does one other important thing in this scene, which is to express the opinion that God has possibly gone a bit overboard with His tribulations this time. She affirms that she’ll do His will, but vehemently adds that she doesn’t much like it. I’ll have eventual cause to further dissect this adaptation’s treatment of religion, but for now it’s enough to note that at this point Abigail isn’t too far off from her literary self, with an obedience that is feisty and grudging but ultimately inevitable. Abigail’s God isn’t a gentle figure for the Precious Moments mindset. His demands are hard, and while she would have gone complaining all the way, Abigail, like Abraham, would have bound Isaac and taken him to the altar for sacrifice.

Her Isaacs are just starting to make their way across the country toward her, on motorcycles and bicycles and sneaker soles.

Without any further ado, it’s time to finally meet the reason for the season, Randall Flagg himself, out of the shadows and loving it. In Arizona, a fried and frazzled Lloyd hears the tap-tap of cowboy boots approaching his dark and lonely cell block.

Jamey Sheridan was doubtless a risky choice to play such a central role; most of the other names I’ve seen thrown around as casting possibilities were actors with much bigger names at the time. Well, whatever else might happen in the hours to come, Sheridan absolutely hits this initial scene out of the fucking park. Brightly gleaming eyes, insincerely gleaming smile, a big and well-fed man in a world of the shriveled and starved— his Flagg is both hypnotic and disquieting. He has one of the best lines in the miniseries when he playfully says: “I never even introduced myself, did I? Pleased to meet you, Lloyd. Hope you guess my name.” Lloyd mutters his lack of comprehension. “Oh. Nothin’. Just a little classical reference,” Flagg smirks.

If miniseries Trash is turned up a few notches from the literary Trash, miniseries Flagg is turned down at first, probably for the best. He’s still strange and menacing and perpetually amused, but a quick glance at the corresponding scene in the novel shows that Flagg, as originally written, was more overtly needling and condescending toward Lloyd, and had a freewheeling theatricality that easily could have gone over the top and canceled out some of the tension. Sheridan’s Flagg seems fine-tuned to work in concert with Ferrer’s version of Lloyd. My understanding is that they were friends in real life, so perhaps they put more work into the mix than other actors in their situation might have. Pure speculation, of course. At any rate, mullet or no mullet, I think Sheridan earns his paycheck and then some.

Elsewhere— Larry and Nadine have a spat while preparing to enter the Lincoln Tunnel on their way out of NYC, and Larry’s petulant side gets it’s clearest showing yet. Larry continues the journey alone, for a while, and the sequence inside the tunnel, with its lines of stalled cars and dead bodies, is an excellently calculated study in tension. Even a brief jump scare in which Larry (apparently) imagines a corpse opening its eyes is in the spirit of fair play, as the supernatural elements of the story are steadily growing more concrete. I can’t say enough about the lighting and staging of this tunnel sequence, or about the music, which has dropped to something barely louder than ambient noise. Every crawling-through-a-tunnel sequence in any movie or video game made in the last thirty years owes something to this one. Larry has a cathartic moment of completely losing his shit, after which he reunites with an equally rattled Nadine and they continue their dysfunctional journey to the broad sunlit uplands of… ah, shit, New Jersey.

The moving camera films, and having film’d, moves on to Attleboro, Massachusetts, where we meet Glen Bateman, an older fellow enjoying a spot of landscape painting while singing a version of “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?” that is if anything worse than Trashcan’s. Stu Redman walks up behind him, carrying a rifle and somehow not using it. After getting past the initial awkwardness of Glen’s singing and Stu’s heavy weaponry, they become fast friends.

Glen is played by Ray Walston, noted star of film musicals but also known for My Favorite Martian and as Boothby, the groundskeeper of Starfleet Academy in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Walston fills his role with the same natural ease Sinise does, and Bateman is a charming old coot. “Superflu took most of the dogs,” he says, in introducing Stu to Kojak, who might be the last dog on the continent. “Along with their idiot masters. Most unfair!”

Out of idle curiosity, I looked up Attleboro to see how close it is to my home. Stovington, VT is fictional (as is Powtanville Hills, IN) but Attleboro is a real place, and it’s not at all where I expected. In fact, it’s tucked away in the far southeasterly reaches of the Commonwealth (God save it!), just above Rhode Island. This raises a fascinating issue, because it doesn’t matter where the imaginary Stovington is— every single inch of Vermont is far to the northwest of Attleboro. This means that Stu Redman, having received supernatural guidance directing him to Nebraska, has somehow immediately headed far enough southeast to nearly reach the Atlantic Ocean. Great job, buddy.

Somewhere in the woods in Pennsylvania, Larry applies his smoothest moves to Nadine and discovers that they only work to a certain point. Larry doesn’t take this well; Nadine says she likes him but needs more time. This is of course a strategy to keep herself unattached so she can fulfill her secret destiny as the devil’s helpmeet, but in light of the fact that six billion people have just died and they’ve spent days running and hiding for their lives, it’s also a perfectly reasonable fucking way to be. Larry only grudgingly avoids having major consent issues. As they sleep, we see that they are having different dreams. While Larry is stepping out of Mother Abigail’s cornfield, Nadine is receiving orders from Flagg to ditch Larry before the last of the East Coast playboys inadvertently makes it past second base. When Larry wakes up, he finds Nadine has been replaced with a Dear Larry note. The camera lingers for a surprising length of time on his reaction, with brief anger turning to hopeless misery. Larry is, of all the people we’ve met so far, perhaps the most terrible at being alone.

In Oklahoma, Nick Andros seems to be doing just fine by himself, coasting along on a ten-speed, hat discarded, wearing a t-shirt rather than hiding under flannels. His situational awareness hasn’t gotten any better, however, as he nearly runs into Tom Cullen (Bill Fagerbakke) in broad daylight. I won’t dwell too much on the subject of Tom’s mental disability right now, but I will say that there was a lot of daylight between 1978 and 1994, just as there has been between 1994 and now, and Fagerbakke is putting a very soulful and sympathetic effort into portraying what would now be regarded, in all fairness, as an outmoded or quasi-fictional depiction of a general learning disability. If my understanding is correct, the “child trapped in the body of a man,” as Cullen is partly characterized, does not really exist as a phenomenon. There’ll be quite a bit more to say about this later.

In frankly beautiful Attleboro, Stu and Glen and Kojak are chilling on Glen’s front porch, which is just about the chilling-est spot imaginable. I don’t often see a location in a TV miniseries that makes me say “gee, I wish I could fall through my screen and end up there,” but whoever scouted the location for Glen’s idyllic brookside house found a real treasure. Attleboro continues to be a weirdness magnet, too, because Frannie and Harold just happen by on their way to the very disease control center in Stovington, VT that Stu recently escaped from. Let’s go back to the maps! Ogunquit is a real town in Maine, on the far southern coast, not far north of the Massachusetts border. Yet, in order to go west, Fran and Harold have for some reason not just segued a teensy bit south but passed through the entire Boston metro area and ended up nearly in Rhode Island. It’s a rhetorical question in the 21st century to wonder how people operated before GPS and computerized maps. The Stand offers a bold and simple answer— like shit.

I suppose everyone has to meet up somehow, so maybe we can just say it was the dreams. Except, in Kansas a few days later, we catch up with Nick and Tom taking a break on their own journey to Nebraska. Feeling snarky, I pulled up Google maps again and double-checked, and actually… these boys are doing just fine. Nebraska is the second state north of Oklahoma, passing through Kansas is exactly how you’d do it. The world’s least situationally aware man and a guy who literally can’t read maps are somehow less confused than the entire surviving population of New England.

Tom has a sour stomach, so Nick investigates a drug store, where he has a close encounter with Julie Lawry (Shawnee Smith), a cruel and unstable young woman who mocks Nick and Tom for their disabilities. As her hostility escalates, Nick forces her away at gunpoint and scribbles her a note that leaves no room for misinterpretation: “We don’t need you.” Something new is definitely alive inside Nick in this post-apocalypse. Although there are no more dubious legal protectors to be relied upon, there’s also no system of prejudices and proprieties urging him to be small or stay hidden. I appreciate this scene for demonstrating what we would call “establishing good boundaries” thirty years later. Julie runs off and establishes some boundaries of her own, showering the boys with badly-aimed carbine fire as they hightail it out of town.

Somewhere near Des Moines, Larry Underwood sits on the hood of an abandoned car, jamming away at an acoustic version of the mid-60s protest song “Eve of Destruction” while the city smokes and smolders behind him. He encounters a woman named Lucy Swann (Bridgit Ryan) and a taciturn, knife-happy boy called Joe (Billy Sullivan). These characters, originally introduced earlier in the novel under much more complicated circumstances, are disentangled in the miniseries from everyone except Larry.

Larry and Lucy have a chat about the burning city in which she reveals that the conflagration started when someone apparently blew up an oil tank farm, leading the audience to understand that the Trashcan Man recently passed through on his way west. Larry wonders why anyone would just burn down a city, and I have to say that in his shoes, in the middle of a mass die-off, I’d be much less curious about big fires on a city-by-city basis. In fact I’d be more surprised by the ones that hadn’t burned.

Next we see Trashcan himself stumbling along the highway in “the Utah badlands,” which look just a touch like “the somewhere-near-Utah merely okay lands,” but I could not say for sure. Feeling snarky yet again, I went to Google Maps, and was once again edified— like Nick and Tom, Trash is steering a flawless course toward his objective. This despite the fact that he is hallucinating cities of gold on the horizon. Perhaps the crows watching him are offering tips? A hell of a way to walk hundreds of miles, but it’s still Flyover Country 2, Eastern Standard Time 0 in the game of making straight lines.

Nick and Tom make it to Hemingford Home at last, in the company of a crew of amiable bumpkins, one of whom is an extremely Hallmark Family Movie little girl who calls Abigail “granny-lady.” There is a strange blending of tones taking place now; nice clean white folks are doing nice clean white folk things while Abigail tells them, as plainly as one might discuss the weather, that they are in a bloody war and God will ask terrible things of his chosen ones. There’s another war brewing, the war between the Old Testament flavor of the source material and the Church of Network Standards and Practices. This war will claim some casualties before the miniseries is over.

The company does not stay long in Nebraska. Abigail tells everyone that it’s time to move on, to the site of their real operation, in Boulder, Colorado. Once her things are packed, Nick (artfully shirtless for the viewers at home) pounds a sign into the lawn telling follow-on dreamers where to go next. Abigail gets another lengthy scene of humanization, confessing to Nick that she has lived here so long, through trial after trial, that she is distraught at the idea of leaving. For so many years she’s been the last living holdout on the last unforfeited parcel of her father’s original land— once again, she is ready to do God’s will but once again she is torn with sorrow.

In Las Vegas, a scorched and exhausted Trashcan Man has finally reached his destination. After soaking in a courtyard fountain, he enters a vast and nearly deserted casino and immediately goes to sleep on a a green gaming table. The camera artfully captures him framed there, half vulnerable child and half feral animal.

A group of men playing a desultory hand of cards has watched all of this. One of them is Lloyd Henreid. When another man asks what they’re meant to do with the newcomer, and where Randall Flagg is, Lloyd responds: “Flagg’ll be around, he’s been waiting for this guy. This guy’s somethin’ special.”

NEXT WEEK ON THE STAND: Sex! Hypnosis! Author Inserts! Bombs!

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*I am of course kidding, no LARP has ever missed any of its Malkavians.**

**This comment unfair to many subtle, knowledgeable players of Malkavians who worked hard in the 90s to keep things real.***

***I can make these comments because I fuckin’ played Tremere all the time, I have no moral high ground, I was a jazz-hands wizard vampire dork from hell.