film notes | apocalyptic summer

Maybe this would more aptly be described as "TV notes," but I finally got the chance to binge watch the new version of The Stand last week .  I have always had a strange relationship with the novel, which I remembering reading during one of those blisteringly hot, long summers--I want to say 1995, where we also spent a lot of time in the mall discount theaters to escape the heat at home with no A/C. On more manageable days, I would lay on the convertable sofa in my room that was sometimes my bed in front of a fan  and read a lot of Stephen King.  While I devoted my undergrad  semesters to appropriately "high" literary reading choices, I usually traded in my Faulkner and Fitzgerald, my Bronte and Austen, for horror during the summer months. 

While I had exhausted the shorter books in high school--Carrie, Misery, Pet Sematary, The Shining, Cat's Eye, Christine-- I'd saved the longer ones for later--The Tommyknockers, IT, The Stand. (my favorite Stephen King is actually the shortish The Langoliers.) I'm having a hard time remembering whether I saw the 1994 mini-series before or after I read the book, since they are pretty entwined in my head, but I do remember being captivated by the first half of the book where everyone is dying and less so by the second half, which seemed kind of slow and overly preachy.  In later years, I sometimes, when it got really apocalypticaly hot, loved to check out the library's copy and read the first half--the gross half littered with death and decay--not every summer, but every few years.  I'd intend to finish it wholly, but always abandoned it about mid way.  

I'd gotten pretty excited when I'd heard a couple years ago they would be making a new version.  This of course, was pre -pandemic. In fact, most of it filmed before we actually had a public heath emergency of our own. Captain Tripps of course, being much more violently game-ending than Covid.  While the 1994 version is terrible in all sorts of ways, that first opening scene, played over with B.O.C's  "Don't Fear the Reaper" is iconic. While the song was played in the credits of one segment of the new version, I kind of missed it. (I also missed the hotness of a young Gary Sinise.) I'm not sure what a post-covid pandemic movie/book would look like, but filmmakers take note of all the assholes who will now have to act like it's not even a thing--not even happening. Maybe people dying in the streets and parked cars would make it all more real. 

The newer version mixes up the timeline in a nice way (you get a hint of the sort of character deep-dives of something like Lost (actually at times I wished they'd gone deeper--than the source material, than the previous version). The story is not always told linearly, which is nice, but I wondered at times if it would be hard to follow if you weren't already familiar with the story. Franny is more of a main character here than Stu, which I liked to see, since so many of the main characters are dudes. You get the push/pull of good and evil in Nadine and Harold a little more clearly than the other adaptation. The structure of the novel lends itself well to a more fragmented, varied timeline, though they could have gotten even more daring with that than they did. 

I was watching the second part of the new IT recently and laughing over the in-joke of King's inability to properly nail an ending, which is mostly true, but those longer books are especially hard I imagine.  I say this as someone who has struggled to end a 15 line poem--I can't even imagine 1000 pages of words and trying to wrap that up successfully and to everyone's liking.