Rewriting a Mythos: John Carpenter and Christine

by Kate Foster Curtis-Hawkins

Only two weeks ago, Emily Wilson, acclaimed translator of the Odyssey, announced that she was planning to redo her own translation of Homer’s epic. This announcement came on the heels of a seemingly never-ending series of denouncements and essays written by Wilson in opposition to the recently released Christopher Nolan adaptation of the Odyssey. Wilson has good reason to disagree with Nolan, given that he mentioned her translation of the poem as a source of inspiration for his adaptation more than once. 

Wilson’s distaste for the recent movie has gone on to spark discourse on the nature of both translations and adaptations, and what exactly makes them good or bad. In that spirit, the editors at Just Keep Up saw fit to give me a space to speak about one of my favorite film adaptations, which happens to improve on its source material: John Carpenter's Christine. 

Christine, the novel, occupies a strange place in Stephen King’s wider bibliography. It was written at the height of his problems with addiction when he was working at a feverish pace, but it wasn’t even his best selling book released that year. That honor goes to Pet Sematary, which still holds the fourth-place spot on his all time sales chart, and has been adapted to film twice. 

Christine has all the hallmarks of King’s literature from the eighties: it's probably too long, definitely too horny, and uneven in its pacing. But it also happens to have some of the greatest, most imaginative elements of horror that keep the reader invested through the periods in which one can't help but retroactively scream at King’s publisher for not insisting on more edits. 

The largest crime this book commits is the decision to have it begin from the first person perspective of Dennis Guilder, the eventual protagonist's best friend. It remains unclear to me exactly why Stephen King chose to do this. If the engine of your horror novel (pun intended) comes from the relationship between a haunted car and its owner, then choosing to tell your story from a perspective completely outside of that relationship makes little sense. Especially when King chooses to devote the first two-hundred and fifty pages to this perspective. 

It isn’t until the middle of the book that we change perspectives to Arnie Cunningham, the new owner of Christine, and get a chance to experience Stephen King at the height of his powers. This portion of the book absolutely bowls the reader over with its slow reveal that Arnie is gradually being possessed by the former owner of the car, and that Christine itself is trying to roll her odometer back to zero so that she can resurrect her original owner and live with him as they once were. I cannot overstate just how well Stephen King unspools this mystery while keeping his reader at arms length so they continue to flip pages with obsession. It's genuinely remarkable. 

By the time you reach the end of King’s seven-hundred and twenty-one page cruise through hell, you’ll have endured Dennis’ perspective one last time as the nascent sex pest steals Arnie’s girlfriend and the two of them scheme to destroy Christine once and for all. At the end of the day, Christine is a good book that is simply too long and too exhaustive in its detail for a premise this simplistic, but there is a genius three-hundred and fifty page masterwork of horror buried somewhere in there, and I think John Carpenter was able to excavate it. 

Is the 1983 adaptation of Christine a good adaptation of the novel? Not really. At least not in the conventional sense. It has the same characters, the same model of car, and the same rough plot elements; but the mythos King developed is completely re-worked for the film. Gone is the symbiotic nature of the car and its ghosts, gone is Christine’s plan to resurrect her original owner, gone is Arnie’s slow transformation into that previous owner, gone is the entire subplot involving the owner of the garage that leads to the climax of the novel, gone is Dennis’ desire to take Arnie’s girlfriend, and, finally, gone are the motivations of Arnie’s bullies. What Carpenter chooses to do with his adaptation, aided with a script written by Bill Phillips, is to depict a story about obsession rather than rage. At the end of the day, King never really says why Arnie is so taken with Christine. By the end of the novel we assume that it’s got something to do with the ghosts that are competing for control of his soul, but the why is sublimated in service of a depiction of how rage distorts and destroys the human heart. Within the book, Arnie’s life is made measurably worse by his association with Christine. He permanently injures his back, he gets kicked out of the chess club and his other extracurricular activities, his best friend stops hanging out with him, he loses opportunities at college, his girlfriend leaves him for his former best friend, and he gets arrested. There is no rational reason why he would continue to associate with this car except for the supernatural. By contrast, in the film, Arnie is made better by Christine, not worse. In the book his life spirals completely out of control, but in the film he gains self-confidence and determination, he gets a job, he makes a genuine friend in the owner of the local garage, he’s able to talk to girls and get a date, and he manages to shake the chains of control that his parents have thrown around him. His obsession with Christine is completely justified: she represents the moment that his life turned around. 

There are, of course, consequences to his ownership of the car in the film adaptation. His girlfriend temporarily breaks off their relationship, but it's in order to try and save Arnie from Christine, rather than an attempt to save herself from the car. Arnie does have a breakdown in his relationship with Dennis in the film, but it never reaches the same level of virulence as it does in the book. By the climax of the novel, Dennis is also trying to save himself from Christine’s toxic retribution. Whereas his actions in the film, like those of Arnie’s girlfriend, are for Arnie rather than himself. 

The smartest bit of revision in the film adaptation is the vandalization of Christine after she is fixed for the first time, and how she ends up repaired. Rather than keeping Arnie’s work on the car a mystery, and how that intertwines with his gradual spiritual possession, the film chooses to use the mechanical nature of Arnie and Christine’s relationship as an allegory for building trust and love within the context of a budding romance. 

Make no mistake, within the film, Christine is a woman. We are introduced to her on the assembly line, watching one man check out her rear end, another putting his hand under her hood, and another who rejects her offer of love. Arnie restores her with his own hands the first time around, leading the two of them to become bonded. It is only after Arnie confesses his unconditional love, after she has been violated by his bullies, that she reveals the entirety of herself to him. A scene that will forever live on in the memory of anyone who watches it. 

In fact, Carpenter and Phillips, through their reworking of the source material, effectively merge this adaptation of the novel into the cannon of “rape-revenge” sagas, which had reached their height in the seventies and eighties. By creating a romantic relationship between Arnie and Christine rather than a parasitical one, the scene in which Arnie’s High School bullies trash the car ends up landing with the impact of a sexual assault rather than mere property destruction. Christine even tries to cry out for mercy before one of her abusers silences her radio. 

Where Christine differs from many others within the genre of rape-revenge films is that the second half becomes an act of shared vengeance on common abusers. A choice which re-imagines what had largely been an exploitative genre into something far more interesting, and less built on the sensationalism of low budget, shot-on-video, horror films. As a result, Arnie’s transformation into a rage-filled man capable of murder comes about because of the abuse of a loved one, not for the arbitrary purposes of a possession narrative. Thus, we see how Carpenter and Phillips translate a story that was originally about rage into one about obsession, completely re-writing the mythology behind the car while managing to respect the source material. 

All of this leads to a final end product in which cycles of abuse are given a silent, but profound analysis. It’s never explicitly stated, but Carpenter succeeds in depicting the ways that obsession can devolve into rage and that rage can lead to hate, and that hate can ultimately build towards violence. But that’s not all, as Carpenter manages to simultaneously depict that the solution to these cycles of trauma is when people care, and put their care into action. In King’s book, Arnie’s rage isn’t even his own, it's the previous owner’s, and the actions of Dennis and Leigh are far too caught up in self-preservation and their own budding romance to have the same impact that their counterparts in the film do. Now, of course, all of this is my own opinion, and whether or not Carpenter and Phillips’ changes from the source material work for any individual viewer will be determined by that individual viewer. Which is ultimately true of any work of adaptation, ancient or modern. This is also where I have difficulty co-signing Emily Wilson’s public distaste for Nolan’s adaptation. 

Wilson is not content to argue that Nolan’s changes don’t work for her, or that she would have done things differently. Her argument is rooted in the perspective that his re-imagining of an ancient mythos is flawed at its core, building an argument that any substantive changes from the original poem will inherently alter the story so significantly that it makes the pursuit of adaptation a fool's errand. I disagree with this thesis. Which is not to say that there are not valid criticisms of Nolan’s Odyssey, there are, but rather to say that if we deny creative people the chance to rewrite the mythos within a given piece of art, we deny ourselves the opportunity to see how old stories can be freshly told, sometimes for the better. A truth that is applicable to epic poetry of the ancient world, and horror pulp of the modern one.