Boardwalk Empire, Terence Winter’s underrated Prohibition Era gangster drama, featured many real-world figures of underworld renown, though mostly at ages much younger than the ones at which they’d become famous. They’d be mixed in with entirely fictional characters, or heavily fictionalized analogues of actual people. Often you didn’t realize until halfway through a scene that, oh my god, that’s Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel and Al Capone all hanging out together. The resulting frisson was a thrill.
In his lamentable mega-series The Dark Tower, Stephen King officially introduced the concept of ka-tet, a group of people drawn together by the benevolent force that partially orders the universe for a specific purpose. I say “officially” because if you’ve read his work you know that this is a recurring feature everywhere from It to The Stand. Often the characters themselves recognize that something has happened when they’re all finally assembled together—that the final piece of a puzzle they didn’t even know they were solving has slipped into place, that the whole of them is somehow greater than the sum of its parts, that when faced with other people there’s a palpable sense of belonging and un-belonging. Great deeds can be done in ka-tet.
Here you see Emmett, Red Webster, Frank Tilghman, and Pete Strodenmire, together for the first time. Until now Emmett had never been seen off his ranch, and Strodenmire had only been seen one time before in total. They’re watching Brad Wesley walk away, having proclaimed “This is my town—don’t you forget it.” Red is about to bust Strodenmire’s balls by repeating what Strodenmire said to him after his auto parts store was destroyed: “You got insurance, don’t you?” Tilghman is, as always, very peculiar.
Yet something looks right here, doesn’t it? Something about this configuration of four weird old men staring into the middle distance rings true. When ka-tet is formed, how can any JC Penney magnate hope to stand against it?
Tags: emmett, frank tilghman, ka-tet, pete strodenmire, red webster, road house, Stephen King