It’s as if on the Vegas Strip did Randall Flagg a stately pleasure dome decree. People in fetish gear fuck freely in public. Everyone’s drunk, and some are doing blow right out the open. It’s a bacchanalia—and it’s being staged around a gladiatorial pit where slaves are made to fight each other with chainsaws.
In other words, it’s the nightmare scenario of people who used to want parental advisory stickers on Marilyn Manson records. Is it a plausible setup for a dystopian society run by a demon in denim? I’m not so sure. Where did he find all the hardbodied models, male and female, who are gyrating and pole-dancing and having sex out there? Does no one find the blend of hedonism and ultraviolence a little much? Could a new society really coalesce around that particular kernel?
The funny thing, and I use funny very loosely here, is that we’ve scene what an American dystopia would look like just last week. And while there is a certain cathartic venting of violent desires, it’s against perceived enemies to the desired order of things, not randos dumped into a thunderdome scenario while onlookers hump each other. It seems to me that the pitch Randall Flagg made to Lloyd Henried in prison—don’t you want the chance to get even with the kind of people who did this to you?—is a much more compelling and plausible way to structure New Vegas. Everyone there is attracted to the darkness Flagg embodies, so promise them the chance to extinguish the light (specifically in Boulder)! Turning the place into a sex club with a death-match arena in the middle just rings hollow. It’s a Hollywood idea of what fascism looks like.
I reviewed this week’s less-than-promising episode of The Stand for Decider.
Tags: decider, horror, reviews, Stephen King, the stand, TV, TV reviews