Tom Spurgeon emails:
One thing you may miss about The Stand is its place in the wider historical context of apocalyptic culture; that is, it was a book that posited a non-nuclear armageddon when that’s what most people were suspecting. It’s like Romero; there was something at the time that was actually very hopeful about these works because they weren’t as nihilistic and bleak as the thought of simply seeing a white flash and being vaporized. You had a chance to deal with things. That’s why teens connected with that stuff, since the generally powerless always connect to effectiveness fantasies, whether in a book or on a tabletop with dice.
That’s interesting, particularly considering the nerd-gone-bad Harold Lauder character. I guess there’s an allure to providing an example of just how wrong you, the nerd reading this book, could go. Particularly if you get a sex slave in the process. At any rate The Stand certainly casts a long shadow as a post-apocalyptic work, even over King’s stuff. Cell read like a semi-successful Stand remix.
Tom:
I’m with you that certain passages in there were good, particularly the Larry Underwood stuff, but that there were also huge and obvious gaps in the storytelling.
Yeah. I noticed that during my most recent re-read of It, too, which was actually worse off in that regard. And I didn’t even bother listing a lot of the stuff that pertains to the supernatural aspects–why can’t all-powerful Flagg kill these clowns himself instead of relying on his incompetent henchmen, why aren’t the Canadians and Mexicans receiving the psychic summons, etc.–since when it comes to the supernatural you actually CAN say “because” and that’s reason enough. But you (I) read King for the scares and the digressions about John Fogerty, not because he’s Alan Moore with the plot mechanics.
Tom:
I’m baffled that since you correctly (I think) identify the texture of the narrative as one of the best elements of the book you would think anything positive out of that goofy-ass TV mini-series, which was all surface elements, some of which were SO poorly done, some of which were okay, and nothing was more than an quarter-inch deep. It was like a string of cinematics made to snare a producer, not an actual finished product. Just awful.
My memory of The Stand is that it failed to capture the atmospherics anywhere, and that it looked like a shoddy TV show at all times. It was on the other day on TV, and in the two minutes I saw they were showing Larry Underwood in a bar, and it was like a bar that David Banner would work in on The Incredible Hulk. I kept expecting Bill Bixby to walk up to the bar and start talking to Esther Rolle.
This really hamfisted staging put a lot of pressure on the acting, which I thought bad all around, including Sinise, Dee, Lowe, and the guy from Coach in addition to the obvious bad ones like Nemec and Ringwald and San Giacomo. Just really obvious, bad choices in the acting, nothing that would hint at lives lived beyond whatever lines were being spoken right at that moment except maybe Walston and the guy playing Larry Underwood.
I thought Sheridan was fine, but it was that kind of fine that was like, “Hey, good for Jamey Sheridan; he should get some work after this” and not so much the “Holy Shit it’s Randall Flagg!” kind of fine.
I’d reserve my harshest criticism of the adaptation mainly for Matt Frewer as the Trashcan Man, who was a scenery-chewing goof, even though I can’t for the life of me picture anyone else when I picture that character now. I also think they blew it in terms of depicting what Las Vegas was like, with the fascist red-and-black Flagg logos, the central-casting badass types who made up the population, and really only showing goons like Lloyd, the Rat-Man, Ace High, Julie Lawry and such as the top echelon. It would have been much more frightening and vastly more interesting, obviously, if they all looked like accountants and gym teachers.
That being said, I stand by my appraisal of the series for a bunch of reasons. One is that it’s seven hours long, which is the closest that anything’s come to giving one of his books the time it needs to unfold as a film. And I really do believe it was REALLY well-cast. Gary Sinise and Ed Harris and Ray Walston, for crying out loud. And Jamey Sheridan was really perfect. Much less crazy about Matt Frewer and Corin Nemec and Molly Ringwald (though she makes sense because everyone had a crush on her at one point just like Harold did on Frannie), and Laura San Giacomo is really not my type, but nothing was nearly as egregious as the casting of, say, It, where your leads were Jack Tripper, John-Boy Walton, Judge Harry Stone, and Venus Flytrap.
It also preserved a lot of King’s richly idiomatic way of writing. Larry telling his mom “That brown sound sho’ do get around.” The plague victim at the CDC center who pops out of nowhere and says to Stu “Come down here and eat chicken with me, beautiful. It’s so DARK!” Calling Flagg the Walkin Dude. Tom Cullen saying he doesn’t go to the drive-in because they only show them diddly-daddly pictures. I love that stuff.
I even liked the biggest changes to the characterization that they made–conflating Nadine with Rita and giving Lucy the kid instead of Nadine. And the music was really good too, not just the W.G. Snuffy Walden score but the pop songs–“Don’t Fear the Reaper,” “Boogie Fever,” “Eve of Destruction,” “Don’t Dream It’s Over.” Finally the scary stuff was actually pretty scary. There were a lot of great boo moments in the nightmares about Flagg, his demon make-up did a good job of conveying the sort of slovenly grossness at the heart of King’s conception of what Flagg is, and the plague stuff was handled well for the budget, too.
I do wish they’d kept the down ending, though.