Apt Pupil tells of Todd Bowden, a practical, above-average student with a sense of humor and natural athletic ability. He’s every parent’s dream child. Except that Todd has found himself with a weird, unwholesome fascination for all things related to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust of World War II. When he recognizes an old man on the local bus as the former commander of a Nazi death camp, living in hiding in rural California (where the novella is set), Todd’s response is not at all that of a normal teen.
He doesn’t confide in his friends. He doesn’t tell his parents. He doesn’t inform the police. Instead, he is thrilled by his secret. Since his private hobby and obsession is the Holocaust, he uses his extensive knowledge to blackmail the Nazi, Kurt Dussander, into sharing with him the horrible stories of those years, complete with every nasty detail. Like a hideous Peeping Tom, Todd gets a thrill from all of this illicit activity.
Meanwhile, his optimistic, conventional parents see only the Norman Rockwell side of things. From their point of view, Todd is a good kid, spending time reading to an elderly man who is losing his sight. What could be more a part of the American myth? They see only what they want to. Meanwhile, when Todd’s academic career falls apart, he dares not allow his parents to discover the truth, and can confide in and rely on only one person: Kurt Dussander.
What begins as a weird obsession and a blackmail scheme begins to evolve. Spurred on by the hideously evil nature of what they share, Todd and Dussander each turn to murder, and eventually trap one another in a web of lies. Because of their shared guilt, neither can inform upon the other. In the end, Dussander has a heart attack and is recognized by a man who had been incarcerated at the death camp where he was commandant. After this truth about Dussander hits the news, Todd is visited by the school counselor Dussander helped him fool. Todd kills the man before retreating to a tree above a nearby highway, where he fires upon cars passing below for hours before police sharpshooters take him down.
Like Rage (1977), one of the half-dozen novels King wrote under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, Apt Pupil depicts harrowing behavior by a high school student. In a time today when such events have become all too common in real life, we are greatly sensitized to such things. It would be easy to allow those depictions—though in the case of Apt Pupil, the story is far more complex than the acts of violence themselves—to overshadow the stories that King is telling, and the themes that lie therein. There is rage in many young people. But what causes them to turn to violence, even murder? There is no single answer.
In the case of Apt Pupil, it seems clear that Todd Bowden is genuinely a bad seed, a mind ripe for twisting. It may be that evil lurks in him the way it lingers in the Marsten House in ’Salem’s Lot (1975). In any case, however, he is evil, not merely misguided or disturbed or misunderstood, as it appears he may be at the outset. It is unusual in a King book for a mere human being to be so unrepentantly sinister, but that is the exploratory nature of this narrative.
APT PUPIL: PRIMARY SUBJECTS
TODD BOWDEN: A high school student in California, Todd discovers that Nazi death camp commander Kurt Dussander is living in his hometown under an assumed name. Already obsessed with the Holocaust, Todd blackmails Dussander into sharing his horrifying memories, and the two enter into a symbiotic relationship that leads them each to commit murder. After Dussander’s death, Todd takes a rifle up into a tree overlooking the highway and fires at cars passing below. He is killed by police sharpshooters.
ARTHUR DENKER (a.k.a. KURT DUSSANDER): Under the Denker alias, Kurt Dussander has created a new life for himself in America after having spent years as a death camp commander in Nazi Germany. When Todd Bowden discovers his identity, Dussander must confront a past he has tried to escape. In doing so, he finds himself almost compelled to commit more atrocities. After a heart attack, he is hospitalized and shares a room with a survivor of the camp, who recognizes him and turns him in. Dussander commits suicide in the hospital.
EDWARD FRENCH: As Todd Bowden’s guidance counselor, Mr. French is taken in by a ruse played out by Todd and Dussander. When Todd’s grades are falling, Dussander pretends to be Todd’s grandfather and speaks to French on Todd’s behalf. When Dussander dies, French realizes the deception, and would have revealed the truth if Todd had not murdered him first.
MORRIS HEISEL: A survivor of the Nazi death camps, he recognizes his one-time tormentor Dussander when he sees him in the hospital.
Morris Heisel’s current whereabouts are unknown.
The Breathing Method
It is appropriate that The Breathing Method is dedicated to Peter Straub and his wife, Susan, since the fundamental conceit owes so much to Straub. Like the Chowder Society in Straub’s masterpiece, Ghost Story (1979), King introduces here a men’s club dedicated to the telling of tales. On the wall is a plaque: IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.
However, King has put his own imprint on this premise. In the club’s library, there are volumes of masterful prose and poetry on the shelves by writers the narrator has never heard of, published by houses that don’t exist. The building itself, an old brownstone located at 249B East Thirty-fourth Street, seems to have endless rooms in which people have been known to become lost forever. And the butler, the de facto host of the club, is named Stevens, perhaps after King himself.
Are those rooms pathways into other dimensions? Perhaps. Is each door a “thinny,” as the term is introduced in the Dark Tower series (1982–2004)? That seems likely. Suffice it to say that the club itself is a setting in which King could set a great many of his own tales. In addition to The Breathing Method, there is at least one other tale in which King did just that, called “The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands.”
Here, however, we are introduced to a man named David Adley, who has achieved moderate success in his firm, but feels he will rise no further. When his boss invites him to the club, he thinks it may be a step up. On that count, he is disappointed. Instead, however, Adley is drawn into the enigmatic group of men who gather at the club to tell stories around the fire. Though at Christmas there is always a “weird tale,” the stories are not usually sinister, or even supernatural.
On the other hand, there is the tale related by Dr. Emlyn McCarron: the narrative of Sandra Stansfield and “the Breathing Method.” It is telling to note that thus far this is the one piece in this collection that has not been filmed. Nor is it likely to be, given the hideousness of the conclusion, in which a woman who has been decapitated continues to breathe for many minutes in order to give birth to her child.
It seems likely that King will revisit the club in the future. As Stevens says, “There are always more tales.”
THE BREATHING METHOD: PRIMARY SUBJECTS
DAVID ADLEY: Adley is a moderately successful lawyer who becomes a member of the club after being invited there by a senior partner at his firm. The club has been an endless source of fascination for Adley in the years since he first passed through its doors.
EMLYN McCARRON: A doctor and member of the club. One night, he relates his experiences with Sandra Stansfield, a young, single woman who had become pregnant, and whom he had taught “the Breathing Method,” a practice that was much maligned in its time, but that Dr. McCarron heartily endorsed.
Though retired, it is presumed that Dr. McCarron is still a member of the club.
SANDRA STANSFIELD: A young, single woman, she becomes pregnant by a man who deserts her, and seeks Dr. McCarron’s help in delivering her child. When she comes to term and is about to deliver, she rushes to the hospital in a taxi. The cab is involved in a car accident, and Sandra is decapitated. Somehow she continues to breathe through her severed windpipe for the duration of time it takes Dr. McCarron to safely deliver her child, and then she dies.
STEVENS: The butler at the club. It is presumed that he still holds that position; he may, in fact, hold it forever.
[NOTE: The novellas Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and The Body are discussed in the sections on Jerusalem’s Lot and Kin
g’s Maine, and Castle Rock, respectively.]
Outside King’s high school DAVID LOWELL
DIFFERENT SEASONS: ADAPTATIONS
Of the four tales collected in Different Seasons, three have been made into films. The first of these, Stand by Me (based on The Body), was released by Columbia Pictures in 1986. (See The Prime Reality, Part Two: Castle Rock.)
The Shawshank Redemption, which dropped off the Rita Hayworth and … part of its literary title for the screen adaptation, was adapted and directed by Frank Darabont (who would later do the same for 1999’s The Green Mile). (See The Prime Reality, Part Three: Jerusalem’s Lot and King’s Maine.)
Finally, there’s the dark one. If Stand by Me is about hope, and The Shawshank Redemption is about the triumph of the spirit, then Apt Pupil is the antithesis of both films. A TriStar picture, starring Ian McKellen as Dussander and Brad Renfro as Todd Bowden, this 1998 drama was directed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects). Though there are a number of major differences between the text and the screen adaptation (primarily in the number of murders committed by each character), the essence of it remains the same.
A notable exception is its ending. Rather than send Todd up into a tree to shoot at passing cars until he himself is shot down, director Singer shows Todd mentally intimidating the one man who can reveal his secret, threatening to destroy him with rumor and innuendo. As depicted on screen, Todd is much more consciously evil, in his way, than in the book. This switch, while making the ending less brutal, perhaps, achieves the impossible: it also makes the ending even darker.
It may be that the critical success of these three films has lent itself to the growing perception—as noted earlier—of Different Seasons as a seminal work in King’s career.
DIFFERENT SEASONS: TRIVIA
• Kurt Dussander, in his Arthur Denker identity, had made quite a bit of money from a stock portfolio set up for him by Andy Dufresne.
• In Apt Pupil, Ed French goes to a conference and stays at a Holiday Inn, in Room 217. That’s the number of the room where the ghost of an old woman tries to kill Danny Torrance at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
• Although the town of Derry was not prominent in King’s fictional landscape at the time, it is mentioned in The Body, as are Jerusalem’s Lot and Shawshank penitentiary.
• The Body features many references to Constable Bannerman, who would, in such later works as The Dead Zone (1979) and Cujo (1981), become Sheriff Bannerman.
• The narrator of The Body refers to the events of Cujo.
• Before the 1998 screen version, an earlier adaptation of Apt Pupil was planned and even began filming, with NYPD Blue’s Rick Schroder as Todd Bowden, and Excalibur’s Nicol Williamson as Dussander. The film was abandoned partway through, due to a collapse in funding.
• Frank Darabont, writer/director of the film adaptations of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, had done an earlier King adaptation as well—a student film version of King’s short story “The Woman in the Room,” for which King gave him permission.
• It seems quite possible that Peter Stevens, the assumed name Andy DuFresne uses in Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, is a combination of the names of the author and his good friend, novelist Peter Straub.
• The brownstone where men gather to tell stories in The Breathing Method is also the setting for the short story “The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands,” which was included in King’s collection Skeleton Crew.
42
CHRISTINE
(1983)
The classic love affair, we all know, is boy meets girl, boy gets girl, and so often, boy loses girl. But in America, and in today’s popular culture, there’s a common variation on that theme: Boy sees car, boy buys car, boy falls in love with car, and they live happily ever after to a rock ’n’ roll sound-track. Oddly enough, in the mythology of twentieth-century America, men can rely far more on their automobiles than they can on true love with a living, breathing human being.
In Christine, King takes that bizarre notion and twists it to the heights of perversity. Published in 1983, it is a novel of obsessions and hauntings, of teenage lust and high school angst. If this storyline were pitched in Hollywood, it would be Carrie meets The Shining … with cars.
Cars are everywhere in the book. To nearly everyone in this story—save for its protagonist and narrator, Dennis Guilder—cars are vitally important. It’s a wonder that the plot line is set in the Pittsburgh suburb of Libertyville, instead of somewhere outside of Detroit.
King grew up in New England in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A flashy car was everything to a teenage boy then. It still is, though other things have since become almost as crucial. So there’s no surprise that the status symbol all the guys in the story—teenagers and their elders alike—covet most is a fine automobile.
The exception, as noted, is Dennis Guilder. He is sufficiently mature to look askance at this kind of posturing. Unfortunately, his best friend, Arnie Cunningham, not only partakes of this, but embraces it. Arnie becomes a contorted funhouse-mirror image of what the average American male’s obsession with cars looks like to someone who doesn’t share that passion.
On the other hand, it isn’t really Arnie’s fault. He’s a lonely, pimply-faced kid, lusting after the smart, pretty girl in school who he thinks barely notices him. His best friend is a handsome jock, and he’s just the forlorn sidekick.
Until he meets Christine, a 1958 red Plymouth Fury. In reality, she’s a pile of junk, but she calls out to him, seduces him in a sense. He can see in her a vision of what she should be, and buys her in order to restore that beauty. Arnie believes, in his secret heart, that he also has that beauty and specialness within himself, and he sees restoring Christine as a way to bring it out.
Well, we know where that leads.
Christine isn’t your average automobile. She’s possessed by the corrupt spirit of her first owner, Roland LeBay. He’s a vicious SOB, and he plays Arnie wonderfully, manipulating him until his insecurities have made him so desperate and cruel that he almost becomes evil himself. Fortunately, Arnie is eventually redeemed. Sadly, it comes too late.
Cars. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.
Christine is also, perhaps more than any other of King’s works, the author’s paean to rock music. As a musician and radio station owner himself, there’s no doubt that music is important to him. Here, King puts it in perspective as part of the high school experience. Each chapter begins with a quote from a classic rock song. More than that, however, when Christine (or, more accurately, the ghost of Roland LeBay) goes out on the prowl to punish those who’ve wronged Arnie, the music pouring from the car’s speakers is the music of the period in which the auto was built.
That element of the story is also present in King’s masterpiece of a haunting, The Shining (1977). Like the malevolent auto in Christine, the Overlook Hotel of The Shining (and, let us not forget, the Marsten House of 1975’s ’Salem’s Lot) is not only inhabited by the spirits of the damned, but in a real, tangible way, possessed by some other, greater, more distinct evil. In Christine, it is never truly elaborated on. In The Shining, however, we actually see the evil rising in the fire cloud above the exploding hotel.
All three King novels present their malignancy as a collaboration between seemingly ancient, preternatural evil and simple human cruelty and corruption. The lingering malignancy is created, in all three cases, by that collaboration of ethereal malevolence, human weakness, and, interestingly, the creations of humanity: a car, a house, a hotel. This combination recurs frequently within King’s work, where events conspire to make an object the focus of both mortal and immortal evil.
Further, in all three cases, the human weakness on display generally plays itself out in the form of obsession. Arnie Cunningham’s fixation on Christine. Jack Torrance’s mania with the hotel, his job, and the play he’s trying to write. Ben Mears’s preoccupation with the Marsten House. (Of course, in the lat
ter case, Ben turned his obsession to positive action, rather than descending into insanity, as do Arnie and Jack.)
Yet another similarity is that each of these characters’ obsessions reflects, in some way, the warped passion of a predecessor. Arnie takes the place of Roland LeBay. Jack takes the place of Delbert Grady, former caretaker of the hotel, who murdered his entire family with an ax. Both of them still exist as ghosts within the respective man-made hosts. In the third case, things are different. Ben Mears does not replace Hubie Marsten, the obsessed, evil man who killed his wife and himself in his home. Rather, he sets himself against Marsten’s heinous legacy.
Another element that is prevalent throughout Christine is that of the horrors of high school. Arnie is a loser on the scale of the title character in Carrie, and suffers many of the same injustices from his peers. Like Carrie’s callous tormentors, Christine’s Buddy Repperton and his cronies represent the worst that high school has to offer. In both novels, the cruelty of the teens feeds into the seemingly inescapable horrors that occur at the climax of each book.
With its mix of pop culture and King’s special brand of evil, Christine is a classic American ghost story.
CHRISTINE: PRIMARY SUBJECTS
The Complete Stephen King Universe Page 35