With the upcoming remake of Carrie hitting cinema screens in a couple of weeks, it seems like a good time for The Truth Inside The Lie to turn its attentions toward the novel and the first movie (and to the "sequel" and the first remake, as well).
Thing is, I just don't have time to do it. So instead, I'm going to do something a little on the lazy side, and a little on the fun side, and a lot on the "nobody is actually going to want to read this, but the hell with it, post it anyways" side.
In the early years of the century, back when I was trying to figure out What I Want(ed) To Do With My Life, a pet project continually popped into my head: I wanted to write a definitive book about the work of Stephen King. It was hubris for me to believe that I had the capability to do so, but that's okay; I eventually disabused myself not only of that particular notion, but also of the notion that that was even something I ought to be aiming for. Eventually, I decided that maybe a more achievable -- and an altogether more appealing -- goal might be for me to simply work toward creating some sort of a definitive statement on the subject of how I perceive the books of Mr. King. It seems like only a slight difference, but it's a crucial one, and the difference is vast. The book I had in mind initially would have been the sort of semi-dry critical tome that gets published by a university press and has all the hallmarks of academia; and also has pretension toward universality.
Critical works of that sort tend to talk TO you, not with you; I was still close enough to college to feel that that was a goal worth aiming for, and so that's the sort of thing that was in my mind.
I had a lot of ideas along those lines; the Stephen King one was merely one. But I'm great at managing to not actually follow through on any of my best ideas, and so the first few years of the century saw me in prime "I'll work on that next year" mode. Circa 2002, though, I decided that the time had come to at least put a few tentative steps forward. So I grabbed a copy of Carrie (feeling that it was best to start at the beginning), reread it, and then re-reread it, highlighting passages that seemed interesting and taking notes on the various things that interested me.
I followed that with similar viewings of the three movies (the 1976 original, The Rage: Carrie 2, and the recently-aired 2002 television remake), which I considered in turn.
So what I'm going to present here is the set of notes I typed up on all of this once I was finished. There's a pretty good bit of it, especially on the novel, and I'm going to just put it all up, warts and all. Revising it would sort of defeat the purpose, and anyways, like I said, I don't really have the time for it.
Looking at it, though, reminds me of how much I enjoyed that initial foray. I'd done plenty of critical writing before, virtually all of it for one class assignment or another; when I began, I wasn't sure I'd have anything to say about Carrie, so when it turned out that not only did I have things to say, but that I had a LOT of things to say, I got a real rush out of it. I had a hell of a lot of fun sitting there with a yellow highlighter and a red pen, making little observations that I later turned into bigger ones, which I in turn intended to edit into an essay of maybe ten pages in length (more, if you count the movies).
The latter part of that never happened. I took three runs at it, and one of them actually ended up being about ten pages. There is good stuff in it, but it's also, to be blunt, not what I wanted it to be.
And so I gave up. I just gave up totally on the whole thing.
I always regretted that. I kept that regret in mind, too; this was active regret, not the kind you bury and forget. Whereas I didn't keep the critical-analysis end of things going, I did keep the chronological reread of King's work going, though. It was slower than I might have liked, but it was a 2-3 books per year thing, at least. By the time I got to Misery, I was in the mood to revisit my idea for writing some sort of large-scale critical work on King.
That's what led to the creation of this blog, which in turn explains why Misery was the first book I tackled as a blogger. I didn't do so as in-depth as I'd done with Carrie years earlier; I was a bit too rusty to do so, and it's also such a time-consuming process that I decided to try and meet myself in the middle, and be expansive, but in a restricted sense.
The tension between those two modes is, in some ways, what this blog is all about. It's a question. A series of them, really; questions I'm posing to myself on a constant basis. What do I want to do? What can I do? What should I do? How long can I spend on this? If I spend less, am I cheating myself? If I spend more, am I being self-indulgent? I'm good at posing them, and I'm decent at answering them; I'm lousy at sticking to the answers once the answers have been given. But this blog is also about trying to teach myself to be disciplined enough to solve those always-present problems.
And in looking back on the notes I took over a decade ago, I am amused to discover that the subtext reveals something: I was already, even then, a lot less interested in the idea of writing from a standpoint of critical universality than I was in simply expressing what interested me.
It's the right approach. I guess it just took a while for me to actually figure out that it was right.
With that messy, self-important, and -- let's face facts -- largely incoherent preamble out of the way, let's just dive into the notes. The notes were taken in the 1999 trade paperback from Pocket Books, the cover of which looks like this:
All page-number references in the notes will refer to this edition. For any of you following along at home, I apologize in advance for the fact that the page numbers may not match your edition.
