And it’s a John Carpenter movie, so you know there’s sinister things and awesome effects about to go down. After all, Stephen King wrote the novel, so you know there’s some malevolence going on.
On the downside, Dennis gets injured in a football game and winds up in the hospital for a month. Real tragedy strikes when Buddy and his friends break into Darnell’s one night and trash Christine. And they don’t just bang her up and break a few windows, it looks like a giant hand came down and crushed the car like an empty beer can.Īrnie freaks out, naturally, but Christine has a secret that even Arnie didn’t know about until then. Things seem to be going pretty well for Arnie after that. He has an amazing car that he pretty much built himself, he’s been hired by Will Darnell to do odd jobs and make deliveries for him, and now he’s dating the newest student, Leigh Cabot. Arnie takes it to Darnell’s, a local do-it-yourself garage, where he is able to raid the junkyard for parts, and soon has Christine looking just as good as she did the day she rolled off the assembly line. We find these totems in our lives and we personalize them so they feel more real to us, so we feel as if we have a companion in our loneliness. I’ve never named a car, but I name all of my guitars, so when I pick one up and play it, I’m not holding a piece of wood, I’m holding a friend. While I’m not very good at playing them, there’s a symbiosis that happens there, and I believe it’s this personification that helps make that possible.ĬHRISTINE is the story of nerdy Arnie Cunningham, a high school senior in 1978, whose best friend Dennis Guilder drives by a house on the way home from the first day of school (a day which started with Arnie being cornered in the school auto shop by bully Buddy Repperton, leading to Buddy’s expulsion) and Arnie spies a for sale sign on a junked out heap of red that doesn’t appear to be worth the $250 George LeBay is selling it for, a 1958 Plymouth Fury. But love at first sight is a real thing, and that’s what happens with Arnie. The car, LeBay tells him, belonged to George’s brother, Roland, the only thing he ever loved in his life, and its name is Christine.Īrnie’s parents are very controlling, and they refuse to let him keep the lemon in their driveway.
While I’m not a car person, the themes found in John Carpenter’s 1983 adaptation of the Stephen King novel CHRISTINE can be relevant to anyone. The idea of feeling slightly out of the loop of regular life, of feeling even the smallest bit outcast from those around you, sometimes you just need to find that one thing to grasp that makes you feel good about being who you are, that one instance of unconditional acceptance.
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