Christine (1983)

Dir: JOHN CARPENTER
Country: USA

aka:
John Carpenter's Christine

The 1970’s had seen a number of films responding in a most conservative fashion to progressions in technology. Like the revolt of nature film which saw the natural world decide it had had enough of humanity, technology was positioned as something that could achieve autonomy, to have a sentience and a will of its own that was dedicated to the destruction of mankind. Carpenter’s film feeds into this strain and builds upon the rather vacuous earlier killer car effort The Car (1977). In that film the vehicles sentience is painted in purely supernatural terms, whereas Carpenter opts to totally remove any sense of the supernatural from his film. The car is alive, can drive around on its own, can regenerate itself, has feelings of love, jealousy, and vengeance and is able to act on these feelings. We aren’t really given an explanation of this - it just does! Depending on your outlook this is either the films major weakness or its great strength.

The film opens with a rather stylishly mounted prologue sequence set in a Detroit car factory in 1957. We see Christine for the first time, a blood red Plymouth Fury…and fury is the operative word. Right from the off Christine has a bad attitude, crushing one mechanics hand under the bonnet, and killing another for flicking cigar ash onto the brand new leather upholstery. Christine is a car with very little tolerance or patience. The novel was essentially a love triangle played out in the same kind of high school environment that King had so evocatively rendered in his debut novel Carrie (1974). Unfortunately the love triangle doesn’t come across as effectively here, largely because the characters in the film rarely rise above the level of stereotype. The initial protagonist is Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon), a nerd simply because he wears glasses. Once he dispenses with the spectacles and dons a leather jacket, he is suddenly irresistible to the school babe Leigh Cabot (Alexandra Paul). Cunningham’s transformation from geekdom to chicdom takes place largely off screen, as does his burgeoning romance with his car. This is a major structural fault because it allows for little exploration of motivation. The book is implicitly concerned with this change in Arnie. Carpenter instead is more concerned with showing Christine mowing down the bad bastards who smashed her up and defecated on her dashboard.



The stock characters begin to build up - a jock with a heart of gold, the bookish love interest, the switchblade pulling school bully, the liberal parents, the down at heel detective. The characters that had such life and depth in the novel are two dimensional and predictable here - and after all this is a 1980’s horror film that is unusually reliant on characters. It as if Carpenter doesn’t realise the importance, and ultimately insults the audience with trite dialogue and mind numbing predictability. The man who was able to radically re-structure tired genres in films such as Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), and Escape from New York (1981) appears to have fallen asleep with this one. He and his collaborators concocting a narrative with all the stylistic grace of a Skoda.

Arnie actually undergoes two transformations in the novel. The other is into the previous owner Lebay, and although Arnie does begin to speak the same lingo as Lebay, this is another undercooked avenue. The Bill Phillips screenplay has attempted to throw as much of the novel in as it can within the allotted screen time, the result are plot developments that go nowhere and confusing character traits that remain unexplained and unanswered. Whilst the motor car initially offers Arnie the freedom and liberation seen in American Graffiti (1973), ultimately it controls, dominates and owns him. The motor car here is a metaphor for social control. Arnie swaps one form of subjugation (his parents) for another. I suppose one could say this is a subversive statement in a film culture that has seen motor vehicles as conduits to freedom and to the realisation of the American Dream.

From a stylistic point of view this is one of Carpenters flattest and least appealing films to look at. The use of framing is less sophisticated than in earlier productions, and DOP Donald M. Morgan fails to achieve the look that Dean Cundey had brought to earlier Carpenter films. There are one or two nice visual effects, but this has to rate as one of Carpenter’s least cinematic films. The one area the film does succeed very well in is its soundtrack. The use of 1950’s pop songs, but covered for a 1978 milieu is very effective, and Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s synthesised offerings are perhaps the only thing to remind us that this is a John Carpenter film after all.

© Shaun Anderson 2010