Christine Recaps: Part Three
by thethreepennyguignol
It’s April Fool’s Day, my friends, but I promise I am not kidding about getting down to another Christine recap! I’m genuinely really enjoying the book so far, not least because I finally found an excuse to actually sit down and listen to all these songs as I get to recappin’ – which brings me to the start of the next chapter, chapter six, and Partytown by Glenn Frey.
We pick up where we left off at the end of the last recap, as Arnie and Dennis leave the autoshop after a clash with the owner. Arnie, to Dennis complete lack of surprise, ends up in tears over the incident – but soon, it’s clear he’s not just sad about the encounter. He’s angry.
“I’ll get them!” he shouted thickly through sobs. “I’ll get those fucking sons of bitches I’ll get them Dennis. I’ll make them sorry…I’ll make those fuckers eat it!”
“Stop it,” I said, scared. “Arnie, quit it.””
This is such an interesting scene, for so many reasons, most of them Dennis’ reaction. At first, he’s obviously disturbed by Arnie’s high emotions, wishing at first that he was somewhere else – and, then, in contrast to the last couple of chapters “wishing I was older. Wishing that we were both older”. After so much of the previous chapters being dedicated to Dennis’ fear of ageing and the imminent arrival of his burgeoning adulthood, it’s fascinating to see his ultimate response to Arnie’s emotion here be a wish that they’re both older – it’s not really explained why he feels that why, but I’m guessing he believes he’d be more equipped to handle this confusing, intense emotion if he had a few more years behind him. He wants to be older to better care for Arnie in his time of need, but, in the circumstances, he does what he’s able to:
“Reluctantly, not wanting to, I slid across the seat and put my arms around him and held him. I could feel his face, hot and fevered, mashed against my chest…neither of us talked about it later, me holding him like that…I sat there and held him and loved him as best I could.”
This is an almost shockingly sweet and emotional response from Dennis to his friend’s distress, a surprisingly intimate moment (that Dennis acknowledges would likely have been viewed as “a couple of queers” if someone had seen them in this embrace) that we haven’t really seen a lot of from Dennis before. I wrote a bit in the first recap about how these intense teenage friendships often blur the line between platonic and romantic, and this, right here, is a perfect example of that. Christine as a book is often seen as a love story between Christine and Arnie, but I think, most importantly, it’s a love story between Arnie and Dennis, a story of two teenage boys who really do care deeply for each other, navigating their care for each other in a world that’s extremely suspicious of this kind of affection (regardless of the intent behind it) between two men.
Dennis drops Arnie off at home afterwards, where his parents are pissed at his lateness; it’s an obvious contrast between Dennis’ tenderness towards him and his parents anger, and it brings us to the end of this short chapter. Chapter seven begins with Bo Diddley’s Roadrunner, which is, unrelentingly, a banger:
Dennis heads home, and we meet his family for the first time, with a particular focus on his fourteen-year-old sister Elaine, who once scratched him so badly after he called John Travolta “John Revolta” that he needed stitches. She’s my new favourite character. She idly refers to Arnie as a creep when Dennis explains where he’s been, which angers Dennis:
“His tears were still drying on the front of my shirt, for Christ’s sake, and maybe I felt a little bit creepy myself.”
Again, and I’m not trying to bang this drum more than it needs to be banged (because Stephen King is doing a good enough job in these chapters as is), but there’s such an intimacy between Arnie and Dennis here that I find so intriguing. We haven’t even met Dennis’ girlfriend yet, and he’s talking about Arnie’s tears on his chest: this is the primary relationship in his life, and there’s no doubt about it. Something that will make Christine’s enroachment on to his territory even more impactful later in the book.
We meet Arnie’s father and his mother in absentia, as she’s in attendance at a creative writing class where she creates short stories about young girls saving their virginities for marriage (interesting, given Dennis’ previous discussions of the large amounts of pre-marital sex he’s been having with his girlfriend). It’s clear Dennis has a good relationship with his parents, even though he finds his mother’s writing endeavours exceptionally funny (and admits that he and his father are both “sexist pigs” for laughing about it, so, I guess, at least we’ve got that). Stephen King nearly makes it to the end of a chapter featuring a teenage girl without mentioning her breasts, but he does squeeze in one remark about Dennis being uncomfortable hugging his sister since her boobs started to come in, so, you know. I live in hope, right?
Dennis ponders a little more on Christine and Arnie as he lays in bed that night, and his jealousy about their newfound relationship is clear:
“…he had been like a man who meets a showgirl, indulges in a whirlwind courtship, and ends up with a hangover and a new wife on Monday morning…I didn’t like it, and I didn’t know why.”
This unease carries over into Dennis’ dreams, where he dreams of a pristine Christine (try saying that five times fast) inviting him in for a ride. When he declines, she makes her move:
“There is a terrible scream of rubber kissing off concrete and Christine lunges out at me, her grille snarling like an open mouth full of chrome teeth, her headlights glaring-“
We’re not into the fully-fledged horror of the book yet, but this is a little hint of what is to come with Christine, and how King uses her as a horror villain. I really enjoy the blending of the mechanical and the supernatural, and it’s a hard thing to do well – M3GAN and the 2022 Hellraiser had some great examples, off the top of my head in recent horror memory – but Christine is an impeccable example of that, proof of how a great horror writer can turn even the most normal, day-to-day details of an object into something terrifying and animalistic.
Dennis’ parents and sister awake to comfort him, another scene underlining how close he is with them – and how comfortably he falls into the childlike state he longed to hang on to in the previous chapters when it comes to being comforted by his parents after a bad dream: “for the first spinning moment or two, I hadn’t even been sure if I was big or little”. Home is where his childhood is, and, for now, Dennis wants (for the most part) to hang on to that childhood with everything he’s got.
That brings us to the next chapter, and the next song:
Dennis spends the following Saturday expecting Arnie to turn up – but, to his surprise, there’s no sign of him. No, he’s off working on that “baggy old whore” (a turn of phrase that I shall be printing on a t-shirt for me and all my closest female friends) Christine, which leads Dennis to ponder “goddammit, was I jealous? Was that what it was?”. The answer to which, of course, is: yes, Dennis, you are incredibly jealous of your best friend’s new romance with his hot twenty-something Plymouth Fury. A phase all teenagers go through, trust me.
Eventually, the next day, Arnie turns up to interrupt Dennis and his sister playing croquet (his sister Elaine, it turns out, is very into talking about her period, having only started getting it about a year ago, and let me tell you, this is not something I ever grew out of, still whining about my monthlies every time they have the temerity to happen again). Arnie cracks a joke about Elaine calling him a man, which delights Dennis:
“I don’t think anyone really saw that wit except me…I could understand the attraction of knowing about something good…something good that was still a secret.”
*looks pointedly* I promise I didn’t just hold off on these chapters till now to cluster together all the Dennis and Arnie Grand Love Affair Romance of the Century, but damn, Dennis just cannot stop talking with a starry-eyed adoration about his Very Platonic Friend Arnie in these chapters and how he wants to keep him all to himself! To be clear, I don’t think there’s an intentional gay overtone in these chapters, but God, if this doesn’t remind me of being a closeted teenager in total denial who was Just Really Close with that one female friend I didn’t want anyone else talking to, you know?
Anyway, Dennis also notes that Arnie’s skin is improving, something I want you to keep in mind for later in the book, because it’s going to be relevant in a few chapters time. Dennis and Arnie agree to go to the movies together, but it turns out that’s the last they’ll see of each other in a while – Dennis, because he’s getting in and about a new love interest, and Arnie, well, for the same reason. It’s just that his love interest happens to be a car.
And that brings us to the end of the chapter! I’m still really enjoying Christine, but I’m ready for some of the real horror to start hitting here. Tune in next time for some more monster motor mayhem (and probably some pseudo-romantic subtext).
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