The Cutprice Guignol

Happy holidays, to those who celebrate, and to those who don’t, just a bloody good December. My gift to you? A new Christine recap. Only slightly late. You’re so welcome.

We pick up with Leigh and Arnie getting hot and heavy in Christine, with some Chuck Berry as our soundtrack for this chapter:

And getting hot and heavy things are, as Arnie ponders on the majesty of going through the bases with Leigh:

“He kissed her and his mouth opened wide, her tongue was there, and the kiss was like inhaling the clean aroma of the rainforest. He could feel the excitement and arousal coming off her like a glow…”

And, yeah, I have to give it to Stephen King here, this is pretty much what it felt like the first time a girl let her put my hand up her shirt, so fair enough. But, before things can go any further, Leigh suddenly climbs out of the car and rushes to the edge of the embankment they’ve driven to. When Arnie follows her, he realizes she’s crying – at first, he’s worried he’s pushed her to do something she didn’t want to do, but she assures him it’s nothing to do with him.

“In this car!” she shouted at him suddenly. “I can’t make love to you in this car!””

This catches Arnie off-guard, and Leigh soon poses a question: as to whether he likes Christine or her more. Arnie protests this as ridiculous:

“I thought girls were meant to be jealous of other girls, not cars.”

“Cars are girls.””

It’s not exactly a subtle moment, but it’s in-line with the psychosexual relationship Arnie has formed with Christine – it’s impossible even for Leigh to ignore Arnie’s attachment to the car. After a brief moment of tension, they reconcile, and they drive back into town, where we get Leigh’s perspective on matters.

Aside from a mild moment of misunderstanding about how female arousal works (no, Stephen, women don’t get sore breasts when they’re sexually unsatisfied – what is this, blue books?), Leigh ponders on her jealousy about Arnie’s relationship with Christine.

This is a really interesting aspect of the story – the woman who Arnie loves, coming up against the car who has obsessed him. To have sex with him in Christine would be to “like making love in the body of her rival”, and she finds herself wishing that the car would fall into some accident, just to get rid of it. She hates Christine, in a way that’s foreign to her, not like that of her feelings towards her family car or any other she’s encountered. More than that, she hates how Arnie is when he’s in the car – how lecherous he feels, compared to the boy she’s fallen for. As though the stain of the man who came before is still all over Christine – Leigh, though she would never say it to Arnie, feels like it stinks of something that died in there.

Leigh apologizes to Arnie at the door and tells him she loves him when they say goodbye, and he heads back to Christine, confused. Only to find, of course, that Christine has stalled. Almost like she’s pouting after what she saw Leigh and Arnie share, it takes Arnie sweet-talking her and calling her pet names to get her moving again, and, when he’s on the road, he finds himself reflecting on his relationship with Leigh.

“She couldn’t understand that he sometimes felt thirty years older than his age – no, fifty! – and not a boy at all but some terribly hurt veteran back from an undeclared war.”

I found this a really interesting point of comparison to Dennis, and his absolute terror in the face of aging – for Arnie, that fear doesn’t exist in the same way, because he feels like it’s already happened. Seemingly entering some sort of fugue state, Arnie cruises up to the airport, with no memory of driving there – and it brings to mind the discomforting truth of his restoration of Christine.

Because Arnie didn’t restore Christine. At least, he doesn’t remember doing it – “all he could remember for sure was sitting behind the wheel for long periods, stupefied with happiness…feeling the way he had felt when Leigh had whispered “I love you”.” It’s not exactly a surprise to find out that there was some less-than-explicable involvement in Christine’s restoration, but what’s even more compelling is that he compares his relationship to Christine to this profound moment in his romance with Leigh – further drawing the parallels between them. Maybe Leigh’s right to be jealous.

Next up, Woody Guthrie:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/jmcrlvNPTJw?si=9COhwUOCUZqg_JZK

– and our next chapter, which opens on Leigh having a profoundly strange dream. Which is definitely a dream, by the way. Because there’s no other explanation as to how a driverless Christine could have pulled up outside her house, communicated with her physically, and then driven off when Leigh told her to leave, right? I love the way King develops this rivalry between Leigh and Christine, and the way it gives such shape to Christine’s character – she’s this older, experienced woman, chasing off the young tail that Arnie is bringing around, and she’s not afraid to pull out all the stops to make it happen.

Leigh dreams of a trip to a department store with her mother as a child, and, when she wakes up, it’s warmed up enough that the snow which would have held Christine’s tracks has melted, leaving no proof of her presence – in dreams or otherwise.

After that short chapter, we have some Bruce Springsteen, and a trip to the airport, where we check back in with Buddy Repperton, who was expelled after assaulting Arnie.

Sneaking around after hours at the airport, Buddy and some friends drink, snort coke, and, it’s implied, do some serious to damage to Christine. Which I’m sure won’t come back to haunt them in any meaningful way. This is a Stephen King book, after all – nobody has to pay for their actions in some thematically-appropriate yet horrifying way, right?

Anyway. With that quick chapter behind us, we carry on with Nervous Norvus (potentially the greatest name any musician ever coined for themselves), and Arnie and Leigh heading down the airport to pick up Christine.

We’re in Leigh’s point of view, as she and Arnie travel from school to the airport on a bus – she’s on her period, which she describes as “usually depressing and almost always painful”, which is…not infeasible, I guess? Call me overly sensitive to the accurate depiction periods in King’s work after Carrie, but it’s just a bit off to me. Anyway!

Leigh is utterly enamoured with Arnie, reflecting on her previous dalliances with romance, and affirming that he’s truly the only man she’s ever loved – and that her “occasional unease” with him and Christine plays a part in that feeling. I like this detail a lot, in terms of the teenage romance King is conjuring here – there’s something as exhilarating as there is terrifying in allowing your to be seen by someone in the way that falling in love forces from you, and Leigh’s unease about the kind of man she has fallen for makes sense in that context. She wonders, briefly, if it’s possible for her to love Arnie fully – if it’s something he will even allow, with his attentions so focused on Christine.

And the kind of man she has fallen for, it seems, is one who has markedly less of a car than he did the day before. They arrive at the airport, and Arnie is horrified when he sees that Christine has been attacked. Christine is in bad shape – the windscreen’s smashed, a door is hanging off, even the needle to the speedometer is broken. Arnie is consumed with anger, especially when he sees that one of the attackers has, erm, let’s just say turned the dashboard into a litter box.

“Shitters!” Arnie cried, and his voice was not his own.”

While I think it’s obvious that the gap between LeBay and Arnie is closing quickly, in my opinion, it’s got less to do with some spirit of LeBay taking over Arnie, and more with the way Christine manipulates her owners into fulfilling the same role for her. Christine is grooming Arnie into the person she wants him to be – and, as Leigh throws up in the parking lot, she “found herself wishing that she had never met Arnie Cunningham.”

And that brings us to the end of this little block of chapters! We’re about halfway through the book now, and things are only going to get grimmer from here on out. Join me in the new year for some more vehicular violence, and have a safe and fun holiday season in the meantime!