Tag: cujo

Cujo: Eat the Rich

On By profrol1 Comment

But there’s one good thing that happens
When you toss your pearls to swine
Their attitudes may taste like shit
But go real good with wine

Aerosmith, “Eat the Rich,” 1993.

In Cujo, the materialism of the 1980s American family tears itself apart from the inside, as represented by the family dog gone mad.

Sarah Langan, “Killing Our Monsters: On Stephen King’s Magic,” LA Review of Books, July 17, 2012.

Cujo and his mindless disease-induced/rabid rage represent the materialism eating away at American families–with materialism being a form of consumption, if you will. The novel reinforces this theme in various ways, not least of which is Vic’s job at Ad Worx, which plays a central role in the plot by way of his having to leave town for work, an absence that is essential for the novel’s conceit to work, for Donna to drive out to the Cambers at all. So you–or I–could argue that if Vic hadn’t made this work trip, Tad would not have died. Which means what necessitates Vic’s work trip would also be implicated in Tad’s death, and that would be, broadly, advertising, and more specifically, an unfortunate misinterpretation of red food dye. The whole backstory necessitated by this plot device/necessity provides some interesting insights into the nature of advertising and human psychology–or more specifically the connection between these–by way of the Sharp Cereal Professor spokesperson. The importance of this figure is highlighted by the classic King tic of using a line from his own novel as an epigraph (which in the case of Cujo stands out even more since the novel only has three at the very beginning and most King novels have a lot more than that). This would be the Sharp Cereal Professor’s iconic (in the book’s world) line:

“Nope, nothing wrong here.”

One of my favorite non-King novels is Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), which has a sequence I’ve taught across the contexts of both creative-writing and composition classes. In it, an English professor named Chip Lambert is teaching the final class of a college course he calls “Consuming Narratives”:

To test his students’ mastery of the critical perspectives to which he’d introduced them, Chip was showing a video of a six-part ad campaign called “You Go, Girl.” The campaign was the work of an agency, Beat Psychology, that had also created “Howl with Rage” for G—— Electric, “Do Me Dirty” for C—— Jeans, “Total F***ing Anarchy!” for the W—— Network, “Radical Psychedelic Underground” for E——.com, and “Love & Work” for M—— Pharmaceuticals. “You Go, Girl” had had its first airing the previous fall, one episode per week, on a prime-time hospital drama. The style was black-and-white cinema verité; the content, according to analyses in the Times and the Wall Street Journal, was “revolutionary.”

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. 2001.

And “revolution,” in another context, usually involves bloodshed.

Franzen highlights the irony of the shifting meanings of “revolution” when the sequence then describes as “revolutionary” and then in detail the content of this campaign, which is “revolutionary” by way of being narrative–that is, presenting a story, in scenes, one that centers on an office employee’s fight against breast cancer with the help of a particular corporation’s software (and with the especially “revolutionary” twist that the employee dies). It’s the narrative nature that makes it more seductive: to Chip’s chagrin, the students drink its Kool-Aid in its entirety. As we discuss in my composition classes, humans are generally more vulnerable to emotional rather than logical appeals, and while narratives are expected to have “logic” in terms of their plot, what they are really vehicles for is emotion. Advertisers seem to have figured this out. Chip wants his students to see the larger narrative at hand, that of the company who has produced the ad campaign’s narrative:

“Well, consider,” [Chip] said, “that ‘You Go, Girl’ would not have been produced if W—— had not had a product to sell. And consider that the goal of the people who work at W—— is to exercise their stock options and retire at thirty-two, and that the goal of the people who own W—— stock” (Chip’s brother and sister-in-law, Gary and Caroline, owned a great deal of W—— stock) “is to build bigger houses and buy bigger SUVs and consume even more of the world’s finite resources.”

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. 2001.

This conspicuously unnamed corporation plays a larger role in Franzen’s novel, further underscoring the theme of corporate bloodshed. But it’s advertising specifically that’s implicated in the above “Consuming Narratives” sequence, and how we consume the narratives it frames to make us feel better about our consumption.

“Consumption” is also a term for tuberculosis, which perhaps most famously reveals itself when the afflicted coughs up blood. So it’s probably not a coincidence that Chip’s brother Gary, the owner of the “W—— stock” who defines himself as a “strict materialist,” suffers from what the novel presents as another disease–clinical depression.

King’s Cujo links these and other iterations of “consuming narratives,” revealing the symbolism latent in the monster figures that “consume,” like vampires and zombies. Almost all of the various editions of the novel sport cover imagery emphasizing Cujo’s teeth in a way that evokes these classic monsters: a bite from Cujo is deadly in an even more terrifying way, since it is from the real-life disease of rabies. In a word, consumption is deadly. In more words, it’s deadly in all of these connected forms: getting literally bitten, getting consumed by disease, getting consumed by the desire to consume capitalist goods as well as consuming the narratives that distract you from processing that it’s your own consumption that’s eating you alive….

…like the ouroboros.

The Zingers’ red dye’s replication of blood freaking people out enough to cause a PR crisis (while doing no actual harm in and of itself other than frightening people via the illusion of having caused harm) could highlight the blood on the hands of the advertising industry at large, which you–or I–could also argue is the grease on the wheels of capitalism, that which it could not run without. This reading highlights the parallel between consuming in the capitalist sense and…some other senses.

“Tad? You want to eat?”

“I want to take a nap,” he said around his thumb, not opening his eyes.

“You gotta feed the machine, chum,” [Donna] said.

Donna uses this “feed the machine” expression earlier in the novel in an exchange that’s explicitly connected to an advertisement for food–or an approximation thereof, which is an important distinction since the quoted slogan itself seems to reference its own lack of substance as such:

“What does the ad say? There’s Always Room for Jell-O.”

“Are you trying to make me mad, Donna? Or what?”

“No. Go on and eat. You got to feed the machine.”

When Donna says this to Tad later, her appending the “chum” label to her son after it might then be read less as a term of endearment and more as a figurative invocation of shark bait. Workers have to feed the machine of capitalism and as such function as chum–and the plot basically shows this to be true for the white-collar family of the Trentons and the blue-collar family of the Cambers.

It seems not a coincidence, then, that of the many conspiring factors that might be implicated as ultimately responsible for the death of this innocent child, a major one is a product that can be consumed via eating–specifically a sugary breakfast cereal, more specifically Red Raspberry Zingers.

The prevalence of the color red in the novel as predominantly but not exclusively connected to blood offers another potential Carrie connection….

“The first time I looked in one of those [cereal] boxes, I thought it was full of blood.”

So what does this thematic treatment of materialism eating the family alive say about the representation and role of advertising in Cujo? If advertising frequently offers us unattainable approximations of what life is supposed to be, it’s interesting that this food product offers this approximation of the literal essence of life in a way that thematically reinforces advertising as the lifeblood of our economy–despite in many ways lacking any more substance than smoke and mirrors.

King uses the food-as-blood comparison again to both reinforce this theme and create suspense via mood when a bottle of ketchup breaks in the backseat of the Pinto:

Half a bottle of Heinz had puddled out on the powder-blue pile carpeting of the hatchback. It looked as if someone had committed hara-kiri back there.

King implicitly reinforces the power of advertising in the above passage by having a brand stand in for the general name of the item. He also inverts the food-as-body matter comparison, effectively carrying through the theme:

And . . . a man like Joe Camber surely kept a gun. Maybe a whole rack of them. What pleasure it would give her to blow that fucking dog’s head to so much oatmeal and strawberry jam!

This thought of Donna’s as she debates whether it’s “worth the risk” to make a run for the Cambers’ front door could be read as reflective of the financial risks one must take to get ahead in a capitalist system. In this thematic context, Tad’s death could be read as an indictment of this system when Donna’s taking the risk does not pay off, does not save him.

Vic’s AdWorx partner Roger comes very close to articulating Cujo’s symbolic connection to the book’s consuming themes:

“Sometimes I wonder if you understand what advertising really is. It’s holding a wolf by the tail. Well, we lost our grip on this particular wolf and he’s just about to come back on us and eat us whole.”

Essayist Eula Biss has explored the layered meanings of “consumption”:

“A metaphor is all this really is,” David Graeber writes. He means consumption, which was once the name for a wasting disease, and is now the word anthropologists use for almost everything we do outside of work—eating, shopping, reading, listening to music. Consume, he notes, is from the Latin consumere, meaning “to seize or take over completely.” A person might consume food or be consumed by rage. In its earliest usage, consumption always implied destruction.

Eula Biss. Having and Being Had. 2020.

Biss gets at the contradictory dichotomy that constitutes capitalism’s dark heart in an analysis of an IKEA slogan:

But what I like, what makes me laugh a little about “for people, not consumers,” is the implication that consumers are not people.

Eula Biss. Having and Being Had. 2020.

Which brings us to one of those classic iterations of “Consuming Narratives”: zombies. If this monster is the ultimate symbol of braindead consumers pacified by mass-produced crap, as reinforced by King bestie George Romero setting his zombie-horror classic Night of the Living Dead in a shopping mall, then the advertisers might be vampires. And now the mall itself is a version of the living dead, as played upon in the 2018 South Park episode “Do You Need Puppies?” and last year’s music video for Billie Eilish’s “Therefore I Am“…

Another device in Cujo that can be read through the lens of the novel’s advertising themes is another that is directly connected to Vic’s advertising-related absence: the “Monster Words” he writes down for Tad because he won’t be there to say them to Tad before he goes to bed. Tad has the paper with him and refers to it when they’re trapped in the car. At one point, Vic has a nightmare of Tad yelling at him that the “Monster Words don’t work,” which Tad’s death at the end essentially confirms. And why should they work–Vic made them up just to give Tad peace of mind; they have no reality beyond whatever material effects Tad’s own faith in them can generate. In this sense they illuminate the overlap of the hollow and specifically narrative-based rhetoric at the heart of religion, advertising, and politics. They–or rather, their failure–also complicate a pattern established in previous King plots, the defeat of the monster requiring a head-on/face-to-face confrontation with a verbal articulation of the monster’s evil, which Donna in essence achieves with her climactic confrontation with Cujo, but which via Tad’s death is shown to be not enough. The monster has technically been defeated, but not in time.

So in class ad-man fashion, Vic has essentially sold his own son a form of narrative snake oil via these Monster Words, which really amount to the opposite of the verbal articulation element shown to be required in previous King plots (Danny Torrance’s “false face” call out)–the critical element of this articulation is defining the monster’s true nature. The Monster Words are really the opposite of the true nature, existing to convince Tad there’s not a monster in his closet when actually, the novel seems to show, there is:

And then something happened which Vic never spoke of to anyone in the rest of his life. Instead of hearing Tad’s voice in his mind he was actually hearing it, high and lonely and terrified, a going-away voice that was coming from inside the closet.”

This happens near the end of the novel as Vic is repeating some of the Monster Words to himself, and it precipitates his putting the pieces together to drive out to Joe Camber’s. In conjunction with some of the omniscient narration and the supernatural gloss on Cujo manifesting The Dead Zone‘s Frand Dodd etc. I discussed in my last post, the Monster Words seem to demonstrate that just saying something–and even believing it–is not enough to make it true.

(The horror trope of a monster coming out of the closet also hearkens back to King’s short story “The Boogeyman” from Night Shift, which points to the general problematic treatment of queerness in King’s work.)

That Vic and Roger get to keep the Sharp account seems to validate the sincerity of their advertising rhetoric, which is troublesome. This brings us to the politics connection and thus to the novel’s requisite Nixon reference:

“But isn’t that why we’ve got our asses in a crack? They wanted to believe the Sharp Cereal Professor and he let them down. Just like they wanted to believe in Nixon, and he—”

“Nixon, Nixon, Nixon!” Vic said, surprised by his own angry vehemence. “You’re getting blinded by that particular comparison, I’ve heard you make it two hundred times since this thing blew, and it doesn’t fit!”

Roger was looking at him, stunned.

“Nixon was a crook, he knew he was a crook, and he said he wasn’t a crook. The Sharp Cereal Professor said there was nothing wrong with Red Razberry Zingers and there was something wrong, but he didn’t know it.”

The “something wrong” would be that it looks like blood, or put another way, the problem is the impression it gives of causing harm even though it’s not actually causing harm other than the stress over the impression of harm… When the SC Professor apologizes, it’s not for causing any actual harm, but “because people were frightened.”

Vic highlights an epistemological crux to constitute a moral problem–Nixon knew–making the coverup conscious, not accidental, thus more malignant/amoral. This epistemological framework is reminiscent of another Biblical narrative, the origin, or Genesis narrative, which I’ve described in the past in a way that also shows it to be a “Consuming Narrative” of sorts:

…the narrative in the first book of the Bible, the aptly titled “Genesis,” when Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden and everything is perfect except for that one darn tree they’re not allowed to eat the fruit from. Then yada yada yada, the serpent tempts Eve and she eats the fruit from it and gets Adam to too, and bam, they both gain *knowledge*—illustrating how the concrete object of the fruit shows the abstract concept of a transfer of knowledge. The first way this knowledge manifests is that they become aware of their nakedness, and connected to this awareness is an immediate need to cover that nakedness, which would seem to imply that knowledge is inherently connected to shame…and of course the general suffering known as the human condition.

From here.

(Side note: A post on ‘Salem’s Lot gets at another biblical “Consuming Narrative” and its potential religious/political/advertising overlaps:

Official Catholic doctrine holds that after transubstantiation, the bread and wine have actually become Jesus’s body and blood, while my understanding is that other Christian denominations (Episcopalian, Lutheran, Presbyterian and the like) maintain that the bread and wine are merely symbols of Jesus’s body and blood. This distinction is where there seems to be the most potential for commentary via the vampiric narrative: the vampire literally drinks blood, as Catholics believe themselves to be doing during what constitutes one of their most sacred sacraments (a sacrament that demands suspension of belief in the physical senses). So it’s almost like the Catholics are using the vampire narrative as a means to figure themselves in the exact opposite role of what they really are to distract from their true nature, in a spin move reminiscent to me at the moment of (Trumpian) politics–accuse someone else of doing what you yourself have done to get the heat off you.

From here.

This would be in line with the Bernaysian rhetoric first discussed in my post on The Shining here…)

In King’s Richard Bachman novel Roadwork, set when Nixon is still President, the protagonist Barton Dawes is depicted as seeing the world through the lens of advertising and how this is also an indictment of consumption in the era of the Energy Crisis. In that novel, Dawes advances a theory that treats television and its attendant advertising as well as the unnecessary things being advertised as a version of Marx’s idea of religion being the opiate of the masses, as well as the Pavlovian dog, which might offer another way to read the figure of Cujo here….

Another iconic horror narrative that embodies our consumption-centric cultural anxieties–and one that probably largely contributes to my interpretation of the larger thematic capitalist commentary latent in Donna’s “You gotta feed the machine, chum” line–is Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. This film is also of interest to me for being part of my personal genesis narrative–this is the movie my parents saw on their first date. Except it wasn’t exactly their first date in the sense that my father did not consider it a date. They worked together and had agreed to go to another co-worker’s wedding; when this turned out to entail only a ten-minute ceremony, my father, so the story goes, felt bad and offered to take my mother to dinner and a movie. The clincher for how un-date-like my father considered this outing is marked by the story’s one surviving line of dialog, my father’s to my mother as they were eating at a Mexican restaurant before going to watch people get eaten by a shark: “You got beans in your hair, bozo.”

Of course, Spielberg’s film doesn’t really show people getting eaten in as much graphic detail as we might expect today, and it doesn’t show the shark that much either, which is considered elemental to the film’s effective development of suspense but, according to the Wikipedia page, originated from a very young and inexperienced Spielberg’s hubristic insistence on filming scenes on the actual ocean instead of a simulation of it.

I brought this up last year in a creative-writing class as an example of how obstacles can create happy accidents (the Chinese character for “crisis” and “opportunity” are the same!). Some of the students had just watched Jaws in a different class. One of these was moved to comment: “I think we can all agree, the shark looks terrible.” I had also just (re)watched the film, and was taken aback: I’d thought the shark looked pretty scary when it finally popped up up on the ship’s deck. But as it was apparently such a consensus, I didn’t even say so. That same night, my cousin-in-law who’s a few years older than me was visiting, and I mentioned that we’d been talking about Jaws in class that day. When she brought up the shark looking scary before I even told her the students thought it wasn’t, I realized the difference was generational: (elder/geriatric) millennials grew up on movies with animatronics for special effects. Kids high-school age now grew up watching Marvel movies with CGI special effects instead. I cite the Jaws example as evidence that they literally see things differently than my generation does. It’s a matter of what your neural pathways were exposed to when they were still developing, how they were, in essence trained: if you grew up on animatronics the CGI stuff looks ridiculous, and vice versa. What looks fake to one generation looks real to another….

Per Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story, narratives similarly condition our brains, which is relevant to film critic Ann Hornaday’s argument that it matters that the overwhelming majority of those in charge of the stories propagated through Hollywood movies are white males (covered in a post on King’s first published Richard Bachman novel Rage). As Matthew Salesses puts it, “The way we tell stories has real consequences on the way we interpret meaning in our everyday lives.” Put another way, the narratives we consume matter.

I essentially cover this in my college rhetoric and composition courses when we take popular culture as our theme and examine how its texts both “reflect” and “shape” our culture. One clip I use to express the principle of how “pop culture inherently normalizes things” is from the show BoJack Horseman, which mentions Ellen: “dancing Ellen makes middle America less afraid of gay people,” listed as an example of the ways this power of pop culture can be used for “good.” Ellen’s a good example of how narratives in pop culture can shift; when she used the mainstream platform of her prime-time sit-com to come out, she alienated a lot of her fan base and didn’t work for years before the culture shifted enough for her to get her daytime TV show. The narrative around how “good” Ellen is has shifted again recently in light of accusations of a toxic workplace environment on the set of this show.

But before that happened, a former student of mine at the University of Houston named Jevh made an appearance on this show, relevant through the lens of “Consuming Narratives” specifically, summed up by the show’s staff thus:

Being a big fan of pranks, Ellen had Jevh and Christian on the show to talk about their creative, epic prank!

After noticing a blank wall in a local McDonald’s, Jevh and Christian decided that something needed to fill the empty space. Seeing a lack of Asian representation in pictures on other walls, Jevh and Christian figured why not them? Using their creative minds and skills, the pranksters took a photo of themselves casually enjoying burgers, put it on a poster similar to the ones in the building, and installed the creation in the empty space! After nearly two months, the poster was noticed by McDonald’s.

McDonald’s is committed to diversity and wants to reflect all of their customers, and they appreciate Jevh and Christian! Ellen delivered the amazing news that McDonald’s wants to hire the two for a marketing campaign! To pay them for the job, McDonald’s gave them each $25,000!

From here.

Maybe you can tell that by the end of this it sounds like an ad for McDonald’s… The comp class I had Jevh in happens to be the only semester I used the rhetoric of advertising as our course theme (as opposed to the broader theme of popular culture I’ve mostly used since then, which still encompasses advertising). Here we see McDonald’s turn a potential PR crisis into an opportunity, a critique into their own ad…and we’re consuming the narrative of how great and generous McDonald’s (and Ellen) is. And most of my students would eat this up, would drink this narrative Kool-Aid, and I would sound a lot like The Corrections‘ Chip teaching his class: Consider that Jevh and Christian would not be getting this money if McDonald’s did not have a product to sell, a product that is unhealthy to consume, thanks, among other things, to an infusion of high-fructose corn syrup, which also looks like blood…

The fake blood amounts to a climactic reveal of the killer’s identity in Scream (1996).

This could offer a metaphor for the more insidious nature of this segment, that it’s an advertisement in disguise: the narrative provides a cover so the viewer doesn’t realize what they’re consuming. That is, we’re consuming narratives that cover up the true nature of what we’re consuming, as well as the larger costs of that consumption.

Consider that if you are what you eat, and you eat meat, you’re dead.

In another iteration of a “Consuming Narrative” in Franzen’s The Corrections, one character, a professional chef, reflects:

She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn’t run away. …

And now the time had come, according to the story that Denise told herself about herself, for the chef to carve herself up and feed the pieces to her hungry parents.

Lacking a better story, she almost bought this one. The only trouble was she didn’t recognize herself in it.

Jonathan Franzen. The Corrections. 2001.

This is reminiscent of the story Donna tells herself in coping with her husband’s career choice to peddle consuming narratives to the culture at large. Readers were upset by it, but Tad was essentially fed to his hungry parents, not consumed by Cujo.

-SCR

Cujo Kills, Connects to Carrie

On By profrol1 Comment

“Y’know, I never thought I’d say this about a movie, but I really hope this dog dies.”

Rachel watching Cujo in Friends 8.12, “The One Where Joey Dates Rachel”

We finally arrive in the ’80s with the publication of Cujo (1981), which has a reputation as one of Stephen King’s self-described “cocaine novels,” aka he claims he was so high on coke in the course of its composition that he can’t remember writing it. This would appear to be something of a myth, though. King biographer Lisa Rogak identifies 1979 as the year King got “hooked on cocaine” and is more specific about what King doesn’t remember:

[King] would later admit that when he did the revisions for Cujo in early 1981, he had no recollection of doing so.

Rogak, Lisa. Haunted Heart (p. 114). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Later in the biography Rogak describes aspects of King’s composition of this novel in enough detail that it seems to contradict a summation she makes early on in it that reinforces the myth, that King has “also spoken with regret that he couldn’t remember writing certain books, such as Cujo” (p. 2).

The novel’s omniscient opening tells us that the “monster” serial killer Frank Dodd (of The Dead Zone) returned to the town of Castle Rock in 1980, in what will be one of the hottest summers on record. Four-year-old Tad Trenton encounters this monster in his closet, but when his parents come in, they don’t see anything. The summer before, Tad’s father Vic took the family out to the mechanic Joe Camber’s on the outskirts of town to have the car worked on, and they met the Cambers’ giant but good-natured Saint Bernard, Cujo. Now, Cujo chases a rabbit into a ground cave on the Camber property, disturbing some bats and incurring a bite on his muzzle. Meanwhile, Vic’s small-time ad agency Ad Worx with his partner Roger is on the rocks after a debacle in which their biggest client, Sharp Cereal, suffered a blow to the credibility of their ad spokesman the Sharp Cereal Professor due to some food dye in their product Red Razberry Zingers made it look like kids were vomiting blood. Vic and Roger are planning a ten-day trip to try to remedy the seemingly hopeless situation as Vic entertains suspicions that his wife Donna is cheating on him.

The Cambers’ neighbor, WWII veteran and alcoholic Gary Pervier, encounters Cujo on his porch and is surprised when Cujo uncharacteristically growls at him. Donna has a threatening encounter with her lover Steve Kemp when Steve shows up at the Trenton house and doesn’t take it well when she tries to end things with him; she started the affair following discontent with the sort-of Vic’s-job-dictated move to Maine and fear of getting old (see new M. Night movie…). Meanwhile, Charity Camber, the mechanic Joe’s wife, wins five thousand dollars on a lottery ticket and starts to lay plans for a trip to visit her sister in Connecticut and take their son Brett, which she knows Joe will resist. Steve Kemp, furious at being jilted, jots a note to Vic exposing his affair with Donna. Vic advises Donna to take their Pinto that’s been acting up out to Joe Camber’s while Vic is gone, and writes down the Monster Words he recites nightly to keep the monsters out of the closet for Tad.

Charity buys a new chainfall for Joe with some of the lottery money; Cujo growls at the two men who deliver it and they consider calling Joe Camber to tell him but don’t. Vic receives Steve Kemp’s note at his office. Charity proposes the trip to Joe and wins a standoff with him after promising a trade of letting Brett go on Joe’s next hunting trip. Vic confronts Donna about the affair and she explains her fear of getting old (the confrontation keeps Vic from remembering to call Joe Camber about the Pinto). Joe Camber plans a trip with Gary Pervier while Charity is off on her trip. The morning Charity and Brett are supposed to leave, Brett sees Cujo looking very scary and abnormal, but Charity convinces him not to tell Joe or Joe won’t let them go, and they get on the bus. Cujo attacks and kills Gary Pervier at Gary’s house. Charity considers the significance of the trip for Brett seeing another way of life besides his father’s. Vic leaves with Roger for their work trip.

Joe discovers Gary’s corpse at Gary’s place, then Cujo comes up from Gary’s basement and kills Joe, too. Donna debates what to do when the Pinto starts acting up again; she decides to drive it to Joe Camber’s even though he’s not answering his phone, and she relents when Tad insists on going with her instead of staying with a babysitter. The Pinto stalls out as soon as they pull in the Cambers’ driveway, and when Donna gets out, Cujo emerges and chases her back into the car.

In Boston, Vic proposes that the Sharp Cereal Professor make a final ad appearance in which he apologizes for the Red Razberry Zingers debacle. Donna debates whether the door to the Cambers’ house is locked and if she should try to make a run for it, and she manages to get the Pinto started but it quickly stalls out again. Brett Camber calls the house to no avail, and the sound of the ringing phone agitates Cujo. Donna and Tad eat some of the little food they brought and doze in the car while Cujo stands watch. Steve Kemp enters the unlocked Trenton house and, finding it empty, trashes it.

Charity again calls the Camber house to no avail and Brett comments on Charity’s sister and her husband flaunting their money. Knowing she’s getting weaker after the first night in the car, Donna makes a run for the house after testing to see if Cujo is hiding in front of the car; he tricks her by waiting to make his move and then attacks, driving her back into the car with a bad bite in her stomach before she manages to shut the door. Vic starts to get worried when Donna doesn’t answer the phone at home, eventually calling the police, who discover the trashed house. Charity ponders but rejects the possibility of divorce.

Tad has a convulsion in the overheated car. Vic comes home and tries to piece together what happened with the police. When Sheriff Bannerman goes out to check if the missing Pinto could be at Camber’s place, Cujo attacks and kills him. Vic falls asleep and wakes hours later when Roger calls with the news that Sharp has decided to let them keep the account. Vic has a note from the police that Kemp has been arrested and Donna isn’t with him, and decides to drive out to the Cambers’ as Donna faces the fact that Tad is dying in the heat and gets out of the car. She staves off Cujo with a baseball bat that was lying in the grass, but he keeps coming at her until it splinters, and then she stabs him in the eye with it. She’s bludgeoning the dog’s corpse as Vic pulls into the driveway, and when Vic gets to Tad in the back of the car, Tad’s dead.

Donna eventually recovers and Vic and Roger are able to keep the Sharp account long enough to keep the agency afloat. Charity manages to hang on to the Camber property and they get a new dog.

The End.

In the biography, Lisa Rogak chronicles how this narrative sparked from two incidents in King’s life:

[King] got the idea for Cujo by continuing his habit of connecting two seemingly unrelated subjects. With Carrie, it was “adolescent cruelty and telekinesis.”

With Cujo, it was two incidents a couple of weeks apart. While bringing his motorcycle in for service to a mechanic located on a remote back road, his bike gave out in the yard. He called out, but instead of a human, a mammoth Saint Bernard galloped out of the garage heading straight toward him, growling all the way. The mechanic followed, but the dog continued to charge. When the dog lunged at King, the mechanic hit the dog on the butt with a massive socket wrench.

“He must not like your face,” he said, then asked Steve about the motorcycle.

Even though they were now flush, Steve and Tabby were still driving the Ford Pinto they had bought new with the $2,500 advance from Carrie, even though the car had been plagued with problems from the beginning. A couple of weeks after Steve’s run-in with the Saint Bernard, the car acted up and Steve’s wild imagination thought back to what if Tabby had driven the car to the mechanic and the dog had lunged toward her? And what if there no humans were around? Worse yet, what if the dog was rabid?

Rogak, Lisa. Haunted Heart (p. 112). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This constitutes another Carrie connection by way of King’s own account, in his craft memoir On Writing, of two real-life encounters, or rather two real-life people, converging for the inspiration of that novel: a high-school classmate of his who was so poor she wore the same clothes every day and who was mocked relentlessly when she finally did wear nicer clothes, and another classmate whose mother had situated a “life-sized crucified Jesus, eyes turned up, mouth turned down, blood dribbling from beneath the crown of thorns on his head” in their trailer’s living room.

In relation to Cujo, Rogak provides another illuminative quote about King’s writing process-slash-basic narrative structure/suspense-building:

“Then the game became to see if I could put them in a place where nobody will find them for the length of time that it takes for them to work out their problem.”

Rogak, Lisa. Haunted Heart (p. 113). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Or, as Vic considers it in the novel itself:

Why? Why had something like this been allowed to happen? How could so many events have conspired together?

One might notice a variation in King’s typical narrative approach via the lack of chapter divisions:

Cujo was an experiment for King, the first book he had written where the story was told all within the confines of a single chapter. It didn’t start out that way; he had initially envisioned the story in terms of traditional chapters. But as the story developed, along with the sense of horror, he altered his approach: “I love Cujo because it does what I want a book to do. It feels like a brick thrown through somebody’s window, like a really invasive piece of work. It feels anarchic, like a punk-rock record: it’s short and it’s mean.”

Rogak, Lisa. Haunted Heart (p. 113). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

But something that’s definitely in keeping with King’s typical thematic patterns is his supernatural gloss on the plot’s premise, a premise that would be every bit as horrifying (if not more so?) if it had been left in the realm of what could “really” happen. The events of the novel require no supernatural element to make them “work,” as most of his other novels up to this point have in that the events necessarily could not have occurred without a supernatural cause–the telekinesis in Carrie, vampires in ‘Salem’s Lot, more telekinesis/telepathy/psychic powers in The Shining, supernatural/divine prophets of sorts in The Stand, psychic powers again in The Dead Zone, and pyrokinesis in Firestarter. Realistic-via-supernatural horror has been one of the primary distinctions between King and his pseudonymous Bachman novels, so publishing this under his own name might have necessitated this element, consciously or unconsciously, for “Brand Stephen King,” as Simon Rich dubs it in his 2018 Screening Stephen King academic study that links this Brand to “a particularly mainstream form of horror.” There’s also the fact that this is the second Castle Rock novel, though the supernatural element doesn’t seem inherently connected to this recurring King setting, or at least not any more so than other settings he uses. The first Castle Rock novel, The Dead Zone, references Carrie not as events that happened in the “real world” of its particular universe, but as a pop-culture text, and Cujo‘s setting is also Castle Rock and via the Frank Dodd/Sheriff Bannerman connections (and Dead Zone protagonist John Smith also referenced) occupies the same “reality,” which then means in the reality/world of Cujo, Carrie White exists only as a fictional figment.

At any rate, given the gaps in King’s memory he attributes to his substance abuse, the breadth of the linked elements in his multiverse is almost staggering, though perhaps less surprising if considered within the context (or confines) of the white male ego and its preference for referencing itself. The most prevalent example of this at the current moment might be this year’s Later; Cujo shares the hallmark element of what Charles Yu identifies in his review of Later, its real-life horrors reigning emotionally if not literally over its supernatural elements:

And the horrors are many. There are hints of evil from another dimension, things from “outside the world” and “outside of time.” But mostly the horrors are familiar ones. Plain old human cruelty. The loss of loved ones to disease or old age. Alzheimer’s. Also, less morbid though no less heavy: the loss of innocence. Growing up too fast. The unexplainable, the incomprehensible in our everyday lives.

From here.

This sentiment seems to echo one previously put forth in this ancient debate of the extent and/or limitations of King’s literary prowess, appearing in the LA Review of Books in 2012 (in direct response to a particular savaging of King’s quality):

But all [King’s] novels, even the stinkers, have resonance. By this I mean, his fiction isn’t just reflective of the current culture, it casts judgment. Innocent Carrie White wakes up with her period and telekinesis at the height of the women’s movement. No wonder everybody craps on her, and no wonder we’re delighted that she slaughters them all. In Cujo, the materialism of the 1980s American family tears itself apart from the inside, as represented by the family dog gone mad.

From here.

Its appearance on Friends ought to be a clear enough marker of Cujo‘s cultural caché, but for a more recent piece of evidence, I offer the personal anecdote of my new landlord greeting my (incessantly) barking chihuahua with “Hey, Cujo!”

In addition to helping the supernatural developments, the novel’s omniscient point of view helps the parallel development of the Trenton and Camber family units; the latter’s absence from the film adaptation might be evidence of the necessarily narrower scope of that media. The novel’s plot registers the interdependence of white-collar and blue-collar, with Steve Kemp a sort of wild card that–forgive me–straddles both worlds, though it’s Kemp who wears the chambray shirt that consistently makes cameos throughout King’s work, and which decidedly has a blue collar. Kemp as a character definitely comes off the worst and most overtly villainous in this narrative. Donna’s affair with him, while a demonstration of her culturally attenuated fears, at first didn’t strike me as affecting the plot materially in the way of playing a direct role in Tad’s death. But one might argue Kemp functions materially as a red herring to mislead the police, that if he hadn’t trashed the house, they might have gone looking at Cambers’ place sooner for lack of other options.

Kemp is an unequivocal douche bag, marked perhaps most overtly by the only detail I recalled from my adolescent reading of the novel–his jacking off on Donna and Vic’s bed after trashing their house–and also in other details like his refusal to shake hands with a tennis opponent if he’s lost the match. That he’s a poet does not speak well for poets, then; his side hustle, or really main one, refinishing furniture under the moniker the “Village Stripper” sexualizes him in a way that also characterizes his relationship to his other work:

…he masturbated a great deal. Masturbation, he believed, was a sign of creativity. Across from the bed was his desk. A big old-fashioned Underwood sat on top of it.

Considering he turns masturbation into a criminal offense in the one scene I remembered, Kemp as a character isn’t doing much for the reputation of the Great White Male writer (and/or connection to the Underwood typewriter), except he identifies more as a poet than a fiction writer–that his fiction-writing exclusively consists of a draft of a novel he’s “attacked badly from six different angles” reads more intensely in light of his attempted rape of Donna. His aforementioned chambray shirt and self-identifying as a poet are strongly reminiscent of Jess Rider’s character from The Stand, a character who also functions as an object of derision and whose chambray shirt becomes a demonstration of his posing as more working-class than he is, thus linking poets to posers. Kemp appears to be a poet in the same posing vein, but taken to the next level of violence and aggression, apparenty largely by virtue of his being older than Jess was; we see the personal agitation Kemp experiences in response to Donna’s jilting him being connected to his age when he discovers the “first threads of gray in his beard”; his irrational/irresponsible actions are thus linked to an almost identical anxiety to what Donna describes to Vic in articulating her reasons for getting with Kemp.

Kemp is more the villain, even, than Cujo himself, who can’t be blamed for his actions. Can King the author be blamed for letting Tad die?

Readers gave him an earful about it, and he received letters by the truck-load that criticized him for letting a child die in a book, albeit one who was innocent and simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, unlike the dozens of teenagers who were killed in Carrie, who seemingly deserved it because of their actions.

Rogak, Lisa. Haunted Heart (p. 113). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

This echoes the “main character” Cujo himself as summed up in the novel’s conclusion:

He had never wanted to kill anybody. He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor.

Despite one essentially (if still ultimately indirectly) killing the other, both Cujo and Tad as characters are “innocent.” For Cujo, rabies is a scientifically sanctioned form of what amounts to demonic possession–nice touch how he gets it from a bat bite, a la vampires. Tad did not call his own demise upon himself, but the actions of his parents did; readers seem to be reacting to the use of a child as a plot device. On Friends, Rachel wants the dog to die in the movie, and he does, if in a bit more dramatic fashion, but I knew the second Tad’s death was confirmed in the book that he would be resuscitated in the film version.

The way events unfold may implicate white-collar reliance on blue-collar: the ultimate coincidence facilitating the horrific scenario is the blue-collar family uncharacteristically being away on vacation. The lottery ticket that facilitates this coincidence may itself be the novel’s biggest coincidence, but it “works” because it plays on what is definitely not a coincidence, the blue-collar pursuit of the possibility of something better, which is further played out by Charity and Brett’s trip and the larger possibilities it opens up in escaping Joe and what he stands for.

In his Later review, Charles Yu also notes:

In his craft memoir, “On Writing,” Stephen King describes a moment in his process when he asks himself the “Big Questions.” The biggest of which are: “Is this story coherent? And if it is, what will turn coherence into a song?”

From here.

Reading Carrie for Toni Morrison’s Africanist presence, there were no actual black characters, but only descriptions that comparatively invoked Blackness. Black characters are almost entirely absent from Cujo as well but exist in relation to music, and manage to be fairly revealing in the limited time they take the page-stage, which I’m quoting here in full:

The cab driver was black and silent. He had his radio tuned to an FM soul station. The Temptations sang “Power” endlessly as the cab took him toward Logan Airport through streets that were almost completely deserted. Helluva good movie set, he thought. As the Temptations faded out, a jiveass dj came on with the weather forecast. It had been hot yesterday, he reported, but you didn’t see nuthin yesterday, brothers and sisters. Today was going to be the hottest day of the summer so far, maybe a record-breaker. The big G’s weather prognosticator, Altitude Lou McNally, was calling for temperatures of over 100 degrees inland and not much cooler on the coast. A mass of warm, stagnant air had moved up from the south and was being held in place over New England by bands of high pressure. “So if you gas gonna reach, you gotta head for the beach,” the jiveass dj finished. “It ain’t goan be too pretty if you hangin out in the city. And just to prove the point, here’s Michael Jackson. He’s goin ‘Off the Wall.’”

“Black and silent” is pretty much the most succinct and accurate summation one could make concerning the Africanist presence here with this weird combo of a literally silent Black body and a disembodied Black voice (or white projection of one)…despite the foundation of American music discussed in my previous post that this obliquely invokes. It seems a potential unintended coincidence that this silent presence appears behind the wheel of a car, that most critical object in this particular plot’s premise.

Charity Camber’s aspirations for a better life are ultimately futile, but we see how her sister escaped Charity’s circumstances through luck, demonstrating how Charity herself had a parallel chance for upward mobility. The “black and silent” cab driver never gets that chance. The futility Charity confronts seems to demonstrate how the illusion of the American Dream is a dangled carrot that keeps the subservient classes subservient. This tactic may be largely successful, but, as with cars, can backfire. Donna’s invocation of the “greenhouse effect” trapping the heat in the car, that most direct cause of Tad’s death, seems perversely prophetic as climate disasters advance apace and we continue to refuse to curb our emissions. From 2021, Tad’s death could be read as an indictment of consumption and its cost to future generations.

-SCR