I am still trapped in the rabbit hole of the Kingian Laughing Place. Exploring Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon for Part V of this all-consuming series “The Laughing Place is a Rabbit Hole to Disney’s Animal KINGdom” has turned out to be a real quagmire. Consider this Part V.V, continuing the exploration of how, as the initial post put it, “Tom Gordon illuminates that the spirit of the Overlook merges toxic fan love with the Africanist presence in this novel’s thematic cocktail mixed at the nexus of fandom, religion, addiction, and media/advertising, all predicated on constructions that blur the distinction between (or merging of) real and imagined.”

Key words: cycle, sign, signature, place, stereotype, merge, laughter, lost, uncle, trickster, trap, explode/explosion, baseball, pitch, radio, fandom, bridge, (toxic) nostalgia, contain, mainstream, construction, contradiction, (im)perfection, addiction, movement, dancing, racial hierarchy, fluid duality, blurred lines, transmedia dissipation

Note: All boldface in quoted passages is mine.

There on the wall in the bedroom creeping
I see a wasp with her wings outstretched

Sufjan Stevens, “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!” Illinoise (2005).

Words are weapons sharper than knives
Makes you wonder how the other half die

Devil inside
The devil inside
Every single one of us
The devil inside

“Devil Inside,” INXS, Kick (1987).

Here I stand like an open book
Is there something here you might have overlooked
‘Cause it would be a shame if you should leave
And find that freedom ain’t what you thought it would be

Elvis Presley, “For Ol’ Times Sake,” Raised on Rock (1973).

And you’re still the same
I caught up with you yesterday (still the same, you’re still the same)
Moving game to game
No one standing in your way

Turning on the charm
Long enough to get you by (still the same, still the same)
You’re still the same
You still aim high

Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, “Still the Same,” Stranger in Town (1978).

(Unmask! Unmask!)

And behind each glittering, lovely mask, the as-yet unseen face of the shape that chased [Danny] down these dark hallways, its red eyes widening, blank and homicidal.

Oh, he was afraid of what face might come to light when the time for unmasking came around at last.

Stephen King, The Shining (1977).

Facing the Face-Off

If only the strong survive, then Trisha proves her strength, even though, as Abigail L. Bowers and Lowell Mick White put it in their aforementioned “Survival of the Sweetest” essay, “Mr. King is perfectly capable of destroying a child; in his past fiction children have often not been guaranteed survival.” But as the construction of its climax will show, Tom Gordon has inherited the legacy of the Overlook–which is the legacy of slavery manifest in blackface minstrelsy–and like Danny Torrance, Trisha will survive.

“‘The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon’ isn’t about Tom Gordon or baseball, and not really about love, either,” King says. “It’s about survival, and God, and it’s about God’s opposite as well. Because Trisha isn’t alone in her wanderings. There is something else in the woods — the God of the Lost is how she comes to think of it — and in time she’ll have to face it.”

“King winds real life into latest fiction” (April 5, 1999).

In Tom Gordon’s function as an Uncle Tom/Magical Negro, his presence exists purely for the sake of assisting the main white character.

“Sometimes those secondary characters are just gonna have to die because if they don’t, the audience won’t believe something scary is about to happen to the real characters who are not the black characters, which is what I think gives birth to this other horrible trope which is the magical Negro.”

Jordan Peele in Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (2019).

How critical this assistance is becomes clear in the novel’s climax, after we’ve gotten plenty of descriptions of how Tom Gordon is a “relief pitcher” who “saves” games, and after Trisha is stalked through the woods by what may or may not be a natural bear. This ambiguous presence–specified to be a “black bear”–is perhaps more than hinted to be more than natural when we see it do something Trisha herself does not see, because she’s asleep:

As her doze deepened she slid further and further to her right, coughing from time to time. The coughs had a deep, phlegmy sound. During the fifth inning, something came to the edge of the woods and looked at her. Flies and noseeums made a cloud around its rudiment of a face. In the specious brilliance of its eyes was a complete history of nothing. It stood there for a long time. At last it pointed at her with one razor-claw hand—she is mine, she is my property—and backed into the woods again.

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

Which might be reminiscent of another pointing bear…

The bear’s potential supernatural nature is further underscored by it coming to be referred to, once we reach the “Bottom of the Ninth: Save Situation” chapter, as the “bear-thing” rather than just as a “bear,” and it evinces a confluence with Tom Gordon via the above pointing at Trisha, since Gordon is known for the same gesture:

Walt from Framingham wanted to know why Tom Gordon always pointed to the sky when he got a save (“You know, Mike, that pointin thing” was how Walt put it)…

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

Which effectively frames Tom Gordon as a “thing” like the “bear-thing.” This “bear-thing” is another critteration that manifests signs of the Overlook entity–its eyes containing “a complete history of nothing” could be an embodiment of the Overlook entity’s “blank” eyes–which is to say, this black bear manifests a malevolent Africanist presence. In the language of the above passage, this presence bears undertones of historical erasure and slavery–i.e., a person being “property” = the Africanist presence figuring Trisha as an Africanist presence, which is pretty much the opposite of what she is. Owning people as property would be Anglo-Saxon (aka WASP) crimes and not Africanist ones, but in being projected onto the “black” critterized presence, the crime of people-owning is inflected here with the trickster rhetoric of blame-shifting. The mud itself is personified as guilty of a version of this WASP crime in an earlier scene when it’s iterated as “black muck” supposedly “too thick to be water and too thin to be mud” that sucks off her shoe:

“You can’t have it!” she shouted furiously. “It’s mine and you . . . can’t . . . HAVE IT!”

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

That the critter embodying the malevolent form of the Africanist presence is a “black bear” underscores its Africanist nature by being “black,” but this particular type of bear is actually less aggressive than other bear species–“a relatively timid animal that feeds on fruit, berries and acorns” according to one source, which should make it less than the ideal candidate to embody the novel’s monster/villain. It seems like the more appropriate literal and thematic choice would be the more aggressive “grizzly” (i.e., grisly) bear, which one encyclopedia entry for the novel mistakenly claims is the bear’s type; the word “grizzly” never appears in the novel, though Michael A. Arnzen also makes this mistake:

But there’s an evil creature in the forest as well—a shadowy “something” out there in the woods, stalking Trisha. This something could be merely a manifestation of her creeping paranoia, or it could be a very real grizzly bear.

Michael A. Arnzen, “Childhood and Media Literacy in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” New York Review of Science Fiction 14.8 (2002).

Then Arnzen also calls it a “brown bear,” which is, again, a term that is never used in the novel:

Trisha eventually finds her salvation through media technology. And—more importantly—through her active, imaginative use of media, she survives the forest. For one thing, Trisha survives by using her radio as a beacon to keep her tuned in to her culture. It keeps her spirits and her fantasy alive. It also becomes a hand tool that protects her, a weapon that she literally pitches at the brown bear in the closing chapter called “Bottom of the Ninth,” in order to “save” herself in the game of survival. This bear, the God of the Lost, ultimately comes to represent either a diseased superego or a bricolage of Trisha’s fragmented identity.

Michael A. Arnzen, “Childhood and Media Literacy in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” New York Review of Science Fiction 14.8 (2002).

Like Arnzen can’t settle on the bear’s type, he can’t settle on its symbolism, but the slippery symbolism might be indicative of a fluidity that the bear manifests in the text. As evidence that the bear is part of Trisha’s “fragmented identity,” the black bear’s diet of nuts and berries, if not acorns, resembles Trisha’s:

[Trisha] dragged her pack into her lap and put her hand inside, mixing the berries and nuts together. Doing this made her think of Uncle Scrooge McDuck playing around in his money-vault, and she laughed delightedly. The image was absurd and perfect at the same time.

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

Another reference for blank-slate Trisha, this one from Duck TALES, a reminder of Elvis’s early-stage rebel hair “combed … back into a ducktail” as well as the cock TALES of the patriarchy often rendering their supremacist tales by making tales out of tails, i.e., invoking dehumanizing critterations to reinforce their own supremacy in a food-chain-like hierarchy. “Absurd and perfect,” indeed. You are what you eat. (Black bears “will also occasionally consume fish,” which Trisha also does at one point.)

Since King violates his own strategy of imbuing the supernatural nature of the bear-thing with ambiguity when he shows it pointing at Trisha outside of her point of view–as well as showing it stalking her when she’s sleeping at the end of several inning-chapters to keep up the suspense–that this realistically docile critter is rendered as aggressive, as carnivorous when it should be essentially be the opposite–herbivorous–seems another sign the bear(-thing) is indeed supernatural (unless, like another bear, it ingested a controlled substance). The bear’s unrealistic aggression is also another sign that it’s Africanist, a constructed stereotype echoing the historical white-supremacist trickster rhetoric decrying the racial violence that arises in response to its own vioent oppression. This would iterate the negative connotation of pointing in “pointing fingers,” i.e., deflecting blame from yourself by blaming others (cough*Trump*cough). That the bear-thing demonstrates its malevolent nature definitively by pointing is more evidence for it being a version of Gordon rather than his opposite: both of them are characterized, positively and negatively, respectively, by pointing. Which = apparently opposite, but actually the same.

Pointing is also a sign of the Laughing Place, as we can see in Carrie’s trigger moment:

Brer Bear in the Disney Song of the South Laughing Place sequence is also the critter in Carrie’s position in the trigger moment, tricked and the butt of a physically and psychologically harmful joke.

King further points at the bear’s supernatural nature (evidence for it being that supreme supernatural entity–fallout from the exploded Overlook) by designating it the “bear-thing” rather than just the “bear,” and the designation as “thing” is a sign of the Africanist presence in the very first example Toni Morrison presents in her study on the subject, Playing in the Dark, as mentioned in Part I:

In Playing in the Dark, Morrison introduces the Africanist presence concept by way of analyzing its manifestation in an example text: Marie Cardinal’s memoir The Words To Say It (1975), which in large part chronicles Cardinal’s treatment for mental-health issues, or what Cardinal in the text designates “the Thing.” Morrison describes how this Thing becomes racially associated and thus a sign of an Africanist presence when Cardinal locates the scene of her mental breaking point to a panic attack induced by hearing Louis Armstrong play at a club.

From here.

In The Shining, wasps are a major sign of the malevolent Africanist presence manifesting that supreme supernatural entity of the Overlook, as well as a sign of its switching from benevolent to malevolent in chapter 33, and in Tom Gordon, they are also present, an inextricable part of the bear-thing:

Its muzzle wrinkled back, and from within its mouth Trisha heard a droning sound which she recognized at once: not bees but wasps. It had taken the shape of a bear on its outside, but on the inside it was truer; inside it was full of wasps. Of course it was.

…

The thing grunted in what might have been perplexity. A little cloud of wasps puffed out of its mouth like living vapor.

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

This “thing” is a bear with WASPS in its mouth. The wasps become fairly prominent in the text before we see them in the bear-thing’s mouth. In keeping with the semi-ambiguity of the supernatural in the novel, these wasps could be seen as Trisha’s hallucinatory projection as a result of her disturbing a wasps’ nest on her first day lost in the woods: her first night, this induces a nightmare that sounds like it’s right out of The Shining, with a taunting father figure and a cellar:

She pulled the door up and the stairs leading down to the cellar were gone. The stairwell itself was gone. Where it had been was a monstrous bulging wasps’ nest. Hundreds of wasps were flying out of it through a black hole like the eye of a man who has died surprised, and no, it wasn’t hundreds but thousands, plump ungainly poison factories flying straight at her. There was no time to get away, they would all sting her at once and she would die with them crawling on her skin, crawling into her eyes, crawling into her mouth, pumping her tongue full of poison on their way down her throat—

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

The wasps are, three times, referred to as “plump, ungainly poison factories.” This echoes King in On Writing referring to the first of a handful of personal anecdotes about the most horrific incidents in his childhood when he was stung by a wasp as “poisonous inspiration.” This also might manifest a Morrisonian “startling contradiction” in figuring “factories”–i.e., a hallmark of industrialized civilization–as horrific when wasps in this context should represent the horror of the wild.

Other hints of likeness to The Shining:

There were a gazillion flies as well. As she drew closer she could hear their somnolent, somehow shiny buzz.

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

Then there’s the “wasp-priest” manifestation of the three hooded figures Trisha meets, who tells her:

“The world is a worst-case scenario and I’m afraid all you sense is true,” said the buzzing wasp-voice. Its claws raked slowly down the side of its head, goring through its insect flesh and revealing the shining bone beneath. “The skin of the world is woven of stingers, a fact you have now learned for yourself. Beneath there is nothing but bone and the God we share. This is persuasive, do you agree?”

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

“The shining bone” = the skeletal structure animating/underwriting this narrative, its backbone, is The Shining.

Trisha is applying the mud that draws the minstrel reference to soothe both stings and insect bites, and this dynamic could be read as iterating the original “laughing place” function of minstrelsy: laughing at performers of “imagined blackness” in blackface minstrel shows in order to dehumanize real Black people and thus justify their subjugation. The mud mask is literally soothing the skin of Trisha’s face while it’s figuratively soothing cultural anxiety. Thus Tom Gordon’s role as a “relief pitcher” becomes tied up in this function of the figurative relief of anxiety, which also calls attention to another meaning of “pitch”—tar. And which renders the “secret of closing” (i.e., in baseball games) that the imagined Tom discloses to Trisha implicitly racist as well: the “secret of closing” is “establishing who was better,” just like the function of the original blackface minstrel performances. In helping Trisha “establish who was better,” Tom Gordon is a true Uncle Tom, not furthering the cause of his own race, but furthering the efforts of whites to establish their supremacy over his race.

The face-off climax reveals that in addition to being a “relief pitcher,” this iteration of Tom Gordon is a symbolic “switch hitter,” essentially switching from serving good to evil, not unlike how the actor Dacre Montgomery switches from the purely evil brother Billy in Stranger Things to the purely good comeback special producer Steve Binder in Elvis, or how Morgan Freeman switches from the benevolent black sidekick in The Shawshank Redemption (1994) to the malevolent colonel in Dreamcatcher (2003), or how the Black Sambo in Uncle Tom’s Cabin switches from persecuting Tom in service of the vile white slavemaster to admiring Tom, or how the Sambo doll in Invisible Man facilitates the main character’s realizing he’s switched from one side to another of what amounts to the same thing, or how the Detroit Eight Mile Wall “was constructed in 1941 to physically separate black and white homeowners on the sole basis of race” but eventually switches to “both sides of the barrier [being] predominantly black,” or how Elvis “moved back and forth” between white country and Black R&B, or how the real Tom Gordon will, like Babe Ruth, move from the Red Sox to the (evil) Yankees–and be defeated in the 2004 curse-breaking season after making that move. The real Tom Gordon moving to the Yankee Evil Empire post Tom Gordon is the perfect symbol of his fluid duality with the bear-thing in the novel’s face-off.

If Morrison’s study of the Africanist presence is not about Blackness in and of itself, but about Whiteness defining itself by constituting itself in relation to Blackness, the climactic face-off in Tom Gordon reveals that the American nature of this relation to Blackness that Whiteness defines itself by is a hierarchical “better than” relation, as on the same human/non-human axis the minstrel legacy is predicated upon, as well as the critteration strategy:

At the core of proslavery ideology was the equating of slaves with animals.

LESLEY GINSBERG, “Slavery and Poe’s ‘The Black Cat‘,” American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, eds. Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (1998).

Yeah, I get up on a mountain
And I call my black cat back
My black cat comes a runnin’
And the hound dogs get way back

Rufus Thomas, Jr./Elvis Presley, “Tiger Man” (1953/1968).

Tom Gordon‘s climactic “face-off” plays out how King’s work recapitulates the use of humor to mask horror as it was used in the minstrel racial anxiety-alleviation function. The sign of Trisha’s “pukin’ place” is a sign for the Laughing Place (where laughter is figurative vomit); Remus is not referenced explicitly, but as on the walls of Disney’s Splash Mountain ride, he is scrubbed but still present. Uncle Remus is Uncle Tom.

Reading again through the lens of The Tales of Two Toms from #3, Tom Gordon is two Toms in manifesting at least two different stereotypes, the Magical Negro and Uncle Tom; he doesn’t seem to qualify as the “zip coon” city dandy stereotype, but this is present in Uncle Remus’s signature song, “Zip-A-Dee-Doo Dah,” and signs of which might also be present in The Wiz, that Black retelling of The Wizard of Oz that Susannah in the Dark Tower series found such a mystifying concept:

A zipper! The song “Ease on Down the Road” from this sequence is referenced in The Gunslinger, as is

…the same window where Susan, who had taught him to be a man, had once sat and sung the old songs: “Hey Jude” and “Ease on Down the Road” and “Careless Love.”

Stephen King, The Gunslinger (1982).

Peter Guralnick takes “Careless Love” for the title of the second volume of his Elvis biography, and Elvis, like King, has invoked “Hey Jude,” covering it as his first performance for his Vegas residency:

The only mistake he made was to sing the coda from “Hey Jude;” once a gimmick has been picked up by Eydie Gorme on a cerebral-palsy telethon, it loses something. But the gesture was understandable. Elvis was clearly unsure of himself, worried that he wouldn’t get through to people after all those years, and relieved and happy when he realized we were with him.

Ellen Willis, “Viva Las Vegas: Elvis Returns to the Stage,” (August 30, 1969).

The Wiz‘s white screenwriter, Joel Schumacher, who wrote Sparkle (discussed in Part II), also makes use of zippers in the climactic “Brand New Day” sequence when the Black dancers unzip and emerge from their critter costumes.

Perpetuated by transmedia dissipation, as when Tom Hanks sings “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” (twice) in the Disney movie Splash (1984), the wheel of stereotypes keeps turning:

Thomas “Daddy” Rice introduced the earliest slave archetype with his song “Jump Jim Crow” and its accompanying dance. He claimed to have learned the number by watching an old, limping black stable hand dancing and singing, “Wheel about and turn about and do jus’ so/Eb’ry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.” Other early minstrel performers quickly adopted Rice’s character.

From here.

Tom Gordon’s role as a literal pitcher comes into play in the climactic confrontation when Trisha finally faces the bear-thing she’s been running from. Her wearing Gordon’s clothes–his jersey and (signed) cap (it might be significant that she wears his cap backward) is also a sort of foreshadowing/figuring of her embodiment of him in her climactic Walkman pitch at the bear-thing. Trisha becomes Tom Gordon here in enacting his signature gesture, his stillness and then his pitch (and, at the very end in the hospital with her family, the signature gesture of his pointing). The text is explicit in its rendering of Trisha = Tom Gordon in the moment that is the climax of the entire narrative, implicit in the rendering of Trisha/Tom Gordon = bear-thing, though this is a confluence the pop-up version illustrators seem to have picked up on:

(King’s pitch in the ’04 Red Sox season captured in Fever Pitch is a moment he becomes Tom Gordon in a way that’s similar to how Trisha becomes him, via enacting the role of pitcher, though opposite in King’s pitch being the opening one while Gordon is the closer, which Trisha’s “pitch” is closer to, since it closes the narrative.)

Ultimately in the face-off, the benevolent stereotype is shown to defeat the malevolent stereotype, imputing the impression that the benevolent stereotype is “better,” i.e., that it’s better for the implicit party being stereotyped, Black people, to be docile and subservient rather than to be threatening and aggressive–i.e., to know and accept their place in the hierarchy. In the white-supremacist patriarchal system, this is the only way Black people can “win.” There’s also the impression that, in general, a stereotype that renders a group “benevolent” is better than one that renders it the opposite, that trap that King falls into repeatedly; the benevolent stereotype is not “better,” but rather just a different form of dehumanization. “Good” stereotypes are just as bad in their damaging potential as “bad” ones.

The face-to-face aspect of the Tom Gordon confrontation strongly echoes Danny’s confrontation with the Overlook entity in his father’s body in the climax of The Shining, a template for a lot of King endings, but the resemblance feels even stronger here:

The bear-creature sniffed delicately all around her face. Bugs crawled in and out of its nostrils. Noseeums fluttered between the two locked faces, one furry and the other smooth. Minges flicked against the damp surfaces of Trisha’s open, unblinking eyes. The thing’s rudiment of a face was shifting and changing, always shifting and changing—it was the face of teachers and friends; it was the face of parents and brothers; it was the face of the man who might come and offer you a ride when you were walking home from school. Stranger-danger was what they had been taught in the first grade: stranger-danger. It stank of death and disease and everything random; the hum of its poisoned works was, she thought, the real Subaudible.

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

That final phrase could be another way of describing systemic racism, of white supremacy and privilege and the legacy of slavery informing all aspects of American function.

Another sign that the bear-thing is manifesting an Africanist presence:

Its breath was the muddy stink of the bog.

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

Mud soothes the sting of the wasps in a covertly insidious function that seemed positive; now it’s shifted to overtly negative (“stink”). The mud also shifts the appearance of Trisha’s face in a way that echoes the bear-thing’s shifting face, which in reflecting the slippery fluid nature of the Africanist presence it manifests, echoes the Overlook-thing’s shifting face (which in turn echoes the layers of shifting inherent in blackface):

But when it turned its attention back to Danny, his father was gone forever. What remained of the face became a strange, shifting composite, many faces mixed imperfectly into one. Danny saw the woman in 217; the dogman; the hungry boy-thing that had been in the concrete ring.

“Masks off, then,” it whispered.

Stephen King, The Shining (1977).

The bear-thing keeps exhorting Trisha to run from it, but the way to defeat the monster in Kingworld is to stand your ground and face it directly. The exchange between the bear-thing and Trisha reads like that between Danny and the Overlook-thing in his father’s body with the names changed–but instead of defeating the monster by yelling at it that it’s a “false face,” like Danny does, Trisha hurls her Walkman at it as if she is, like Tom Gordon, throwing a pitch; in this sense she embodies or becomes him. This essentially renders the climactic confrontation a face-off between the poles of stereotypes or constructions of Blackness: the overtly evil/threatening bear-wasp thing v. the Magical Negro figure. The latter wins; Trisha succeeds in “establishing who was better” and thus incurs rescue by what amounts to a deus ex machina when a hunter shoots at the bear at almost the same time she throws her pitch. So the Magical Negro iteration wins by default. Good defeats evil on the surface; beneath the surface one form of evil has defeated another in a battle that was rigged from the start.

In the face-off is between Trisha and the bear-thing, each side of this face-off is bolstered by the equivalent of old-time “second”s in a duel: Trisha has Tom Gordon (which amounts to Trisha = Tom Gordon) and the bear has the wasps (i.e., = the Overlook). But here we see Trisha also = bear-thing, reinforcing that the benevolent Africanist presence of Tom Gordon = the malevolent Africanist presence of the (Overlook-)bear. Another sign that Trisha = bear-thing is the tough tootsie voice, which I previously noted almost exclusively says things about the God of the Lost, which is explicitly the bear-thing:

Trisha may not realize it at this point, and one could argue that she never fully realizes her relationship to the voice on a completely conscious level, but it is clear to the reader that the cold voice is very much a part of her.

Matthew Holman, “Trisha McFarland and the Tough Tootsie,” Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics: Reflections on the Modern Master of Horror, eds. Phil Simpson and Patrick McAleer (2014).

The apparently opposing sides of this face-off manifest in benevolent v. malevolent are actually the same in being Africanist, illuminating the dehumanizing function of the more positive-seeming racial stereotypes King tends toward with the Magical Negro trope. The fluid duality between the apparently opposing sides of this face-off is another version of the fluid duality between Misery‘s Annie Wilkes and Paul Sheldon (and Elvis and the Colonel in Elvis) discussed in Part IV. As Michael A. Perry argues that the merging of fiction and reality constitutes a confluence between the work of Toni Morrison and Stephen King, this same type of merging reinforces the confluence between Tom Gordon and the bear-thing:

Tom Gordon is both a real and an imaginary character in the novel.

…

The beast that is finally identified as a bear is also both real and imaginary in the book.

Sharon Russell, Revisiting Stephen King: A Critical Companion (2002).

So it’s kind of like Face/Off (1997) with a good white guy v. a bad white guy: they’re the same in being white guys, and even white guys that seem good are actually bad…

And the Tom Gordon face-off is also something like Key & Peele‘s “Magical Negro Fight” (aka “Dueling Magical Negroes”), Uncle Remus v. Morgan Freeman (except this is a battle between two benevolent Africanist presences):

King’s repeated renderings of the Magical Negro trope seem like an effort to “reverse the curse” of slavery, but instead become part of his pattern of undermining himself.

The white guys in Face/Off and the two Magical Negroes in Key & Peele present us with types of battles that are different from the Tom Gordon face-off battle bc they’re clearly battles between two versions of the same thing, while the Tom Gordon battle is purporting to be between two different (opposite) things, but is really a battle between two versions of the same thing like the Face/Off and Magical Negro battles. So all three of these battles are actually the same–battles between versions of the same thing–but the Tom Gordon battle is iterating/performing the more sinister sugarcoating colorblind trickster rhetoric because of its difference from the first two battles–that it is not explicitly a battle between two versions of the same thing, but rather implicitly is, and further, that it actively purports to be its opposite. This performs the Obama-era rhetoric that delivered us to Trump, that racism didn’t exist anymore.

Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations. It is beating within us. Many of us who strongly call out Trump’s racist ideas will strongly deny our own.

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

Masquerading under the guise of nonexistence, racism can spread even more than when it’s explicit. Racism that’s not conscious of its own racism is even more insidious, can spread further, a disease in the system going unchecked due to a diagnosis that there’s no disease to treat. Via W.E.B. Du Bois–“[w]hat Du Bois termed double consciousness may be more precisely termed dueling consciousness”–Kendi further elaborates on the two sides of Black v. white each having their own two “dueling” sides in their consciousnesses, with an overlap so this amounts to a total of three of four sides–antiracist v. assimilationist on the Black side, and assimilationist v. segregationist on the white side:

Black self-reliance was a double-edged sword. One side was an abhorrence of White supremacy and White paternalism, White rulers and White saviors. On the other, a love of Black rulers and Black saviors, of Black paternalism. On one side was the antiracist belief that Black people were entirely capable of ruling themselves, of relying on themselves. On the other, the assimilationist idea that Black people should focus on pulling themselves up by their baggy jeans and tight halter tops, getting off crack, street corners, and government “handouts,”…

WHITE PEOPLE HAVE their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot–ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer…

Assimilationist ideas reduce people of color to the level of children needing instruction on how to act. Segregationist ideas cast people of color as “animals,” to use Trump’s descriptor for Latinx immigrants—unteachable after a point. The history of the racialized world is a three-way fight between assimilationists, segregationists, and antiracists. Antiracist ideas are based in the truth that racial groups are equals in all the ways they are different, assimilationist ideas are rooted in the notion that certain racial groups are culturally or behaviorally inferior, and segregationist ideas spring from a belief in genetic racial distinction and fixed hierarchy.

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

The Tom Gordon face-off potentially performs what amounts to the dueling white consciousness: assimilationist on the side with the Uncle Tom construction, segregationist on the side of the animal construction that, via being “supernatural,” is not really an animal. When the deus ex machina hunter enters the configuration, he tips the scales of the two double-sided sides of the duel–Overlook + bear-thing v. Trisha + Tom Gordon–as he renders it a more traditional duel by adding the weapon of a firearm. This essentially unfair tipping of the scales performs the unfair advantage of white privilege; Trisha is aided in “establishing who was better” by a gunshot, iterating the violence of systemic racism that was further exacerbated by Reagan-era deregulation manifesting racist policies:

In the same month that Reagan announced his war on drugs on Ma’s birthday in 1982, he cut the safety net of federal welfare programs and Medicaid, sending more low-income Blacks into poverty. His “stronger law enforcement” sent more Black people into the clutches of violent cops, who killed twenty-two Black people for every White person in the early 1980s.

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

The two-sided duel of the Tom Gordon face-off reflecting “a three-way fight” echoes a framework of literary character representation Adena Spingarn lays out to explore the cultural significance of Stowe’s Uncle Tom:

Character, as John Frow and others have noted, is a crucial and yet strikingly undertheorized element of the novel, “both ontologically and methodologically ambivalent” because of its dual status as literary device, on the one hand, and cultural concept related to the individual or self, on the other.⁶⁹ As Alex Woloch usefully articulates, “literary character is itself divided,” simultaneously pushing the novel to expand outward, toward an actual person who might exist in the world and who might think or do any number of things not represented in the novel (character’s referential function), and inward, to the finite set of descriptions and social interactions contained within a narrative’s structure (its structural function).⁷⁰ …

What ultimately distinguishes character from other novelistic devices is its three-pronged referentiality. Characters can represent human beings in three ways, all of which have social repercussions. One is through the amount of space they occupy in a given work of fiction. In the aggregate, if most black characters in fiction are minor, as was the case for many years in American literature, literature can imply the minimal importance of an entire race. The second mode of representation is at the individual level, in the personality traits and activities of a character. For example, a novel seriously portraying a black doctor might show a white reader that such types can and do exist, while one that pokes fun at such a character’s delusions of grandeur might suggest that there is no such thing as black progress. This mode can also work historically, suggesting a certain assessment of the past. The third aspect of representation is social: when fictional narratives frequently repeat a set of power relations between characters, they can create a cultural script that perpetuates that power dynamic in real life.

Adena Spingarn, Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitor (2018).

Three prongs, like the three genres Strengell argues express the “dualistic view of determinism [through which] King merges fact with fiction and comments on common social taboos and fears.” Three prongs, like the devil’s pitchfork…

Facing the Face-Off: The Invisibility Lens

…“Elvis aron Presley” (as he signed his library card that year) was like the “Invisible Man”…

Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (1994).

As there is a confluence between Trisha and the bear-thing revealed in the face-off, so there is between Tom Gordon‘s climax and that of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)–a text that itself reinforces the confluence between Tom Gordon and Trisha, with Gordon in this purely imagined construction manifesting as a literal invisible man, and Trisha thinking “The Invisible Girl, that’s me” at the site of the inciting incident of the narrative when she diverges from the path–so that not just Trisha’s invisibility to her mother and brother but her conception/construction of her own invisibility underwrites the entire plot.

At the end of Ellison’s novel, the nameless title character’s conception of his own invisibility has boiled down to a product of being caught between two sides:

And that I, a little black man with an assumed name should die because a big black man in his hatred and confusion over the nature of a reality that seemed controlled solely by white men whom I knew to be as blind as he, was just too much, too outrageously absurd. And I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others, whether for Ras’s or Jack’s.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952).

This essentially describes the true nature of the Tom Gordon face-off, which reveals (unconsciously) that two apparently opposite sides are really working in service of the same thing–perpetuating stereotypes to perpetuate the white-supremacist patriarchy, or “the nature of a reality that seemed controlled solely by white men.” The Tom Gordon face-off pitting a benevolent against a malevolent Africanist presence recapitulates this climactic moment in Invisible Man that pits opposite versions of the same thing against each other–“little” Black man against “big” Black man–for the sake of what the main character has realized is the product of white control–more specifically, white control that represented itself as trying to achieve the opposite of its true end, maintaining the appearance of working in service of uniting the Black and white races as a means to facilitate the Black race destroying itself–this trickster presence is the WASP presence, which per Morrison’s definition is ultimately the underwriter of the Africanist presence, i.e., a white construction of blackness. Like the Tom Gordon construction, the “little black man” seems “good” and doesn’t realize the true nature of what he’s contributing to through his intellectual efforts, and in turn is explicitly designated by the “big black man” Ras–who is riding a horse and manifests overt aggression parallel to the bear-thing’s–as an UNCLE TOM:

They moved up around the horse excited and not quite decided, and I faced him, knowing I was no worse than he, nor any better, and that all the months of illusion and the night of chaos required but a few simple words, a mild, even a meek, muted action to clear the air. To awaken them and me.

“I am no longer their brother,” I shouted. “They want a race riot and I am against it. The more of us who are killed, the better they like –“

“Ignore his lying tongue,” Ras shouted. “Hang him up to teach the black people a lesson, and theer be no more traitors. No more Uncle Toms. Hang him up theer with them blahsted dummies!”

…

“Don’t kill me for those who are downtown laughing at the trick they played—”

But even as I spoke I knew it was no good. I had no words and no eloquence, and when Ras thundered, “Hang him!” I stood there facing them, and it seemed unreal. I faced them knowing that the madman in a foreign costume was real and yet unreal…

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952).

Which essentially renders Invisible Man‘s plot in a nutshell the narrator realizing (or facing) that he’s been an Uncle Tom, which might be the ultimate white construction of blackness. This realization–“I was no worse than he, nor any better“–means he transcends “establishing who was better,” even if he himself might not be much better off for it. Ras is Sambo to the title character’s Uncle Tom, while the Clifton character is also some version of Sambo, being the hocker of the Sambo doll (which leads to his death), but prior to that Clifton works with the main character against Ras in the only other scene the “Uncle Tom” epithet is used–both times by Ras–and unlike the Sambo in Stowe’s novel, Ras never changes sides. But the Sambo and Uncle Tom figures are inherently apparently oppositional versions of the same thing, reconstituted in the bear-thing and Tom Gordon.

A symbol of the confluence, or fluid duality, between Ras and Invisible Man‘s title character is that they both end up using the same literal spear in this climactic battle: the latter hits Ras with the spear Ras threw at him and missed.

All save Harry Doolin brandished spears; he had his baseball bat. It had been sharpened to a point on both ends.

Stephen King, Hearts in Atlantis (1999).

In Invisible Man, following the appearance of literal spears, a figurative “spear in the side” is invoked in a separate but related context as a symbol of “the real soul-sickness”:

It came upon me slowly, like that strange disease that affects those black men whom you see turning slowly from black to albino, their pigment disappearing as under the radiation of some cruel, invisible ray. You go along for years knowing something is wrong, then suddenly you discover that you’re as transparent as air. At first you tell yourself that it’s all a dirty joke, or that it’s due to the “political situation.” But deep down you come to suspect that you’re yourself to blame, and you stand naked and shivering before the millions of eyes who look through you unseeingly.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952).

The hair settled back light as milkweed puffs but Trisha did not move. She stood in the set position, looking through the bear’s underbelly, where a bluish-white blaze of fur grew in a shape like a lightning bolt.

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

In the Invisible Man passage, being “transparent as air,” or “invisible,” is a product of being an Uncle Tom, i.e., an insubstantive construction. The “spear in the side” is a reference to a crucified Jesus hanging on the cross, in keeping with the narrator constantly referring to the “sacrifice” of the people of Harlem as the ultimate “trick” the WASP presence is playing in using him as a tool for.

…something I realized suddenly while running over puddles of milk in the black street, stopping to swing the heavy brief case and the leg chain, slipping and sliding out of their hands.

If only I could turn around and drop my arms and say, “Look, men, give me a break, we’re all black folks together . . . Nobody cares.” Though now I knew we cared, they at last cared enough to act — so I thought. If only I could say, “Look, they’ve played a trick on us, the same old trick with new variations — let’s stop running and respect and love one another . . .”

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952).

This WASP presence would seem to have succeeded in its trickster aims, since the climactic battle with Ras occurs in the course of a race riot, during which the title character continues to carry the “brief case” he’s carried since the beginning, when he wins it after a “battle royal” in which a group of white men watch a group of Black men he’s part of fight for money on an electrified rug in another (foreshadowing) version of a battle of Black v. Black controlled by white. Near the end of the novel, the title character’s brief case contains all his identifying “papers” and two constructions of Blackness manifest literally that were developed in earlier scenes–one of the Sambo dolls already discussed in #1, and the broken pieces of a bank for coins formerly in the shape of a:

…figure of a very black, red-lipped and wide-mouthed Negro, whose white eyes stared up at me from the floor, his face an enormous grin, his single large black hand held palm up before his chest. It was a bank, a piece of early Americana…

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952).

He broke it after being “enraged” by this “self-mocking image” kept by his Black landlord and was subsequently chastised by another Black person when he tried to throw the pieces away in her garbage can. That he’s still carrying the pieces in the same place he carries his papers reinforces the theme of stereotypes as paper constructions. That such constructions are white-propagated–that the Africanist presence is a WASP presence, a white construction of Blackness–is reinforced when, after he escapes Ras in their face off, the brief case appears to be the reason a couple of white men then start chasing him with a baseball bat, causing him to fall down an open manhole onto a coal pile, where the white men’s disembodied voices float down, with one noting “‘You can’t even see his eyes.'”

“Hey, black boy. Come on out. We want to see what’s in that brief case.”

“Come down and get me,” I said.

“What’s in that brief case?”

“You,” I said, suddenly laughing. “What do you think of that?”

“Me?”

“All of you,” I said.

…

“Come on down,” I said. “Ha! Ha! I’ve had you in my brief case all the time and you didn’t know me then and can’t see me now.”

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952).

That is, the stereotypical constructions of Blackness manifest in the coin bank and the Sambo doll do not represent his race, but rather the race who made the constructions (the underwriters).

We are what we see ourselves as, whether what we see exists or not. We are what people see us as, whether what they see exists or not. What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion.

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

But [Preston] Sturges was a fan of false fronts. He believed that how someone presented himself—his actions, his appearance, whatever name he chose on a given day—was as revelatory as any “true self” within. He was not a director who sought to probe the depths of humanity. The exquisite irony of being alive, he thought, was that, despite our genuine desires, we still had to walk around in the meat suits of our bodies, trying to get by. There was an essential tension between who we believed we were and the person others saw, and this tension lent life its absurdity, its richness, and its potential for surprise.

Rachel Syme, “The Profound Surfaces of Preston Sturges” (April 3, 2023).

Symbolizing the new identity constituted by his realization that the two apparently opposite sides are working toward the same end of Black destruction through the propagation of various versions of misrepresentations, the Invisible Man has to burn his identifying papers to light his way out.

Unlike babies, phenomena are typically born long before humans give them names. Zurara did not call Black people a race. French poet Jacques de Brézé first used the term “race” in a 1481 hunting poem. In 1606, the same diplomat who brought the addictive tobacco plant to France formally defined race for the first time in a major European dictionary. “Race…means descent,” Jean Nicot wrote in the Trésor de la langue française. “Therefore, it is said that a man, a horse, a dog, or another animal is from a good or bad race.” From the beginning, to make races was to make racial hierarchy.

Gomes de Zurara grouped all those peoples from Africa into a single race for that very reason: to create hierarchy, the first racist idea. Race making is an essential ingredient in the making of racist ideas, the crust that holds the pie. Once a race has been created, it must be filled in—and Zurara filled it with negative qualities that would justify Prince Henry’s evangelical mission to the world. This Black race of people was lost, living “like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings,” Zurara wrote. “They had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in a bestial sloth.”

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

A hunter that Trisha “actually sees” is actually imaginary, before she imagines him seeing her (dead body) and then her dead body seeing him in turn:

She could actually see the hunter, a man in a bright red woolen jacket and an orange cap, a man who needed a shave. Looking for a place to lie up and wait for a deer or maybe just wanting to take a leak. He sees something white and thinks at first, Just a stone, but as he gets closer he sees that the stone has eyesockets.

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

Ellison confirms the Uncle Tom as part of this trifecta of paper(-related) Invisible Man constructions along with the Sambo doll (which proves hard to burn) and his identifying papers in his 1981 introduction to the novel by way of invoking the “‘Tom Show'” (aka a blackface minstrel show) by way of the “poster” advertising it, which he then invokes again in describing what “the voice of invisibility” led him to:

…things once obscure began falling into place. Odd things, unexpected things. Such as the poster that reminded me of the tenacity which a nation’s moral evasions can take on when given the trappings of racial stereotypes, and the ease with which its deepest experience of tragedy could be converted into blackface farce. Even information picked up about the backgrounds of friends and acquaintances fell into the slowly emerging pattern of implication.

…

…I would have to approach racial stereotypes as a given fact of the social process and proceed, while gambling with the reader’s capacity for fictional truth, to reveal the human complexity which stereotypes are intended to conceal.

Ralph Ellison, introduction to Invisible Man (1981).

“To conceal” = “to mask.” In addition to strongly echoing Toni Morrison’s description in the foreword of her novel Tar Baby–also from 1981–of constructing this novel’s characters as “African masks” in order to reveal the damaging potential of stereotypes, Ellison’s description imparts that he was blind, but now he sees–which would be the continuation of a hymn lyric referenced in Tom Gordon:

…when Gordon indeed saves the day and points skyward (his signature gesture) to thank the heavens above, Trisha too reaches a religious epiphany:

“She cried harder than she had since first realizing for sure that she was lost, but this time she cried in relief. She was lost but would be found. She was sure of it. Tom Gordon had gotten the save and so would she.” (King 85)

The obvious “once was lost but now am found” reference will not be lost on a Christian reader. King’s prodigal daughter doesn’t simply find her way home in this book; she discovers religious faith through a sports-hero-turned-prophetic-angel.

Michael A. Arnzen, “Childhood and Media Literacy in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” New York Review of Science Fiction 14.8 (2002).

And now we see, to use Ellison’s language, the bear-thing “falling into place,” see King’s “emerging pattern of implication” associated with the Laughing Place, see that Tom Gordon‘s climactic face-off ultimately reveals a larger buried history of a MERGING of the transmedia dissipation strategy with the blackface minstrel strategy: American entertainment started with blackface minstrelsy, then Disney came along and dissipated or collapsed the meaning of the function of that medium/mode via cartoon animation, which via the critteration strategy dissipates meaning–or, like the mud, SUBMERGES it like the SUBaudible replicates the racism that’s submerged when meaning is LOST. Disney dissipates the stereotypes into critters, as in Disney’s A Tale of Two Critters (1977), shifting the negative function of “laughter” to positive and rendering it a “sign” of love instead of hate:

A young raccoon and a bear cub become separated from their families and team up for an exciting cross country trek filled with adventure, laughter and love.

From here.

This is the flip side of Tom Gordon‘s stereotype-dissipating face-off, and the flip side of how Ralph Ellison inverts the negative function of laughter expressed via blackface minstrelsy, an inversion (or reappropriation) that “the voice of invisibility” led him to:

Thus despite the bland assertions of sociologists, “high visibility” actually rendered one un-visible… After such knowledge, and given the persistence of racial violence and the unavailability of legal protection, I asked myself, what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter? And could it be that there was a subtle triumph hidden in such laughter that I had missed, but one which still was more affirmative than raw anger?

…It was a startling idea, yet the voice was so persuasive with echoes of blues-toned laughter that I found myself being nudged toward a frame of mind in which, suddenly, current events, memories and artifacts began combining to form a vague but intriguing new perspective.

Ralph Ellison, introduction to Invisible Man (1981).

This “new perspective” is a recognition and awareness of the hidden histories in such “current events, memories and artifacts.” He continues:

I was already having enough difficulty trying to avoid writing what might turn out to be nothing more than another novel of racial protest instead of the dramatic study in comparative humanity which I felt any worthwhile novel should be, and the voice appeared to be leading me precisely in that direction. But then as I listened to its taunting laughter and speculated as to what kind of individual would speak in such accents, I decided that it would be one who had been forged in the underground of American experience and yet managed to emerge less angry than ironic. That he would be a blues-toned laugher-at-wounds who included himself in his indictment of the human condition.

Ralph Ellison, introduction to Invisible Man (1981).

This “blues-toned laugh[t]er” might be a version of “beast-music”:

It rose up on its back legs again, swaying a little as if to beast-music only it could hear…

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

“Beast-music” expresses how American music expresses the American curse traced back to slavery:

…King’s fiction also offers his Constant Readers faith that the world and individuals might reshape themselves, break free of the degeneration that defines America’s past (a History characterized by violence and selfishness) to something humbler and more in harmony with the sanctity of the individualism that King has long extolled. While his successes on this front deserve our attention, we must not lose sight of his failures. Stephen King’s literary and cinematic corpus–with its inability to shake loose, in a substantial way, from the grip of a bestial History–has critical lessons to impart to an audience racing madly toward its own end.

TONY MAGISTRALE AND MICHAEL J. BLOUIN, STEPHEN KING AND AMERICAN HISTORY (2020). 

The lost meaning inherent in the critteration strategy might well be why Eric Wolfson can affirm in 2021 that “‘Elvis freed minstrelsy from much of its racist essence'” (quoting a 2007 book) without acknowledging that just because that essence is covered up or rendered unrecognizable doesn’t mean it’s not there, doesn’t in fact make its dissemination more insidious for going unrecognized for what it really is. More likely it means we’re just, to quote Hanks’ Disney in Saving Mr. Banks, “‘tired of remembering it that way,'” and our Disney-facilitated preference for remembering the good over the bad might be why we’re doomed to continue to repeat the bad. The critteration strategy is a version of the “sugarcoating” covert trickster rhetoric, switching from explicit overtly negative depictions to implicit covert depictions that seem positive but are still–covertly–negative, thereby facilitating ongoing racism under the guise of its no longer existing.

What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “antiracist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism.

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

Kendi’s whole framework is essentially based on opposites, or what an opposite is NOT: that being “not racist” is not opposite of racist, that “antiracist” is the opposite of racist and therefore different from being “not racist” and that it’s important to define this opposition that so many are misinformed about–so many think “not racist” and racist are opposites when they’re really not–which describes the Tom Gordon face-off: they’re supposed to be opposites, but they’re really not. 

(The more I hear white people talk about Elvis, the more it seems to reveal an underlying belief that “not racist” = the opposite of racist. If one thing is clear, it’s that he was not an “antiracist.” The opposition between the way Black people v. white people read Elvis’s racism has started to strike me as echoed in the stark opposition between Black and white reactions to the O.J. Simpson verdict.)

And yet, does the fluid duality between the face-off’s binary oppositions of good v. evil = a “false duality”?

With the popularity of the powerless defense [that no Black people have any power anywhere, and therefore “can’t be racist”], Black on Black criminals like [Ken] Blackwell get away with their racism. Black people call them Uncle Toms, sellouts, Oreos, puppets—everything but the right thing: racist. Black people need to do more than revoke their “Black card,” as we call it. We need to paste the racist card to their foreheads for all the world to see.

The saying “Black people can’t be racist” reproduces the false duality of racist and not-racist promoted by White racists to deny their racism. It merges Black people with White Trump voters who are angry about being called racist but who want to express racist views and support their racist policies while being identified as not-racist, no matter what they say or do. …

When we stop denying the duality of racist and antiracist, we can take an accurate accounting of the racial ideas and policies we support.

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

By my reading, the function of “fluid duality” becomes the opposite of “false duality”–the fluidity ultimately reveals that the two seemingly opposed sides are not actually opposed, which is what Kendi labels a “false duality.” The way the climax plays out amounts to a “mask for racism” (that is, the opposite of a “face-off” that would more appropriately describe an unmasking) by trying to mask its fluidity and maintain the illusion of duality, hence “false duality”; the duel structure of the face-off performs duality (duel = dual) as if it’s not fluid, thus “denying the duality” of racist and antiracist. The “mask for racism” the face-off performs can be traced back to Trisha’s twin mud-mask referents, I Love Lucy and Little Black Sambo. The function of these texts in Trisha’s narrative arc would seem to complicate Michael A. Arnzen’s argument that Trisha becomes increasingly media literate over the course of the novel:

Through her faith and resilience she manages to stay alive, despite all the threats to her survival. And in the process, her literacy increases and empowers her. … The book dramatizes Trisha’s progressive mastery of language and signification even as it describes her loss of innocence. … Painting her character with the maturity of one who has “dealt with” far worse problems, King progressively aligns Trisha’s language use towards the sophistication of an adult. She [] gains control over language…

Michael A. Arnzen, “Childhood and Media Literacy in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” New York Review of Science Fiction 14.8 (2002).

If it’s true, per Arnzen, that Trisha “master[s] the patriarchal language (of brothers and baseball),” which is in part reinforced by her cursing, the twin mud-mask referents seem to reveal that the buried history of minstrelsy is an element of this mastery: “[h]er face was a pasty gray, like a face on a vase pulled out of some archeological dig,” but it has to be re-buried to facilitate her emergence from the savage wild back into civilization, reinforced by the face-off climax in which she succeeds in “establishing who was better” with the help of what appears to be (but in no way is) a “real” Black man. She (and the text) have succeeded in upholding a racist hierarchy under the mantle of being “not racist.” This could be the legacy of what might be dubbed “Tricky Dick Halloran,” to merge the politician who (until Trump) was the most emblematic of King’s explicit distrust in American systems with his first “Magical Negro” figure. And that legacy in turn descends from the legacy of the curse of slavery, which continues to return and enact Ralph Ellison’s “boomerang” version of history, the return of historical patterns, which returns us to The Shining‘s wasps’ nest:

It is clear that the metafigure of the unempty wasps’ nest, in King’s novel, functions again and again to symbolize the return of the repressed, in the shape of personal history (as in Jack’s and Wendy’s case) or in the shape of the visions given to Danny by Tony (154). The unempty wasps’ nest is, after all, both a literal threat, and a figure for what returns in Jack’s head, Danny’s head, Wendy’s and Hallorann’s heads, what returns in the entire space of The Overlook Hotel, and even perhaps, ultimately, the psychic state of post-Vietnam America itself. Unlike the more literal trope of repression located in the hotel’s faulty boiler, the unempty wasps’ nest keeps expanding in reference, emptying back down to a physical object before overspilling once again with figurative signification. As Jack puts it, late on in the novel: ‘Living by your wits is always knowing where the wasps are’ (421).

Graham Allen, “The Unempty Wasps’ Nest: Kubrick’s The Shining, Adaptation, Chance, Interpretation,” Adaptation 8.3 (March 2015).

And here, in Tom Gordon, the wasps are again, per Allen, their “unempty” nest representing the “intertextual approach” that

sees the relationship between texts as a two-way process available for a two-way interpretive description and analysis. In this two-way approach what has been emptied of motivation and signification can be reanimated, as it were, or shall we say repopulated with motivation and meaning.

Graham Allen, “The Unempty Wasps’ Nest: Kubrick’s The Shining, Adaptation, Chance, Interpretation,” Adaptation 8.3 (March 2015).

Allen is referring to the text-to-film adaptation process facilitating this “reanimating” or “repopulating” of meaning, but this description could also apply to the process of “adapting” the text by way of reading it through a different critical lens (i.e., the lens of the Africanist presence). Yet, as Arnzen notes, Trisha’s Walkman radio is only “one-way”:

…her relations with others are imaginary and occur through the oneway communicative vehicle of her Walkman. She protests patriarchy, in other words, but she does so alone. She has no transmitter; her radio is only a receiver. So how much power does she really acquire?

Michael A. Arnzen, “Childhood and Media Literacy in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” New York Review of Science Fiction 14.8 (2002).

Trisha is a “receiver” while Tom Gordon is a “reliever”…and if a “receiver” would be in the position of a catcher, that would be the “apparent opposite” of Tom Gordon’s pitcher…

Toward his conclusion, Arnzen brings up an excellent point: Tom Gordon‘s ending is “problematic” for reinstating patriarchy via King’s favorite vehicle of restoring the nuclear family unit, and it’s precisely the gesture of pointing (or the appropriation of the gesture of pointing) that cements its reinstatement:

…this ending also betrays a patriarchal conceit on King’s part: that the return of the father and the resurrection of the nuclear family into an organic whole is a necessary component to a unified female subjectivity. In the closing passage of the book, Trisha’s mother is virtually absent. From her hospital bed, Trisha nonverbally gestures to the father who stands by her side, signifying her approval of his return to the family: she points to the god in the sky. Her father smiles, and they all live happily ever after, so to speak.

Michael A. Arnzen, “Childhood and Media Literacy in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” New York Review of Science Fiction 14.8 (2002).

The return of the father = the return of the (white-supremacist) patriarchy = the return of the WASP. Here we might return to one of the twin texts at the site of the mud-mask reference: Little Black Sambo. At this site, Trisha voices a line of the Sambo character’s (it turns out the line she says as if it’s from the book is not actually in the book; more on this discrepancy later). Trisha thus symbolically adopts what would seem to be Little Black Sambo’s Africanist role–though critics have noted that the race of this character is rendered ambiguous via the Indian references. Michelle Martin’s analysis of this text reveals a confluence between Sambo’s narrative arc and Trisha’s–Martin’s description of the former’s plot could be a description of the plot of Tom Gordon with the names changed:

Like many other circular journeys in children’s literature, Little Black Sambo leaves his parents at home, encounters a conflict that enables him— free from parental intervention—to act as an empowered individual, then returns to the safety of home and a warm parental welcome after his triumph.

Michelle Martin, Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2002 (2004).

Through his becoming “an empowered individual,” Martin argues that Little Black Sambo is more than a stereotype:

In examining the racial ideology in “The Story of the Inky Boys” and The Story of Little Black Sambo, one finds that Hoffmann’s story is explicitly antiracist yet implicitly racist, while the reverse is true of The Story of Little Black Sambo.

Michelle Martin, Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2002 (2004).

But her analysis seems to inadvertently reveal a deeper ambiguity to his racial nature: his parents “are bringing Sambo up in a cultured, European-influenced environment,” and his journey to empowered individual is predicated on his adopting a trickster role to outsmart the tigers–and being a trickster, or as Martin puts it, demonstrating a “presence of mind,” is a sign of the WASP presence:

In investigating whether Bannerman’s image of the black child is more positive than Hoffmann’s earlier image, one of the most telling tests of all is the reasoning powers of the two children. Sambo is a subject; the Black-a-moor is an object. Although Sambo fears the tigers, he demonstrates the presence of mind to take command of creatures that he cannot physically overpower; Sambo uses his verbal skills and newly acquired material possessions to bargain his way out of being devoured. The mute Black-a-moor, notably lacking possessions and apparently unaware of his surroundings, enjoys no such privilege. Humans antagonize the Black-a-moor; animals antagonize Sambo. While Sambo’s name and the title of the book call attention to his race, the tigers torment him because of his edibility not because of his ethnicity. They see him as a tasty morsel. Writing in the fairy-tale tradition of children being threatened and/or eaten by anthropomorphic, talking beasts, Bannerman focuses the conflict on the interaction between the protagonist and the antagonists. With the help of his thrifty father, Sambo prevails, not by defeating the tigers himself but by capitalizing on their self-destruction. Given the formidability of these antagonists, Sambo’s
choice to fight with brains rather than with brawn is a wise one.

Michelle Martin, Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2002 (2004).

Kendi’s lens of the history of racist ideas reveals the repeated association of the Africanist presence with “beasts,” and through this lens, all the evidence that Martin provides that Sambo is humanized seems to show he’s ultimately more a WASP presence than Africanist: he enjoys “privilege,” he “capitalizes,” he has help from his father, he uses “presence of mind to take command of creatures that he cannot physically overpower,” which, broadly, is language that, in addition to describing traits of Trisha’s, could also describe the institution of slavery from a white-supremacist perspective. It’s the beasts, the tigers, that manifest the Africanist presence in this narrative, aggressive and overtly threatening creatures of the jungle/wilderness, like the bear-thing in Trisha’s narrative. Martin concludes:

Child readers can empathize with Sambo because of his humanity, but they feel little or nothing for the Black-a-moor because of his lack of personhood. The Black-a-moor is a stereotype rather than an individual.

Michelle Martin, Brown Gold: Milestones of African American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2002 (2004).

This conclusion, through Kendi’s lens, seems to reveal that Little Black Sambo has only attained the status of an “individual” with “humanity”–which Martin presents as an antidote to “Americans early in the twentieth century consider[ing] black people invisible within the culture”–by adopting WASP characteristics–that is, assimilating into white culture is the only way for Black people to gain visibility. The tigers threaten to eat Sambo, but at the end he eats them, thus establishing himself above them in a (racial) hierarchy. As quoted earlier, Martin points out the use of names in the text denote “a higher status and respect for these humans than for the nameless though anthropomorphic tigers who live out in the jungle.”

Tony Magistrale reminds us that:

King begins The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon with a sentence that parallels closely William Blake’s famous portrait of the tiger as a fearful product of a misanthropic god: “The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted” (9). However, while the lamb, its sweetness meant to counterpoint the random wrath of the tiger–“Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”–tempers Blake’s description of a hostile universe, King’s forested environment provides no such relief for Trisha.

Tony Magistrale, Stephen King: America’s Storyteller (2010).

“Relief” is provided instead by the Tom Gordon figure, as Magistrale notes: “Gordon serves to close many of [Trisha’s] anxieties, a reminder of a safe place beyond the woods.” With this figure’s help, Trisha defeats the tiger, manifest in King’s narrative in the bear-thing.

Little Black Sambo’s European nature also parallels a point Kendi makes about Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 bestseller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the only four runaways are the only four biracial captives. Stowe contrasts the biracial runaway George, “of fine European features and a high, indomitable spirit,” with a docile “full Black” named Tom. “Sons of white fathers…will not always be bought and sold and traded,” Tom’s slaveholder says.

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

If part of Stowe’s defense of the Tom character was that he was based on a “real” person, that defense is undermined by the fact that this person, Josiah Henson, was a runaway, and a successful one, while the Tom character in her novel (like John Coffey in The Green Mile) refused to even entertain the possibility of escaping.

Arnzen also proceeds to undermine himself and his point about the return of the patriarchy at the end of Tom Gordon:

I believe it would be an oversimplification, however, to say that the patriarchal conceits embedded in this ending “win” and that Trisha’s identity has been wholly appropriated by a male-dominated culture. As a male reader, I myself cannot claim to know how a female reader—let alone a teenaged girl—would respond to the closure of this text. I assume, though, that her reading might be just like mine: if not out-rightly resistant to any pat “father knows best” sort of closure, then at least highly conscious of the symbolic level of the reading experience, brought right out into the open by Trisha’s last gesture and King’s proclamation that reading this book has been like playing a baseball game. The book ends, after all, in allegory. By imitating Tom Gordon’s sign and pointing toward the sky, Trisha literalizes her imagination within a context that is no longer simply roleplaying with her imaginary icon.

Michael A. Arnzen, “Childhood and Media Literacy in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” New York Review of Science Fiction 14.8 (2002).

Here Arnzen seems to fall into the “say it” trap–he acknowledges the problem of his lack of a female perspective then proceeds as if this acknowledgement alone enables him to adopt this perspective. Further, by the concluding pointing gesture, Trisha has already surpassed “simply roleplaying” with the construct of Gordon–she does this at the climactic moment of the pitch at the bear-thing. Arnzen’s use of “imitating” here reminds us that what facilitates Trisha’s victory in “establishing who was better”–her taking of Tom Gordon’s clothes and posture and pitch = her taking of his identity and body–enacts a potential form of cultural appropriation, illuminating such appropriation as a potentially racist act recapitulating the appropriation of literal Black bodies in slavery (itself recapitulated in blackface minstrelsy)–and yet Arnzen’s actual point here is the opposite, that Trisha’s “imitating” is what facilitates her own personal transcendence, that Trisha is the one who is a potential victim of appropriation, that Trisha’s identity, not Tom Gordon’s, is the one with the potential to be subsumed by the WASP, aka the white-supremacist patriarchy. Arnzen thus mistakes the bear’s (species) identity and the identity of the victim of the text’s enactment of the harm of appropriation. He’s pointing fingers in the wrong direction.

King returns to the metaphor of horror as a safety (or escape) valve, and returns to the Overlook in “What’s Scary,” a “forenote” to the 2010 edition of Danse Macabre (1981).

For us, horror movies are a safety valve. They are a kind of dreaming awake, and when a movie about ordinary people living ordinary lives skews off into some blood-soaked nightmare, we’re able to let off the pressure that might otherwise build up until it blows us sky-high like the boiler that explodes and tears apart the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (the book, I mean; in the movie everything freezes solid—how dorky is that?). 

We take refuge in make-believe terrors so the real ones don’t overwhelm us, freezing us in place and making it impossible for us to function in our day-to-day lives. 

Stephen King, “What’s Scary,” Danse Macabre (2010).

Yet again, King demonstrates his talent for undermining himself–as soon as he calls the freezing “dorky,” he justifies its symbolic use, showing it fits with his metaphor. If the Overlook is, per my reading, Africanist, then when King uses the exploding Overlook as a metaphor for the function of horror in general, he (inadvertently) describes how horror in general evokes that of existence in Black America. The “freezing us in place” also fits with something else King would overlook: when Jack is frozen, he’s paralyzed/killed by whiteness, and White America is frozen/paralyzed by the curse of slavery.

“Strike three called, I threw the curve and just froze him.”

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

This is a curse that should haunt white people, but ends up in turn affecting Black people as a consequence of white denial: we refuse to face the curse, which brings up another curious turn of phrase King emphasizes in “What’s Scary,” continued directly from the passage above:

That being the case, the central thesis of Danse Macabre, written all those years ago, still holds true: A good horror story is one that functions on a symbolic level, using fictional (and sometimes supernatural) events to help us understand our own deepest real fears. And notice I  said “understand” and not “face.” I think a person who needs help facing his/her fears is a person who isn’t strictly sane. If I assume most horror readers are like me—and I do—then we’re as sane or saner as those who read People, their daily newspapers, and a few blogs, and then call themselves good to go. My friends, a vicarious obsession with celebrities and a few dearly held political opinions is not a useful life of the imagination…

Stephen King, “What’s Scary,” Danse Macabre (2010).

This would seem to undermine one of the defining dynamics of his endings: a face-to-face confrontation with a shifting face. It also potentially undermines the usefulness of Trisha’s obsession with a celebrity as a “useful life of the imagination,” since her construction of this celebrity is in the novel depicted as integral to her survival. The inversion of the fan obsession from murderous in Misery to life-saving in Tom Gordon also echoes an inversion of the link between insanity and laughter in these two novels: in Misery Annie says of her Laughing Place that “sometimes I do laugh when I go there. But mostly I just scream,” while in Tom Gordon the tough tootsie voice tells Trisha she’ll go “insane” when she sees the “face” of the thing: “If there was anyone to hear you, they’d think you were screaming. But you’ll be laughing, won’t you?” Further, the link between insanity and Disneyland is inverted in these texts when King says of Misery‘s Paul Sheldon in On Writing that “He was sane, I’m sane, no four days at Disneyland there.” Here King invokes Disneyland as representing insanity, but in Tom Gordon it represents the opposite: “there the forest seemed almost all right, like the woods in a Disney cartoon.”

A Curse of Curses: Angels v. Devils

According to the Bible–or a misreading of it–Black people have their own curse:

THE SAME BIBLE that taught me that all humans descended from the first pair also argued for immutable human difference, the result of a divine curse. “The people who were scattered over the earth came from Noah’s three sons,” according to the story of the biblical Great Flood in the ninth chapter of Genesis. …When Noah awoke, he learned that Ham, the father of Canaan, had viewed him in all his nakedness. “May a curse be put on Canaan,” Noah raged. “May Canaan be the slave of Shem.”

Who are the cursed descendants of Canaan? In 1578, English travel writer George Best provided an answer that, not coincidentally, justified expanding European enslavement of African people. God willed that Ham’s son and “all his posteritie after him should be so blacke and loathsome,” Best writes, “that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde.”

Racist power at once made biological racial distinction and biological racial hierarchy the components of biological racism. This curse theory lived prominently on the justifying lips of slaveholders until Black chattel slavery died in Christian countries in the nineteenth century. Proof did not matter when biological racial difference could be created by misreading the Bible.

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

So the nature of this curse is that Noah was drunk asshole who pass out naked and then got pissed at someone seeing how disgusting he is. Classic WASP trickster blame-shifting in the vein of (childish) finger-pointing. It’s interesting that the name of this particular (unfairly) cursed figure would be “Ham”: in keeping with the blackface minstrel legacy and its justification of a system protected by law–and so in keeping with another merging of church and state–the figure representative of the enslaved Black race is defined in the Bible by a critteration invoking comedic performance:

[King] also thought Jack Nicholson hammed it up appallingly, and Shelley Duvall as Wendy was “insulting to women. She’s basically a scream machine.”

Emma Brockes, “Stephen King: on alcoholism and returning to the Shining” (September 21, 2013).

and

James Naremore describes what he calls “the aesthetics of the grotesque” in his analysis of Kubrick’s directorial style and notes Kubrick’s “love of exaggerated performances and caricatured faces and bodies,” hovering between the realistic and the sardonic.⁷⁷ Kubrick also pushed Nicholson into increasingly crazed performances, amping up the emotional register with each take. One critic said that Nicholson “hams atrociously”; another wrote, “his eyebrow arching, mouthy work here makes Bela Lugosi look conservative.” And finally, one wrote, “long before he is supposed to go crazy, Nicholson is mugging shamelessly, popping his eyes, wiggling his brows, and even sticking out his tongue.”⁷⁸

ELIZABETH JEAN HORNBECK, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?: Domestic Violence in The Shining,” Feminist Studies 42.3 (2016).

Which makes it sound like Kubrick wanted to direct cartoons…

There are two reveals near the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?–the reveal that Doom, who up to this point has been intent on executing Roger as “justice” for the murder of a Hollywood executive, is actually the one behind the murder and thus behind the titular framing (i.e., a false accusation, or finger-pointing), then the reveal that Doom is not a “real” person, but a toon who’s been wearing a rubber mask. In the latter reveal, we see yet another example of undermining manifest in a fluid duality of identity–in his “real-person” identity, he is an evil WASP presence who becomes even more WASP after the initial reveal of his master plan due to the covert nature of his dirty tricks (blaming others for what turn out to be his own actions). This seeming critique of the WASP nature (i.e., emphasizing white patriarchy as the evil/villainous presence) is also manifest in his “vision,” the nature of his master plan before we know he’s a toon, that he wants to enact a terrible future for Los Angeles (the film is set in 1947):

Doom: Several months ago, I had the good providence to stumble upon…this plan of the City Council’s, a construction plan of epic proportions. They are calling it a freeway.

Valiant: ‘Freeway’? What the hell’s a freeway?

Doom: Eight lanes of shimmering cement running from here to Pasadena. Smooth, safe, fast. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past.

Valiant: So that’s why you kill Acme and Maroon? For this freeway? I don’t get it.

Doom: Of course not. You lack vision. I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on, all day, all night. Soon, where Toontown once stood, will be…a string of gas stations; inexpensive motels; restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food; tire salons; automobile dealerships…and wonderful, wonderful billboards…reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988).

Doom’s motivation for this might be money, but at this point it seems more like he’s really motivated by a hatred of toons and the prospect of destroying Toontown for the sake of the apparent convenience of “real” (i.e., white) people. And then: we learn he’s a Toon:

Valiant: Holy smoke, he’s a toon.

Doom: Surprised?

Valiant: Not really. That lamebrain freeway idea could only be cooked up by a toon.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988).

So maybe his motivation is that he hates himself, but the film after the latter reveal never addresses this; instead Doom just becomes more exaggerated and crazy until he is destroyed by the same “Dip” he created to destroy other toons.

As Bernard Wolfe said, “[Joel Chandler] Harris’s inner split—and the South’s, and white America’s—is mirrored in the fantastic disparity between Remus’s beaming face and Brer Rabbit’s acts.” And as per one aforementioned analysis, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? the main human character and the animated rabbit parallel the fluidity as in the Remus-rabbit relation–which is a variation of an angel-devil relation: Remus on one shoulder telling you to be good, Brer Rabbit on the other wanting you to play a trick. Remus and Brer Rabbit are really two sides contained in the same entity, that of the psyche of Joel Chandler Harris (which per Wolfe = the psyche of white America). As Christopher Lloyd’s psyche must also contain the apparently oppositional roles of the angel-devil relation:

“We’re always watching,” Al the “Boss” Angel says in his only overtly angelic appearance at the end of the film.

Isn’t that what Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel offers up, after all—a mode of vision which sees everything and sees it all the time? A mode of vision, then, which is terrifying in its transcendence of the contingent. This is a mode of vision that is unbearable because it is total, like the vision of a god, or like the vision of a movie-camera, another ‘being’ that does not have eyelids to close, a sclerophthalmic machine if you will. …elements of the uncanny enumerated by Freud are to be found in the film: the double, the repetition of the same thing, fear of the animation of the dead, the evil eye. Most significantly of all, throughout Freud’s essay, first in his analysis of Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’ and then more generally, there is a focus on eyes. This is understandable, because as Freud makes clear, the uncanny is most often generated by the temporary collapse of the distinction between the imaginary and the real, moments when the evidence of our eyes comes under question.

Graham Allen, “The Unempty Wasps’ Nest: Kubrick’s The Shining, Adaptation, Chance, Interpretation,” Adaptation 8.3 (March 2015).

Thus Freud’s Uncanny = Kristeva’s Place Where Meaning Collapses = Mary Poppins’ Place Where Lost Things Go = the (Kingian) Laughing Place…

Since the entire world of the novel could be read as contained in Trisha’s white psyche (although, technically contained in King’s), this might all show that the battle between the WASP and Africanist presence is ultimately a battle contained in the white psyche. (It’s also the white-angel part of the psyche embodied by twin Lloyds that merges church and state (i.e., lets their religious beliefs dictate how they enact their power): Al the “Boss” Angel’s cap shows that “Al” stands for “American League”:

The Africanist presence is ultimately a sign of the WASP presence by way of being a white construction of Blackness (more specifically for the sake of maintaining racial hierarchy), and if Africanist = ultimately WASP, WASP in a mask, i.e.,, WASP in blackface, then WASP v. Africanist = WASP v. WASP. WASP subsumes Africanist, as Trisha subsumes Tom Gordon via her appropriating his pitching and his pointing. This whole narrative is really staging an internal conflict, that of Trisha constructing her white identity, in addition to her TOMboy one. The angel-devil battle her psyche has constructed could be read as the battle over whether to take advantage of her white (possibly also male?) privilege in the face of a cruel world.

This book builds on recent works including Deidre Lynch’s The Economy of Character, Woloch’s The One and the Many, and David Brewer’s The Afterlife of Character by offering a wider scale of analysis: the relationship between character and culture.⁷¹ Woloch’s scale of analysis is the finite structure of the realist novel, which he suggests is destabilized by its “dual impulses to bring in a multitude of characters and to bring out the interiority of a single protagonist.”⁷² … While Lynch’s “pragmatics of character” identifies the individual psyche as character’s most resonant cultural space, David Brewer posits a more communal function for character in what he calls “imaginative expansion,” a practice in which communities of readers collaboratively envision extended lives for fictional characters. (Today we call this “fan fiction.”) 

Adena Spingarn, Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitor (2018).

The reading that the novel, and its face-off battle, enact a battle contained in Trisha’s psyche, which in turn could, like Harris’s psyche, be read as symbolic of the (white) American psyche, posits that the individual and collective are not distinct but overlapping entities. This would also be in keeping with reading American fiction through a psychoanalytic lens, i.e., reading books for what they express about the collective American psyche, per Leslie Fiedler, who has applied the lens of what Linda Williams calls the dialectic between “‘pro-Tom’ sympathy and ‘anti-Tom” antipathy'”–which is a dialectic it’s also possible to read the Tom Gordon face-off as performing. Fiedler’s work in general seems to show that to identify “archetypes” in literature amounts to psychoanalyzing the culture that births these types that literature expresses. If the figure that enters into the Faustian pact is such a type, then it’s possible the Tom Gordon face-off could also be read as performing a correction to such a pact: rather than make a pact with the (d)evil bear-thing, Trisha does the apparent opposite–but since the apparent opposites are really the same, this correction is only the appearance of a correction.

The reason that the Faustian pact is such a central concept in American literature, as Leslie Fiedler shows, and to American music, as Robert Johnson shows, is, as I hope I’ve shown, directly related to the curse of slavery: the Americans who generated wealth from unpaid human labor essentially made a version of a deal with the Devil. The Devil’s origin story amounts to the curse of the fallen angel, which might be inverted by Christopher Lloyd’s ascent from Doom the (d)evil toon dressed all in black to Al the “Boss” Angel in Angels in the Outfield (July 1994), another baseball movie I was somewhat obsessed with as a child, though not as much as Rookie of the Year (July 1993) and The Sandlot (April 1993) (I thought these were all Disney movies, but Angels is the only one clearly designated so on Wikipedia). These baseball movies constituted a pretty significant part of my own TOMboy identity, and I was around Trisha’s age when this trifecta came out (so to speak). I saw The Sandlot in the theater, and I remember it as a significant moment because my mother, as a reward for my First Communion (a Catholic thing), offered me a choice instead of just, per standard procedure, telling me what to do: we could go see The Sandlot, or I could have some sort of girly piece of jewelry–I’m a little hazy on what the second option was, since I stopped listening after “Sandlot.” It was also around this time that my own media coming-of-age occurred by way of the OJ Simpson Bronco chase–I have no memory of registering Kurt Cobain’s death just a month or so prior, but I remember watching the Bronco, which happened a month before Angels in the Outfield was released. It was also around this time that my mother, to my shock, allowed me, at my request, to have my nearly waist-length hair cut so short that I was routinely mistaken for a boy even when I wasn’t wearing a baseball cap–though, like Trisha, I usually was, except mine was a White Sox cap instead of a Red Sox one. Like Trisha, I also attempted to construct my own TOMboy identity around sports fandom (an assertion of masculinity), but since Memphis did not have any professional sports teams at the time (now they have the Grizzlies for the NBA), this was harder to do, so I picked the Chicago White Sox as my favorite baseball team, and since I played first base for my softball team, first baseman Frank Thomas was my favorite player. (This was also around the time that Michael Jordan switched from basketball to baseball and played briefly for the White Sox before switching back to basketball, if you forgot that happened. And around the time Stephen King and Greil Marcus were on tour with the Rock Bottom Remainders together.)

As mentioned in the first Tom Gordon post, Babe Ruth is a presence in The Sandlot, embodied in the great HAMbino character who points to the fences and prompts everyone to erupt in laughter, and who bears a Babe-Ruth inspired nickname. In this movie’s narrative, which revolves around the value of Babe Ruth’s signature, “the legend of the Beast” turns out to be wrong. In its climactic sequence, the Cujo-like dog designated the “Beast” chases the character Benny in what amounts to a large circle back to the starting point of the boys’ sandlot baseball diamond, then Benny and the Beast hop the fence into the yard the dog leapt out of to start the chase in the first place, at which point the fence that the great Hambino pointed at collapses onto the dog. This strikes me as a link to Tom Sawyer’s whitewashed fence in the metaphorical sense of whitewashing historical narratives: if the “legend of the Beast” amounts to a sort of curse, when the fence falls on the dog, the curse is broken in the legend being proven wrong and revealing the dog to be ultimately harmless. The collapsing fence physically harms the dog like the legend harms its reputation, and the legend is proven wrong in this moment when the benevolent Black man who owns the equivalently benevolent dog emerges and reveals he is blind, his blindness having been caused by a PITCH, a fastball (not a speedball) from when he played pro ball with none other than Babe Ruth. (This player is played by James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader that once exhorted his son to join the Dark Side; Jones also plays a character who hears the ghost voice in the baseball-as-toxic-nostaglia movie Field of Dreams.)

“Holy shit,” Eddie said, seeing the baseball Cullum must have meant. “Autographed by the Babe!”

“Ayuh,” Cullum said. “Not when he was a Yankee, either, I got no use for baseballs autographed by Yankees. That ’us signed when Ruth was still wearing a Red Sox . . .” 

…

“So? I got you out of a jam on t’other side of the water. Seems like you owe me one. Have they ever won the Series? At least up to your time?”

Eddie’s grin faded and he looked at the old man seriously. “I’ll tell you if you really want me to, John. But do ya?”

John considered, puffing his pipe. Then he said, “I s’pose not. Knowin’d spoil it.”

Stephen King, Song of Susannah (2004).

If 1918 is when the Curse of the Bambino that was not broken until 2004 began when Ruth was traded to the Yankees, the fixed 1919 World Series also happens to correspond to the “Red Summer” of race riots that occurred that same year.

In order to re-create the ideal WASP American core family with the white frontier Christian woman at its center, King constructs the white female coming-of-age narrative as a discursive battle with the Africanist Savage Villain. It is also a discursive standoff between “a white man’s game by design” (Bryant, “Don’t Expect” n.p.)¹⁵ and its frequent narrative associations with WASP American civilization, quite fittingly since baseball is the sport that is broadly known as WASP America’s national pastime and “national religion” (famously coined by Morris R. Cohen in 1919) and a Blackness discursively rendered as an unhumanized abject.

Corrine Lenhardt, Savage Horrors: The Intrinsic Raciality of the American Gothic (2020).

Perhaps then it’s not incidental that the expletive form of a curse Trisha utters at the nexus of her own vomiting and shitting is “sugartit:”

“Oh sugartit,” Trisha said, and then vomited again. She couldn’t see what was coming out, it was too dark for that and she was glad, but it felt thin, more like soup than puke. Something about the almost-rhyme of those two words, soup and puke, made her stomach immediately knot up again. She backed away from the trees between which she had thrown up, still on her knees, and then her bowels cramped again, this time more fiercely.

“Oh SUGARTIT!” Trisha wailed, tearing at the snap on the top of her jeans.

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

Like the Hearts in Atlantis baseball bat that’s been “sharpened to a point on both ends,” Trisha has been rendered the same on “both ends” in that each end is now, as Matthew Holman puts it, “expelling the toxins.” She is effectively expelling such toxins in the pattern of vomit-“sugartit!”-vomit-“SUGARTIT!”-shit. The symbolic sickness this double regurgitation is a sign of, pivoting on the erupted verbal curse of “sugartit” (which is itself doubled), is that engendered by the curse of slavery, reinforced by the verbal curse invoking food consumption, specifically the food (or food ingredient) that, alongside tobacco, constituted the roots of American slavery (which grew out of West Indian slavery), and which also indirectly summons the mammy stereotype, a type embodied by Little Black Sambo’s mother Black Mumbo. It is a curse that infantilizes, and as such, a potential sign of the tar baby, which is a sign of the Laughing Place, or perhaps rather, a sign of the path to the Laughing Place, since the tar baby is the trap that causes Brer Rabbit to be caught; like Little Black Sambo, he has to escape being eaten by predators higher up on the food chain by “outwitting” or tricking them via the device of his Laughing Place. The fact that both Trisha’s father and the tough tootsie voice call Trisha “sugar” is another, related version of the same point on both ends, since her father is on the “good” side as denoted by the happy ending of the return of the patriarchy, and the tough tootsie voice is associated with (if not is outright) the bad side of the (bear-)thing. If Holman points out that the tough tootsie voice is Trisha’s own voice–both use the markedly incorrect “inbarned” for “embalmed”–this voice calling her “sugar” would then in turn indicate that Trisha is her father, which would in turn indicate she’s been subsumed by the patriarchy.

An actor from Angels in the Outfield, Danny Glover, provides the voice of Josiah Henson, the real-life figure Stowe’s Uncle Tom was in part based on, in the documentary Redeeming Uncle Tom: The Josiah Henson Story (2019), which effectively blames media dissipation for exaggerating Stowe’s portrayal of the character into a stereotype, and more specifically blames lax copyright laws for enabling the appropriation of the figure in blackface minstrel shows bearing the same name as Stowe’s novel. The documentary also seems to credit rather than blame–or at least quotes Lincoln crediting–Uncle Tom’s Cabin for starting the Civil War.

The Battle is the War

Connected to Trisha’s conception of herself as a “minstrel mud girl by MOONLIGHT,” Mark Twain points out that Southerners can connect anything to the Civil War:

Everything is changed since the war, for better or for worse; but you’ll find people down here born grumblers, who see no change except the change for the worse. There was an old negro woman of this sort. A young New-Yorker said in her presence, “What a wonderful moon you have down here!” She sighed and said, “Ah, bless yo’ heart, honey, you ought to seen dat moon befo’ de waw!”’

The new topic was dead already. But the poet resurrected it, and gave it a new start.

A brief dispute followed, as to whether the difference between Northern and Southern moonlight really existed or was only imagined.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).

This is immediately preceded by an equation of the Civil War to Jesus:

In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it. All day long you hear things ‘placed‘ as having happened since the waw; or du’in’ the waw; or befo’ the waw; or right aftah the waw; or ’bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo’ the waw or aftah the waw. It shows how intimately every individual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode. 

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Tony Magistrale, who compares King’s depiction of the Trisha-Tom relationship to Twain’s depiction of the Huck-Jim relationship as different versions of the same dynamic, tries to blame Maine when he says the Tom Gordon construction is a sign of Maine’s influence:

…whatever deficiencies are inherent in the writer’s construction of the “Magical Negro” figure, they are at least in part fueled by his regionalism. As a Mainer, King’s exposure to blacks has been necessarily limited…

Tony Magistrale, Stephen King: America’s Storyteller (2010).

But Magistrale’s own analysis of Tom Gordon‘s confluence with a Twain text itself betrays a more Southern influence. Magistrale designates the influence of Maine “a decidedly ambivalent presence” in King’s work, but I would argue this “decidedly ambivalent presence” is Africanist and derives from a Southern influence–one derived from Twain but also possibly more prominently from Harris, who Twain himself outright conflated with his Uncle Remus character.

MR. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS (‘Uncle Remus’) was to arrive from Atlanta at seven o’clock Sunday morning; so we got up and received him. … There is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind [his shy nature], as all know who have read the Uncle Remus book; and a fine genius, too, as all know by the same sign. 

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).

This will be in keeping with Mark Twain’s apparent belief that blackface minstrel shows were “authentic.” Twain continues:

[Harris] deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked eagerly to Mr. Cable’s house to get a glimpse of the illustrious sage and oracle of the nation’s nurseries. They said—

‘Why, he ‘s white!’

They were grieved about it. So, to console them, the book was brought, that they might hear Uncle Remus’s Tar-Baby story from the lips of Uncle Remus himself—or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him. But it turned out that he had never read aloud to people, and was too shy to venture the attempt now. Mr. Cable and I read from books of ours, to show him what an easy trick it was; but his immortal shyness was proof against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read about Brer Rabbit ourselves.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Perhaps not incidentally, one thesis designates the Twain-Harris relationship as defined by “Southern Ambivalence.”

It’s the Remus influence that plays a critical role in the construction of the battle for Trisha’s white psyche, and Remus is a sign of Joel Chandler Harris’s psyche. Per Bernard Wolfe, the Remus-Brer Rabbit relation constitutes Harris’s split psyche, which means it could by itself be characterized by “Southern ambivalence”:

Perhaps, as Bernard Wolfe has insisted, “the Remus stories are a monument to the South’s ambivalence.” … He noted that there appears to be a powerful implication of interchangeable colors in the stories that “whites are bleached Negroes and Negroes are dusky whites.”²²

Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (1988).

The two sides of the face-off battle echo a parallel to Harris’s split in Trisha’s psyche, with one side of the split (the Trisha-Tom side) manifesting the Twain influence via the Huck-Jim relation: hence the Twain influence is manifest on one side of the face-off, contained within the larger Harris influence that encompasses both sides; it turns out each side of Trisha’s psyche might itself be split.

Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), with its depiction of the interracial friendship between Huck Finn and Jim, might also be thought to descend from Stowe. With the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe had set up a cultural battleground upon which the nature of both the institution of slavery and of African Americans would be hotly contested for many years to come.

Adena Spingarn, Uncle Tom: From Martyr to Traitor (2018).

(Perhaps the selection of “Remus” as this character’s name by Harris encodes the twin nature of the character with himself in echoing that of the twin brother of Romulus, founder of Rome.)

Per Wolfe, Harris’s split psyche is also reflective of the southern psyche that then becomes reflective of the psyche of all white America, which the construction of the Tom Gordon face-off ultimately supports–the battle in Trisha’s psyche for the construction of white identity = the angel and devil on her shoulders, the equivalent of the Remus and Brer Rabbit angel-devil (loving v. hating Black people) battle in Joel Chandler Harris’s psyche. The southern psyche bleeds north.

That said, Mark Twain claims that Harris actually escaped a Southern influence in a split lineage that echoes the split influences in the Tom Gordon face-off: Twain claims the writing of Sir Walter Scott engendered a common literary style in North and South alike until the North moved on while the South maintained, to its detriment, the style of the Scott influence–and here Twain conflates Harris and Remus again:

There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. But when a Southerner of genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about America and England, and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany—as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the South ought to have a dozen or two—and will have them when Sir Walter’s time is out.

A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by ‘Don Quixote’ and those wrought by ‘Ivanhoe.’ The first swept the world’s admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott’s pernicious work undermined it.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).

In this discussion, Twain blames the Civil War on Sir Walter Scott (or on his writing):

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter’s influence than to that of any other thing or person.

One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. 

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).

And these “signs” are in the style of the writing. As with the aforementioned Henson documentary, other sources credit (rather than blame) Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for starting the Civil War:

“Harriet Beecher Stowe’s most famous introduction took place on or around Thanksgiving Day, 1862, when she was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln, who allegedly greeted her with these memorable words, ‘So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!'”

DANIEL R. VOLLARO, “Lincoln, Stowe, and the “Little Woman/Great War” Story: The Making, and Breaking, of a Great American Anecdote,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 30.1 (2009).

The battle for Trisha’s white psyche reenacts this same war, emphasizing its ongoing influence, whether we want to see it or not. The three-part nature of this seemingly two-sided War enacted in Elvis’s “American Trilogy” fits with “the Freudian perception of the human psyche”: the ego, the super-ego, and the id. (The supernatural presence of the bear-thing seems like it would manifest the “super-ego.”) So the “tough tootsie” voice always saying things in her head about the threat of “the thing” supports that as the narrative escalates, the voice escalates into manifesting in a material form, i.e., the “bear-thing,” whose “true form” is “full of wasps.”

This can be read as another hint that this narrative is all taking place in Trisha’s mind. The “bear-thing” is Africanist on the outside, wasp on the inside. And inside Trisha’s mind “it was full of wasps,” fitting with the Africanist presence constructions of Trisha ultimately being WASP, as the Africanist presence as a white construction functions in general.

We saw that according to many trends and thinkers who seek to explain reflexive humour by employing the superiority theory, a split in one’s personality is the source of incongruity, hence humour. A similar internal split explains self-referential humour in some relief theories of humour. Reflexive humour can be partly explained by appealing to Freud’s tripartite model of self. Humour is meaningful in terms of opposition, but this time an internal one. In other words, self-referential humour can be interpreted as the result of an opposition between superego and ego. The superego suppresses some libidinal energy, which is safely vented through jokes and laughter (see also Critchley 2002: 94). Freud believes that laughing at oneself is the discovery of the child in oneself… 

Massih Zekavat, “Reflexive humour and satire: a critical review,” European Journal of Humour Research 7(4) (2019).

The face-off’s re-enactment of the Civil War as a sign of its ongoing influence plays out on thematic and narrative levels: the re-enactment itself evidences its relevance, but then there’s a certain lack of resolution in the face-off that demonstrates the unresolved nature of the War in the American psyche. In contradistinction to the explicit lack of resolution of The Dark Tower‘s ending that apparently drew such ire, Tom Gordon seems to have an explicit resolution when Trisha succeeds in “establishing who was better” and (with help) defeats the bear-thing. But if we read this all as allegorical for a battle in Trisha’s own head (in what offers a strong confluence with the explicit premise of “Life of Chuck” and Whitman’s “I contain multitudes” concept), the battle unfolding is a battle between two sides of herself; Trisha’s body = (white) America’s body. As Whitman reads baseball as emblematic of the American character, so we can read Trisha. And if one side of herself wins out over the other, is that a resolution? Shouldn’t the real battle between parts of oneself not be to defeat one side, but to integrate/merge them into a cohesive, unified whole?

I began to silence one half of the war within me, the duel between antiracism and assimilation that W.E.B. Du Bois gave voice to, and started embracing the struggle toward a single consciousness of antiracism….

….I had imagined history as a battle: on one side Black folks, on the other a team of “them n*****s” and White folks. I started to see for the first time that it was a battle between racists and antiracists.”

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

The integration of two apparently opposite sides into “a single consciousness of antiracism” is what America will have to achieve to break its curse, and almost a quarter century after Tom Gordon‘s publication, we are still far from it.

Many cities in the United States could trace similar repetitive patterns of policing that torments and kills people who aren’t considered white, all the way back to the origin of law enforcement in this country. It is a history rooted in slave patrols and militias designed to protect white people’s lives and livelihoods from rebellion among enslaved Black people. But in Memphis the grief and oppressiveness resulting from those systemic patterns run especially deep — lingering and reverberating, like the rap, soul, blues and rock ’n’ roll music this city has given the world.

…

Mr. Nichols might not have known every detail of the cruel heritage that was ensnaring him as he tried to calm the mob of policemen beating him, tried to escape and shouted, “Mom, Mom, Mom.” But that doesn’t mean he didn’t know in his bones or in his DNA or from the Memphis soil beneath him that he could end up joining those who preceded him in the lineage of terror running through our nation’s history.

Mr. Nichols’s stepfather told a reporter how wrenching it was to see on video when officers who had just taken turns kicking his son and beating him with batons acted so nonchalantly afterward, as if they had done the same thing many times before. Isn’t that similar to how our nation has responded for centuries when it comes to police violence against Black people? Isn’t it high time, again, to stop treating police brutality as just another issue to address with half measures? Or will this be yet one more moment when the vicious, racist (blue) line twisting through our nation continues to be as American as apple pie, baseball and Elvis?

Emily Yellin, “Violent History Echoes in the Killing of Tyre Nichols” (January 28, 2023).

If the Red Sox broke their curse via a binary victory, that might even be part of the ongoing problem. Trisha’s victory, and the novel’s resolution, is false; the conclusion seems like a resolution the same way the two sides of the face-off seem to be opposites–i.e., it’s the opposite of what it purports to be, not a resolution (or an anti-resolution?): Trisha’s psyche remains fractured–which is to say, ambivalent–in a way that reads as oppositional to the resolution of the psyche of Ellison’s Invisible Man: he might not know what to do about it, but he sees that both sides are bullshit. Trisha, on the other hand, remains blind.

Elvis’s first record perhaps embodies the integration that escapes Trisha in her false victory: Blues on the A side (the “cat” side) with a cover of “That’s All Right,” Bluegrass on the B side (the “hillbilly” side) with a cover of “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Twin moons the night the Red Sox break their curse. Twin sides of one identity. WASP v. Africanist actually = WASP v. WASP.

Once again, WASP v. Africanist (which amounts to WASP v. WASP) is evoked by wasps v. bees:

In other words, metafigure as it is, the image of the unempty wasps’ nest and here its final release and dissipation, allows King to exorcise and thus conclude his novel, resolving the uncanny into Hallorann’s witness of its rational and material destruction (487). How does this figure meaningfully return in our reading of Kubrick’s adaptation of the novel? We might start by returning to the lone wasp, rather than nest, on the front cover of the reissued novel. Taking our lead from that, and with one eye on Aristotle’s De Anima, we might remind ourselves that the wasp, along with the nobler bee, is a sclerophthalmic animal, an animal with hard, lidless eyes which, as Derrida states, thinking of and reflecting on these things, is terrifying because it ‘always sees’ (Eyes: 132). Such a feature of the wasp, of course, cannot but make us reflect upon the emphasis Kubrick places in his film on opening and closing the eyes.

Graham Allen, “The Unempty Wasps’ Nest: Kubrick’s The Shining, Adaptation, Chance, Interpretation,” Adaptation 8.3 (March 2015).

But King doesn’t really “resolve the uncanny” in The Shining; its unresolved nature is indicated by the “return of the repressed” (aka the “uncanny”) that the Overlook represents when signs of it manifest in Misery and Tom Gordon (among other King texts)–it was blown up, but it was not destroyed. The “nobler bee” Allen invokes is somewhat unsettlingly reminiscent of the “noble savage,” and as Seirian Sumner notes in her study on insect wasps, Aristotle was wrong about the bees’ divinity. Something that “always sees” is “terrifying” in some contexts, comforting in others (i.e., God). If it’s “terrifying” in the context of the Overlook Hotel, it’s also terrifying in the concept of the OVERSEER, the figure that oversees the enslaved people working on a plantation, a role that the real-life Uncle Tom, Josiah Henson, once occupied.

The return of the repressed manifest in the Overlook returns us to a passage cited in Part III on The Shining:

The Hive’s pictorial space is bipolar; its emotional associations follow suit. Community attracts, but it also repels. To know a social order as a whole is an act of simplification that extends to all of its elements. Yes, to see the whole, the city, the future from afar is to long for it, to wish, as it were, to join the masons raising its walls. However, to see in this way is also to stand apart and above, to be superior. To see a human group thus is to be privileged with the big picture, to be beyond and thereby relieved of the problems of cooperative becoming, of history, of a shared present and a future complicated by others. 

CRISTOPHER HOLLINGSWORTH, POETICS OF THE HIVE: INSECT METAPHOR IN LITERATURE (2001).

“To stand apart and above, to be superior” also describes a hierarchical relation. If Trisha succeeds in “establishing who was better,” she succeeds in cementing an identity predicated on being better than Black people in a way that’s ironically not privileged with the full picture because it’s predicated on repressing that her identity is constituted by being better than Black people. After all, a Black person, or rather an imagined construction of one, helped her achieve this superiority.

This battle for her white psyche might also be read as a battle over whether Trisha will take advantage of her white privilege in the face of an uncaring cruel world. The assistance in defeating the bear-thing she ultimately gets from the farmer that shoots the bear is not gained by a conscious choice on her part signals that she’ll continue to benefit from it unthinkingly in a way that supports the conclusion’s ultimate lack of resolution in the construction of her still fractured psyche–she is perhaps the “lone wasp” on the reissued Shining novel’s cover Allen described above, lost in the woods and cut off from the collective of the nest.

This figure on the cover might look like a bee if not for the wingspan…

In the climax of the film, the team is disheartened to find out the angels are absent during their pivotal game against Chicago. But Roger restores the faith by flapping his arms to support the worried Clark, which triggers a wave of belief, and flapping, among the team, and fans.  

Madalyn Mendoza, “S.A. man pulled an ‘Angels in the Outfield’ rally signal, proving Spurs fans really tried everything” (May 25, 2017).

But “the cover is not the book,” and if Jack Torrance falls prey to the Overlook’s offer to be “privileged with the big picture” by the (false) cohesive version of history he might piece together in the scrapbook, Trisha falls prey to a different (possibly opposite) version of this privilege more explicitly articulated by Hollingsworth’s description of it, which embeds a contradiction of the vantage supposedly facilitating the big-picture view in turn engendering a form of blindness: “relieved of the problems of cooperative becoming, of history.” Tom Gordon is a relief pitcher, after all, and unlike Jack, who sees connections between the historical scraps, Trisha remains blind to the history of her blank-slate referents. (And if on the surface the hunter’s deus ex machina appearance is supposed to show that God exists and can miraculously intervene, this religious ideal might itself be a symptom of white privilege.) In the end, Trisha’s appropriated gesture of pointing cementing the return of the patriarchy enacts the inextricability of the Africanist presence in constituting a “whole” American identity that’s still predicated on the inextricable element of the Africanist presence remaining repressed/oppressed.

To sum up, the apparently opposite versions of the explicit and implicit manifestations of racial constructions playing out in the Tom Gordon climactic face-off are ultimately the same: tools that work to dehumanize, to uphold a racist hierarchy that in turns uphold the white-supremacist patriarchy, both within Trisha’s head and without.

You look like an angel (look like an angel)
Walk like an angel (walk like an angel)
Talk like an angel
But I got wise
You’re the devil in disguise
…
…I thought that I was in heaven
But I was sure surprised
Heaven help me, I didn’t see
The devil in your eyes
…Heaven knows how you lied to me
You’re not the way you seemed

Elvis Presley, “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise” (1968).

-SCR

While we’re still stuck in the quagmire of the 1999 novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, a summary might be a handy road map.

The “Pregame” chapter opens with nine-year-old Trisha McFarland lost in the woods after ducking off the trail to pee while her older brother Pete and divorced mother Quilla are fighting. We get exposition about how Pete has been discontent after having to move from Malden to Sanford, unable to make friends due to being a computer nerd and always complaining on the regular outings their mother has been taking them on since the divorce a year ago–including this one, to the Appalachian Trail. As Pete and Quilla fight in the car on the way to the trail, Trisha escapes by fantasizing about her (and her father’s) favorite baseball player, Red Sox relief pitcher Tom Gordon, whom she has a crush on and imagines meeting at a hot dog wagon, where he’s in need of directions.   

In “First Inning,” the three McFarlands pack their gear and hit the trail. Quilla and Pete, fighting over Pete’s inability to make friends, ignore Trisha when she asks to stop at a water pump, and then she decides to step off the trail to pee near a place where the path forks. She decides she can cross the gap to pick up the trail on the other side. 

In “Second Inning,” Trisha can’t find the trail where she thinks it should be, and after ten minutes she can no longer hear voices coming from it. She wriggles under a fallen tree blocking her way and a “fat black snake” wriggles under her hand. She goes a little farther and trips and falls and decides to turn back, but after walking in that direction still doesn’t find the trail. She tries to ignore the voice in her head telling her she’s lost. Finally she gives in and starts shouting out for help and that she’s lost. 

In “Third Inning,” Trisha cries for a bit after no one responds to her yelling, and, surrounded by a cloud of bugs, imagines the fuss that will have to be made to find her (while we’re told her mother and brother still have not even noticed she’s missing yet). In a panic, she starts to run and almost runs right off a cliff but manages to turn just in time. She tries to convince herself she’s okay, and faints. 

In “Top of the Fourth,” Trisha wakes up to a thunderstorm. After a while she feels hungry and takes out all the food from her pack, eats a hard-boiled egg and a Twinkie and drinks some of her Surge. As she’s putting the rest of the food back in her pack, she finds her Walkman and turns on the radio and hears news from Castle Rock. She walks along the bluff listening for water that she thinks she’ll be able to follow back to people. She imagines finding a hunter’s cabin with a phone as she comes across a small stream. As she’s following it, she gets stung in the face by a wasp and goes tumbling down the rock slope. She falls twenty-five feet, landing by the wasps’ nest so that more sting her. She runs back to the stream and recalls her mother talking with someone about an allergic reaction to wasp stings. She checks her pack and finds her Gameboy shattered but her Walkman in tact. When she turns it on she hears the news on the radio that she’s been reported missing. She follows the stream for hours. She tries to pray and recalls the discussion she had with her father about whether he believes in God and his explanation that he believes in the Subaudible. She listens to a Red Sox-Yankee game on her Walkman and eats half a tuna sandwich and the second “splooshed” Twinkie. Tom Gordon comes on in the ninth inning of the game to preserve the lead, and when he succeeds and the Sox win, Trisha thinks it means she’ll be saved–though we’re told she’s already left the area that rescue workers are focusing on in their search for her. She sleeps while suspicious “sounds” move closer to her. 

In “Bottom of the Fourth,” Trisha has a nightmare that she encounters a huge wasps’ nest when she tries to get her father a beer out of the cellar. She wakes covered in bugs and itching. Illuminated by moonlight, she washes her face in a stream and applies mud to it to soothe the itching and stings. The voice in her head tries to convince her she’s going to die and that the sounds she hears are from some “thing” that’s after her. Trying to think of something else to imagine, she imagines Tom Gordon, who tells her the “secret of closing” is “establishing that it’s you who’s better.” In a Castle View hotel, her distraught parents end up having sex, and her brother has nightmares. 

In “Fifth Inning,” Trisha reapplies mud to her face and recalls putting makeup on with her friend Pepsi when they were little. She continues to follow the stream thinking it will lead her to people and feels something watching her. The stream ends up leading into a bog, and Trisha steps into mud that sucks her shoe off and she has to fish it out. She debates turning back but keeps going, walking through stagnant water and tripping and falling into it at one point, shortly after which things get “wiggy” and she starts talking to Tom Gordon. She’s excited to see a row of beavers on a log. She gets to a hummock where she finds edible fiddleheads, then a severed deer head buzzing with flies that the voice in her head tries to convince her was killed by the “thing.” She finds solid ground and more fiddleheads, then the rest of the deer. She resists drinking from the bog. Hours later she’s extremely thirsty and comes across a brook; she falls getting down to it, then drinks. As she’s finding a place to stop for the night, her stomach cramps and she has diarrhea, then gets lightheaded and falls back into her own shit. After cleaning her clothes in the stream, she starts vomiting, then shitting some more. She crawls into a little shelter and listens to a Red Sox game, which they lose, with Tom Gordon not playing. The police get a tip Trisha was abducted. Trisha vomits some more and sees Tom Gordon for the first time waiting for a sign for a pitch. As she sleeps, “something” watches her.

In “Sixth Inning,” Trisha wakes up and drinks from the stream again. She walks with Tom Gordon and after a few hours is too weak to get up when she trips and falls. She’s thirty miles outside the area searchers are focusing on and crosses out of Maine into New Hampshire. She finds a lot of bushes with edible checkerberries, then, after encountering a doe with two fawn, sees they were eating beechnuts that she gorges on and collects in her now empty pack. She sees a bigger stream connected to the smaller one and then sees three robed figures in a clearing. One looks like her science teacher and tells her he’s “from the God of Tom Gordon” who’s too busy with other things to intervene; one looks like her father and says it is the Subaudible and is too weak to do anything. The one in the black robe (the other two are in white robes) says it’s “from the thing in the woods”/”from the God of the Lost” and has a head of wasps. She thinks she might be hallucinating from the food she ate and continues downstream. 

In “Top of the Seventh,” Trisha finds a sports radio talkshow on the Walkman and hears about the police questioning the child molester suspect in the search for her. She sees a meteor shower. She has a dream that Tom Gordon is messing with a ringbolt on a post. Coughing and possibly feverish, she gathers some branches to cover herself, hears an inhuman grunt, and falls back asleep thinking the “thing” is coming for her. In the morning, the pine needles near her are disturbed enough for her to think she wasn’t just being irrational in her fear of being stalked the night before. Seeing some little trout when she drinks from the stream, she uses a stone to cut the hood off her poncho and uses that to catch one, then eats it raw. She keeps following the stream until it disappears into a marsh, prompting her to have a mini-breakdown. She sleeps for a bit then decides not to cross through the marsh, turning north instead. We’re told if she had crossed it she would have seen a pond and a New Hampshire town, but instead she’s now moving deeper into the wilderness. 

In “Seventh Inning Stretch,” the next four days of Trisha’s journey are summarized as she talks to Tom Gordon and her friend Pepsi. She sees a helicopter but it flies away. She’s sick with a fever and coughing. She listens to Red Sox games and is careful about preserving the Walkman’s batteries. She feels the presence of the God of the Lost accompanying her. Stopping to cough, she leans on an old stump she realizes is a post because it has a ringbolt screwed into it, and Tom Gordon tells her she dreamed of this place. She finds a hinge on the post and realizes it was a gate. She searches for more posts to try to identify a path they’re marking, and finds some. She follows the path for hours until it meets a dirt track. 

In “Eighth Inning,” Trisha comes across the cab of an old truck on the track and takes shelter in it from a thunderstorm and senses the God of the Lost very nearby, seeing something with “slumped shoulders” at the edge of the road when lightning flashes. When she wakes to sunlight hours later, she sees something has dug a circle around the cab.

In “Top of the Ninth,” Trisha walks all day and can feel the thing tracking her. She trips over a log and can’t get up, then eats the last of the nuts from her pack. She turns on a Red Sox game but falls asleep and the thing comes out of the woods and points at her. 

In “Bottom of the Ninth,” Trisha wakes up to find the Walkman’s batteries dead. She walks on then stops for the night and drops the Walkman in the grass but finds it the next morning. She has trouble figuring out which way on the road she was going, and starts to cough up blood. She hears a distant noise she recognizes as a truck backfiring. She goes on, and the “rutted track” hits a perpendicular dirt road. She decides to go west–which, this time, is the right decision. She thinks she can hear the distant hum of traffic, then hears the God of the Lost behind her and turns to face it. 

In “Bottom of the Ninth: Save SItuation,” a black bear emerges from the woods that she thinks is just a bear until it stands on its hind legs. She realizes “she must close” and channels Tom Gordon’s stillness. She tells it to come on and it approaches her and she sees its eyes are tunnels and its throat is filled with wasps. She stays still, gripping the Walkman like a baseball, and as it sniffs her face she sees its face shifting. It rises on its hind legs again and tells her to look at it. She does, then makes her pitch. A man in the woods out hunting deer out of season sees them and we cut to him describing it later, how when she pitched the Walkman like a baseball the bear was startled and stepped back, far enough away from her for him to shoot it. From Trisha’s perspective, she sees the bear’s ear “fly apart,” then her pitch hits it between the eyes, and it turns and runs. The man comes out and tries to talk to her and she asks if he saw her throw strike three. He’s not sure if the thing was entirely just a bear but won’t tell anyone that. She falls and he catches her, accidentally discharging his rifle right by her ear. She tries to tell him she got the save as she passes out. 

In “Postgame,” Trisha has the dream of Tom Gordon messing with the ringbolt on the post again. She wakes up in a hospital room with her mother, brother, and father. The nurse says she has pneumonia in both lungs and is trying to get her family to leave, but Trisha gestures to her father that she wants her baseball cap, which he gives her. Making sure he’s watching, she taps the cap’s visor then points to the ceiling, and when she sees his smile of understanding, she falls asleep. “Game over.”

-SCR

I am still trapped in the rabbit hole of the Kingian Laughing Place. Exploring Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon for Part V of this all-consuming series “The Laughing Place is a Rabbit Hole to Disney’s Animal KINGdom” has turned out to be a real quagmire. Consider this Part V.IV, continuing the exploration of how, as the initial post put it, “Tom Gordon illuminates that the spirit of the Overlook merges toxic fan love with the Africanist presence in this novel’s thematic cocktail mixed at the nexus of fandom, religion, addiction, and media/advertising, all predicated on constructions that blur the distinction between (or merging of) real and imagined.”

Key words: cycle, sign, signature, place, stereotype, merge, laughter, lost, uncle, trickster, trap, explode/explosion, baseball, pitch, radio, fandom, bridge, (toxic) nostalgia, contain, mainstream, construction, contradiction, (im)perfection, addiction, movement, dancing, racial hierarchy, fluid duality, blurred lines, transmedia dissipation

Note: All boldface in quoted passages is mine.

I walk along a thin line, darling (darling)
Dark shadows follow me (follow me)
Here’s where life’s dream lies disillusioned (disillusioned)
The edge of reality

Oh, I can hear strange voices echo (echo)
Laughing with mockery (mockery)

…She drove me to the point of madness (madness)
The brink of misery (misery)
If she’s not real, then I’m condemned to (condemned to)
The edge of reality

Elvis Presley, “Edge of Reality,” Live a Little, Love a Little (1968).

Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost
I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town

Bruce Springsteen, “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978).

With a taste of a poison paradise
I’m addicted to you
Don’t you know that you’re toxic?

Britney Spears, “Toxic,” In the Zone (2003).

Rape me
Rape me, my friend

Nirvana, “Rape Me,” In Utero (1993).

Popping (the Return of) Mary Poppins

If rape cultural appropriation is a major likeness between the twin Kings of Elvis and Stephen as discussed in the previous post, then it’s a likeness shared by the third party whose influence is on par with theirs: Walt Disney.

A Disney movie about Disney himself, the movie Saving Mr. Banks (2013) plays out at the crossroads of signing a deal with the devil (aka the Faustian-pact pattern that characterizes American literature) and rape culture. Its director, John Lee Hancock, provides another Disney-King connection (as well as a name mashed up from Black Delta blues singer John Lee Hooker and white signature-defining Founding Father John Hancock): this Hancock wrote and directed the recent King adaptation of Mr. Harrigan’s Phone from 2020’s If It Bleeds. This collection’s title expresses an indictment of the media via the idea that “If it bleeds, it leads,” meaning it gets the newspaper headline, imputing that newspapers reflect America’s nature as black and white and re(a)d all over, most interested in the sensational and violent. It’s admittedly ironic that King would indict sensationalized violence, having made a career out of it himself (and self-identifying as “a child of the media” in Danse Macabre (1981)), but he invokes this quote in his repeated media indictments in Faithful.

We become exactly like the nightly local-news shows—if it bleeds, it leads—and our stories center on violent Black bodies instead of the overwhelming majority of nonviolent Black bodies.

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

The night before he won the Golden Globe for best actor for playing Elvis, Austin Butler appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and, in the course of recounting how Tom Hanks contracted Covid three days before they were supposed to start shooting, called Hanks “America’s uncle.” My temporarily renewed Disney+ subscription for Hocus Pocus 2 finally enabled me to behold the performance of the performance of the innocuousness of racism and rape culture in the figure of Uncle Tom Hanks as Uncle Walt in Saving Mr. Banks (2013). John Lee Hancock’s most famous effort might the 2009 football/white-savior movie The Blind Side (based on a true story of course), but before that, he took his first swing for Disney with baseball movie The Rookie (2002), in which the titular rookie is a pitcher (and which is also based on a true story of course). I fully concur with Roger Ebert’s take on the general terrible-ness of this one:

“The Rookie” is comforting, even soothing, to those who like the old songs best. It may confuse those who, because they like the characters, think it is good. It is not good. It is skillful. Learning the difference between good movies and skillful ones is an early step in becoming a moviegoer. “The Rookie” demonstrates that a skillful movie need not be good. It is also true that a good movie need not be skillful… 

From here.

The film is entirely in keeping with happy-ending Disney formulas glossing over the darker aspects of the source material, and in 2013 Hancock directed a Disney narrative about Disney himself that is a continuation of this pattern. If Hanks’ Disney comes off as pushy at times, this potential character defect is ultimately depicted as being in the service of a greater good. This Disney is one of many predominantly lovable characters Hanks has depicted, with the only one that seems to come close to loathsome apart from Colonel Tom Parker being Jimmy Dugan in the baseball movie A League of Their Own (1992), but Jimmy gets redeemed by the end, while the Colonel doesn’t.

If Elvis plays on the fluid duality of the apparently oppositional figures of Elvis and Colonel Tom Parker, predicated on the difference of a single letter (or a piece of a letter) in their respective designations as snowman and showman, there is also a fluid duality in Tom Hanks’ (twin) embodiments of the apparently oppositional figures of the benevolent Walt Disney and the malevolent Colonel. This parallel has a symbolic parallel in the seemingly syrupy sweetness, the gentle coercion, of “Now or Never” versus the aggressively rockin’ “Power of My Love”: apparently opposite in being gentle versus rough, but the same in expressing rape culture.

Hanks’ Disney is a hero positively motivated by and promoting family values; Hanks’ Colonel is a villain using family values as an exploitative wedge. But both these figures are ultimately doing the same thing: not just perpetuating rape culture through appeals to family values, but doing so through means that appear innocuous–and both of these brands/types of innocuous-seeming rape-culture perpetuating are manifest in the work of Stephen King.

Mary Poppins (1964) is apparently considered Disney’s “crowning achievement” and embodies the legacy of Song of the South (1946) by achieving this crown via merging live action and animation. Saving Mr. Banks tracks the long journey of Disney’s adapting this story based on the Mary Poppins stories originally written by P.L. Travers, and Tom Hanks as Uncle Walt Disney performs Elvis’s brand of white male privilege in the rape-culture-perpetuating vein: the narrative’s fulcrum is Disney’s trying to procure the rights to Travers’ story, which amounts to the rights to her when the plot reveals the personal nature of the Poppins narrative to Travers. The film’s narrative portrays Travers’ reticence to sign over the rights as a product of her character-defining defect of general bitchiness, a defect defined in turn by her resistance to the film’s defining feature: the inclusion of animation. Her positive reaction to seeing the premiere of Mary Poppins at the film’s end implies a certain acceptance of this feature (as does her walking arm-in-arm with someone in a Mickey Mouse costume), but in fact IRL she was displeased enough with this specific aspect to block the making of any sequels, which is why we did not get a Mary Poppins sequel until 2018, after her death. When she’s still in her resistant phase and finds out about the animation, she responds:

Travers repeatedly says no to Disney’s request for her story rights, but finally says yes because Disney refuses to take no for an answer. In the Disney version of this Disney narrative, she realizes the error of her ways in having said no. The rape-culture takeaway: women don’t know what they really want, so when a woman says “no,” it does not really mean “no.” The key to Disney’s success is persistence.

A key scene in Walt’s wearing down of P.L.–Pamela–occurs when he takes her to see Disneyland, something he does expressly against her will by ordering her driver to take her there after she’s said no.

You can see her starting to wear down when she sees how beloved “Uncle Walt” is by park attendees. He then takes her to his favorite ride, a carousel at the center of the park, where he continues his pattern of refusing to take “no” for an answer (as well as the film’s pattern of expressing the power dynamics between the pair via name usage):

Walt: Mrs. Travers, I would be honored if you would take a ride on Jingles, here. This is Mrs. Disney’s favorite horse.

P.L.: No, thank you. I’m happy to watch.

Walt: Now, there’s no greater joy than that seen through the eyes of a child, and there’s a little bit of a child in all of us.

P.L.: Maybe in you, Mr. Disney, but certainly not in me.

Walt: Get on the horse, Pamela.

Saving Mr. Banks (2013).

And: she does. What happens next essentially summarizes the plot of the majority of Elvis’s movies when Walt makes a joke:

Walt: I brought you all the way out here for monetary gain. I had a wager with the boys. Couldn’t get you on a ride.

Saving Mr. Banks (2013).

It’s unclear if the film is aware of the sexual implications of this metaphor.

In Elvis’s G.I. Blues (1960), he plays a character named Tulsa:

To raise money, Tulsa places a bet with his friend Dynamite (Edson Stroll) that he can spend the night with a club dancer named Lili (Juliet Prowse), who is rumored to be hard to get since she turned down one other G.I. operator, Turk (Jeremy Slate). 

From here.

In the critical scene where P.L. is finally convinced to sign over the rights, Walt shows up uninvited and unannounced on her doorstep and gives her a speech about the “realness” of the fictional characters in her stories that underscores that his interest in “monetary gain” previously joked about is not his true motivation, and that his brand’s promotion of family values is genuine: he wants her rights not for profit, but in order to keep a promise to his daughters. He takes this appeal further, insisting on a likeness between them because of the significance of their fathers, revealing that newspapers play a critical role in Walt’s backstory–more specifically, how his father forced him to deliver newspapers in the snow:

“Honestly, Mrs. Travers, the snowdrifts, sometimes they were up over my head. And we’d push through that snow like it was molasses.”

Saving Mr. Banks (2013).

The climax of this speech seems to embed a contradiction inadvertently but appropriately symbolic of contradictions in Mary Poppins itself:

“And I loved my dad. He was a…He was a wonderful man. But rare is the day when I don’t think about that eight-year-old boy delivering newspapers in the snow, and old Elias Disney with that strap in his fist. And I am just so tired. Mrs. Travers, I’m tired of remembering it that way. Aren’t you tired, too, Mrs. Travers? Now we all have our sad tales, but don’t you want to finish the story? Let it all go and have a life that isn’t dictated by the past? It’s not the children she comes to save. It’s their father. It’s your father.”

Saving Mr. Banks (2013).

This is an extended and entirely stationary scene, so that a certain figure, one that might be interpreted as an Africanist presence looming over Hanks-as-Disney’s shoulder, is featured quite prominently:

The thought articulated by Walt here articulates the function of that presence: a container of history White America prefers to willfully ignore–or overlook–the significance of. Which, in other words, embodies the spirit of the Overlook Hotel:

Thompson admits the prickly novelist has been one of her most difficult roles and describes the author as “deeply contradictory“.

From here.

Walt’s “pitch” in the critical scene contains its own contradiction: he’s trying to convince Pamela that if she gives Mary Poppins to him, it will help her heal from her past and not let it dictate the present, but he tells her he still thinks of his past self every day, so when he says he’s tired of remembering it that way, he seems to imply that he still does remember it that way despite all the supposedly healing narratives he’s peddled since then…

The emphasis on the value of “nonsense” embodied by the character of Mary Poppins reinforces overlooking connections of historical significance, what Richard Brody calls “the falsifications, denials, and suppressions of history that are integral to the right wing’s political agenda of miseducation.”

In addition to both narratively pivoting on the signing of contracts, and to both of these signings evoking the quintessentially American Faustian pact, the critically convincing speech that Tom Hanks-as-Disney gives Travers happens to be pretty much the same as the critically convincing speech that Tom Hanks-as-Colonel Tom Parker gives Elvis–the one where the Colonel tells him:

“That’s right, even your own daddy has looked after himself before he’s looked after you. Yes, I have lived from you, too, but the difference is you have also lived from me. We have supported each other. Because we shared a dream. We are the same, you and I. We are two odd, lonely children, reaching for eternity.”

Elvis (2022).

The Tales of Two Toms: Tom Hanks, hero, in Saving Mr. Banks from 2013 (left) and Tom Hanks, villain, in Elvis from 2022 (right):

In embodying hero and villain, these two are apparent opposites, but ultimately both are the same in their exploitation of artists, Disney of Travers and the Colonel of Elvis. The hero/villain distinction is predicated on presentation/awareness: Disney seems to have been duped/seduced by his own trickster rhetoric and thus does not consider himself a trickster, while the Colonel not only identifies as but revels in his own trickster status.

In the image above, Hanks’ Disney occupies a carousel and Hanks’ Colonel a funhouse of mirrors: it’s a combination of these settings that underwrite the original mechanics of animation.

In Saving Mr. Banks, the carousel at the center of the Disney theme park occupies the center of the film, narratively and thematically. This would seem to be an homage to the animation sequence in Mary Poppins:

The center does not hold, according to one intertextual refrain King leans on in The Stand…

“I wanted to make my way to the center of American culture and find ways to decenter it,” [Margo Jefferson] has said…

From here.

The end of Mary Poppins seems to undermine, or contradict, itself: as Hanks-as-Disney articulates, Mary Poppins really came to save the workaholic father, which she does when he loses his job and then, critically, accepts the benefits of this loss for the gain in time with his family, but then at the last minute, he actually gets his old job back. Why? Because the guy who fired him died–more importantly, died laughing at a joke the father Mr. Banks told him that signaled his acceptance of the job loss and that he appropriated from Mary Poppins.

This will apparently become a significant development in The Dark Tower, with Strengell describing a certain entity who will “attempt[] to destroy Roland by making him laugh himself to death.” Did King appropriate this concept of weaponized laughter from Disney?

Mary Poppins was released in 1964. In The Shining, King says the wheel of progress comes back around to where it started, which is maybe a more cynical take on the wheel of progress than music producer Sam Phillips’ philosophy that you have to look back to move forward. (Another AA saying: “progress not perfection.”)

Disney had his own circular metaphor for the movement of progress:  

Fast forward to mid‐twentieth century America. In the post‐war economic boom, it was the age of automobiles, housing construction, and new suburbs. Glossy magazines, radios, and televisions appeared in every home. With a spirit of innovation… As long as you ignore the occasional atomic bomb drill, you could say that the period was dominated by an optimism about technology and the future.

We can see this in the 1964 World’s Fair, where Disney debuted the Carousel of Progress, sponsored by General Electric. This performance of ground‐breaking audio‐animatronics, which you can still experience today in Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, shows how through the decades technology keeps making life better and better.

Elizabeth Butterfield, “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Disney: Marx and Marcuse at Disney World,” Disney and Philosophy: Truth, Trust, and a Little Bit of Pixie Dust, ed. Richard Bryan Davis (2019).

Which is in line with the treatment of technology as a means of saving grace in Tom Gordon, in contradistinction to King’s frequently apparently opposite treatment of technology by having it be a source of horror.

The Elvis movie It Happened at the World’s Fair was released in 1964 and features Elvis, in pursuit of a nurse who works there, faking ailments to continue to see her when she rebuffs his advances; one of these ploys is to pay a young boy played by Kurt Russell (a Disney child star who would later play Elvis in Christine director John Carpenter’s 1979 Elvis) to kick him in the shin. This Elvis movie also features a secondary plot-device character named “Uncle Walter,” the rapey song “Relax” (“when love knock’s invited / Don’t you fight it,”) and the song “Cotton Candy Land,” which Baz uses in Elvis with the lyrics changed from “Sandman’s comin'” to “Snowman’s comin’.”

With both a string to be pulled and a tail, the kite is a critical object in Mary Poppins, brought back in the 2018 sequel Mary Poppins Returns, which reinforces the importance of paternity in the context of promoting inherited wealth when the son from the original is threatened with the loss of the original house, and the critical piece of paper proving ownership is found in a patched-up kite. Except the piece is in pieces, and literal signatures, as in Saving Mr. Banks, become plot-critical.

The sequel further enacts the legacy of the original in a merged live-action and animation sequence; the outfits from this sequence were part of the display at the Disney exhibit I saw at the Graceland Exhibition Center in December 2021:

This sequence embeds a verbal link between (Black) music, shitterations, and critterations…

And the song “A Cover is Not the Book” could be read as an allegory for King’s regurgitated appropriating as well as his merging of the visual with the written:

A cover is not the book
So open it up and take a look
‘Cause under the covers one discovers
That the king may be a crook
Chapter titles are like signs
And if you read between the lines
You’ll find your first impression was mistook
For a cover is nice
But a cover is not the book

Mary Poppins Returns (2018).

The cover is not the book, but according to one cover, the cat is the rat…

Which encodes the inextricability of the hierarchical relation of the Africanist presence: the predator is its prey in the sense that the prey is crucial to the predator being identified/defined as such (i.e., you are what you eat). And one crucial aspect in maintaining the hierarchical better-than relation with the literal bodies of the Africanist presence is legal control, manifest in contracts, which are predicated on signatures.

The two images on the left, from Jailhouse Rock and Roustabout, feature manager figures who share a real-life confluence with the Colonel, the cat to Elvis’s rat, the telltale signs of which are, in the case of the former, that he wants to split their take 50-50, and in the latter, that he’s smoking a cigar.

But the genial “Uncle Walt” persona was arguably as manufactured as his famous signature, which had been designed by his animators.

J.I. Baker, “Walt Disney: From Mickey to the Magic Kingdom,” Life Magazine Special Edition (2016).

One can see this Disney signature had not reached its final design at the time of the studio’s first full-length animated feature film, which, considering the buried history of animation and its associations with blackface minstrelsy, is aptly named. (That American music and American animation similarly carry out the (obscured) blackface-minstrel legacy makes it potentially fitting that the year of the first full-length animated film is the year before Robert Johnson died from his deal with the devil.)

The Mary Poppins Returns animated sequence also embeds something else related to music, critterations, and the buried history of animation that was expressed in the original in the (overlooked) blackface imagery of the chimney sweep sequence:

Part of the new film’s nostalgia, however, is bound up in a blackface performance tradition that persists throughout the Mary Poppins canon, from P. L. Travers’s books to Disney’s 1964 adaptation, with disturbing echoes in the studio’s newest take on the material, “Mary Poppins Returns.”

…This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if Travers’s novels didn’t associate chimney sweeps’ blackened faces with racial caricature. “Don’t touch me, you black heathen,” a housemaid screams in “Mary Poppins Opens the Door” (1943), as a sweep reaches out his darkened hand. When he tries to approach the cook, she threatens to quit: “If that Hottentot goes into the chimney, I shall go out the door,” she says, using an archaic slur for black South Africans that recurs on page and screen.

…[Another] episode proved so controversial that the book was banned by the San Francisco Public Library, prompting Travers to drop the racialized dialogue and change the offending caricature to an animal. (A number of British authors built on the tradition of turning American minstrelsy into animal fables: Beatrix Potter and A. A. Milne both cited Uncle Remus dialect stories, including “Br’er Rabbit” tales, as inspiration.)

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, “‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface” (January 29, 2019).

The Mary Poppins Returns “Cover” sequence references one of of the racial offenses excised from Travers’ original stories:

I was surprised to see that hyacinth macaw pop up in “Mary Poppins Returns.” In the middle of a fantasy sequence, Emily Blunt’s nanny bounds onstage at a music hall to join Lin-Manuel Miranda’s lamplighter for a saucy Cockney number, “A Cover Is Not the Book,” which retells stories from Travers’s novels. One of these verses refers to a wealthy widow called Hyacinth Macaw, and the kicker is that she’s naked: Blunt sings that “she only wore a smile,” and Miranda chimes in, “plus two feathers and a leaf.”

In the 1981 revision of “Mary Poppins,” there’s no mention of her attire; you’d have to go back to the 1934 original to find the “negro lady” with “a very few clothes on,” sitting under a palm tree with a “crown of feathers.” There’s even a straw hut behind Blunt and Miranda that replicates Mary Shepard’s 1934 illustration. (The hut was removed in the 1981 revision.)

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, “‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface” (January 29, 2019).

When I was watching, I noted the “two feathers and a leaf” part not because I had any idea what it was referencing, but because Miranda gestures at his crotch in a way I thought was “racy” for a Disney movie in the “mildly titillating sexually” sense of the term–but Pollack-Pelzner reveals it’s also “racy” in the racial sense, and so another confluence between cultural appropriation and rape culture. This nexus is another manifestation of the King’s X that marks the spot where something is buried.

But a glance at the list of most frequently banned books makes clear that “mature content” is a fig leaf: what parents and advocacy groups are challenging in these books is difference itself. In their vision of childhood—a green, sweet-smelling land invented by Victorians and untouched by violence, or discrimination, or death—white, straight, and cisgender characters are G-rated. All other characters, meanwhile, come with warning labels. When childhood is racialized, cisgendered, and de-queered, insisting on “age-appropriate material” becomes a way to instill doctrine and foreclose options for some readers, and to evict other readers from childhood entirely.

Katy Waldman, “What Are We Protecting Children from by Banning Books?” March 10, 2023.

But there’s more: the question of what’s in a name answered by: stereotyopes.

Blackface minstrelsy, in fact, could be said to be part of Disney’s origin story. In an early Mickey Mouse short, a 1933 parody of the antislavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” called “Mickey’s Mellerdrammer,” Mickey blacks his face with dynamite to play Topsy, a crazy-haired, raggedy-dressed, comically unruly black child from the book whose name had become synonymous with the pickaninny stereotype.

In “Mary Poppins Returns,” the name of the crazy-haired, raggedy-dressed, comically unruly character (played by Meryl Streep) is also Topsy. She’s a variation on a Mr. Turvy in the novel “Mary Poppins Comes Back” (1935), whose workshop flips upside-down.

Even if these characters’ shared name is accidental, it speaks to a larger point: Disney has long evoked minstrelsy for its topsy-turvy entertainments — a nanny blacking up, chimney sweeps mocking the upper classes, grinning lamplighters turning work into song.

In this latest version, Mary Poppins might be serenading Disney genres, outdated but strangely recurring, in the Oscar-nominated song “The Place Where Lost Things Go,” when she reminds us that “Nothing’s gone forever, only out of place.”

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, “‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface” (January 29, 2019).

“The Place Where Lost Things Go” is another version of “the place where meaning collapses,” reinforcing that in the practice of transmedia dissipation, harm is inherent when meaning is lost.

This “Master Tom” epithet is an apparent antithesis to “Uncle Tom”–since the latter is necessarily the subject (or object) of a master in the institution of slavery–and likely more directly intends to evoke, or derives from, the idea of a “TOMcat.” In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Topsy is the comical counterpoint to Stowe’s angelic white child whose angelic nature is contained in her name of Evangeline. Topsy is the name of the elephant Thomas Edison electrocuted in the name of science (in the vein of Ben Franklin torturing green mountain men), and the name of a creepy (twin) character on Lovecraft Country. Topsy is also the name of the dying horse Roland rides in King’s “The LITTLE SISTERS of Eluria,” a Dark Tower prequel in which Roland is still in pursuit of “the man in black,” aka WALTER.

It’s interesting that the rider of a horse, a “jockey,” is the same language used in radio: disc jockey. Both relate to concepts of “movement”; per Elvis, music can “move” you, and Jordan Peele’s NOPE (2022), featuring what turns out to be a very Lovecraftian monster, reveals that a horse and jockey were the first “motion picture”:

“Did you know that the very first assembly of photographs to create a motion picture was a two-second clip of a Black man on a horse?” Emerald Haywood, played by Keke Palmer, asks at the start of the movie.

From here.

Which makes Bojack HORSEman an appropriate referent for a quote from Part I…

The figure for nature in language, animal, was transformed in cinema to the name for movement in technology, animation.

LAUREL SCHMUCK, “WILD ANIMATION: FROM THE LOONEY TUNES TO BOJACK HORSEMAN IN CARTOON LOS ANGELES,” EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES 13.1 (2018). (SPECIAL ISSUE: ANIMALS ON AMERICAN TELEVISION)

…and which means that African Americans underwrite American movies in the same way they underwrite American music (though an explicit stereotype is not the foundation of movies as with music), and American animation:

“The trick of making things move on film is what got me.”

J.I. Baker, “Walt Disney: From Mickey to the Magic Kingdom,” Life Magazine Special Edition (2016).

Everybody at Sun [Records] was white trash. The whole point of American culture is to pick up any old piece of trash and make it shine with more facets than the Hope Diamond. Any other approach is Europeanized, and fuck that—that whole continent’s been dead a hundred years. Sid Vicious was the only time it came to life in a century. Whereas the American principle, what this country was really founded on, is motion. Energy, and using it to move on up or out and go and get somewhere, don’t really matter where. Saddle up your pony and ride.

Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: The Work of a Legendary Critic: Rock’N’Roll as Literature and Literature as Rock ‘N’Roll (1987).

I didn’t know a damn thing about horses at the time, but Elvis had been badly spooked by a runaway ride during one of his early films, and he wasn’t eager to get up in the saddle again. So I was the one who got up on each of the potential gift horses. I quickly learned some of the crucial, equestrian basics: a Western saddle gave you something to hold on to, while an English saddle left you no choice but to pray that the horse didn’t hate you.

Jerry Schilling, Me and a Guy Named Elvis: My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley (2006).

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth…

Peele never invokes Lovecraft as inspiration for his monster that feeds on horse and rider alike:

Discussing Jupe’s fate, Michael Wincott‘s character, Antlers Holst, makes mention of Siegfried & Roy^[11]—a duo known for training white lions and white tigers—the latter of whom was attacked and severely injured by one of his tigers. GameRevolution‘s Jason Faulkner further noted “Peele quoting Neon Genesis Evangelion‘s Angels as the principal inspiration for the film and the monster within”, and of the true meaning of Jean Jacket’s true form’s resemblance to the biblical description of angels; he notes the verse from Nahum prefacing the film as indicative of Peele’s thoughts on the Bible, and how if one “think[s] about the way [Jean Jacket] feeds and the concept of people ascending to heaven, [one can] connect the dots [that] Jean Jacket[‘s species has] been with humanity for a long time, and an attack from one of the creatures could [be] misinterpreted as something from the divine.”

From here.

The Tom Gordon construct has been interpreted as a “a guardian angel of sorts” by Michael A. Arnzen, with his signature pointing gesture characterized as acknowledgment of the divine:

The gesture of pointing up to the sky is another means of acknowledging a divine presence.

Sharon Russell, Revisiting Stephen King: A Critical Companion (2002).

But this “presence,” as my unpacking of Tom Gordon’s climactic face-off will show, has likewise been misinterpreted and is ultimately more Africanist than divine.

“Horse” is also a nickname for heroin, that addictive drug that Lou Reed said makes him feel like “Jesus’ Son,” which became the title of a celebrated story collection by Denis Johnson that opens with a story recently revealed to have a real-life corollary in a car accident that, like the one in King’s Fairy Tale, occurred on a bridge: once again, that rendered a positive in some contexts (as Strengell does for Stephen King and CA Conrad does for Elvis), in a different context becomes the opposite.

Naturally, minstrel shows grew like Topsy, playing to the highborn and the lowly across the land. With their Irrepressible High Spirits they cheered the South through the Civil War, and managed to create such goodwill in their audiences that by the late 1860s even Negro performers were in demand. Negro minstrels, though, were accorded no special privileges, the assumption being that none had a patent on the “pathos and humor,” the “artless philosophy,” or the “plaintive and hilarious melodies” of Negro life once it became public entertainment.

Margo Jefferson, “Ripping off Black Music: From Thomas ‘Daddy’ Rice to Jimi Hendrix” (1973).

The invocation of a “patent” here expresses the idea of ownership predicated on signatures, that most potent weapon in the white-supremacist trickster arsenal. Jefferson compares these shows to Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but Ralph Ellison reveals they also went by a different name–from the same source:

Shortly before the spokesman for invisibility intruded, I had seen, in a nearby Vermont village, a poster announcing the performance of a “Tom Show,” that forgotten term for blackface minstrel versions of Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I had thought such entertainment a thing of the past, but there in a quiet northern village it was alive and kicking, with Eliza, frantically slipping and sliding on the ice, still trying—and that during World War II!—to escape the slavering hounds.… Oh, I went to the hills/ To hide my face/ The hills cried out. No hiding place/ There’s no hiding place/ Up here!

No, because what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William Faulkner insisted. Furtive, implacable and tricky, it inspirits both the observer and the scene observed, artifacts, manners and atmosphere and it speaks even when no one wills to listen.

Ralph Ellison, introduction to Invisible Man (1981).

The “outdated but strangely recurring” aspects of history and Disney texts alike (a phrase that could also describe a lot of King’s work) is of a piece with the company’s transmedia dissipation strategy, the aim of which, according to Jason Sperb, is ultimately to dissipate or “collapse” meaning. If we seem to have gone far afield from Tom Gordon, we’ll recall that Trisha demonstrates the dangers of such media-facilitated dissipation, even if not explicitly Disney-rooted, in her referent for minstrelsy–an I Love Lucy rerun (reruns a version of Disney’s strategy of re-releasing films). Ironically for blank-slate Trisha, the history of blackface minstrelsy potentially buried by the mud mask is not actually dissipated, has not collapsed–but the horror associated with it has.

As we learned from the creative team post-episode, the character’s names are Topsy and Bopsy, and their look is based on racist caricatures of the same-named Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Misha Green noted in a tweet last night about the demonic characters, “Nothing is scarier than real American history – minstrel shows and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

John Squires, “‘Lovecraft Country’ Introduces Its Version of Freddy Krueger With Twin Villains Topsy and Bopsy” (October 5, 2020).

And there’s the relevance of a signature–not on a contract, but Tom Gordon’s on Trisha’s cap brim means the “real” Tom Gordon has touched something that’s touching her; this “real” aspect is the means of access to a “fantasy”:

To escape them, Trisha opened the door to her favorite fantasy. She took off her Red Sox cap and looked at the signature written across the brim in broad black felt-tip strokes; this helped get her in the mood. It was Tom Gordon’s signature.

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

There’s an uncomfortable sexual undertone in the description of these “strokes” and idea of getting “in the mood”… At any rate, by the end, this signature is smeared beyond recognition:

And now the signature was gone, blurred to nothing but a black shadow by rain and her own sweaty hands. But it had been there, and she was still here—for the time being, at least.

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

If potentially the single most emblematic song of rape culture, at least in a post-Elvis era, is “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus, it turns out this song also embodies the nexus of rape culture and cultural appropriation:

At the time, Eminem appeared to be the portent of hip-hop’s future—artists, critics, and other protectors of the genre worried about the next coming of Elvis, worried that Eminem might catalyze a transformation of rap similar to what long ago happened to rock and roll, and to jazz before that. They weren’t so wrong. Thirteen years later, the VMA for Best Hip-Hop Video was awarded to a white anti-hip-hop rap duo from Seattle named Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Those same 2013 VMAs invited Robin Thicke and Miley Cyrus to jerk and jive to the riff of a song that would later pay court-ordered royalties to Marvin Gaye’s estate for borrowing without permission.

Lauren Michele Jackson, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue … and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation (2019).

The “without permission” is one of the keys to this nexus constituted by taking.

And we can further read Tom Gordon through the lens of the time Uncle Tom Hanks played Uncle Walt Disney via the novel’s chronological proximity to Bag of Bones, with its more direct embodiment of the nexus of cultural appropriation in music and rape culture. Then there’s King’s male gaze on Trisha, a female child and little sister:

Trisha stared, neck tilted, eyes wide, arms crossed over her breastless chest, hands clutching her shoulders with nervous nail-bitten fingers.

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999).

The designation of her chest as “breastless” is utterly unnecessary here. It’s like the male gaze–which should, by virtue of the novel purporting to be predominantly in Trisha’s perspective, be entirely absent here, or at least not give away any evidence of its presence if it’s always technically present somewhere in the work of a male author–is looking for breasts and is disappointed to not find them. Even if some nine-year-old girls might be conscious of their lack of breasts, Trisha would not be in this instance because 1) she’s experiencing a life-or-death situation, and 2) it’s not consistent with her characterization as a TOMboy.

Ultimately this is a reading of Tom Gordon through the lens of two Toms–not so much A Tale of Two Toms as the Tales of Two Toms. Or really, the Tales of Twin Toms.

In his fiction King reverts again and again to the duality between good and evil and the fact that human beings personify both.

Heidi Strengell, Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism (2005).

Which encapsulates the quintessentially American paradox/contradiction…

The excessiveness that cannot (or will not) be entirely contained by [John] Ford is symptomatic of an excessiveness that cannot be contained in the larger project of framing an ‘‘American identity.’’

…

…there is much contradiction at play in Ford’s films. Therefore, while the films do work on the level of reflecting (as well as constructing) American nostalgia, they simultaneously destabilize this identification. The final result is a soundtrack often at odds with itself, impossibly trying to sync emotional swells with regulated cadence. In truth, this type of conflicted soundtrack is inevitable, the only form capable of adequately expressing the vast and problematic symphony that is American culture.

Michael J. Blouin, “Auditory Ambivalence: Music in the Western from High Noon to Brokeback Mountain,” The Journal of Popular Culture 43.6 (2010).

The figure of “Walt from Framingham” who makes an appearance in Tom Gordon via a radio call-in could reinforce that Disney is a conductor of this “problematic symphony.” And the concept of conductor introduces a confluence between music and trains that illuminates a confluence between Disney, Elvis, and King. Disney’s obsession with trains apparently led to the development of Disneyland; the train (and relatedly, crossroads) is an enduring and recurring symbol in blues songs; Charlie the Choo Choo figures in The Dark Tower.

This train is a clean train, everybody’s riding in Jesus’ name

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “This Train” (1939).

The String-Pulling Trickster Returns

Some common archetypal characters in literary works include the hero, the antihero, and the trickster.

From here.

If I’ve been reading for likenesses between the Twin Kings of Elvis and Stephen, a parallel project released the same year as Tom Gordon reads likenesses between Elvis and that old political trickster whose corruption has seemed integral to King’s horror, particularly in The Shining: Tricky Dick.

To the masses, their images [in 1972] epitomized the true American ideal, but inside, each man continued trying to defy mortality, nurturing the seeds of a futile search for perfection.

Connie Kirchberg and Marc Hendrickx, Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon, and the American Dream (1999).

Nixon has also been compared to the figure Elvis commonly is:

Skinner shared how he came to worship an elite White Jesus Christ, who cleaned people up through “rules and regulations,” a savior who prefigured Richard Nixon’s vision of law and order. But one day, Skinner realized that he’d gotten Jesus wrong.

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

Nixon also symbolizes King’s undergraduate political conversion:

College also brought King in contact with new ideas. He entered the university a conservative, but the activism of colleges in the 1960s affected him. The student reaction to events in Vietnam changed his view of the world, and he joined in student protests. He revisits his experiences as a student during the Vietnam War in “Hearts in Atlantis,” in the book of the same name. In its opening, the narrator of this story presents the changes he has experienced. He arrived at the university with a Goldwater sticker on his car. He leaves with no car. “What I did have was a beard, hair down to my shoulders, and a backpack with a sticker on it reading RICHARD NIXON IS A WAR CRIMINAL” (257).

Sharon Russell, Revisiting Stephen King: A Critical Companion (2002).

And the different timelines in Hearts in Atlantis, published (later) the same year as Tom Gordon, are linked by the concrete object of a baseball glove.

In the episode of The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon Cooper marries long-time girlfriend Amy Farrah-Fowler, the latter’s mother is played by Kathy Bates, while Sheldon Cooper’s mother is reprised by Laurie Metcalf–both actresses who have played crazed Misery nurse Annie Wilkes–the 1990 film for Bates, in her first non-stage acting role, and the 2015-16 stage play for Metcalf. (This episode, “The Bowtie Asymmetry,” also features Jerry O’Connell as Sheldon’s older brother as well as Wil Wheaton reprising his role as himself–a reunion for half of the actors in the 1986 Stand By Me ka-tet quartet–and also has Mark Hamill displacing Wheaton as the wedding officiant.)

Mrs. Cooper: Let me straighten your tie.

Sheldon: No, no, no, it’s all right. It’s supposed to be a little asymmetrical. Apparently, a small flaw somehow improves it.

Mrs. Cooper: I can see that. Sometimes it’s the… imperfect stuff that makes things perfect.

The Big Bang Theory 11.24, “The Bowtie Asymmetry” (May 10, 2018).

And Sheldon thinks the number 73 is perfect:

Sheldon: 73 is the 21st prime number. Its mirror, 37, is the 12th, and its mirror, 21, is the product of multiplying, hang on to your hats, seven and three. Eh? Eh? Did I lie?

Leonard: We get it. 73 is the Chuck Norris of numbers.

Sheldon: Chuck Norris wishes. In binary, 73 is a palindrome, one-zero-zero-one-zero-zero-one which backwards is one-zero-zero-one-zero-zero-one, exactly the same. All Chuck Norris backwards gets you is Sirron Kcuhc.

The Big Bang Theory 4.10, “The Alien Parasite Hypothesis” (December 9, 2010).

This would mean the fictionalized Will Smith character that the “real” Will Smith played being an interloper in the Banks family on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has the perfect birthday:

Jameson: My lucky numbers have always been three and seven. Will, when’s your birthday?

Will: July 3rd.

Jameson: What year?

Will: 1973.

Jameson: So you were born on 7-3, 73? My lucky numbers.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air 1.16, “The Lucky Charm” (January 7, 1991).

Perhaps 1973, the year of Roe v. Wade and the year Tricky Dick resigned, was a perfect year…though not for King; even though it was the year he learned his first novel would be published, it’s also the year his mother died. And not for a lot of people:

By 1973, when the resource inequities between the public schools had become too obvious to deny, the Supreme Court ruled, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, that property-tax allocations yielding inequities in public schools do not violate the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (2019).

Perfection has its pitfalls:

The great American novelist Robert Stone once joked that he possessed the two worst qualities imaginable in a writer: He was lazy, and he was a perfectionist. Indeed, those are the essential ingredients for torpor and misery, right there. If you want to live a contented creative life, you do not want to cultivate either one of those traits, trust me. What you want is to cultivate quite the opposite: You must learn how to become a deeply disciplined half-ass.

It starts by forgetting about perfect. We don’t have time for perfect. In any event, perfection is unachievable: It’s a myth and a trap and a hamster wheel that will run you to death. The writer Rebecca Solnit puts it well: “So many of us believe in perfection, which ruins everything else, because the perfect is not only the enemy of the good; it’s also the enemy of the realistic, the possible, and the fun.”

Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear (2015).

Trisha might be perfect in her imperfections, as rendered, or “animated,” “flawlessly” by the voice of Anne Heche in the audiobook according to more than one review:

In a near-perfect characterization on King’s part, we experience Trisha’s fears, hopes, pains, hallucinations, and triumphs through her internal monolog, which is animated in this program by the voice of actress Anne Heche. She flawlessly conveys Trisha’s youth and the spectrum of her emotional states.

Kristen L. Smith, “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” Library Journal 124.20 (Dec. 1999).

In this tale of a nine-year-old girl lost and alone in the Maine woods, King allows the listener to experience the child’s “fears, hopes, pains, hallucinations, and triumphs through her internal monolog,” which is flawlessly animated by actress Anne Heche.

Ann Burns, “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” Library Journal 125.3 (Feb. 2000).

Anne Heche has a special place on the Kingcast because of an infamous interview they did with the actor Thomas Jane that aired in September 2020; Jane has been in three King adaptations (Dreamcatcher, The Mist, and 1922) and at the time of the interview Anne Heche was his girlfriend and they were living together, and you can hear at one point talking to him and at another point screaming in the background; neither Jane nor the hosts remark on her screaming in the interview itself but the hosts have brought it up a few times in other episodes. (Some media outlets have sources claiming Heche went into a downward spiral after she and Jane broke up, as if this played a significant role in her death last year.) But what struck me is what you can actually hear her saying when she’s talking to him–she asks what he’s doing and he half explains and she says “You didn’t tell me you were doing that.” Since she didn’t know, it appears she didn’t have a chance to remind him about her turn in the Kingverse as an audiobook narrator, and the hosts remained ignorant of this until one listened to her reading for the recent episode they finally did on Tom Gordon, with host Eric Vespe opining that Heche really gave it her all. But the sublimation of Heche’s voice in the Jane interview stuck out to me more prominently due to what the bulk of the conversation was taken up by: how great the director Frank Darabont is. Of course, the problems with his glorified Green Mile adaptation never came up.

In her watershed article, “In Hollywood, Racist Stereotypes Can Still Earn Oscar Nominations,” Tania Modleski discusses The Green Mile as a film that enables “white people to indulge their most prurient and fearful imaginings about African Americans and have their dread symbolically exorcised, all the while allowing them to feel good about a black man’s dying to preserve the status quo” (n.p.).

Corrine Lenhardt, Savage Horrors: The Intrinsic Raciality of the American Gothic (2020).

Lenhardt places The Green Mile at ground zero of the accusations that King’s work is racist, showing The Green Mile can’t really be excused as “perfect imperfection.” In the conversation glorifying Darabont, Heche’s voice was drowned out by the WASP patriarchy, and yet her voice manifests “a wonderfully believable little girl”…

My only real quibble is Trisha’s age. King puts her at nine, but she seemed older to me—eleven or twelve. But I don’t have kids, so what do I know?

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon stands right up there with the best work that King’s produced, and that’s very fine work indeed. In Trisha, he has created a wonderfully believable little girl.

Charles De Lint, “Review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, by Stephen King,” Fantasy and Science Fiction 97.3 (September 1999).

As having a quibble with Trisha’s age apparently contradicts that she’s “a wonderfully believable little girl,” so it is that imperfection can contribute to perfection. (Her age seems to be intentional: the novel is structured around the nine innings of a baseball game, Trisha is nine years old, and she’s lost for nine days.) That “sometimes it’s the imperfect stuff that makes things perfect” returns us to Sam Phillips’ (“apparently oppositional”) idea of “perfect imperfection,” and is essentially the thesis of Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection (2010). Gilbert mentions Brown in the context of two (apparently) opposing types of energy: martyr energy v. trickster energy.

Brené writes wonderful books, but they don’t come easily for her. She sweats and struggles and suffers throughout the writing process, and always has. But recently, I introduced Brené to this idea that creativity is for tricksters, not for martyrs. It was an idea she’d never heard before. (As Brené explains: “Hey, I come from a background in academia, which is deeply entrenched in martyrdom. As in: ‘You must labor and suffer for years in solitude to produce work that only four people will ever read.’”)

But when Brené latched on to this idea of tricksterdom, she took a closer look at her own work habits and realized she’d been creating from far too dark and heavy a place within herself. She had already written several successful books, but all of them had been like a medieval road of trials for her—nothing but fear and anguish throughout the entire writing process.

…

By setting a trickster trap for her own storytelling, Brené figured out how to catch her own tiger by the tail.

Much laughter and absurdity were involved in this process.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear (2015).

Brené “tricks” her process by harnessing her gift for verbal over written storytelling, enlisting her friends to transcribe her orating her case-study anecdotes. That she was creating “from far too dark and heavy a place” in herself makes me think King must be able to embody/enact martyr and trickster energy simultaneously in his process–he’s writing from some kind of dark place when he’s accessing the grimness of Grimm, but his writing clearly sustains more than suffocates him, or he would have died a long time ago. When you’re publishing a book or more a year, you don’t have time to perfect your prose (or as some might point out for King, your endings). Gilbert here also juxtaposes a critteration with the concept of the “trickster trap”–an unconscious acknowledgment of the inextricability of these elements per their origin in Brer Rabbit?

In another example of the same thing embodying “apparently oppositional elements,” Gilbert figures trickster energy as a good thing contrasted with martyr energy as bad, while Strengell’s discussion of Dark Man Randall Flagg, a quintessential villain in the King canon, reminds us that the trickster has a dark side. Discussing the origin text for King’s Dark Tower series, Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” she notes:

These two stanzas illustrate the essential qualities of the antagonist. First and foremost, the creature is characterized as a liar crippled by his own evil. He is seldom seen at the site of action, because he prefers to pull the strings behind the scene and vanish. Gloating over the misfortunes of humans, he creates havoc wherever he wanders.

King could hardly have chosen his archvillain’s name by accident. “Flagg,” on the one hand, refers to the verb flag, that is, “to give a sign” in the sense of taking a stand. On the other, it can also indicate the unfortunate outcome of the pursuit, that is, “to wither,” “to weaken.” In King good lasts (Underwood and Miller, Feast, 65), whereas Randall ends up “flagging.”

Heidi Strengell, Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism (2005).

By this analysis, Flagg’s name contains “apparently oppositional elements,” potentially meaning to “take a stand” when the title of The Stand ostensibly means the stand the good guys are taking against him. And a trickster is a string-puller, per another iteration of Tom (Hanks):

For dedicated Hanksians like me, these are confusing times; compare the trailer for Disney’s upcoming “Pinocchio,” in which Hanks—Einstein wig, a hedge of mustache, and, I suspect, yet another nose—assumes the role of Geppetto. At present, for whatever reason, this most trusted of actors has chosen to seek cover in camouflage and to specialize in the pulling of strings, whether wicked or benign. 

Anthony Lane, “How ‘Elvis’ Plays the King” (June 24, 2022).

There’s no strings upon this love of mine
It was always you from the start

Elvis Presley, “Wooden Heart” (1960).

The WPA also produced minstrel shows in the puppet tradition. In the northern cities, the Marionette Vaudeville had stringed dolls jumping to minstrel tunes and skits. Among the different types of shows was a version of Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo, one of the most popular of the nation’s children’s stories. It featured a young black couple with a son, depicting them in the mode: the mother was attired in a servant’s outfit, with a long skirt and multicolored bandanna, the father in a multicolored shirt and panama hat, and son Sambo was only partially clad, in overalls. Being puppets, they wore perpetual grins against coal-black faces with wide eyes and thick red lips.⁵³

Joseph Boskin, Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester (1988).

The paper construction Sambo doll in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (discussed in #1) is apparently a marionette, though that word is not used in the novel itself; rather the “grinning” cardboard and tissue-paper doll moves via “some mysterious mechanism.”

Per Disney’s owning a third of the media landscape, they’re the ones currently pulling the strings. In a hierarchical relation where they have all the power, their appropriations become more questionable.

“Ladies and Gentlemen as a series, you know, one way to read it is… that it’s exploitative. Uh… another way to read it is that it’s a kind of celebration, but that sort of begs the question, who’s throwing the party? You know? So, it’s an interesting question about appropriation because I feel like to just say he appropriated their image is to imagine that these trans women had no agency at all, but it doesn’t erase the sort of… unequal economics of it or the imbalance in power, you know?”

Glenn Ligon in The Andy Warhol Diaries 1.3, “A Double Life: Andy & Jon” (2022).

This offers a potential thematic return to the Overlook via the “apparently oppositional elements” of the Hegelian dialectic discussed in the context of The Shining evoking America’s “shadow self” here, what I’ve since referred to as “covert rhetoric” and which could also be designated “trickster rhetoric,” a version of what Blouin says about western soundtracks in 1950s consumer culture, which “create[] ambivalence to allow the illusion of agency in a populace becoming less like the ‘cowboy’ and ever more like the ‘cow.’“

Like Flagg, the Overlook Hotel entity has trickster energy disseminated through the King canon from its explosion; it deploys the trickster rhetoric of accusing Danny of what it does itself–tricking:

“Let’s see you pull any of your fancy tricks now,” it muttered.

Stephen King, The Shining (1977).

The Overlook entity derives from the America curse of slavery, and one potential problem with Warhol’s type of appropriation is that it reiterates this curse, the original American forms of appropriation:

“…that good old respectable ground, the right of the strongest; and he says, and I think quite sensibly, that the American planter is ‘only doing, in another form, what the English aristocracy and capitalists are doing by the lower classes;’ that is, I take it, appropriating them, body and bone, soul and spirit, to their use and convenience.

…

…having speculators, breeders, traders, and brokers in human bodies and souls,—sets the thing before the eyes of the civilized world in a more tangible form, though the thing done be, after all, in its nature, the same; that is, appropriating one set of human beings to the use and improvement of another without any regard to their own.“

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

One thing Stowe’s novel does successfully in spite of its problems is, through the contrasting perspectives of the twin brother slave masters, debunk the myth that there are “good” slaveowners capable of creating an environment in which enslaved people will be better off than if they were freed–Augustine’s good intentions to free his slaves are nullified by his unexpected early death. The language in this particular passage calls to mind that players on professional sports teams are essentially treated the same way, as commodities: bought, sold, traded. This is precisely the origin of the Red Sox’s infamous Curse of the Bambino; as they put it in Fever Pitch: “‘[Ruth] played for the Red Sox. They were great. I mean, they were the Yankees.'” The Red Sox curse is a smaller-scale version of America’s curse. They overcame it, but can we? Does cultural appropriation and narrative appropriation continue the curse of America’s original sin of the appropriating literal bodies?

Though King does not typically speak in terms of postmodern thought, his reflections on the multiple voices contributing to Lisey’s Story, including his metaphor of the pool, brings to mind Graham Allen’s own reminder that “it is not possible any longer to speak of originality or the uniqueness of the artistic object, be it a painting or a novel, since every artistic object is so clearly assembled from bits and pieces of already existent art.”[15]

Part of King’s own contribution to these “bits and pieces” is his own experimentation with the Stephen King brand itself.

Carl H. Sederholm, “It Lurks Beneath the Fold: Stephen King, Adaptation, and the Pop-Up Text of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics: Reflections on the Modern Master of Horror, ed. Phil Simpson and Patrick McAleer (2014).

Graham Allen’s reading of the figure of the wasps’ nest in The Shining and its absence in Kubrick’s adaptation as a metaphor for the general adaptation process–that, like the nest in King’s narrative, a text is emptied and refilled in this process–offers a parallel for Sederholm’s reading of the Tom Gordon pop-up adaptation reflecting the reader’s active role in the making of any text’s meaning. (That Allen’s reading of the wasps’ nest entails an extended discussion of eyes will echo the POP eyes that the POP-up text betrays as a sign of the Africanist presence and a connection to the wasp/bee role in signing this presence.)

Warhol is a case in point for both an ongoing legacy–the Supreme Court is currently reviewing a lawsuit over his appropriations of images of Prince–and the exploitative aspects of appropriation and how they beget violence.

Albert Goldman wrote a 1981 biography of Elvis–entitled Elvis–that Greil Marcus destroyed as an attempt to destroy Elvis in what amounts to an attempt at “cultural genocide”; in a section of Dead Elvis whose title merges a critteration with a shitteration, “HILLBILLIES EAT DOG FOOD WHEN THEY CAN’T GET SHIT,” Marcus writes:

It is hard to know where to begin: the torrents of hate that drive this book are unrelieved. 

From here.

Sounds like Goldman needs a “relief” pitcher… he has apparently always traded in stereotypes:

The process of appropriation is always infused with the unequal power relations that operate at every level of Western society. Yet Goldman asks: “how can a pampered, milk-faced, middle class kid who has never had a hole in his shoe sing the blues that belong to some beat-up old black who lived his life in poverty and misery?” Goldman answers his own question with a thesis that white kids are “trying to save their souls. Adopting as a tentative identity the firmly set, powerfully expressive mask of the black man, the confused, conflicted and frequently self-doubting and self-loathing offspring of Mr. and Mrs. America are released into an emotional and spiritual freedom denied them by their own inhibited culture.” (Goldman D25)

Here Goldman repeats the old stereotype of black culture as simple, instinctive, and carefree, unencumbered by the white burden of intelligence, introspection, and responsibility.

This is the trope at the center of the blues revival—the fantasy of the white blues aficionado as the savior of black music—the benevolent master. He retrieves the dying tradition from the clutches of decadent black culture and reanimates it, even improves upon it.

Mike Daly, “‘Why Do Whites Sing Black?’: The Blues, Whiteness, and Early Histories of Rock,” Popular Music and Society 26.2 (2003).

In fact, the postwar Chicago blues musicians who excited a generation of English performers—Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf—were themselves nostalgically repurposing, partly for a white crossover market, the Delta sound of lost prewar giants like Robert Johnson, who died in 1938. As early as 1949, the music industry cannily decided to baptize this modernized, electrified blues sound as “rhythm and blues.” In this sense, you could say that English players like Clapton and Page were double nostalgics, copiers of copiers.

James Wood, “Led Zeppelin Gets Into Your Soul” (January 24, 2022).

Margo Jefferson calls imitation a form of cannibalism; Strengell implicitly frames imitation as carrying out a function of transmedia dissipation in “reinforcing the traditional modes of thinking,” a parallel function of toxic nostalgia:

Because of their seemingly innocent, harmless, and natural appearance, myths and fairy tales have undergone the process of duplication and spread throughout the world in various forms of presentation, for instance, books, films, and musicals. The act of doubling something imitates the original and reinforces the traditional modes of thinking that provide our lives with structure. The audiences are not threatened, challenged, excited, or shocked by the duplications, and their socially conservative worldview is confirmed. Revisions, however, are different, because the purpose of producing a revised story is to create something new that incorporates the critical thinking of the producer and corresponds to the changed demands of audiences or may even seek to alter their views of traditional patterns (Zipes, Fairy Tale, 8-10). Both duplication and revision also feature in King’s use of myths and fairy tales.

Heidi Strengell, Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism (2005).

Duplication is imitation is regurgitation; revision is building on the original to make something new. But according to Daly this potentially falls into the white savior trap, so when Marcus credits Elvis with doing more than just taking and regurgitating Black music, of merging it with white country music to make something new, it might not be as positive as it sounds. When a Black artist does it, there’s a difference; native Houstonian Michael Arceneaux articulates how the “taking” inherent in appropriation has to give back while reinforcing the ongoing influence of radio:

I know Beyoncé is someone who listened to  97.9 the Box and heard the same New Orleans bounce mixes played throughout the day. I’m sure of it, because “Get Me Bodied” sounds like something by someone who grew up routinely hearing DJ Jubilee’s “Get It  Ready” and loved it so much that she wanted to create something that would both pay homage and offer her own spin on it. 

Michael Arceneaux, I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put My Faith in Beyoncé (2018).

As is apparent from the title, Arceneaux’s memoir offers another pop-star-as-deity construction in Queen Bey, complete with “beylievers” and “beytheists.” He also talks a lot about the influence of representations in pop culture texts on him as a Black male coming to terms with his homosexuality, pointing out the harm in comedy sketches mocking feminine/gay men on In Living Color, and positioning Madonna’s “Vogue” video as a positive counterpoint to this negative representation. Voguing and the drag subculture it derives from inform the title of the Ryan Murphy show Pose, on which one trans woman of color is excited about the mainstreaming of their culture that Madonna’s video represents, thinking it will lead to wider acceptance of their marginalized community, while others aren’t so sure. Murphy purports to acknowledge the complexity of the mainstreaming of a subculture that attends appropriation, but on the whole the show’s portrayal of the significance of “Vogue” is more glorifying than not, in a way that struck me as parallel to the essentially celebratory way Baz depicts Elvis’s appropriations in Elvis. If cultural appropriation has pros and cons, these prominent creator-directors seem to show that white men put the “pro” in “appropriation.”

The first episode of Pose (2019) features the Kate Bush song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” (1985), but it wasn’t until the song was re-disseminated on (the Stephen-King-inspired) Stranger Things in 2022 that it gained major traction with the TikTok generation, as did the Metallica song “Master of Puppets” for the same reason–but the latter engendered a debate about cancel culture once the TikTok generation discovered some of Metallica’s questionable past conduct. Given the general misogyny inherent to this song’s genre that I discussed in Part IV, here’s another example of the problematic nature of the generational re-issue facet of transmedia dissipation, and toxic nostalgia (another example of trickster string-pulling). By resurrecting metal, Stranger Things glorifies 80s misogyny and the culture that’s the apparent opposite of the subculture featured on Pose, but the use of the Kate Bush song on both of these apparently opposite shows indicates they’re not as opposed as they appear. Beyoncé’s most recent album, Renaissance (2022), featuring a cover image of the Queen on horseback, is a celebration of the same subculture Pose and “Vogue” celebrate, and if Wesley Morris’s review of the album is a celebration of Bey’s celebration, it’s a counterpoint to the cancel culture debate surrounding Metallica that amounts to the new generation hating on hatred–and to Greil Marcus’s nearly vitriolic takedown in Dead Elvis of Albert Goldman’s vitriol against Elvis in his infamous 1981 Elvis biography.

(King’s love of Metallica might be related to Metallica’s love of Lovecraft.)

Alice Walker mounts a critique of Elvis’s appropriation in his first national hit “Hound Dog” in the short story “1955,” seeming to accuse Elvis of mere regurgitation, of simply stealing Black music rather than integrating it into the foundation of something new. Greil Marcus disputes this, pointing out the song’s more complex history: the song itself was written by a pair of white men, but they were appropriating a black style/aesthetic if not the song itself. Walker also depicts the Elvis-based character (Traynor) as feeling guilty about taking the song (even though he pays the Mama-Thornton-based character money for it), which it doesn’t really seem like Elvis himself probably would have; he didn’t see anything wrong with his so-called animalistic dance movements specifically because Black people danced that way rather than thinking he was doing something wrong because he was taking a way that Black people did something. Spencer Leigh points out that Elvis did nothing when Arthur Crudup didn’t receive royalties for the songs of his Elvis recorded:

…Presley joined Sun and recorded Crudup’s ‘That’s All Right, Mama’, for his first single. …

Presley subsequently recorded ‘My Baby Left Me’ and ‘So Glad You’re Mine’ but Crudup was cheated out of royalties and, it must be said, Presley did nothing about it. This as we will see was by no means an isolated incident. … Crudup died in 1974, and his family did receive some royalties after his death.

If there had been a court case over the song, I could imagine some clever lawyer saying that Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup wasn’t entitled to anything as he had based ‘That’s All Right, Mama’ on ‘Black Snake Moan’ by Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Spencer Leigh, Elvis Presley: Caught in a Trap (2017).

Walker’s critique of Elvis might not fully hold up by certain–white–standards, but it’s worth noting the parallel in her critique of Disney:

As far as I’m concerned, [Joel Chandler Harris] stole a good part of my heritage. How did he steal it? By making me feel ashamed of it. In creating Uncle Remus, he placed an effective barrier between me and the stories that meant so much to me, the stories that could have meant so much to all of our children, the stories that they would have heard from us and not from Walt Disney. 

Alice Walker, “Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine,” The Georgia Review (2012).

On the other (or another) side of the appropriating-critique coin might be the short story “Black Elvis” by Geoffrey Becker, selected by a writer Jack Torrance reads on the porch of the Overlook, E.L. Doctorow, in the 2000 edition of Best American Short Stories.

…Becker’s characters find themselves as lost at the end of each story as they were at the beginning.

In the title story, for instance, a blues guitarist who goes by the stage name “Black Elvis” suddenly finds himself supplanted at the local club’s open mic night. Already strumming his way through an ungrounded existence, the guitarist suddenly wonders what the future holds for him. “Have I gotten it wrong all this time?” he asks the man who replaced him. “Should I be doing something else?”

From here.

Then there’s the album “Black Elvis/Lost in Space” released by hip-hop artist Kool Keith the same year Tom Gordon was published, which peripherally speaks to the space between interpretations of Elvis’s appropriations.

In creating his own version of existing African American styles, Elvis was participating in a kind of racial appropriation that went all the way back to America’s first popular music, minstrelsy. Elvis, like many others both before and after him, repositioned the minstrel as an all-around entertainer, not just a parodist of a certain group of people,” write Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor in Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music: Elvis wanted to be all things to all people. So he shucked off many of the most obvious signifiers of stereotyped blackness that previous minstrels had employed. . . . Elvis thus freed minstrelsy from much of its racist essence—his early RCA singles were high on the R&B charts, were played on R&B radio stations, and were bought by black Americans in large numbers. He made neither black nor white music but American music that could appeal to everyone on earth with a new message of youth, liberation, desire, and joy.14

Trying to find authenticity in rock and roll is a fool’s errand. Peel back the layers behind one singer or style and you find an endless hall of mirrors of white singers imitating African American styles, stretching all the way back to when the first slave ship arrived to the New World in 1619. In this sense, Elvis was just adding his voice to this conversation.

Eric Wolfson, Elvis Presley’s From Elvis in Memphis: 150 (33 1/3) (2021).

(Which is why it’s fitting that when the Colonel says “You look lost” to Elvis in Elvis, they’re in a hall of mirrors…) CA Conrad recounts an overheard conversation that paints Elvis’s appropriations as heroic:

Sure, Elvis is an American emblem. 

Well…sure…I guess so. 

Elvis is a hero for Working Class America. 

I wouldn’t go that far. 

Why not? I certainly believe it’s so. 

I don’t know. I guess I just think Elvis gets way too much attention. 

Ah, EXCUSE ME, but, the man built BRIDGES!

Huh?

Bridges between the North and the South. Bridges between blacks and whites. 

How so?

By bringing black music into mainstream American culture. 

Oh. I never thought of that. 

Elvis is a hero.

Okay, okay. 

He’s a f***ing hero!

C.A. Conrad, Advanced Elvis Course (2009) (boldface in original).

The space between the parallel Conrad-Wolfson interpretations and the parallel Alice Walker-Margo Jefferson interpretations is a gulf one could get lost in, constituted by competing views that resonate with the apparent contradiction of Trisha’s situation:

Though one should stay on the right path, getting lost is often inevitable…

Carl H. Sederholm, “It Lurks Beneath the Fold: Stephen King, Adaptation, and the Pop-Up Text of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon,” Stephen King’s Contemporary Classics: Reflections on the Modern Master of Horror, eds. Phil Simpson and Patrick McAleer (2014).

The King of Nostalgia

As noted, appropriations can evoke (toxic) nostalgia:

It is in an attempt to grasp this cultural authenticity of the working class that many have tried to appropriate its image (sometimes, as Ronald Reagan did, out of all proportion and out of control), especially since the 1980s, when his career exploded and Springsteen became an icon full of sometimes contradictory messages, so as to make easy attempts at appropriation coming from very different political perspectives (Seymour, in Womack, Zolten, Bernhard 2013).

Annabella Nucara, “Glory Days. Identity nostalgia in Bruce Springsteen’s poetics,” H-ermes. Journal of Communication 8 (2016).

While Faithful plays extensively on the treatment of baseball as religion, King also draws a parallel based on baseball that implicitly draws a parallel between religion and addiction (and slavery):

Worst of all, during the season I become as much a slave to my TV and radio as any addict ever was to his spike.

Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King, Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season (2004).

This connects to Springsteen’s evocation of (toxic) nostalgia in the song “Glory Days,” which, per White and Bowers, expresses nostalgia sprung from baseball, but which one commentator points out falls short of perfection due to its use of the term “speedball” instead of “fastball,” since this term indicates not a pitch, but a (deadly) drug cocktail of cocaine and heroin. King himself would seem to confirm the use of “fastball,” or “fast ball,” as the standard term:

When King wakes in the night, he is not preoccupied with thoughts of death. He worries about his grandchildren, or turns over new ideas. His writing habits have changed over the years. “As you get older, you lose some of the velocity off your fast ball. Then you resort more to craft: to the curve, to the slider, to the change-up. To things other than that raw force.”

Emma Brockes, “Stephen King: on alcoholism and returning to the Shining” (September 21, 2013).

But maybe Springsteen was sending a message about nostalgia itself being a drug…

Both King and Springsteen received Presidential medals from Obama (the latter at the same time as Diana Ross and Tom Hanks on 11/22(/16) no less):

[Obama’s] motivation reads, among other things, a phrase that captures all the meaning of Springsteen’s nostalgia, cultivated in a continuous cycle of pain and promises, of disappointment and hope, of glances to the past and escapes into the future, summarizing the great contradiction of the American dream that Springsteen sang for half a century: “His songs capture the pain and the promise of the American experience”.

Annabella Nucara, “Glory Days. Identity nostalgia in Bruce Springsteen’s poetics,” H-ermes. Journal of Communication 8 (2016).

It makes sense this is the contradiction Springsteen would sing: Elvis Presley is his idol, or one of them, as he’s noted: “The way that Elvis freed your body, Bob [Dylan] freed your mind.” And Stephen King has called Springsteen one of his idols, a lineage through which we can see elements of rape culture inherited (though King is two years older than the Boss):

The horror master and the Boss met for the first time years ago at a local restaurant when a cute teen girl — “like a girl out of a Springsteen song” — approached their table, King said.

Rocker Springsteen gave the lass a huge smile, and even reached into his pocket for a pen. But “she said, ‘Aren’t you Stephen King?’ It was one of the best moments of my young life!”

Ian Mohr, “Stephen King’s epic first meeting with Bruce Springsteen” (June 8, 2016).

Apparently this is an anecdote King likes to repeat, at least on the same tour:

After a brief Q&A, King closed by recalling a dinner he once had with one of his idols, Bruce Springsteen. A teenage girl was having a birthday dinner with her parents at the same restaurant and upon seeing Springsteen and King at the bar, darted toward them “as if in a trance, I swear her feet didn’t even touch the floor.” As Springsteen reached for the pen in his pocket, she directed her attention solely to King: “I’ve read all of your books. Can I have an autograph?” King used Springsteen’s pen to sign for her.

Kelli Ebensberger, “Comedy, family and Bruce Springsteen: Stephen King shares a lighter side at the Englert” (June 14, 2016).

In 2022 Springsteen released a cover as a single (with “single” offering another overlap between baseball and music), the Commodores’ “Nightshift” (Night Shift is the title of King’s first story collection) from his new album Only the Strong Survive, which is the title of a song on Elvis’s “comeback” album From Elvis in Memphis (1969) that’s in a “country soul” style:

“Only the Strong Survive” is the only song on From Elvis in Memphis by African American songwriters—Jerry Butler, Kenny Gamble, and Leon Huff.

Eric Wolfson, Elvis Presley’s From Elvis in Memphis: 150 (33 1/3) (2021).

The song was originally recorded by Jerry BUTLER for his 1968 album The Ice Man Cometh, as Butler was known as “The Ice Man” (who also took this song title for the title of his 2000 memoir), but which also invokes the 1939 Eugene O’Neil play about alcoholism The Iceman Cometh (infamously spoofed on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in their production of The Nightman Cometh), a 2018 production of which Austin BUTLER starred in with Denzel Washington, which might well be the reason he was cast as Elvis, as Denzel called Baz to recommend Butler after working with him. Butler thanked both Denzel and Tom Hanks and expressed his love for Priscilla and Lisa Marie in his Golden Globe acceptance speech in Lisa Marie’s final public outing. The sudden death of Lisa Marie just two days later has re-ignited the nostalgia of Elvis’s legacy as American emblem:

His significance arguably went beyond accumulated fame and fortune. It sometimes is easy to forget that before he became “Elvis,” he was just a kid who turned to music, movies and fashion because he wanted to escape invisibility and anonymity.

Like countless adolescents who have succeeded him, he was a passionate consumer whose consumption knew few bounds. And Elvis Presley helped reveal that consumerism — despite its many drawbacks — has the potential to break down barriers that separate people.

The Presley legacy, however, is about perception. And Elvis is perceived by many through a lens that focuses on a supposed backward culture he refused to abandon.

In a nation whose story emphasizes progress and always moving forward, such a refusal was an unpardonable sin, a punishable lapse. Therefore, any revolutionary impact he may have had was accompanied and negated by an asterisk that lampooned him as a “Hillbilly on a Pedestal,” “a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party” and the “King of White Trash Culture.”

That perception, of course, is contested. For the mourners in 1977 who filed past his casket, those who have bought over 1 billion of his recordings and the countless people today who are grieving the loss of his daughter, Elvis Presley was a rags-to-riches hero who personified the American dream.

Michael T. Bertrand, “Opinion: Why Lisa Marie Presley’s untimely death was so jarring” (January 16, 2023).

That Elvis was a “passionate consumer” is definitely a likeness to his Twin King, Stephen.

Via Austin Butler, there’s a weird fiction v. reality meld happening with the actor playing Elvis having a relationship with Elvis’s real family. Lisa Marie died just days after celebrating what would have been her father’s 88th birthday at Graceland, the double-infinity birthday. I’ve mentioned Nnedi Okorafor’s using “the concept of [Ursula] Le Guin’s classic story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas‘ as a metaphor for the way the ‘magical negro’ trope operates,” and this trope is an integral iteration of Morrison’s Africanist presence; the child in LeGuin’s story, the one who, as Okorafor puts it, “must make the sacrifice so that everything in the story can be possible,” could be a symbolic version of a tar baby, figuratively trapping the majority of Omelas’ inhabitants; the rare ones who can escape the trap of first-world privilege at the expense of third-world poverty are the ones worthy of the story’s title.

…from Vietnam’s crucible emerged King’s distrust of institutions, politicians and the military-industrial nexus certainly, but also his general indictment of adulthood as corrupt and duplicitous, willing to abuse and sacrifice its children in order to maintain a communal status quo.

TONY MAGISTRALE AND MICHAEL J. BLOUIN, STEPHEN KING AND AMERICAN HISTORY (2020).

Both LeGuin, in 2018, and Morrison, in 2019, died at the age of 88. Butler didn’t just say “I love you” to Lisa Marie (and Priscilla, and Elvis), he said “I love you FOREVER.”

RIP, Lisa Marie.

-SCR