STEPHEN KING –
BIG DRIVER – 2014
That’s not an outstanding film,
but it is well-built and well-conducted. It is faithful to the original story
and it reveals some of the worst evils ordinary people carry in their
frightened souls, the dark sides of their souls. Just say, mister, what are
these frightful and frightening things?
First of all our robotized cars. Before
we were afraid, and Stephen King loved that fear of ours, of the car itself and
the evil that could live in it, the way it lived in Christine. Now the car is nothing
at all. The car is inhabited by a GPS, that simple and daily version of the mad
computer of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, the
Space Odyssey and that GPS has a masculine identity, in this film, whereas
the car is necessarily a female symbol since it can contain us the way a cocoon
or a womb would. It is the voice of the father inside the mother’s womb. That
is reassuring up to a point, up to the point when someone from outside
manipulates the GPS and turns it into a trap.
And that one is a woman. All evil
comes from a woman, the eternal Eve, who manipulates a man, here the poor Tom
the GPS. That’s already very frightening. This woman is the conspirator, the
serial killer you imagine most of the time as being a man. But this woman is
even worse than that because she is a mother.
The eternal Eve needs a serpent
to put her on the road to evil, and that serpent is a two-headed one since it
is a pair of brothers. That cuts deep into us, right through to the bone, or
maybe even to the marrow in the bone. Two brothers unified in their crime. That’s
really ugly, but two sons who, unified in their crime, are both manipulating
their mother and manipulated by their mother, and they have to pay for the
passage and give their mother some trinket, some trophy, some souvenir from the
victims she sends them for their fun.
That is becoming blood curdling
to anyone sane in their minds. But the film adds a few details that imply we
are all living with a deep secret in our own memory, a big secret from infancy
that is both motivating us and manipulating our own motivations. We are the
puppet of the traumas, big or small, we experienced, then registered in our
infancy and childhood, at times teenage, and that we yet buried deep in our
unconscious or subconscious, and little is needed for it to come up and make us
do the most horrific things or just fail in our most desired and dearest
dreams.
The film then works very well
even if it does not insist on the numerous details King gave us in this story,
since he is such a meticulous writer. The reader then cannot ignore the most
intimate details of the characters like the brand names of their underwear or
the color of their bathrobes. And that is no metaphor at all. Some writers
consider the truth of the story is in such details. I would agree for sure and
at the same time agree to disagree: some details are at times there just to
have some gross effect on us and I do not exactly appreciate grossness. I
prefer horror and terror.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 1:05 PM