"Under the Dome" begins to feel like a fairy tale toward the climax. There are curses and reverses. Like Shakespeare, King makes sure people don't end up where they started. An earnest Selectman has a conversation with a meth dealer, and by the end, the Selectman is a dyed-in-the-wool full-on meth addict. The key to Barbie's salvation is smuggled into his prison cell via Corn Flakes; the guards spit and flick their boogers into the Corn Flakes, and King lingers over a description of one booger (laced with blood). At the bottom is a note explaining the first steps for Barbie's release from jail. Meanwhile, the once-powerful Rennie seems to be shrinking; his health is getting worse and worse, just as his son seems to be slowly losing his mind. And Andi throws off her OxyContin addiction to become a crime-fighting warrior goddess (at least, that's what I predict for her).
Another fairy-tale twist: Do you remember when Rennie murdered the pastor with his gold-plated baseball? Investigating the death of the pastor, various good-uns discover the imprints of baseball stitching in the face of the corpse. Who besides Rennie owns a gold-plated baseball in this town? A normal baseball wouldn't do such damage. I love this kind of imaginative work--the way earlier details come back to play major roles in the third act. And there's something notably folklore-ish about a gold-plated baseball.
King indicated in an interview that part of the inspiration for this novel came from Bush/Cheney. Cheney was secretly in power though he was just the vice-president; Rennie is not-so-secretly in power, though he is just the Second Selectman. I'm touched by the role of friendship; the band of kids, for example, would lose some of its power if any one kid were working on his own. Similarly, Barbie leans heavily on Julia. Linda and her husband work as a team. And Brenda carries her dead husband's good work forward before she herself is brutally "offed."
The JFK book spins off into new worlds when it's revealed that preventing JFK's assassination will actually cause near-apocalyptic calamities. King has great fun describing the monsters that eventually stalk the earth--I think there are actual monsters--as a weird butterfly-effect result of the preservation of JFK's life. So the hero has to sacrifice his love and JFK's life, among other things, to restore order to the world. "Mr. Mercedes" builds to a showdown at a boy-band concert. The villain, who has murdered a few jobless folks with his vehicle, will now wipe out hundreds of teens as they listen to some kind of stand-in for One Direction. So I predict some kind of similar upping-the-ante twist soon in "Dome." I've heard a bit. I think something happens involving airlessness; 80 percent of the air gets sucked out of the dome, so several people die? Then I anticipate the toppling of Jim Rennie, via forces-of-good-united. That's a surprising feature of King's books--at least his recent books. The endings tend to be fairly happy!
P.S. The other great twist! Sam, the victim of the gang rape, gathers herself. She seems to be recovering. She decides she will exact revenge on her thugs, her assailants; she gets her gun. And then another startling twist: The gun isn't just for the assailants. At the end of a major bloodbath, she turns it on herself, as Glenn Close did in the original (canned) version of "Fatal Attraction." Curses and reverses! "The wolves, the lies, the false hopes, the goodbyes!”
***
A bit more on Amy Schumer. “Sex Prep” is a great skit that doesn’t earn canonical status--simply because the ending is weak. But the material before that is solid. Amy goes on a journey. She receives a text--asking if she is Down to Fuck. Without thought, she quickly replies: “Totes. Whatevs.” Then, repelled by the meatball on her fork, she throws her Ordinary World utensils across a diner and begins her odyssey.
Like Homer’s hero, Amy has many stages in her wanderings. An ally assists her with her “asshole-reshaping”: “Should I get a diamond? A heart? Make it a four-leaf clover. I need all the help I can get!” (“Four-leaf clover” isn’t an option on the menu, and I particularly love that detail.) Others aren’t so helpful. When her boss informs her she can’t take the day off, Amy simply quits. As she examines herself, Amy discovers that even her own psyche can be an enemy: “Hair Down There? KILL YOURSELF,” suggests “Cosmo,” and Amy winces as she reads the words.
An unfortunate part of any DTF encounter is the need for conversation, so Amy practices: “Mmmhmmm....Yeah.....Oh....Ah! So you get off holidays?!?!” “Come on, bitch,” she murmurs, “you’ve got this.” But then various questions arise in her head: “Is Your Pussy Too Loose?” “Are Your Boobs Disappointing Everyone?” "Is Your Body Hair Disgusting?” And so: the date is over, before it has even started. Amy cowers under her bed, and ignores the ringing doorbell, and a title card informs us: “She never had sex again.”
I love this skit because it mocks white-girl entitlement while also skewering the kinds of crazy messages people are exposed to. It shows sympathy for its central clown, even as it ensures that “the knives are out.” I can relate. It’s a jungle out there! Good luck to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N39uWjr-u4
Another fairy-tale twist: Do you remember when Rennie murdered the pastor with his gold-plated baseball? Investigating the death of the pastor, various good-uns discover the imprints of baseball stitching in the face of the corpse. Who besides Rennie owns a gold-plated baseball in this town? A normal baseball wouldn't do such damage. I love this kind of imaginative work--the way earlier details come back to play major roles in the third act. And there's something notably folklore-ish about a gold-plated baseball.
King indicated in an interview that part of the inspiration for this novel came from Bush/Cheney. Cheney was secretly in power though he was just the vice-president; Rennie is not-so-secretly in power, though he is just the Second Selectman. I'm touched by the role of friendship; the band of kids, for example, would lose some of its power if any one kid were working on his own. Similarly, Barbie leans heavily on Julia. Linda and her husband work as a team. And Brenda carries her dead husband's good work forward before she herself is brutally "offed."
The JFK book spins off into new worlds when it's revealed that preventing JFK's assassination will actually cause near-apocalyptic calamities. King has great fun describing the monsters that eventually stalk the earth--I think there are actual monsters--as a weird butterfly-effect result of the preservation of JFK's life. So the hero has to sacrifice his love and JFK's life, among other things, to restore order to the world. "Mr. Mercedes" builds to a showdown at a boy-band concert. The villain, who has murdered a few jobless folks with his vehicle, will now wipe out hundreds of teens as they listen to some kind of stand-in for One Direction. So I predict some kind of similar upping-the-ante twist soon in "Dome." I've heard a bit. I think something happens involving airlessness; 80 percent of the air gets sucked out of the dome, so several people die? Then I anticipate the toppling of Jim Rennie, via forces-of-good-united. That's a surprising feature of King's books--at least his recent books. The endings tend to be fairly happy!
P.S. The other great twist! Sam, the victim of the gang rape, gathers herself. She seems to be recovering. She decides she will exact revenge on her thugs, her assailants; she gets her gun. And then another startling twist: The gun isn't just for the assailants. At the end of a major bloodbath, she turns it on herself, as Glenn Close did in the original (canned) version of "Fatal Attraction." Curses and reverses! "The wolves, the lies, the false hopes, the goodbyes!”
***
A bit more on Amy Schumer. “Sex Prep” is a great skit that doesn’t earn canonical status--simply because the ending is weak. But the material before that is solid. Amy goes on a journey. She receives a text--asking if she is Down to Fuck. Without thought, she quickly replies: “Totes. Whatevs.” Then, repelled by the meatball on her fork, she throws her Ordinary World utensils across a diner and begins her odyssey.
Like Homer’s hero, Amy has many stages in her wanderings. An ally assists her with her “asshole-reshaping”: “Should I get a diamond? A heart? Make it a four-leaf clover. I need all the help I can get!” (“Four-leaf clover” isn’t an option on the menu, and I particularly love that detail.) Others aren’t so helpful. When her boss informs her she can’t take the day off, Amy simply quits. As she examines herself, Amy discovers that even her own psyche can be an enemy: “Hair Down There? KILL YOURSELF,” suggests “Cosmo,” and Amy winces as she reads the words.
An unfortunate part of any DTF encounter is the need for conversation, so Amy practices: “Mmmhmmm....Yeah.....Oh....Ah! So you get off holidays?!?!” “Come on, bitch,” she murmurs, “you’ve got this.” But then various questions arise in her head: “Is Your Pussy Too Loose?” “Are Your Boobs Disappointing Everyone?” "Is Your Body Hair Disgusting?” And so: the date is over, before it has even started. Amy cowers under her bed, and ignores the ringing doorbell, and a title card informs us: “She never had sex again.”
I love this skit because it mocks white-girl entitlement while also skewering the kinds of crazy messages people are exposed to. It shows sympathy for its central clown, even as it ensures that “the knives are out.” I can relate. It’s a jungle out there! Good luck to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N39uWjr-u4
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