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Stephen King / Haddish

OK. Some other notable “Under the Dome” features:

(1) The villainous father/son pair. King would return to this with “Mr. Mercedes,” but with a twist: It’s the mom, there, who spawns the villain. (And she makes him sleep with her. He responds with confusion and rage and self-delusion; he can’t consciously accept that what’s happening is wrong, because this would shatter him. King does this troubling mix so well.) In “Under the Dome,” you have the villain, Junior, viewing his evil father from a distance. The father has done bad things; he runs the country’s largest meth lab; he murdered his wife. Junior, too, goes on sprees; he kills two women and stores them in his attic, then begins to think about mating with their rotting corpses. It’s such fun to watch Junior interact with his father, because you know things won’t turn out well between these two. Thieves fall out.

(2) The unexplained event. One element of the Gothic is lingering mystery. We don’t see the baby in “Rosemary’s Baby.” We don’t see Vito in the final moments of “Godfather II.” One thing I love about the first half of “Dome” is that no one knows where this dome came from. (There’s speculation, around the midpoint, that the dome is the product of aliens’ tinkering, but I hope King doesn’t go too far down this particular speculative road. That said, it could lead to a fun “Ten Cloverfield Lane”-ish ending, where you think you’ve defeated all the John Goodman-ish baddies, only to discover that there are menacing aliens in the third act.) In “End of Watch,” a big source of pleasure is just wondering how/if the bad guy is really committing acts of evil from a semi-comatose state. And then, of course, in the JFK book: Did Oswald really “do it”? Was he helped? What role did his wife play, if any, in the plotting?

(3) The weary guy learning to fight. In “Under the Dome,” it’s Barbie, who is getting driven out of town by a coterie of villains. An injustice has been inflicted on him; rather than contest the charges, he is trying to escape. King will design circumstances to force him to confront his demons; by doing so, King will shape Barbie into a hero. We see this in “Dolores Claiborne”; the title character has no real interest in making her sad story known until life requires her to step into a heroic role. And in “Mr. Mercedes,” the retired detective, at first, is just gaining weight and waiting to die. The fight against evil is a means by which various characters “find their voices.” King has an uncanny ability for imagining both the evil and the good so fully, and for making you empathize with both sides in the war, at least intermittently. (The politician addicted to OxyContin in “Dome” is also a fine example of “feature (3).”)

(4) The sort-of-relentless, stunning violence and the smart kids. In “Under the Dome”: A gang rape. A man who whips himself until he bleeds, then gets his brains bashed in by a golden baseball. The shooting of a dog. A suicide-by-gunshot under the stars, which have been tainted pink because of pollution that has accumulated along the roof of the dome. (“Mr. Mercedes”: a lunatic mows down the unemployed at a job fair--with his vehicle. The JFK book: A man assaults and murders several members of his own family with a meat cleaver.) I’d argue that a great attraction horror has--if you like horror--is that it helps you to contemplate your own frightening death in a “safe” way. Who isn’t fascinated by life’s fragility? King returns to that terrain over and over. And then the smart kids: King has an interest in mentorship. The detective in “Mr. Mercedes” helps a kid through college and also pushes his oddball agoraphobic pseudo-love-interest to begin to cultivate a social life. One of the weirdest and most moving facets of “Under the Dome” is an odd couple--a professor in his sixties illegally shtupping his grad student. King makes clear that this guy is sort of laughable, childish, weak, and narcissistic, as many academics are. “I edited the most recent Ploughshares,” says the professor, over and over, to no one who cares. His gamine love interest is, in fact, the adult in the relationship. The professor may redeem himself, inadvertently, when he stumbles on two small children cut off from their mother via the “dome.” Suddenly: an impromptu family of four. King observes the four, and hypothesizes that the grad student will abandon the professor as soon as she can. It’s a sweet, poignant, disturbing, aching moment; it’s all those things wrapped into one.

(5) The vignette. King stops the propulsive story, now and then, to include a creepy semi-related short story. So, in “Dome,” we get a memorable digression about a brainiac kid, Rory, who gets a bright idea to puncture the dome with a bullet. King takes time to think about the dangers of being brainy and impulsive. He says Rory’s brother--who is far less bright and inventive than Rory--would never carry out a bullet plan. He would stop to think about possible consequences. But, King says, when you are passionate and impetuous and you get a Big Idea, you’re sometimes in trouble. We fall in love with Rory, then we watch him race toward the dome in an ATV; he takes out his father’s gun and shoots at the dome, and of course the bullet flies right back at him, shoots through his eye, and kills him. There are vignettes like this scattered through the JFK novel: the fate of various high-school plays, the high-school teaching couple who fall in semi-forbidden love in late middle age. There’s so much texture and so much detail. One critic wrote about King’s “slightly frenzied commerce with his muse”; he reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates, and, strangely, he does a direct JCO quote halfway through “Dome.” I wasn’t sure I’d really sink into this book, and I’m glad I’ve stuck with it. More soon. (Other vignettes. The girls’ high-school basketball star who is hypnotic, scores an important three-point shot, then dies in a car crash. The “Not Lindsay” rugs from Iraq. Why “Not Lindsay”? Because they’re not fake--and thus differentiated from the rugs airmailed to Lindsay Graham.)

***

The setup for “Girls Trip” basically matches the John Cheever story, “Goodbye, My Brother.” A group that was once a family reunites. Old, unexplored tensions come to the surface. Tribal loyalties are tested. In “Girls Trip,” certain problems grow out of sex. “Tiffany Haddish,” says Jada Pinkett-Smith, “I need you to use your lady mouth on this trip.” And Tiffany replies: “*I* need *you* to use your lady mouth. On some dicks.” Part of the point of the trip is to get Jada to loosen up and have some fun; it has been years since her divorce, and her private areas are, according to her friends, “covered in cobwebs.” But when she meets a man, she discovers that his endowment is too large, and she can’t get it into her mouth, or other orifices. This is when Tiffany teaches her an important lesson: You gut a grapefruit and slide it onto the shaft, then you perform fellatio on the exposed portion of the member, the tip. So the recipient feels as if he is receiving both a blow job and penetrative sex, in one fell swoop. (Jada tries this later, and of course, some grapefruit juice finds its way into the young man’s “pee-hole.” Hilarity ensues.)

On other terrain, Regina Hall is struggling because her picture-perfect husband is sleeping around. So Tiffany Haddish makes a promise. She will insert her fist into the man’s rectum and pull out his heart. She will stick two straws into his urethra, or something like that. She will saw off part of a champagne bottle and go after him with the jagged remains. (She does actually do this last thing.) Basically, Tiffany Haddish is the hero of this movie, and the one who understands true friendship, and if we had any doubts, they’re put to rest in the zip-lining scene. Here, Jada humiliates herself by getting stuck directly above Bourbon Street and peeing all over the crowds. Tiffany embraces this and decides to do an encore--a golden shower of her own. She also brings the girls drugs in her “booty hole,” because “you can’t get an infection in your booty.” She forgives the other women when they disappoint her, and she shows an ability to laugh at herself. She is like a modern update of John Wayne.

As we wander off to work on this dark, dreary Monday, let us all remember Tiffany Haddish. May her spirit give us strength.

(P.S. I also enjoyed the early moment when we see Haddish at work. A colleague has stolen her GoGurt, and he refuses to 'fess up. So? The only solution? Throw glassware at the colleague's head. I think we've all "been there.")

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