CBS All Access has made a lot of fuss over their new miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s giant (really giant, over a thousand pages in its final form) apocalyptic novel, The Stand. In it, the world is mostly wiped out by a superflu that escapes from a military facility, and the few who remain in the United States gather in two groups: a good one, led by the kindly Mother Abagail, and a bad one, led by the extremely evil Randall Flagg.
I loved this book. As much as I rarely make the time anymore to dig into enormous novels, that’s how much I loved reading enormous novels when I was younger. I think I read The Stand for the first time when I was 16 or so, and King wrapping his head around all these different horrors, many of them made up of plain old good-and-evil battles between people led by different elemental forces, was right up my alley.
Not only am I older now, but I’ve essentially been alone since March, because while there is not a superflu that has left only a few to wander through a desolate landscape, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans alone who have died of a communicable disease, and that makes it a weird time for an adaptation of The Stand.
The Stand is less of a monster-horror book than a lot of what Stephen King has written, but it has a lot of body horror, especially at the beginning, when the illness descends. A lot of bodies being ravaged, a lot of people who can’t breathe. And the miniseries has a good deal of this, too. They’ve chosen massively swollen throats as their visual signal that people are gravely ill, and it’s … unsettling.
But what was interesting to me was that what made it a weird time to watch The Stand was as much about King’s use of archetypes that strike me now as so very dated: the wise Black elder in touch with the spiritual world and two essentially angelic disabled men, to name three. I expected to watch it through my fingers because watching anything about disease right now gives me the willies; I wound up watching it through my fingers because yeesh. The cast is really solid -- Whoopi Goldberg as Mother Abagail; James Marsden as the closest thing the book has to a hero, Stu; Greg Kinnear as a professorial type.
It’s an example of something that seems both uncomfortably current and uncomfortably dated somehow, like I don’t want to think about meeting the moment as regards an outbreak of communicable disease so specifically unless it’s through something that feels perfectly suited to all the other things that have been much on my mind this year, including racial and economic justice and representation in media.
It’s still a heck of a story, about sacrifice and commitment and community, and a lot of it still scares me in the same unnerving way King’s imaginative explorations of evil always do. But is it the right time for this one? Not for me. Not until I can breathe wherever I want again, and other people can too.
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Our pal Sam Sanders has a great interview with Phoebe Bridgers that you should give a listen to over at his show, It’s Been A Minute.
I want to tell you a few things about this mug cakerecipe I made this week. One is that you do not need that much sugar. It’s extremely sweet. Nothing needs a one-to-one ratio of flour to sugar. Another is that you may not need that much oil, either. Another is that I used peanut butter chips, because I found them while looking for chocolate chips, and it was delicious -- but you could leave them out, too. And finally: It’s the closest thing I’ve found to an actual emergency dessert for one person (although you will probably only want half of it) that’s easily scavenged.
Like everyone else, I greatly enjoyed the video that came out this week of Boston health care workers dancing about the vaccine. Blue Suit and Camel Coat are committed.
What We Did This Week
David Lee/Netflix
Aisha wrote a terrific piece about Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom on Netflix, which is also the topic of our Friday show with Joelle Monique.
On Thursday, Aisha and Ashley Clark talked about Steve McQueen’s series of films, Small Axe.
On Wednesday, I got to talk to our buddy R. Eric Thomas about one of my favorite shows of the year, HBO MAX’s The Flight Attendant.
On Tuesday, Stephen and NPR Music’s Lyndsey McKenna talked about Taylor Swift’s Evermore.
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