So I've been watching Castle Rock with a friend and... I think it might actually be better than its source material. Stephen King has always been frustrating for me because I love his ability to create a sense of dread, but he doesn't seem to trust his own subtlety. 1/
Like, in his setups, he'll lay out these haunting, lovely--and deeply chilling--threads, but then seem to get uncomfortable with the ambiguity and bring in the substance like a sledgehammer. 2/
Even mediated through Kubrick, who obv wasn't afraid of subtlety or subtext or ambiguity, Jack Torrance is WAY scarier at the beginning of the Shining, without a supernatural explanation for his menace toward his wife and child, than he is in full-on "Here's Johnny!" mode. 3/
He's clearly a keen observer of human nature, and really good at suggesting depths--often terrifying ones--early on in character dev. But when he's writing supernatural horror, at least, he seems to ultimately attribute intense human malice to supernatural evil. 4/
The interesting thing about Castle Rock is it doesn't seem to trust its audience in the same way Stephen King doesn't seem to trust humanity alone to drive compelling horror stories. 5/
It's relying SO HEAVILY on Easter Eggs and callbacks to Stephen King stories, but there's a different sort of storytelling there that's trying to come out, and it's far better than the nostalgia trip. 6/
We're two episodes in, and it could be great, or it could be the Stephen King Ready Player One--all callbacks, no actual substance. So everyone keeps referencing the supernatural evil that hangs over Castle Rock, but so far there's been ZERO supernatural anything. 7/
But there certainly is evil. The town seems to be basically a company town for Shawshank Prison, and the series isn't shy about noting the inherent corruption of the very idea of for-profit prisons. 8/
It's also not shy about the rot at the center of the very idea of on-tap redemption, but it's strangely compassionate about it, too. It would have been easy to personify that through a skeezy evangelical preacher. But it doesn't go that route. 10/
There's a pastor, all right, but while he falls prey to condescension, he's not played as malicious, greedy, or anything of the sort. He wants to comfort the prisoners and see them redeemed. Avoids TV's difficulty in portraying clergy as anything between heroes and villains. 11/
However, the series quietly, subtly--amid all the IT and Cujo references--zeros in on the problem with easy redemption: without repentance, without attempts to repair the harm done, it traps people in endless repetition of "sin" and hollow, unsatisfying "forgiveness." 12/
“People say ‘It wasn’t me, it was this place,' and the thing is, they’re right," one of the characters says, and that's the true horror of the thing: a town full of people hurting others, convinced that they're doing it because they're trapped in hell. 13/
And the pressure to do that harm is real--one of the most poignant moments, for me, was when a prison guard asks, "if there were a Walmart around here, do you think I'd be working at a prison?" All these haunting shots of decaying towns. 14/
Basically, as far as I can tell, the story the writers WANT to tell is a Stephen King-style horror story where the actual evil haunting the town is the for-profit prison that shapes the lives of everyone who lives around it, the economic desperation that feeds the beast, and 15/
the resignation and abdication of responsibility that leaves the residents believing that they're trapped, that the evil there possesses them, in a way (in both senses of the word), that *it* creates the impulses toward malice and cruelty. 16/
Which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that you are the helpless prisoner of an evil force that makes you do terrible things you wouldn't otherwise do, you're not going to grapple with them. You're not going to STOP doing them. 17/
So you're left with shame & helplessness, rather than the sort of guilt & sense of personal control that drives you to try to change. The promise of redemption in a worn-down church, given anew every Sunday morning, that doesn't last even through Monday, when you sin again. 18/
That's the story that keeps bleeding through the Stephen King references, and it feels like that's the story that the writers WANT to tell. But they seemed trapped, too, by the belief that they've got to tell A Stephen King Pastiche. 19/
Which is a unfortunate, if it continues throughout the series, because the story straining at the margins is something more timely, resonant, and real than the lines they're trying to color inside. /FIN.
