Autoeroticism: Christine (dir. John Carpenter, 1983)

DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is still available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and via your local bookshop at Bookshop.org.

Be Not Afraid #4 is still at comic stores and on Comixology. Stay tuned for updates on Issue #5 as I get them.

I’ll be honest with you: When I sat down to watch Christine, I expected it to be bad. It’s a Stephen King adaptation, in a world replete with terrible Stephen King adaptations. It was made in 1983, a time when sexual politics and horror-movie pacing were both very different. It’s about a killer car, the rare horror premise that started life as a Monty Python skit. No-one can make killer cars scary. Especially not Stephen King, and believe me: He tries.

I was wrong, and I'm glad to be wrong. 1983 might have been a dismal year for the female gaze, but this was also a time when filmmakers had apparently just discovered how to put gay subtext in their movies, and splashed it about with the abandon of Jackson Pollock slinging paint on a three-day bender. At its core, Christine is a simple tale of teenage homosexuality, played via parable: Once upon a time, there was a boy who wanted to fuck a car. 

First, let’s meet that boy: “Arnie Cunningham,” gotten up in 1980s nerd gear, with the big plastic glasses only seen on movie dorks, Rivers Cuomo, and every single one of my boyfriends from 2002 through 2011. Arnie's dominating mother and impotent father are presumably on loan from Sal Mineo in Rebel Without a Cause, and his high school experience is full of bullies who torment him for completely inexplicable reasons, which I am sure none of us can guess, let alone relate to. Every single one of these teenagers is at least 37 years of age, and the men are aggressively and ceaselessly heterosexual.

These are men who cannot watch a girl chew on a pencil without falling into a screaming, convulsing pile of self-declared erections. Yet when Arnie’s best friend, hot jock Dennis, offers to hook him up with some girls, Arnie responds with discomfort that borders on distaste, insisting that he would rather masturbate. The thing everyone else wants, he doesn't want, because – he says – he's "ugly." Cue the following dialogue exchange: