Way back in "Oh-Em-Gee-Too!" I shredded the shit out of the theology of "The Stand" such as it was.
I'm fine with it now, and here's why.
Stephen King is a worshipful Lovecraft fanboy, and has connected his universe to Lovecraft's many times.
King has said that Randall Flagg is an incarnation of Nyarlathotep from Lovecraft-verse.
Nyarlathotep basically being a homicidal version of Q from Trek.
That solves all my issues.
When you try to make sense of Christian theology, you end up with mish-mash.
But if it's not Christian God and Satan, but Nyarlathotep vs Nodens, then it's fine.
It's just a couple crazy extraterrestrials messing with humans.
The confusion arises because Flagg lets people go ahead and assume he's Satan, and Nodens is just totally zipper-lipped, and leaves Mother Abigail to assume he's Christian God.
And King is a rascal, so he sat back and let America assume.
Well played, King, well played. 😏
3 comments:
Did you see that new version of "The Stand"? King liked it a lot, apparently, but I don't know how much you can always trust his opinions of adaptations of his own work. I literally know nothing about it aside from that King liked it. I don't even know who's in it and have seen not a single image from it.
The old one from 1994 was partially saved by the actors (well, some of them--King himself couldn't read his own dialogue!), and I guess some of King's story shone through, but it was pretty corny and low budget in a lot of ways. It introduced my high school classmates to "Don't Dream It's Over," though, which is my primary memory of it; we got to watch it for the end of a semester and then my dumbass little buddies ran around going "hey now, HEYYYY now!" over and over. I'm not surprised it was remade.
As for the religious subtext, pttbhtthh, he was just doing generic good old fashioned good vs. evil, he's a Baby Boomer 60s Rebel and always will be, there's no escaping it, he's never going to go Anne Rice on us. I would have never even bothered to analyze it.
All I know about the new "The Stand" is Whoopi Goldberg played Mother Abigail.
And yeah, you're right about the subtexts, but back then, I was on an atheism pop-culture tear like Neil Degrasse Tyson was running around ruining sci-fi science for everyone.
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