brian 's Reviews > Under the Dome

in the 2008 film max payne the gloomy hero is, of course, offered casual sex by this woman:



aware that payne is mourning the murder of his wife she says something to the effect that he can call out his wife's name as he fucks her. ok. now this utterly bland piece-of-shit movie is getting kinda interesting. there's some potential complexity here; some fun with eros/thanos.
of course payne tosses her out, all offended at the very notion. in movies like this you can't have your hero engaging in any kinda deviancy.

well, there's a bunch of that shit going on in under the dome, in which the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad (i mean reeeeaaaaal bad. like gang-rape bad, kill-your-own-son bad, mass-murderer bad). and it's a shame b/c there's much to love about this novel. but king's view of human beings and human behavior in this one is kinda narrow and uninteresting. strange from a guy with such a fertile imagination for the fantastic. what's most frustrating is that when you're dealing with common folk it's mot fun to throw them in extreme situations and watch them crack. we've seen it all over Apocalit*: lord of the flies, blindness, the road, etc… and this is the part i don't get: the characters that crack when the dome comes down ARE ALREADY ASSHOLES! what's fun about this shit is watching the slow burn of a decent or sane character as they descend into evil or lunacy. it's kinda obvious what's gonna happen when dick cheney is tossed into No Exit, ain't it? king's bad guys were bad before the dome and once the shit comes down they kill and gang-rape with no fore or afterthought. how the shit is this interesting? has king been too long in the horror genre that he's come to see murder and rape as something akin to jogging around the block or swatting a fly? what's great about murder in serious works of art (and make no mistake: this novel means to be a serious work of art) is not the murder itself but all which surrounds it.

i happen to believe that human existence is kaleidoscopically demented and deranged and far weirder than it appears on the surface. the most normal & upstanding of us are revealed to be sucking random cock in airport bathrooms, talking to snakes or burning bushes or interplanetary beneficiaries, etc… in short, i appreciate people like david lynch not in that he offers an alternative to the humdrum of daily existence but that he throws to the forefront what is actually happening behind closed doors; i reject Under the Dome's view of the world in that it lacks moral complexity, it lacks the true stink of human existence. blue velvet is heightened for sure, but it reveals what small town americana feels like. edward hopper to king's norman rockwell.

the good? gobs of it. what king might lack in his basic presentation of human behavior he almost makes up for in his evocation of a kind of horrible and ineffable beauty. amidst this mash-up of sci-fi & political allegory there are scenes of true beauty and a kind of gritty poetry as the town descends into a Hobbesian nightmare. one that sticks out: as pollutants and dust and pollen collect on the roof of the invisible dome, the townspeoples' view of the sky is skewed, the sky itself appears... different. sunsets seem as when a volcano explodes, a deep rich burning red. and the night sky? a meteor shower appears as streams of pink and red slashing the sky to bits. and minus the 'leatherhead' parts, the final 'fireball and survivor' sequence haunted the hell outta me. some seriously horrifying stuff.