I watched all nine hours of Stephen King’s THE STAND on CBS All Access so you don’t have to.
This is not going to be a full review, since the miniseries came out last year and if you reeeeeally wanted to watch it, you would have done so by now. I’m under no illusion that you’ve waited a year for George MF Washington’s review before making your final decision. However, all that said, I do want to make a few points about the production.
First, is it any good?
Welp… It’s not great… it’s not horrible… it’s fine.
Which, to a guy who loves movies, is basically the kiss of death. I blame it all on streaming. Before streaming there was actual financial pressure on companies to make great movies. If you didn’t make them great, the poor financial results showed up on the front pages of the Hollywood trades every Monday morning like the Grim Reaper come to collect. I believe people worked harder to make great movies B.S. (Before Streaming) because they were terrified of seeing their failures broadcast for all the world in glorious 24-point type. Nowadays, by contrast, the “ratings” are hidden deep within the Streaming Company algorithms where no one can see (or mock) them, and so there is little to no accountability.
Chris Pratt has what looks like a big expensive sci-fi movie premeiring on Prime this July 4th weekend. Will it be any good? I dunno… Does it even matter? Probably not…
Ten years ago THE TOMORROW WAR would have been a big Friday Night movie theater premeire and oceans of pre-release ink would have been spilled debating whether or not it would be a hit, and then even more would have been spilled post-release analyzing what the box office numbers really mean… for the studio… for Pratt… for the Writer… for the Director. Back in the day, folks in Hollywood cared about box office numbers so much that they joined Weekend Box Office betting pools for real money every Thursday night. But this Chris Pratt movie (can you even call it that if it premieres on TV sets?) will likely come-and-go with a mere fraction of the press and excitement such a release would have generated only a decade ago.
That’s part of the reason there was always a GODFATHER, ALIEN, RAIDERS or BACK TO THE FUTURE for us to go and see every Friday night in the 70’s and 80’s. You either made a great movie, or you failed and had to go get a real job, so more great movies got made. Now… Amazon makes and releases Tom Clancy’s WITHOUT REMORSE, a movie for which Clancy fans have been waiting decades, with zero fanfare and no one seems to care. A month later, it’s been assimilated into the massive maw of Amazon’s Prime streaming tundra, and it’s as if it never existed at all.
That’s the story with THE STAND. Even though I’m a huge Stephen King fan, this show came and went without making much of a dent in the Culture or even on my consciousness… and now, having watched all of it (a year later), I can’t think of a single detail from this miniseries (sorry, we’re calling them “Limited Series” now) that will stick with me a year from now.
But what did strike me as I was watching the Mini (sorry, Limited) was the Villain Plot… or more accurately, the lack thereof.
Once upon a time, I used to visit the office of a senior executive at a movie studio about twice a month. On the wall in his outer office he had framed a piece of paper on which he’d written “what is the villain plot?”
This was a reminder to himself, and to those he met with, that to be effective, a movie has to have a convincing villain who wants something that makes sense and plays off the goals of the hero. As an extreme example, take JAWS. The “villain plot” of JAWS is that the shark wants to eat every human being he finds in the water, while the humans prefer not to be eaten. Simple and effective.
Randall Flagg is the “Big Bad” of THE STAND (or at least he’s supposed to be… but more on that later). So what does he want? Well he seems to want to hang out in his Las Vegas hotel suite all day and, well yeah, I guess he wants to kill everyone living in the Boulder Free Zone. Why? Well, I don’t really know. I guess because he’s the bad guy and the bad guy is supposed to want to kill everyone?
As Roger Murtaugh once said…
But there’s something else a good villain needs, in additon to a good plan. He needs to be scary… especially in horror movies. Whatever else Flagg may be in this version of THE STAND, “scary” he is not. He sings, he dances, he mugs for the camera and, occassionally, he murders people in brutal fashion. But it all has a sort of grudging inevitability to it, as if the murders are just boxes that must be checked so that we can get to the big finale. And as for the dancing and singing and mugging… it’s like we’re in the grip of a generation of screenwriters who all grew up on wise-cracking villains like Hans Gruber, for whom snark walked hand-in-hand with cruelty. But this trope ignores the fact that DIE HARD, while great, was an action movie and not a horror movie.
It turns out the real villain of THE STAND (at least as re-imagined by CBS) is poor jilted Harold Lauder. Much of the first seven hours is made up of a will-he-or-won’t-he series of cliffhangers as we wait to see if Harold will make good on his threats to murder Stu Redman for the crime of stealing away a girl who was never his to begin with. Perhaps this would be a compelling story in another context, but set against the grand good versus evil backdrop of THE STAND, it’s small ball by any measure.
But the biggest sin CBS’ THE STAND commits is that it exists in violation of one of Stephen King’s most important philosophical ideas. one that recurs over-and-over again in his novels… that Christianity, as a movement, has lost the plot. That its leadership has decided that fighting the Big “E” Evil (represented by The Devil and all his works) is too esoteric, too hard to sell. And so the infrastructure of Christianity has evoled into an organization that is now focused on fighting small “e” Earthly evils…
And why not? The battle against capital “E” Evil won’t be decided in any of our lifetimes, perhaps not ever. How can any one person be the Hero of that story? How can any one person “change the World” on that kind of a timeline? I mean, to fight that kind of a battle you’d have to believe in something larger than yourself… and we can’t have that, now can we? Better to spend your limited time here on Earth trying to take down the small “e” evils of this world so you can get social media famous… evils like that guy at Lowe’s who won’t put his mask on and is LITERALLY KILLING PEOPLE!!! Or those grandmas who trespassed at the Capitol Building on January 6th.
But that’s not how things used to be, and it’s never been how King has viewed the world.
At one point in SALEM’S LOT, one of King’s first novels, the lead character approaches the local Priest Father Callahan for help investigating whether or not the town has been taken over by vampires. Callahan is one of King’s most tragic characters, a man destined to fall only to finally be redeemed by his faith a couple dozens books later.
Callahan makes the argument this way:
“The over-all concept of evil in the Catholic Church has undergone a radical change in this century. The Catholic Church began to cope with a new concept… evil with a small “e.” With a devil that was not a red-horned monster… (but) a gigantic compopsite id, the subconscious of all of us. Impersonal. Merciless. Untouchable. The Catholic Church has been forced to reinterpret its whole approach to evil- bombers over Cambodia, the war in the Middle East, Cop-killings and ghetto riots. The billion smaller evils loosed on the world each day like a plague of gnats. In the process shedding its old Medicine Man skin and re-emerging as a socially active, socially conscious body. The inner city rap-center ascendant over the confessional. Communion playing second fiddle to the Civil Rights movement and urban renewal. I think it’s an abomination. It’s the Catholic Church’s way of saying that God isn’t dead, only a little senile.”
Powerful stuff. Almost as if faith in something larger than ourselves is the very thing that enables us to fight the larger battles in the first place. And you see this philosophy repeated over-and-over throughout King’s novels. In the novel version of THE STAND, Glen Bateman, who begins the story as a cynical academic athiest makes many of the Callahan’s same arguments on his own long path to belief, faith and self-sacrifice in Las Vegas.
THE STAND, as imagined by CBS, commits the same sin as Callahan’s Catholic Church. And that’s how a grand battle between essential good and evil, God and the Devil, with the future of humanity hung in the balance, becomes a story about Harold Lauder: Incel… because in our #MeToo obsessed modern times, that’s what TV executives think should scare you the most.
To read Stephen King’s novels is to understand that while he may be an aggressively unappealingly Progressive in real life, as a storyteller he has always understood the power of Faith, for both good and evil. And unless and until Hollywood begins to understand Faith the way King does, they’ll always have difficulty adapting his novels into Movies and TV shows.