Stephen King's "Kingdom Hospital"

posted to www.marxmail.org on March 4, 2004

After being hit by a van while walking near his house in Maine in 1999, Stephen King not only nearly lost his life but seemingly the ability to produce gothic tales up to the standards of such classics as "Tommyknockers" or "The Shining". Even before the accident his work had been suffering from a kind of formulaic lethargy, even if the output had not fallen off. The criticism was basically that Stephen King had become a Stephen King imitator. A couple of months ago I tried to get through the 2001 "Dreamcatcher", but gave up when the novel began meandering off into interminable interior monologues.

Last night ABC television aired the first part of a fifteen hour series written by King and titled "Kingdom Hospital". It is an adaptation of Lars Von Trier's "The Kingdom", which ran on Danish television as a mini-series in 1995. Although it precedes the Dogma 95 manifesto that Von Trier formulated and abided by in such works as "Breaking the Waves" and "Dancer in the Dark", it incorporates many of the same elements, including characters who are disabled or marginal, such as those that Diane Arbus doted on.

The only Dogma 95 work I've ever seen is Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's "Mifune" that tells the story of Kresten, a middle-class businessman from Copenhagen, and his simple-minded and mentally ill brother Rud who he cares for after the death of their father at the family farm. The title of the film is drawn from a game Kresten plays to amuse his brother when he is agitated. He pretends to be Toshiro Mifune, a "Samovar" warrior. After putting a metal pot on his head and wrapping himself in a sheet, he stamps the ground while grimacing and growling in mock-Japanese. It is an altogether appealing film that I recommend highly.

Although "Kingdom Hospital" has been knocked by the critics, I found the first episode to be vintage Stephen King and am looking forward to the remaining 12 episodes. Not only does include elements from Von Trier's tale, it features a character based on King himself who is depicted as one of Maine's most famous artists. In the opening scene, he is clobbered by a van whose driver is momentarily distracted by his dog, just as was the case in real life. It should not come as a surprise that the fictional driver gets tormented lustily in "Kingdom Hospital".

"Kingdom Hospital" has the same gritty populist sensibility of all of King's work. This comes from his experience as a working class nerd bullied in high school. With all his fame and millions, he has never stopped feeling an underdog resentment especially toward the rich and the powerful. In last night's episode, a haughty chief physician played by Bruce Davison (essentially the same kind of role he played in "X-Men") goes to all sorts of extremes to make sure that a group of apparently unemployed men won't steal his Jaguar. It is the same sort of class-aware comedy that cropped up in "Curb Your Enthusiasm" in a recent episode when Larry Davis was caught turning on his car alarm as a black man passed him in the parking lot. (The black man said he wouldn't be caught dead in David's underwhelming vehicle.)

Last year when King was presented with a distinguished career award by the National Book Foundation, a big hue and cry went up from all the snobbish critics and authors who regarded him in much the same way that Dumbo was viewed by the other elephants.

His acceptance speech was an eloquent testimony to his belief in a people's art:

Now, there are lots of people who will tell you that anyone who writes genre fiction or any kind of fiction that tells a story is in it for the money and nothing else. It's a lie. The idea that all storytellers are in it for the money is untrue but it is still hurtful, it's infuriating and it's demeaning. I never in my life wrote a single word for money. As badly as we needed money, I never wrote for money. From those early days to this gala black tie night, I never once sat down at my desk thinking today I'm going to make a hundred grand. Or this story will make a great movie. If I had tried to write with those things in mind, I believe I would have sold my birthright for a plot of message, as the old pun has it. Either way, Tabby and I would still be living in a trailer or an equivalent, a boat. My wife knows the importance of this award isn't the recognition of being a great writer or even a good writer but the recognition of being an honest writer.

Frank Norris, the author of McTeague, said something like this: "What should I care if they, i.e., the critics, single me out for sneers and laughter? I never truckled, I never lied. I told the truth." And that's always been the bottom line for me. The story and the people in it may be make believe but I need to ask myself over and over if I've told the truth about the way real people would behave in a similar situation.

http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_sking.html