Sixteen Further Screams For Halloween: Day 8 (Dolores Claiborne)

(TW: discussion of CSA)

I'd like to tell you a little story. It's one I've told on the blog before, but we're coming at it from a different angle this time, sort of a road not taken. Sometime in the late 90's our neighbor was getting rid of a bunch of old books and offered me first dibs on anything I wanted. That led me to be in their basement going through these things. The standout I remember taking back with me was The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer, which led to its own odyssey. I've told that part before, but let me tell you about one of the books I passed on. I lifted up this hardcover novel to see a woman in a red dress looking down at me with what I assumed was malice and menace. I was looking at Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King, and I put that down right away because it was Stephen King and Stephen King is too scary. Never mind that, with hindsight, Laura Palmer's diary is just as harrowing. There's a deep synchronistic meaning to the fact that I should encounter both of those books in the same basement. In a mad way, they deal with the same story, but from different worlds. So, even though it's not a typical Stephen King movie with ghouls and blood and scares, fuck it, it's my blog and I get to talk about whatever I want. (Okay, you'll get the typical Stephen King stuff next time. I'm nice like that.) Let's talk about Dolores Claiborne.

The horror, not unlike Laura Palmer's diary or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, is about what happens to a young girl. You don't learn that right off the bat, as you have estranged mother and daughter reuniting on a little island in Maine when the mother is accused of murder. You get to luxuriate in their prickly relationship, shacking up in their run-down old home as they reminisce on the past, and what led them to drift apart. I love the use of contrasting colors here: everything in the present is lit in icy cold blue, whereas the flashbacks are all radiant and warm. You would think, then, that the things being remembered are warm happy memories as well. They really aren't, focusing on the abusive and dangerous relationship between Dolores and her husband Joe. The past was not a safe beacon of positivity. It was bad, full of traumas and pains that Dolores has shouldered for 20 years and that her daughter Selena has repressed. I am reminded of It and how that book deals with the repressed memory of a childhood one could not return to, and how the adults in that book needed to grapple with it in order to survive their hardships. Of course, the hardships in It are "a nightmare monster clown is trying to kill you", whereas the ones in this film are a little more domestic.

Yeah, the father is doing the worst possible thing to his loving daughter, and the scene where Jennifer Jason Leigh recalls this is harrowing and sickening, a long-buried trauma bursting forth from the earth. Comparing it to Twin Peaks, as I can't help but do given my history with both works, it provides an interesting alternative by asking two questions of Twin Peaks, a pair of "what ifs" that bear thinking about. What if Laura Palmer had lived through her pain, repressed it, and grown up? What would she have been 25 years later? We get to see that in the movie, but the other "what if" is what drives the proceedings. What if Sarah Palmer found out what was happening to her little girl, and she did something about it? That, friends, is exactly what Kathy Bates does in this movie. Joe St. George is an outwardly worse person than Laura Palmer's abuser, but in the end both abused their positions and the child suffered for it. Kathy Bates is a tour de force, and this should be the King adaptation she's remembered for instead of that crazy lady in Misery. The scene where she actually does what she has to in order to protect her daughter, during the height of a solar eclipse, is beautiful and terrible all at once. Let's drop the spoiler pretense: she tricks her shit of a husband into plunging down a well, and that's the POV of the book cover I saw all those years ago. That malice and menace, as it turned out, was well deserved, and Bates delivers exactly the same in front of the backdrop of the eclipse.

In the 90's King got off of the ghouls and ghosts kick for a little bit there, and Dolores Claiborne is paired with another novel from the same time called Gerald's Game, in which the same subject matter is tackled. In fact, in both books, at the same time the woman in Gerald's Game is experiencing the same horrible thing happening to her, the eclipse is happening as Dolores stands over the well. A synchronistic connection between two works, based on this terrible thing happening. Just like Dolores Claiborne and Twin Peaks. So it's not traditional horror. Big deal. It nevertheless is one of the finest King adaptations of this era, and an absolute must-watch if you can stomach the subject matter. A movie brimming with the feminine, both powerful and tragic. Not bad. Not fucking bad at all. Next time, as I promised, a King adaptation with the horror in it, but I wanted to do one last thing.

That neighbor who gave away those books to me all those years ago passed away just a few weeks ago. So, I offer her my thanks for those books, for broadening my horizons, and for believing in that weird little bookworm kid of her best friend. Thanks, Ivy. Rest well, it's all greatly appreciated.