The Dark Rites of Assent: The Town Meeting Goes Gothic in King's Storm of the Century (Part 2 of 2)

[For Part 1 of this piece, see yesterday's post.]


Having considered the three main source texts for Storm of the Century, I want to focus now on how the miniseries Gothicizes the concept of the town meeting.  To start with, notice how Linoge transforms the town hall itself into a site of terror.  Little Tall believes that the building's basement will be "the safest place on the island" during the storm, but various individuals at this emergency shelter are surreptitiously driven by Linoge to commit murder and suicide before the sorcerer even arrives in person and calls for a town meeting.  The very dilemma that Linoge poses to Little Tall--surrender a single child or risk the annihilation of the entire community--darkens the docket of the subsequent meeting.  The pompous town manager Robbie Beals bangs his gavel and tries to treat the matter like "any other piece of town business," as "an item on the floor" to be debated then voted on.  Lapsing into officialese, Robbie orates: "Oyez, oyez--this question has been called.  Do we or do we not give Mr. Linoge what he has asked for, pursuant to his promise that he will leave us in peace?  How say you, Little Tall?  Those in favor, signify in the usual way."  Only Constable Mike Anderson understands the absurdity of the situation, the utter incongruity of form and content: "We're debating whether or not to give a child to a monster!...Don't give in to this.  This is damnation."  Mike's protest, though, is drowned out by the majority, and he is literally beaten down by his fellow citizens when he refuses the terms for the town meeting dictated by Linoge.  Such forceful suppression of a dissenting voice gives a wicked twist to a statement Mike makes at the start of the narrative (as he laughs off the cost of the preparations for the coming storm): "I hope Robbie Beals can kick my ass for being an alarmist, come town meeting next month."

A similarly ironic development can be traced from Robbie's prior warning to Mike that "Come town meeting, there's maybe going to be a change in law enforcement on Little Tall."  A transfer of authority does occur at the meeting, but both Robbie and Mike end up displaced.  Significantly, Linoge is the one who seizes the pulpit and declares "this meeting at an end."  Again, I offer that Linoge (like a quintessential politician) makes a false promise that he will leave Little Tall in peace if he's given what he wants.  He does take his protege and his exit at tale's end, but not before he has woven his corrupting presence into the fabric of the town itself.  The climactic town meeting serves not to expel Linoge but to incorporate him into the body politic.  Ever devious, Linoge
employs a rhetoric of consensus even as he perverts and pervades the ritual of the town meeting.  He appeals to Little Tall's sensibilities, reminding the people that they have "always stuck together on the island," and asserting that "I'm here because island folks know how to pull together for the common good."  When given what he allegedly wants, Linoge assures the islanders that they have done "a good thing.  The right thing.  The only thing, really, that loving, responsible people could have done, under the circumstances."  Like some latter-day John Winthrop or Puritan preacher delivering a jeremiad, Linoge also warns the congregation of the disastrous effects should "insular selfishness" prevent them from doing "what's best for the town": Little Tall (once the islanders are driven en masse into the sea) will recapitulate the mysterious disappearance of the Roanoke colonists of 1587.

Linoge perhaps reaches the pinnacle of duplicity when he says, "I'll give you half an hour.  Discuss it...isn't that what a town meeting is for?  And then...Choose."  His imperative tone here, his ultimatum to Little Tall, exposes the pretense of personal freedom and democratic process; the situation serves as a perfect example of what literary theorist and cultural critic Sacvan Bercovitch has termed "the imposed duties of assent" to a dominant social order.  Linoge seeks not to elicit discussion but to ensure silence: he advises the inhabitants of Little Tall to strike this town meeting from the public record and to keep their scandalous agreement with him a secret.  Nor is Linoge much interested in freedom of choice, as we might realize by turning once more to Bercovitch's work, his critique of the  "rituals of crisis" that served as ready vehicles of social continuity and control: "Millennium or doomsday...it was the choice demanded by the rhetoric of consensus....On those grounds the leaders of American society, from Winthrop through Lincoln, have invoked the threat of doomsday, formulaically, as a rallying cry for cultural revitalization....The point was not to offer alternatives but to induce a state of anxiety, an apocalyptic urgency, that would enforce compliance.  and generally, through the Nineteenth Century, the American middle class responded by embracing the covenant.  Those who did not join in hope conformed in desperation."  By threatening catastrophe, Linoge turns the town meeting into a ritual of crisis and effects fearful compliance.

Such formulaic manipulation of cultural anxieties through rituals of crisis also calls to mind the conservative account of the poetics and politics of the horror genre itself.  For instance, Noel Carroll in The Philosophy of Horror notes that modern horror fictions "might be thought of as ritual of inversions for mass society.  And the function of such rituals--as literally acted-out in their plot structure--is to celebrate the dominant cultural viewpoint and its conception of the norm."  We might recall King's own politically-slanted comments on the horror genre in his 1981 treatise, Danse Macabre:  "Monstrosity fascinates us because it appeals to the conservative Republican in the three-piece suit who resides in all of us.  We love and need monstrosity because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings."  In Danse Macabre, King clearly presents the horror writer as "an agent of the status quo" who restores communal
order by vanquishing the disruptive monster at the end.  Still, we must be careful not to restrict King to this sole viewpoint or to constrict his work to such formula.  Linoge in Storm of the Century--described in one stage note as "GRINNING SAVAGELY; looks like Richard Nixon at a political rally"--might be taken as the disguised
"Republican" who subverts the subversion-and-containment paradigm itself, paradoxically triumphing even as he is expelled (or, more accurately, removes himself) from Little Tall.

King, in his introduction to the published teleplay, admits that most of his small-town tales "had a certain unexamined postulate at their center: that a malevolent encroachment must always shatter the community, driving the individuals apart and turning them into enemies" (the two novels King cites, Salem's Lot and Needful Things, show monstrous intruders working a divide-and-conquer scheme, and the climactic defeat of these antagonists leads not to a resumption of the former status quo but to the fiery destruction of Salem's Lot and Castle Rock, respectively).  Storm of the Century, though, provides one more turn of the screw, as Linoge shatters Little Tall by driving the individuals together and turning them into a community.  King's account of Little Tall ends not with a bang but with a whimper, not in fire or even the ice of the titular storm.  The narrative concludes at the time of the spring thaw, when the snow that has been metonymically linked with Linoge has melted into the island's soil.  Through a series of divorces and suicides, Little Tall's community unravels even after Linoge departs with Ralphie Anderson.  As Sandra Beals drowns herself in the reach separating island from mainland, one senses that the trickster Linoge's threatened punishment is beginning to transpire anyway.  The word Sandra leaves scrawled on her abandoned rowboat, "Croaton," also recalls the mysterious clue left by the missing Roanoke colonists, and Mike Anderson's earlier speculation that Croaton is Linoge's ancient name only reinforces the notion that Linoge has bequeathed himself to Little Tall and has not been truly exorcised from the community.  At the conclusion of the town meeting, the islanders are said to look "like people waking up from a communal nightmare in which they have done some terrible, irrevocable thing."  But by the conclusion of Storm of the Century, the islanders seem to have awoken to a communal nightmare, to the undying guilt over the consensus reached at the town meeting.

King's Linoge ostensibly destroys Little Tall by exposing and exploiting the inherent contradictions of its rhetoric and rituals of consensus (in this light, we might note the oxymoronic nature of the very name "Little Tall").  Storm of the Century thus pushes towards a more radical account of the cultural work of horror, the unsettling of the nation's cultural identity explored by Teresa Goddu in her recent study Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation: "The nation's narratives--its foundational fictions and self-mythologizations--are created through a process of displacement: their coherence depends on exclusion.  By resurrecting what these narratives repress, the Gothic disrupts the dream world of national myth with the nightmare of history."  Goddu's premise seems to concord with Bercovitch's scholarship and King's slice of American Gothic in Storm of the Century.  First, King challenges the myth of a chosen people, of a divinely-sanctioned Puritan errand into the American wilderness.  As Little Tall prepares for the coming storm at the start of the miniseries, the islanders mouth platitudes such as "God takes care of his own" and "Trouble don't cross the reach," but the trouble Linoge brings when he singles out Little Tall for an infernal visit undermines such confidence and faith.  Secondly, King craftily demonstrates the breakdown of the Puritan hermeneutic of typology that was used to justify the errand and prophesize its end results.  In Storm of the Century, things fall apart, the Biblical parallels do not hold.  When Mike Anderson decodes Linoge's name and recognizes it as an anagram of "Legion," he reminds us of the Gospel story of the demons who announced (as they were cast into a herd of pigs by Jesus and driven into the sea), "Our name is Legion, for we are many."  But in King's reconfiguration of this story, it's Linoge who ominously assumes the Jesus role and the legion of islanders who face extermination via drowning. 

Ultimately, King hollows out the town meeting, that hallowed sociopolitcial forum tracing back to Puritan New England.  The violence accompanying acts of communal cohesion is exposed when islanders twice attempt to assassinate Linoge during the town meeting.  Even more significantly, Linoge warps Little Tall's sense of consensus so that they forget how to pull together for the common good.  During the debate at the town meeting, an impassioned Mike Anderson begs his brethren to "Stand against [Linoge], side by side and shoulder to shoulder.  Tell him no in one voice.  Do what it says on the door we use to get in hear--trust in God and each other."  But the bonds of trust having been corrupted by Linoge (who knows everyone's secret sins), the islanders fail to form a united front against Linoge and instead reach a consensus that merely concedes to his dire demands.  "Perhaps you tricked yourselves," is Linoge's final, taunting retort to Little Tall when accused of somehow having tricked it out of one of its native sons.  This appears to be precisely the case, as Little Tall has allowed a sorcerous intruder to turn its most-trusted social apparatus back against the islanders, has let the town meeting become the staging ground for the dark rites of assent.