"She's up and waiting for more and I know he's only looking to score." - Mutt - Blink 182
I started a post the other day with the focus being on Ace Merrill – a character that appears in at least two Stephen King works. To give you a visual Ace Merrill was played by Kiefer Sutherland in the movie 'Stand By Me.' He's the leader of a pack of high school thugs looking to gain glories by discovering the corpse of a missing boy.
Anyway I got halfway through and started to wonder what the point was. There really wasn't one. I also got to thinking it was kind of bizarre to free write about a fictional character.
After deleting my post, I did some research. I typed in the name Ace Merrill into a google search. Maybe not surprisingly, I wasn't the first to expound on Mr. Merrill on the world wide web. There's a wikipedia page (naturally) devoted to Merrill and the two works he appears in. There's a fanlisting devoted to Merrill with images of Sutherland holding up a knife. That's right people love a bully.
I guess I am getting halfway through again and I am not sure I've still found a reason to write this.
What made me think about Ace is that in the written version of Stand By Me (titled the "The Body"), Merrill is only one of two main characters that live into their 30s. The other being narrator – Gordie Lachance – who is a thinly veiled fictional version of the author.
The thing about all this is that at points it seemed obvious to me that King was only writing this probably because it was in his contract to write something that could be turned into a screenplay. Its more rushed and less detailed than his other works. But at points, he also seems to use the character of Lachance to free write about his own life. The value of writing about death and murder and horror and all those scary things.
And through it all Merrill is really only a name till his appearance very late in the book. Yet it's Lachance and Merrill that survive life. (At least until the book "Needful Things" where Merrill perishes while destroying King's fictional town of Castle Rock, which most of his early stories were based in).
I thought why? Why Merrill? But I think its because Merrill is the real scary in the world. All the beasts and phantoms King created were imagination. Merrill is scary because he could be any number of people that have passed through all our lives. That human terror motivated by urges.
Urges are the scariest thing about people and they seem to be running the world. Just google 'porn', 'naked women' or 'violence' sometime and see the infinite websites about those subjects pop up.
Almost all reason is lost.
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2 comments:
I think it is along the same lines of why people like Grand Theft Auto etc, they want to see what it feels like to do the evil that they are too scared to do. Since most of us live with a good set of morals or ethics code, it is truly scary when you encounter those who don't.
I didn't really get where I was going with this until the end. I think if I were going to spend more time on this or turn it into some sort of personal essay, I think I'd hit on the play on the word reason earlier and the idea of urges would be more prevalent. Likely dramatize the urge to write somethings and then trying to find reason for writing and that sort of thing. This sort of an example of post that wasn't great, wasn't bad, but it did give me some ideas for other things I could write or how I could attack this subject in another way. Again, I am a writing process nerd.
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