In the Flesh: Christine (Patreon)

As a metaphor for the sort of rugged masculine individualism around which American identity has long revolved, the car is hard to beat. To skinny, bullied loser Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon), the battered 1957 Plymouth Fury he buys off the yard of the physically broken and emotionally soured George LeBay (Roberts Blossom) certainly represents the powerful, independent masculinity his own underwhelming puberty has denied him. The titular vehicle, Christine, is the sort of muscular Detroit rolling steel synonymous with a certain type of manhood, a proxy for Arnie’s long-desired and delayed adulthood. He chooses and buys Christine almost immediately after his best friend Dennis (John Stockwell) pressures him to pick a girl to whom to lose his virginity, a playful challenge from which he demurs. In fact, Arnie never loses his virginity. His obsessive relationship with Christine replaces first his overtly sexually charged connection with Dennis, then his emotionally stunted fling with Leigh (twin sisters Alexandra and Caroline Paul).

Christine sublimates Arnie’s emerging sexuality, taking it from action to aesthetic as her growing influence subsumes his fashion sense, his mannerisms, and eventually his entire personality. Instead of growing through experience he crystallizes into an archetypal form of masculinity, the greaser dandy, car-obsessed and arrogant, his vehicle a proxy for his ego and his gender both. His ultra-masculinity is incredibly violent and reactive, meeting the slightest threat or insult with murderous brutality, but this near-hysterical brutality both reveals and serves to protect a much more fundamental fragility. The frozen, brittle world inside Christine cannot survive contact with reality. Her radio, only able to pick up 1950s rock and roll crooning, her incriminating discontinued paint job she cannot shed or change — everything about her recalls a world that no longer exists, that never existed except as a cruel and immature fantasy of manhood. Gradually we learn of the women — almost always women — who have died in Christine, of the little girl who choked in her back seat, of her mother — the previous owner’s wife — who died of carbon monoxide poisoning not long after.

Christine’s femininity is as brittle and sharp-edged as the masculinity into which she ushers Arnie. She won’t stand for competition, can’t abide the presence or happiness of anything not preceding from herself, and demands the total attention and devotion of her man. She is a codependent nightmare, a real Leave Her to Heaven tangle of reactive attachment and shrieking insecurity. In the end not even Arnie’s safety can stop her from pursuing her homicidal urges toward Leigh. The final scene between car and driver is a sort of twisted sexual consummation as Arnie’s trembling, bloodstained fingers caress the Chrysler V mounted on Christine’s grille as though the shining chrome were the folds of a woman’s labia. Christine’s radio blares maudlin rock as she pulls away from him with a scream of rubber on concrete. As a parable of the violent rigidity of gender roles and the fantasies of young men branded “outsiders” by their peers, Carpenter’s Christine is second to none.