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.8 184 Edward MaddenThroughout Christine, anal language functions as a discourse of bothpower and aggression, further collapsing structures of violence and privilege.Arnie, becoming or echoing LeBay, keeps inveighing against the shitters ofthe world it is LeBay s signature word that Arnie adopts.But shit as both amarker of aggression and an item of exchange is literalized when the townhoodlums destroy Christine and, in a final and crucial act of defilement,defecate on her dashboard (213).This act is the pivot of the novel.After thismoment, every relationship in the novel is markedly changed, and thekillings begin.After Christine smashes the first of the boys, Moochie Welch,the invective is returned, and Moochie is metaphorized as shit to be scrapedup with a shovel.(Implied, perhaps, is that Moochie is the one who actuallydefecated on Christine.) Arnie actually calls Moochie shit only in the movieversion.In the book, it is the police investigator, Rudy Junkins, who says ofMoochie. Isn t that what you re supposed to do with shit? Scrape it up witha shovel? (257).But he is mocking Arnie s unbelievably flippant dismissal ofthe dashboard defecation.Arnie pretends to be unaffected by the vandalisticdestruction of his car, and he keeps repeating, about the excrement. Shitwipes off (256).In between these utterances, a mechanic in the garagecurses his car, female of course, chanting, Oh shit on you, you whore atextual echo of Christine s desecration (257).It is surely no accident that at the novel s end, Dennis crushes Christineinside of Darnell s garage, the space of shit, with a sewage truck namedPetunia.Calling the truck a kaka sucker (263), he tells its owner, I wantto get rid of some shit (265).And he proceeds to use it to restore order, tokill Christine, to clean up that defiled social space and homosocial order.Butthe social space is still tainted.The smell of shit remains and reminds.Petunia still smells of sewage and Christine of dead bodies, the excess and the(living) dead she leaves in her wake.It is surely no accident either that whenDarnell is arrested for his illegal business, the police again use anal languagefor the restoration of social order: Get this bag of shit out of here (336).In her analysis of the movie To Live and Die in L.A., Sharon Willis tiesanal language not only to illicit commerce (counterfeit money) and maleaggression, but to the homoerotics of commerce and the corollaryhomophobia of the narrative as well male aggression is figured repeatedlyin images of male rape (16 19).Sedgwick writes of Dickens s Our MutualFriend. [It] is the only English novel that everyone says is about excrementin order that they may forget that it is about anality (Between Men, 164), andshe connects the traditional and Freudian criticism of acquisition, of filthand lucre, to anal eroticism.Similarly, economic and social power and issuesof control are tied to the bodily images of anality in King s Christine.Moochie Welch, the novel s sack of shit is also literally a sack of money Cars Are Girls: Sexual Power and Sexual Panic in Stephen King s Christine 185he had been begging for spare change outside a concert, and as he ran awayfrom Christine, the pockets of his pants and parka jingled with over thirtydollars worth of nickels and dimes.But in the emphatically homosocialtextual realm of Christine, both homophobia and aggression play aninevitable part in the textual trajectory of the anal theme.As Willis explains, male homosocial bonding.depends on keeping its distance, throughrepression and violence, from homosexuality; hence it depends, in itshistorical construction, upon homophobia (18).When the ghost of LeBay actually takes over Arnie, Arnie/LeBay findshimself saying,and those shitters with their fancy goddam cars and the trunksfull of golf-clubs those goddam officers I d like to bend them overthis here lathe I d play some golf with them I could find the righthole to put those little white balls in you bet your ass.(317)Later, while drinking beer with Dennis, Arnie/LeBay throws his empty cansinto a wastebasket, saying, Watch me put it up the little tramp s ass, Dennis (408).Both the wastebasket and the right hole to put those little white ballsin are aggressive images of anal rape.The little tramp is an image of waste(a wastebasket) and of power; the name refers not to a woman, but to CharlieChaplin and indirectly to Hitler one of LeBay s obsessions (429).Theother image suggests the multiple rape of powerful men (military officers);anal rape becomes an expression of power over them.The double-bind ofthe image of anal rape is its aggressive masculinity and its possiblehomoeroticism.In a textual world of relentless heterosexuality, such animage may symbolize the presumed unnaturalness of other exchanges inthe novel (such as the illegal commodities hidden in the trunk), but it alsocontinues the dynamics of homophobia and misogyny because thepowerless male or female are always the fucked. LIKE A COUPLE OF QUEERSLate in the novel, Dennis wonders if this has only been the story of twochildhood friends growing apart and of his own consequent fixation onChristine, the wedge that had come between [them] (439).One might thusread the novel as a narrative of the movement from adolescent same-sexrelationships to adult heterosexual relations.9 Even such a traditionalpsychological narrative may be marked by anxieties about homosexualdesire and female sexuality, and to simply dismiss the narrative in such away as only a narrative of boyhood friends sexually and socially growing 186 Edward Maddenapart is to dismiss the overwhelming homosociality the novel inscribes,indicts, and evades
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