Dreamcatcher, or How Stephen King Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Himself
The Flop House fans amongst my newsletter readers (and – who am I kidding, that Venn diagram is, at most, a mildly blurry circle), probably thirst for a little more about bad movies. Thus – while Special Interests is probably the most quixotically specific thing I do – there’s no harm in giving the people what they want once in a while. So let’s take a moment to talk about the largely-forgotten 2003 bomb Dreamcatcher.
It’s a film about love – not love between male friends (in this case four telepathic dudes and the differently-abled guy they’ve sworn to protect) – although it does certainly contain plenty of male bonding. Within its celluloid walls, you’ll find more beer drinking, fart jokes, and toothpick-chewing than a Cannonball Run marathon on Spike TV.
No, not that kind of love, even though the movie sure seems to harbor a subconscious fear that their totally straight, men-only, romantic getaway to a cabin in the woods might be construed as somehow less than hetero, seeing as the films “villains” are flesh-tubes that forcibly burst from your anus – or as Dreamcatcher dubs them, “shit weasels.”
That’s what they’re really called. Shit weasels. I shit-weasel you not.
No, Dreamcatcher is a movie about the love that Stephen King (author of the book that spawned the film) holds for his own writer’s tics – a love that was somehow transmitted, like a rabid shit weasel, to usually-great screenwriter, William Goldman, who should’ve known better. Imagine Goldman sitting at home, flanked by Oscars for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men, as he types “shit weasel” into Final Draft for the first time, and struckles mightily to remember the number of zeros on his paycheck to avoid having a breakdown, calling his agent, and quitting writing to open a taco truck.
I can’t blame King for Dreamcatcher. He wrote it under the influence of Oxycontin, while recovering from the accident that nearly killed him. If you weren’t reading The New England Journal of Car Accidents Involving New England Writers back in 1999, here’s a brief recap: King had been on a walk along the road near his house, when a drunk driver slammed him into the woods. His injuries required extensive surgery and a long painful recovery, and Dreamcatcher was his first post-collision work. He credits getting back to writing as an important part of that recovery, and thus it’s a work of immense personal value.
And yet… even King isn’t particularly fond of it, which is also how I’d imagine I’d feel about any book I hand-wrote in half a year, under the influence of opioids, while in extreme pain. Although he’s Stephen King, and I’m me, so his book probably made him another million, whereas mine would be read by a publisher who would immediately call someone to get me on an FBI watchlist.
I fear I’m getting mean-spirited, so let me take a moment to say – I love Stephen King. I’ve read much of my way through his output, and he’s my author of choice when I’m on vacation and want something that will divert for hours on end (well, except From a Buick 8 which I tossed aside on my last vacation with an internal “life’s too short”). And, despite his early, rocky reputation with literary critics, his book, “On Writing” is one of the two or three best I’ve read on the subject, with plenty of excellent advice, wrapped in an engaging memoir.
I can’t speak to Dreamcatcher, which lies in the pile of thus-far-unread King. I’d imagine it’s okay in novel form, because much of what makes King work (a constant focus on the interiority of his characters) is hard to translate to the screen. But I can speak to the film, which plays like a gonzo spoof of all of King’s weirdest tropes – which is a shame, because a shit-weasel-ton of talent was tossed at this thing. Aside from the Goldman screenplay, the film features terrific actors, like Morgan Freeman, Damian Lewis, and Timothy Olyphant, and a wonderful director, Lawrence Kasdan, who seems to have lost all of his Body Heat and Accidental Tourist mojo around the time he thought audiences would flock to a movie named “Mumford.”
“Mumford,” America’s filmgoers would say to themselves. “That could be about anything! Probably a guy named ‘Mumford.’ I simply must know what this Mumford fellow is up to! Ten tickets to Mumford, please!”
(I actually saw Mumford in the theater. I remember liking it.)
Anyway, to extricate myself from the fugue state I enter into whenever someone says Mumford – what these talented collaborators birthed was a movie that, in the words of Roger Ebert, has “…too many farts for a movie that keeps insisting, with mounting implausibility, that it is intended to be good.”
This is true. HOWEVER, as a codex for his favorite tropes, Dreamcatcher is a King fan’s delight. Let’s run themm down:
Trope the First: The Magical Mentally-Challenged Person
Stephen King’s mentally-challenged characters bear no resemblance to any real differently-abled person living or dead, which is both what’s offensive about them, and what makes them impossible to take all that seriously. Instead they are archetypal saintly idiots, sentimentalized, simplified, and usually touched by some sort of magic. And Dreamcatcher includes the saintliest idiot since The Stand’s Tom Cullen got M-O-O-N as his first spelling bee word.
In the world of Dreamcatcher, a mental disability is just an excuse to give our hero, Duddits (played by lesser tufted Wahlberg, Donnie), a Scooby-Doo lunchbox and have him mispronounce the bad guy’s name, “Mr. Gray” as “Mr. Gay.” Does Duddits have hopes and dreams or his own, like maybe opening a Wahlberger’s franchise in this old cabin? Or is he just a Christ figure, there to hang out, do some light magic, and die to save the others? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. Literally. At the climax he explodes in a cloud of dust. Dig out the Dudditsbuster!
Trope the Second: The Group of Special Kids that Band Together to Fight Evil
In Dreamcatcher, our heroes cement their bond while saving Duddits from bullies, then the newly-assembled Scooby gang team up to find a lost girl, for reasons deemed not important enough to explain, but too important to cut from the movie. They do this by all putting their hands on Duddits’ head (for… I dunno… luck?) which transfers telepathic powers to them, because… why not?
These powers are, by the way, weirdly extraneous and mostly-unused in the epic war with intergalactic anus aficionados, but I guess having them was probably easier than passing notes in class. Anyway, this instant bond is all directly in line with what I know about adolescent boys: there’s nothing they love more than associating with social outcasts, physical contact with others, and empathy. They’re absolute fiends for it.
Trope the Third: Painfully Inaccurate Slang
Stephen King is a marvelous writer, who has apparently been in a Blast from the Past-style bomb shelter that’s kept him from hearing any normal human conversation for the last sixty or seventy years, and is thus stuck in the hepcat slang of his youth. If you want to experience pure, uncut King jive, please dig up his dearly departed, deeply terrible Entertainment Weekly column, where, “Uncle Stevie” clued you in to the best in honky tonk rock and not much else. King lingo (or “Kingo,” as no one calls it) is all over Dreamcatcher. Here are few words and phrases you will not hear anyone say outside its unconscionable 134-minute runtime:
- “Jesus-Christ-bananas”
- “fuckaroo”
- “bitch-in-a-buzzsaw”
- “bite my bag”
- “Bucko, I think we're on the same page - pissin' in the same latrine.”
Trope the Fourth: The Deus Ex Machina
After the shit weasels invade – after evil alien Mr. Gray takes over the mind of one of our heroes – after crazy Morgan Freeman almost slaughters our protagonists and several innocent citizens – and right when the weasels almost get in the water supply… At the moment of greatest tension, how is the villain defeated?
Well, uh…
Duddits turns into an alien and wrestles Mr. Gray. And then they both explode into CGI dust like they’re vamps in an episode of Buffy.
THE END.
Mr. King—speaking as someone who read all thousand-plus pages of The Stand only to find, at the end, that the hand of God literally comes down and saves everyone, a development that went out with the ancient Greeks, and which renders all of the actions of everyone in the rest of the book completely meaningless?
You’re famous for not outlining your novels, and I realize you’re hugely successful, so what the hell do I know, but… Perhaps you should consider it.
Trope the Fifth: The Dreamcatcher
Oops, did I say that this was a trope? I meant this is a physical object that shows up in several shots, for absolutely no reason that I can divine, as an excuse not to name this film Shit Weasels: The Anal Invasion.
In conclusion, Dreamcatcher stands as a powerful monument to a man’s love for every bad idea he ever had. To write you must kill your babies. King loves his babies far too much for that. Instead, he hands his babies Scooby-Doo lunchboxes and thrusts them into the world.
On the other hand...
Dreamcatcher got him through that accident. A van hit him and, god help me, Dreamcatcher put him back together again. Fucking Dreamcatcher. King is the rarest of creatures: the writer who truly loves to write. And if that love fixed him, like some sort of anal-probe Patch Adams, I say that’s wonderful.
When we love a thing, we take the good with the bad. Not all the stories a writer tells his, or her, or theirself are going to be brilliant. Sometimes they’ll even be about shit-weasels. But, if you’re lucky, they’ll be shit-weasels that heal.
For earlier posts, check out the archive. In my other life, I’m a podcaster. Listen to my show The Flop House, here. In my other other life, I’m an Emmy-winning comedy writer. If you’re looking to staff, get in touch! And if you love the newsletter, you can always consider tipping me, by enrolling in the paid tier!