Frank Darabont’s Parable of the Collapse of Civilization

By John David Ebert

The idea of a mist full of monsters which traps a group of people inside of a small grocery store is a wonderful image of hyper-rational late capitalist society coming up against the world that it has excluded and repressed in order to be built up: the realm of gods, demons, devils and archaic matriarchies which demand human sacrifice. As Jane Ellen Harrison writes in her analysis of early Greek religion, the primary offerings that were made to the cthonic gods were not made in order to get the gods to come down and do their bidding, but rather to make them go away. This was the early idea of religiosity in pre-Homeric Greece, and it is also the idea suggested in this film by one of its lead characters, a wacky, female Christian fundamentalist who believes that the mist has been sent by God as a punishment for the sins of atheistic capitalists.

Late capitalist society, with its desire to turn the entire globe into one gigantic shopping mall, in which shopping becomes the primary ritual which displaces all others, does so only at the cost of arousing the ire of societies which still retain the idea that piety and sacrifice (not necessarily human, of course, but the sacrifice of the ego) are the goals proper to the human spirit. The group trapped inside the grocery store is a wonderful metaphor for capitalism under siege by the Other: religiously motivated societies which revolve around death and not life.

But then, of course, the store with its people inside can be looked at from a broader perspective as a microcosm of the breakdown of any civilization, period, as a sort of illustration of what happens to a civilization during a so-called “time of troubles” when leadership and a single ideology break down into diviseness and internal proletariats which attempt to sabotage leadership, while the external proletariat of the barbarians come crashing at the gates to deliver the deathblow to the weakened society. It is the same story whether we are talking about Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome or our own present day world which is under siege from “without” — although, with globalization there is now only a within, so the adversary must metastasize and become cancerous in order to have any effect. All social classes are represented in the film: the military, religious fundamentalism, the proletariat, leadership, the worker, etc, and this is a clue to its function as an allegorical microcosm.

There is a certain similarity to the premise of the recent Beowulf film, in which monsters must be fought and subdued if civilization is to be erected, although in the case of Beowulf the situation is reversed, since that story concerns what is necessary in order to begin civilization, while The Mist concerns itself with what happens at the end, when the strength and singlemindedness of leadership can no longer be summoned up to fight the monsters in order to keep the machine running, and so the machine breaks down as the monsters come pouring in across the border (in this case, the plate glass window of the storefront). In the original Beowulf, the monsters are killed and civilization is victorious: in Stephen King’s novella, civilization lies in ruins and the monsters are victorious. Frank Darabont has changed King’s ending, but the overall point of the story — the breakdown of civilization, which is happening all around us at this very moment — is still the same.

This is, admittedly, a “highbrow” reading of the film and of King’s narrative. Most people will insist that the film is, at bottom, just an entertaining popcorn movie that seeks to thrill us with its hi-tech images. But I am of the opinion that every narrative, no matter how innocuous, has a point to make whether we choose to draw it up out of the well of subliminality or not. And since the job of our poets and artists is precisely to become aware of the subliminal undercurrents that are going on in our society all the time, but which remain hidden to our conscious view, it stands to reason that their narratives are in actuality naive attempts to communicate to the rest of us, using the picture language of mythology, what is going on in the environment in which we find ourselves situated.

Frank Darabont has done a fine job here with his adaptation of King’s very good novella, and it is hoped that he will continue to apply his intelligence and good taste toward the adaptation of more of King’s stories and novels, for Darabont is a little more consciously aware than King is that these stories are making a point beyond that of being just good entertainment for the masses.

I look forward to the next one.