The essays and autobiographical writings of Stephen King have served as an intellectual touchstone throughout my life. It was through King that I first developed a fierce distaste for censorship in any form. In his non-fiction book Danse Macabre and in many interviews during the 1970s and 1980s, he defended the horror genre against those who wanted to ascribe all society’s ills to it, everything from juvenile delinquency to serial murder.
“A crazy person is going to do crazy things,” he said in the documentary Stephen King’s World of Horror, adding that they might get the idea of how to do it from Taxi Driver or Carrie or Salem’s Lot, but if they didn’t watch those films, they would come up with some more mundane way of hurting or killing people.
Using ‘immoral’ art as a scapegoat for society’s problems is intellectually slothful, the sort of thing a politician employs when he has run out of ideas or wants to raise his profile among ultra-conservative voters. No one much bothers blaming literature any more, the way they did around the turn of the 20th century (American Psycho was one rare exception). The focus tends to shift as each new form of artistic entertainment is invented. Everything from rock and roll music to the current whipping boy, video gaming, has been accused of corrupting minds. It’s a specious accusation that doesn’t stand up to even a feather of logical analysis. Yet it refuses to die.
When this criticism of controversial art is stripped of its moral posturing and sanctimony, what is left is plain old censorship. I don’t like what you’ve written/painted/sculpted/composed, so it should be banned. It’s the philosophy of the mental pygmy and the feeble-hearted. Some of what passes for art is garbage, no doubt, but anything that is brainlessly offensive only has a short half-life anyway; it shocks for a day or two and then is forgotten. True art, whatever its nature, resonates long after its creator is gone. It gives a society or humanity a different perspective on itself.
I got a nasty shock while reading the introduction to Stephen King’s novel Blaze (2007). In it, King mentioned that his ‘Bachman book’ Rage was out of print and called it “a good thing”. His reasoning, which he went into elsewhere, was that it was allegedly the inspiration for several high school massacres in the U.S. and he just didn’t need the notion that he was somehow responsible – however unfair that might be – hanging over his head.
Now, I’m not in King’s shoes, so I can’t presume to know how it feels to be associated, albeit tenuously, with a killing spree. But no matter how one justifies taking Rage out of print, it is still just another form of censorship (self-censorship in this case, which may be the most cowardly censorship of all). While it might help King sleep better at night, it did what all censorship does; it stopped an important question being asked. In this case:
What is it about Rage that speaks to the troubled teenage psyche?
I read Rage for the first time as a teenager, so I think I can make a pretty good guess. As a story about a weird teenage misfit who suddenly becomes all-powerful when he shoots his teacher and takes his classmates hostage, Rage is, quite simply, a revenge fantasy for anyone who has ever been bullied.
Instead of asking whether Rage inspired four high school massacres, what the politicians and talking heads should have asked was how did these kids – and that’s all they were, kids – get to the point psychologically where they felt the need to take up firearms and gun down their peers?
Rage didn’t cause the problem, it only caused the problem to come to a head. And as the younger and stouter-of-heart King observed, if it hadn’t been Rage, it would have been something else.
I suffered my fair share of bullying as a teenager. The result was impotent rage, the most dangerous kind of rage because it lingers and eats you up inside. For me, Rage acted not as an accelerant but as a release valve. It relieved some of that mental pressure through escapism. Along with heavy metal music, martial arts, movies and video games, books like Rage helped me cope with the true-life horrors against which I was otherwise powerless.
Which brings me to another question, one that King and his publishers should have asked themselves before hitting the self-censorship button:
How many troubled teenagers didn’t snap thanks to the psychological release of reading Rage?
