Castle Rock.

I had to write to say that I won't be home anymore

'Cause something happened to me while I was driving home

And I'm not the same anymore

As part of this newest wave of filming Steven King adaptations, Hulu has released the ten-episode series "Castle Rock" (all episodes streaming now). It is written by Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason and based in the King multiverse, set in his oft-used fictional, foreboding town of Castle Rock, Maine and making frequent nods to past literary horrors. The story is new, and as mentioned not penned by King, but tries mightily to carry the spirit and underlying philosophy of his work.

The series is made to appeal to both the rabid and the casual King fan; you do not need an intimate knowledge of his canon to understand and enjoy it. I personally have only read two of his short story collections and seen a handful of his films, but his writing is so iconic, so permanently etched into the fabric of modern American society, that the odd reference to Cujo or The Shining is immediately recognized. (The series also features at least three actors who have been in previous King films: Sissy Spacek of Carrie, and Bill Skarsgard and Chosen Jacobs from the recent It)

The premise is this: on a bright late summer morning, Shawshank Penitentiary's very recently retired warden Dale Lacey (Terry O'Quinn) commits suicide. Upon hearing that he had kept an entire cell block empty for decades, his successor Theresa Porter (Ann Cusack) sends two prison guards to investigate the area; there they find, in an underground cell, a young man in a cage. When asked to identify himself, he says the name Henry Matthew Deaver. The problem is, he is most decidedly not Henry Deaver, and the guards who grew up in Castle Rock know this instantly.

One of those guards, Dennis Zalewski (Noel Fisher), calls the real Henry (Andre Holland) anonymously and tells him he is being asked for in his hometown. Henry is currently a lawyer for death row inmates in Texas; we see him eloquently (but ultimately fruitlessly) arguing to a jury for the commutation of the death sentence of a woman who killed her husband. He reluctantly makes the trip up to Maine to discover the purpose of the anonymous call, and on a more personal note, to visit his mother Ruth (Sissy Spacek), currently suffering from dementia.

(thar be spoilers ahead)

"Cat Person," Aziz Ansari, and the end of love.

In December 2017 a short story published in The New Yorker titled "Cat Person" caused a stir as it depicted the awkward, ugly realities of modern dating; it caught more notice, perhaps, because of the attention lavished on it by people (largely young women) who claimed it was a page ripped directly from their own lives.

My interaction with the hubbub was mainly through Instagram, as my cousin tagged me in The New Yorker's post and I read the thousands of too-similar comments exclaiming some version of "this is soooo true!!!" My cousin tagged me because it resonated strongly for her, and she knew that it would for me as well. I proceeded to read it, and it did.

"Cat Person" details one college student's misadventures in trying to get to know a patron of her movie theater where she sold him snacks. Because he was mildly more talkative than most boys her age, they managed to swap numbers and then for a few weeks engaged in dopamine-triggering text exchanges full of witty banter. But when it came time to be fully human - to go on a date, to fool around - everything changed. The guy who was so confident and funny via smartphone screen turned out to be just another socially-challenged disappointment who'd learned all he knew about sex from porn, and who claimed to have a bunch of cats she never actually saw.

In a weird trick of timing, several weeks after the fervor over "Cat Person," an article was published in Babe magazine detailing a young woman's abysmal date with comedian Aziz Ansari. There was even less to their connection than the ill-fated duo of the short story, as she and Ansari hardly knew each other, and the "date" quickly devolved into an almost shockingly comical imitation of shockingly bad porn. The hubbub surrounding this article, which was printed less than a week after Ansari won a Golden Globe for acting, involved a wide range of social factors: the #metoo movement, feminism in general, the racial implications that it was a hit piece (considering his incredibly recent accomplishment), the state of sexuality among Millennials, the increasingly embedded effects of a porn-saturated society.

Both of these events, and many, many more before them, have forced us to begin trying to figure out how sex, love, and companionship have become so very difficult and distant in a time when we should be reaping the multiple rewards of a sexual revolution now fifty years in our past. This is simply my perspective.

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