Apt Pupil: Different Seasons Tie In [マスマーケット]

This book was very dark and frightening. This haunting novella, about a young boy's strange and perverse "relationship" with a fugitive Nazi, is quite thought provoking. King gets into the psyche of a serial killer, whether he is a Nazi or the salutorian of his high school class.

The former SS man and butcher of 800,000 now lives as a "kindly old man", hiding his identity from the world and charming the pants off of his "pupil's" naive parents. The "pupil", Todd Bowden (or the "boy", as Kurt never refers to him by name), is a bright and seemingly normal young teenager. Kurt brings out a dormant evil in Todd that he feeds with his nightmare stories of the concentration camps.

Kurt and Todd share a common bond and even though they have nothing outwardly in common. These commonalities are more telling than the exteriors they represent. They are both masters of deception and lies. They share a sick need to torture and hurt people and animals. Most of all, they lack a conscience and have no love or empathy for their fellow human being. Todd thinks of killing his loving parents and torturing young girls. He gets his kicks on murdering homeless drunks, as does the old man he emmulates. He hates this old man because he sees too much of himself in that rotting diseased old package, but he has a need, an addiction almost, to visit him and experience the tales of the massive slaughter. Separated by 65 years and countries halfway across the globe, the similarities between these two individuals exist nonetheless. The old man recognizes it and enjoys the company of one so much like himself.

King points out that in the deep dark places of the mind, there is sometimes an inward need to experience the macabre and horrific. Edgar Allen Poe couldn't have done a better job at translating this need! King is brilliant! It is interesting to note that Todd's character has a striking resemblence to that of Cathy in John Steinbeck's masterpiece, "East of Eden". Both were handsome young people who's looks and art of deception both disguise a genetic flaw; an utter lack of conscience. They both charm and delight those naive around them, while thinking up how to destroy those that love them or get in their way. If you enjoyed "Apt Pupil", I highly recommend "East of Eden".

I read "Different Seasons" in the early 80's, after I became totally taken, not by the nature, but by the style of "The Shining" (the way the story was told and the way I got engulfed on the thoughts and on the basic nature of its characters.) Unlike "The Shinning", the stories of "Different Seasons" became a total reading experience -same writer, different themes-. In "The Body", Stephen King masterfully explores the romanticism and nostalgia of childhood discoveries among the most unlikely friends. "Apt Pupil", on the other hand, focuses on the unexpected sources of potencial evil, an exchange that goes beyond age and culture. Hope is ,at the end, the predominant theme in both "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" and "The Breathing Method". Without missing the expected gory and violent scenes(especially in "Apt Pupil") this compilation of novellas was then -in the early 80's-, and still is my favorite Stephen King publication!

The first thing I need to make clear is that the novella "Apt Pupil" is much better than the 1998 movie adaptation. Despite a superb performance by Ian McKellen, the filmmakers made a number of choices which hurt the integrity of the story. The novella is a meditation on the nature of evil, whereas the movie is more of a thriller.

Reading the novella at this late stage brought into focus all the things I've always admired about Stephen King: his vivid imagination, his sharp attention to detail, his perverse sense of humor, and his mastery at crafting a battle of wills between two characters. But I was also impressed that he tackled material this challenging. He not only had to present a believable Nazi, he also had to confront the question of what makes people evil, all the while telling a compelling story about two unsympathetic characters who are surrounded by idiots.

The story is set in the 1970s. A pampered suburban youth named Todd Bowden discovers that an elderly neighbor of his is an escaped Nazi commandant named Kurt Dussander. Instead of turning him in, Todd blackmails him into recounting his hideous crimes. Todd once did a research paper on the camps and greatly impressed his teachers, who don't realize he is fascinated by the subject for all the wrong reasons.

King invites us inside these two people's heads, and what we see are two individuals lacking in guilt but filled with fear, haunted by the threat of exposure. Both characters turn to violence as a release, but this in turn increases their fear, in a self-perpetuating cycle not unlike drug addiction.

The story tempts us to ask which character is more evil. Though Dussander has done worse things than almost any human being alive, Todd has ghastly potential. Unlike Todd, Dussander rationalizes his actions, giving the standard line about having been just following orders. Todd is simply a sneaky bully who puts on a public face of being a nice, well-adjusted kid.

Even I, a grandson of Holocaust survivors, found myself almost rooting for Dussander. He's smarter and more charming than the boy, and since he begins the story as victim, I had to marvel at the way he maneuvers the situation and turns it to his advantage. It is easy to forget that his cold rationality is in many ways more frightening than Todd's sick perversion. King exploits this deceptive quality of fiction by not letting us get to know any of Dussander's victims until late in the story.

Another question left unanswered is how much Todd's descent into violence is influenced by Dussander. He might have become that way on his own, but we can't be sure. His most obvious internal change surfaces when he privately rationalizes his lack of attraction to his girlfriend by thinking she must be secretly Jewish. (The real reason is that he has violent homoerotic fantasies which take the place of ordinary sexual feelings.) Did he get his anti-Semitism from Dussander, or was it there to begin with? His liberal parents show no signs of prejudice but are trapped in a world of empty platitudes that keep them from seeing what's in front of them.

There are political overtones to the story, set at the end of the Vietnam War. Dussander defends himself by accusing America of hypocrisy: "The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting.... Only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives" (p. 130). Here and elsewhere, King hints at the idea that Americans tend to have a sense of incomprehension at evils committed by other countries yet fail to see the parallels when the evil is homegrown.

The introspective nature of the story may help explain why the movie (set in the 1980s) didn't work. The problems are various. The process of abridging the plot for screen time makes certain elements seem arbitrary. The racial aspects of Nazism are largely ignored. Most significantly, the film softens the character of Todd, depicting him more as a confused kid who gets in over his head than as an unrelenting psychopath. This change leads the movie to have a very different ending than in the novella.

I suppose the producers felt that audiences needed to be able to relate to the young protagonist, but it creates an imbalance that obscures the story's message about the nature of evil. The film can't even decide what exactly Todd and Dussander are guilty of doing. There are several confusing scenes that leave us unsure whether the two have been murdering animals or simply imagining doing so.

I had the feeling the filmmakers were interpreting the novella as a typical horror story because it was written by Stephen King. They underestimated the source material, a thoughtful fable with something valuable to say about the world.