“Who can come to me demanding recompense? Everything beneath the heavens is mine” (Job 41.11).
Stephen King is one of the authors who helped me realize that writers were regular people, folks who hadn’t climbed mountains or moved to the back-of-beyond to create. He was also one of my biggest influences as a writer when I was a teenager. So, understand that when I tell you Maximum Overdrive is a bad movie, I’m saying it as a fan.
Released in July 1986, Maximum Overdrive is an adaptation of King’s short story “Trucks.” It tells the story of our world when, after passing through the tail of a comet, all machines become self-aware. And all of them from bridge controls and pitching machines to cars and semis decide that what they want to do is kill all of humanity.
As plots go, it leaves plenty of time in the ninety-eight minutes of its run-time for electrocutions, vehicle crashes, and a little-league coach getting killed by projectile soft-drink cans. And a ring of menacing semis that appear to be led by one with a goblin mask on its grille. Oh, and a soundtrack by the author’s (and, for this film, director’s) favorite band, AC/DC.
While, as mentioned at the outset, this movie is bad, I happen to like it. Mainly because it makes no apologies for what it is, which is a B-movie full of gags and explosions. It’s really hard not to love a film that begins with a massive car crash and flying watermelons. And “Who Made Who” playing over it all.
That’s the other thing I like about this movie, the theme of what it means when you’re no longer at the apparent top of the hierarchy of creation. When, perhaps, someone or something decides it wants to be closest to God, if not being gods outright. Because, in this case, it’s what happens when our creations decide they want to supplant us as gods.
Of course we’ve seen this before. Terminator and Terminator 2, which we discussed last summer, play this out to the machines taking over everything. In those films, of course, it’s one sentient computer that supplants us humans. But, just like here, it’s the creation ready to supplant the creator.
Or is it? The film never gets into the motivation. The epilogue makes reference to UFOs and things settling down after the comet passes by, but it doesn’t concern itself with the why. It’s far more interested in just how powerless we humans are.
The verse above comes from the speech God gives to Job out of the whirlwind. The whole can be summed up as I’m God and you’re not. This statement, in particular, is pretty direct. All of this—stars, nebulae, even cats—are mine. And I’m indebted to no one.
This is about more than money or assets, of course. The statement about recompense, about repayment is about owing someone else something. It, for me, should be taken in the same sense in how I think about Stephen King or Ray Bradbury or several other writers to whom I am indebted to because of what they’ve given to me. In a sense, what they’ve helped me to become.
No one has helped the Holy One develop or become what They are. And unless you can say the same, you aren’t the maker but the made. Not the one owed but the one who owes. Something that goes not just for me or for you but for all of us. All of us who have been formed and encouraged by those we’ve come in contact with, and to those they were formed by. Each and every one back to the One no one made.
Remember, we’re told, who made you.
Holy One, may I be brave enough to admit that I’m not self-made; so, I might be vulnerable enough to become who I was created to be.