Not Everything Is Always Explained
If you only know The Mist from the movie version, forget everything you know. The military is not identified as being responsible for creating the disaster nor are they the cavalry arriving too late. Those who make the escape in the jeep at the end survive, at least to the end of the story. What happens after is anyone’s guess. Several explanations are forwarded to explain the inexplicable events, but for some reason people tend to adopt the Project Arrowhead theory more than Mrs. Carmody’s whole God’s wrath thing. The truth is that neither of these theories are actually identified as the culprit. Even more to the point, both are equally likely. It’s just that…
People Love a Good Conspiracy Theory
Atomic things. Bigger vegetables. Shale oil. Black ice. Wormholes into another dimension. Project Arrowhead keeps popping up throughout the story, but only as rumors and hearsay with nothing confirmed. For that matter, even the name exists only as rumor. In fact, that any project of any kind is taking place is never substantiated. The fact that so many people in the story take it on faith that it not only exists, but is responsible is pitted against the clearly defined madness of those taking Mrs. Carmody’s God’s wrath explanation on faith. They are two extremes of paranoid conspiracy theories, both lacking in facts, evidence or any genuine reason to be suspected.
The Mechanics of Paranoia
During the story’s opening sequence of almost pastoral representation of pure and absolute normality, the narrator never gives any indication of suffering from paranoia. His response to the theories surrounding Project Arrowhead are dismissive, but respectfully so. He’s not snotty about it, but neither is there the slightest signal that he might be a secret believer. His final statement on the issue, however, are thoughts about “what crazy damned thing they could have been doing up there.” Watching unimaginable horrors take place before your very eyes and being in close proximity to those who really are true believers can break down even the most stubborn defense. In a brilliantly conceived paragraph, King has his narrator illustrate how the mechanics of paranoia works upon a psyche made fragile by trauma:
“…if life is the rise of consciousness…then it is also the reduction of input. Terror is the widening of perspective and perception…When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real…”
