Nearly a decade after its premiere on Hulu, 22.11.63 has moved to Netflix, introducing the critically acclaimed miniseries to a whole new audience.
The 2016 sci-fi thriller is based on Stephen Kingthe best-selling novel of 2011, 22/11/63. It follows a recently divorced high school English teacher from Maine, Jake Epping (played by James Franco), who travels through time to try to prevent the assassination of the president John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
In the fourth episode, titled “Texas Eyes”, Jake begins a romance with a librarian, Sadie Dunhill (Sarah Gadon), who confides that her ex-husband, Johnny Clayton (TR Knight), had been abusive throughout their marriage.
“When I first met Johnny, I thought he was the most charming man I’d ever met,” she says. “We had never done too much physically. I just thought it was old fashioned.”
Stephen King is famous for writing novels that have redefined the horror genre, from Carrie to The Shining and dozens more, but he’s also known as a devoted moviegoer. The horror novelist loves movies of all kinds and is quick to tweet his latest thoughts on current movies, including Arms. On Monday, September 8 (…)
With tears in her eyes, Sadie tells Jake that she’s still traumatized by her and Johnny’s wedding night.
“He got really tense. He didn’t want to kiss me. He just asked me to close my eyes, so I did,” she recalls. “Then he grabbed my hand and put it on him, and I screamed because he had a clothespin. I didn’t know what to say, so I laughed, and then he hit me, I started crying, and he hit me again.”
Sadie doesn’t explain her “clothespin” line in the scene, which has left many viewers confused by her graphic storyline.
Before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, some conservative mothers attached clothespins to their children’s penises to discourage masturbation. However, in 22.11.63the painful practice from Johnny’s youth eventually becomes a fetish for him.
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“Clearly, this is someone who has some things to work out. He has some issues,” Knight, 52, said. TV Guide in 2016. “There was a lot of repression and a lot of oppression, obviously, at the time. And unfortunately, some of it still exists. But I think he’s on a different level… He’s clearly so badly damaged that he’s apparently beyond help. He has his own idea of these rules to justify the way his brain works is not right.”
King, 78, also included the conversation with clothespins in the 22/11/63 book The famous horror author has suggested that he got the idea from reading about the famous serial killer Ted Bundyproblematic childhood.
“I believe in evil, but my whole life I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not there’s an external evil, whether or not there’s a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from the inside out, individually and collectively. Or if it all comes from within and it’s all part of genetics and environment,” King said. Rolling Stone in 2014.
He continued: “When you find somebody like, say, Ted Bundy, who tortured and killed all those women and sometimes came back and had sex with the dead bodies, I don’t think when you look at his upbringing you can say, ‘Oh, that’s because mommy put a clothespin on him when he was 4.’ people. And unless we’re able to address this problem, sooner or later we’re going to kill each other.”
22.11.63 it’s now streaming on Netflix.