The Mist

The tension between locals and out-of-towners is felt throughout The Mist, but the dynamic between the characters becomes more nuanced as they spend more time together. After the incident with the generator, two local men accuse David of being an outsider. They point to his professional connections with New York and his status as an artist as evidence that he is not truly a member of the Bridgton community. They view the community through a class lens, believing that a person’s status is reflected in their membership of the working class within Bridgton. Both men work hard for a living while they view David’s profession as distant and bourgeois. Viewing themselves as true locals, they see David as an out-of-towner, ranking him alongside men like Brent in terms of people who are not quite a part of the community even though they live nearby. David resents this implication. Not only does he not want to be associated with Brent, but he also considers himself a local. His self-perception clashes with the way others perceive him. Now locked in the supermarket, David is forced to confront the idea that not everyone sees him as he sees himself. This creates a class-based identity crisis: David, who considers himself an authentic local, is told otherwise. Just as the mist outside fills him with a dread of the unknown, David now faces an internal dread, confronting an identity that he is no longer certain is real.

David struggles to give voice to his inner tensions. Just like the realization that he may not be as authentically local as he once thought, he knows that Steff is likely in great danger. Furthermore, he understands that the problems outside the supermarket may be affecting the rest of the world. He forces himself not to think about these issues, just as he avoids explicitly dealing with the issues concerning his identity. David deals with his tensions by ignoring them in favor of more practical matters. He tries to fix the generator, and he focuses on keeping Billy safe. He can understand and control these matters, unlike the great unknown that lurks inside the mist. Other men approach their situation similarly, becoming determined to fix the generator because doing so provides them with a sense of self-worth that is suddenly lacking in a confusing and terrifying world. At the same time, they consume alcohol. They try to numb their thoughts by drinking beer and wine, using alcohol as a coping mechanism. By focusing on the beer in their hand and the next beer to come, they feel comfortably in control of a situation rapidly becoming more dangerous. The characters’ insistence on dealing with immediate, practical issues, such as a broken generator or the location of the next beer, illustrates their need to understand and control. Focusing on these issues allows them a reprieve from thinking about the threat outside of the supermarket, which they cannot even begin to comprehend.

Brent dies because of his arrogance. He refuses to believe David’s story about the dangers of the mist, and, to make matters worse, he leads others outside in his fatal folly. Brent is the consummate out-of-towner in The Mist. He does not belong to the community in any meaningful sense but insists that everyone should respect him because he spends money in the town. He cannot conceive of any social interaction not built on a financial foundation, ignoring social concerns like friendship and community. Brent’s antagonistic relationship with his neighbors manifests in his death: he does not understand the trust within a community and always considers himself an outsider, so he leads others outside because he is unwilling to accept his neighbor’s word. Brent ignores the advice of others, refuses to integrate himself, and dies by symbolically embracing himself as an outsider, stepping outside the store and meeting an instant demise.