Randall Flagg

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Image:Randallflagg7.jpg

Randall Flagg is a fictional character created by Stephen King. He is considered by many to be King's "supervillain", a recurring archetype of personified evil and malice who appears in a number of King's writings. Flagg made his first appearance in the 1978 novel The Stand as the central antagonist. This was followed by central roles in the Eyes of the Dragon and the Dark Tower, the latter of which was possibly his final major appearance outside of speculated hints and cameos.

Randall Flagg is generally described as having an everyday appearance, dressed in casual American-style clothing. His goals typically center around spreading destruction and causing conflict, and he often prefers to work behind the scenes. He goes by many names, from the "Dark Man" to the "Walkin' Dude", a reflection of his demonic nature. He is also a magician, is said to come from the "outside", and has lived for centuries, but cannot remember every life he has had.

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Names, appearance and role

Flagg goes by many names, ranging from mythical names such as Nyarlathotep (a Lovecraft character that he may have been based on) to common, everyday names. However, many of the names he goes by make use of the initials R.F., so the appearance of a character whose initials are R.F. sometimes serves to clue in readers to Flagg's presence. He also draws on the archetype of the "plague-bearer", particularly in The Stand, and of Ahasuerus, the legendary Wandering Jew. He carries pamphlets for the Ku Klux Klan and other such radical groups, presumably to stir up trouble where none exists.

However, Flagg's appearance is not described as threatening. He is said to just be an average-looking man, taking on the appearance of whatever the local people look like. However, his attire frequently fits into the Americana style. He dresses in typical American clothing, such as blue jeans, a hooded sweater, and boots with worn-down heels. Particularly noteworthy are the buttons he collects and attaches to his clothing over the course of his appearances. Amongst these are a peace symbol, a smiley face, and a "CK" button, the last of which most likely stands for Crimson King, though it is also similar to the logo for Calvin Klein. In the Dark Tower series, he also has a button that has a picture of an eye on it.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

King recently revealed Flagg to be a guise of the Man in Black from his Dark Tower series. So, although the name "Randall Flagg" is more popular among King's fans and has been used more, it would be more accurate to refer to the character by his true name Walter o'Dim, or his birthname Walter Padick.

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Origins

Throughout most of King's novels, Flagg's origins and true nature are left to the reader's imagination. In The Stand, it is suggested that Flagg cannot remember his life before each "era" of his history (possibly because this variation of him never really had a childhood, and just at some point "became"), and that he has vague memories of having been a Marine, a Klansman, and of being involved in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. It is said that he was always able to find extremists and rally them together for a malevolent cause.

It is known for a fact that Flagg was not always known as Flagg; he had many aliases, almost all of which have the initials "R.F." In Eyes of the Dragon, he is described as an aged wizard that eventually reveals itself to be demonic in nature, and in The Gunslinger, he describes himself, under his true name of Walter o'Dim, as an "Ageless Stranger".

In his final appearance in The Dark Tower, it is revealed that Flagg is in fact a human being, born 600 years or more earlier as Walter Padick in a land called Delain (the setting of Eyes of the Dragon). He ran away from home at the age of thirteen and was tortured and raped by a bandit on the road a year later. He resisted the temptation to slink back home and instead went on further to find his destiny and devote his life to darkness. He became determined to exact revenge on Delain, the place of his suffering. Becoming a powerful wizard, Flagg began to sow discord and strife through Delain and neighboring lands. He seldom acted directly, preferring to act behind the scenes and patiently set events into motion over years, decades, or even centuries. At some point after fleeing Delain, he attracts the attention of the Crimson King and becomes his emissary.

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Appearances

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The Stand

Image:FlaggTheStand.jpg Flagg made his first appearance in the 1978 apocalyptic novel The Stand. In it, he was an antichrist-like being who was trying to stop civilization in the United States from rebuilding after a devastating plague. Flagg is portrayed as the personification of evil set against Mother Abagail, the personification of good, and attracts many drawn to technology, law and order and dictatorship-style culture around him in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Flagg is described by Tom Cullen with "He looks like anybody you see on the street. But when he grins, birds fall dead off telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits. He's always outside. He came out of time. He doesn't know himself. He has the name of a thousand demons. Jesus knocked him into a herd of pigs once. His name is Legion. He's afraid of us. We're inside. He knows magic. He can call the wolves and live in the crows. He's the king of nowhere. But he's afraid of us. He's afraid of . . . inside."

Flagg plans to attack and destroy the other emerging civilization in Boulder, Colorado, leaving his civilization as the only survivors. His plans were foiled when the hand of God is turned upon him causing a nuclear bomb to detonate in front of his assembled followers.

Whether or not Flagg himself was killed in this event is left open. In the original version King implies that Flagg may have had an out-of-body experience in the instant of the explosion that allowed him to spiritually (possibly magically, as later books suggest) escape unharmed. Still, even in this case it is possible that Flagg's physical body may have been destroyed in the blast. While the original version of the novel does not tell of Flagg's fate afterwards, the 1990 expanded re-release of the novel, The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition, tells that Flagg reappeared somewhere on a beach with complete amnesia, where it is suggested that he continued to wreak havoc upon the human race in his new form.

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Prior to The Dark Tower, some fans suggested that the original edition of The Stand and the expanded edition are actually parallel dimension variations of the same story. The theory was due to the multiple dimensions of the Dark Tower series, which the story of The Stand intersects. If it was, then it would have been possible that there was an infinite number of him spread throughout other dimensions. This theory was disputed in later books of The Dark Tower series where it is mentioned that there is only one true version of Flagg despite his use of several different names.

Flagg was depicted in film by Jamey Sheridan in the TV miniseries version of The Stand.Template:Ref This miniseries was based on the original edition of the novel. As of 2005, this is the only film appearance the character has had.

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The Eyes of the Dragon

Image:EyesoftheDragonFlagg.jpg In the 1984 novel The Eyes of the Dragon, the villain is a wizard called Flagg. While it is not explicitly stated that this is Randall Flagg, hints are made to this when a connection between this novel and The Dark Tower series indirectly connects The Eyes of the Dragon to The Stand. The two characters are even further connected by an event in Hearts in Atlantis (see the Other appearances section) and the use of the alias "the Dark Man".

Because Flagg here acts and looks slightly different than he was in The Stand, (most likely because The Eyes of the Dragon features a medieval setting while The Stand took place in more modern times) some have argued that the two are different versions of him from two different dimensions, given the presence of parallel dimensions in the Dark Tower series. However, Stephen King strongly implies that the two are indeed one and the same in the final Dark Tower novel, in which we find out Flagg was born in Delain, the setting of The Eyes of the Dragon.

We are told that in the medieval country of Delain, he has a white corpse's face, and is described in an uneasy way as "well preserved", a "thin and stern faced man of about fifty":

"He had, in fact, come to Delain often. He came under a different name each time, but always with the same load of woe and misery and death. This time he was Flagg. The time before he had been known at Bill Hinch, and he had been the King's Lord High Executioner [and] had made an end to hundreds — thousands, some said — of prisoners with his heavy axe. The time before that ... he came as a singer named Browson, who became a close adviser to the King and a Queen. Browson disappeared like smoke after drumming up a great and bloody war between Delain and Andua.
"Flagg always showed up with a different face and a different bag of tricks, but two things about him were always the same. He always came hooded, a man who seemed almost to have no face, and he never came as a King himself, but always as the whisperer in the shadows, the man who poured poison into the porches of Kings' ears.
"He wanted what evil men always want: to have power and use that power to make mischief. Being a King did not interest him because the heads of Kings all too often found their way to spikes on castle walls when things went wrong. But the advisors to Kings . . . the spinners in the shadows . . . such people usually melted away like evening shadows at dawning as soon as the headsman's axe started to fall. Flagg was a sickness, a fever looking for a cool brow to heat up. He hooded his actions just as he hooded his face. And when the great trouble came – as it always did after a span of years – Flagg always disappeared like shadows at dawn. Later, when the carnage was over and the fever had passed, when the rebuilding was complete and there was again something worth destroying, Flagg would appear once more."

Though Flagg is never killed in the course of the novel, he is wounded badly by an arrow that is shot into his eye, and vanishes, perhaps to escape mortal death. The book ends with the cryptic comment that "Thomas and Dennis ... did see Flagg again, and confronted him," but no details are given. Many fans expected the continuation of the story to be in The Dark Tower (King has even said that Eyes is a Tower story when asked if there would be a sequel) but they did not appear.

Due to the fact that the story takes place in the same world as The Dark Tower, it could be assumed that, if he did in fact die, then he had reincarnated once again in this same world, much like in the case of the extended version of The Stand. This may also explain the Stand-like variation of him that appears in the Dark Tower series.

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Hearts in Atlantis

In the 1999 book Hearts in Atlantis, Randall Flagg makes a brief appearance towards the end of the book. While little is said to show that it is him, the disturbing nature of his presence along with the use of the name "Raymond Fiegler" (which follows Flagg's "RF" theme in his aliases) clue readers into the character being him. Also worthy of note is the connections made to previous books with Flagg as a character. For instance, Carol Gerber mentions that she was taught by someone how to turn "dim" (a reference to Flagg's ability in Eyes of the Dragon). She also says that she and Fiegler were the only survivors of an act of arson on a small house in Los Angeles. This is quite similar to an event in Randall Flagg's life that he brings to mind in The Stand.

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The Dark Tower series

Image:Walterodimrevisedgunslinger.jpg Flagg has made the majority of his appearances in The Dark Tower series. He is hinted at early on in the series, but his role in the story does not become evident until near the end of the third book, The Waste Lands. Though he is referred to as a wizard in this series, he appears to be the Flagg of The Stand.

Flagg appears in the first line of The Gunslinger as "The Man in Black", going by his true name Walter o'Dim (though the character is not identified as Flagg at this time) and practicing the art of necromancy. After leading Roland Deschain, the series' main hero, on a lengthy pursuit across the Mohaine Desert, he gives Roland a tarot reading which predicts events to occur in several of the following novels. He also, oddly enough, warns Roland about himself, telling him that he must be defeated before Roland can enter the Tower and, paraphrasing the Bible, identifies himself as Legion (Mark 5:9: "And [Jesus] asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.") He then gives Roland a vision of the Tower that sends him into a deep delirium. When Roland awakes, Flagg is gone, having left behind a skeleton that convinces Roland, for only a moment, that Walter is dead.

There is a brief reference to him in The Drawing of the Three, in which near the fall of Gilead Roland witnesses the wizard being pursued by Dennis and Thomas, the two boys from Eyes of the Dragon.

He next appears near the end of the third novel, The Waste Lands, in the city of Lud to save the Tick-Tock Man, who becomes Flagg's devoted servant afterwards (similar in the way that the Trashcan Man became Flagg's servant in The Stand). He appears for just a short time in this book, so there is little else of him until the fourth book, Wizard and Glass. In this, Roland reveals Flagg to be the wizard Marten, who had corrupted Roland's homeland, seduced his mother Gabrielle and has been conspiring along with the Crimson King to cause the fall of the Dark Tower. Flagg manages to escape from Roland in this book before Roland gets a chance to kill him.

Flagg also appears in the lengthy flashback that comprises the middle part of Wizard and Glass. Once again in the role of Walter o'Dim, he acts as an emissary for the rebel leader John Farson. (There has been contradictory accounts concerning Farson's identity; the Revised makes reference to him being another alias of Walter, yet later in the series Walter himself refers to the revolutionary as a seperate entity.) Walter entrusts the Pink Grapefruit of the Wizard's Rainbow to Eldred Jonas, Farson's agent in Mejis. Jonas in turn entrusts the crystal to the witch Rhea of the Coos.

Walter o'Dim has cameos in Wolves of the Calla and Song of Susannah. In Wolves, after committing suicide, Father Callahan runs into Walter at the Way Station (where Jake and Roland were only moments before). Walter gives Callahan Black 13 in hopes of it killing Roland later in his journey. Later, Walter taunts Callahan to which the priest responds that he is cruel. Surprisingly, Walter looks hurt.

"Walter's eyes widen, and for a moment he looks deeply hurt. This may be absurd, but Callahan is looking into the man's deep eyes and feels sure that the emotion is nonetheless genuine. And the surety robs him of any last hope that all this might be a dream, or a final brilliant interval before true death. In dreams--his, at least--the bad guys, the scary guys, never have complex emotions."Template:Ref

Walter later shows up in Song in a flashback. He appears to the succubus Mia and makes a deal with her that culminates in her giving birth to the son of Roland and the Crimson King. This later leads to his tragic downfall.

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Death

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Flagg met his death in the final book of the Dark Tower series. Before this, it is revealed that his goal all along has been the same as Roland's, to climb The Dark Tower and see the room at its top. To unlock the tower, Flagg believes he needs the red-marked foot, the heel dipped in red, of Mordred Deschain, the bastard son of Roland. In their first and only encounter, Mordred senses Flagg's intentions telepathically, and devours Flagg's eyes and tongue before killing him and eating the rest of his body. It is during this encounter with Mordred, the son of both Roland and The Crimson King, that Flagg realized that the sigul he would have needed is not the red heel, but the red hour-glass shape on the bottom of Mordred's spider form.

Flagg's death was met with much controversy by the fans. Supporters claimed that it was fitting that Flagg would be ultimately undone by his arrogance and that it suited King's general opinion that all evil are ultimately 'bumhugs'. It also shows a seldom shown side of Flagg. The fact that he is not invincible, and is only a man who has been overcome with his own quest for The Dark Tower. One can relate his quest to Roland's.

On the other side of the argument, fans were disappointed that one of King's greatest villains was met with such a mediocre end before getting the chance to face Roland. It also seemed to them like a cheap ploy on King's part to give Mordred extra credibility.

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Speculated appearances

Because of Flagg's tendency to use seperate identities and aliases, many fans try to find the elusive wizard in other King works. If a character is a wizard or a demon with shape-shifting abilities, fans often assume it to be Flagg no matter what evidence there is to the contrary. Here are some of the more notable speculations.

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In the made for T.V. movie Storm of the Century the villain Andre Linoge displays various characteristics associated with Flagg; specifically the use of red paint or ink when composing messages, the reference to him being Legion (which "Linoge" is an anagram of), and Linoge's final purpose of obtaining an heir to pass on his knowledge to. He also reveals his "true form" as an aged man in the obvious guise of a wizard, and uses chanted spells through out the mini-series. Some fans believe these characteristics may be implications that Andre Linoge and Randall Flagg are the same person.

That being said, there are many differences between the two. Andre Linoge states that while he has been able to live a long life, he will eventually die of old age. Although Flagg is indeed ancient, he has never faced this problem. Another thing to note is that at the climax of Storm, Andre Linoge takes away the young boy Ralphie to be his heir to carry on in his place when he dies. While Flagg has had similar agendas, he has never made reference to having Ralphie or anything indicating that he is indeed Andre Linoge.

It is also speculated that Flagg appeared in the novel The Long Walk by Richard Bachman (a pseudonym King once wrote under). In the end of the novel, Ray Davis Garraty, the last surviving contestant in the Walk, sees a "dark man" in the distance, and attempts to follow him.Template:Ref It is speculated by fans that this man is the Man in Black from King's The Gunslinger, who himself was Flagg. Still, it is possible that this is only a coincidence, or that in the context of the story, the contest winner, having walked compusively for his life to the point of exhaustion, may have been hallucinating.

In the novel Dreamcatcher, Col. Kurtz is given orders by a "General Randall".Template:Ref Despite the similar name, the novel does not say that the character is Flagg, nor is there anything concrete to suggest that the two are related. Because there are references to other King characters from the previous Derry novels such as It and Insomnia through out the novel (most of these characters were residents of Derry, where much of the story takes place), some fans speculate that he was using the name to show Flagg's presence.

Some people believe that Leland Gaunt in Needful Things is another version of Flagg. Gaunt is also mentioned as be capable of making himself "dim". However, these similarities alone do not provide enough proof that Gaunt is in fact Flagg. In fact, its most likely that any similarities are merely coincidences.

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Motivations

There is no clear answer as to why Randall Flagg does what he does. He seems to just enjoy inflicting chaos for the sake of doing so. But it may not be that easy.

His final appearance did give some new insight, however. His birthplace in is in Delain, the same place that he wrecked havoc in. He was raped here, so it could be possible his lashing out in Delain is for the pain it had caused him earlier. Dark Tower scholar Bev Vincent's The Road to the Dark Tower supports this theory.

In his final monologue with Mordred, Flagg claims the reason for his hatred of Roland Deschain is his involvement in the death of Gabrielle Deschain, the woman he loved ('or at least coveted' as he admits). He states that no matter what role that he or Rhea of the Coos played in it, it was Roland who had done the deed.

Although Flagg has been causing trouble for Roland before Gabrielle's demise, it is possible that he only saw him as a nuisance in his grand scheme and this just solidified that hatred.

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Aliases

According to The Stand, Flagg has been known to use or be referred to by the following names:

The Eyes of the Dragon claims he also used the following:

  • Bill Hinch
  • Browson
  • The Dark Man

He used the following in The Dark Tower series:

  • The Ageless Stranger
  • John Farson (Up to debate)
  • Legion
  • Maerlyn (Up to debate)
  • Marten Broadcloak
  • Richard Fannin
  • Rudin Filaro
  • Walter o'Dim
  • Walter Padick
  • The Wizard

In Hearts in Atlantis, he is known as:

  • Raymond Fiegler
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See also

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References

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