What does Sadie’s clothespin line mean in ‘11.22.63’? Backstory explained
Nearly a decade after its premiere on Hulu, 11.22.63 has moved to Netflix, introducing the critically acclaimed miniseries to a brand new audience.
The 2016 science fiction thriller is based on Stefan King‘s 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 back in time in an attempt to prevent the assassination of the president John F Kennedy on November 22, 1963.
In the fourth episode, titled “The Eyes of Texas,” Jake begins a romance with a librarian, Sadie Dunhill (Sarah Gadon), who confides in him that her ex-husband, Johnny Clayton (TR Knight), had been abusive throughout their entire marriage.
“When I met Johnny, I thought he was the most charming man I had ever met,” she says. “We had never done much physically. I just thought he was old-fashioned.”
With tears in her eyes, Sadie tells Jake that she is still traumatized from her and Johnny’s wedding night.
“He got very tense. He wouldn’t kiss me. He just asked me to close my eyes, and I did,” she recalls. “And then he grabbed my hand and put it on himself, and I screamed because he had a clothespin. I didn’t know what to say, so I laughed, and then he hit me, so I started crying, and he hit me again.”
Sadie doesn’t elaborate on her “clothespin” line in the scene, which has left many viewers confused about the graphic backstory.
Before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, some conservative mothers taped clothespins to their sons’ penises to discourage masturbation. However, inside 11.22.63the painful practice from Johnny’s youth eventually becomes a fetish for him.
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“Obviously this is someone who’s got some things to work through. He’s got some issues,” Knight, 52, said TV guide in 2016. “There was obviously a lot of repression and a lot of oppression going on at that time. And unfortunately some of it still exists. But I think he’s on a different level. … He’s clearly so severely damaged that he’s seemingly beyond help. He has his own idea of these rules to justify the way his brain works, which is just not accurate. It’s not right.”
King, 78, also recorded the clothespin conversation in the 22/11/63 book. The famed horror author has suggested he got the idea from reading about the infamous serial killer Ted Bundyhis difficult childhood.
“I believe in evil, but all my life I’ve gone back and forth on whether or not there is an outside evil, whether or not there is a force in the world that really wants to destroy us, from within, individually and collectively. Or whether or not it all comes from within and it’s all part of genetics and the environment,” King said. Rolling stone in 2014.
He continued, “When you find someone like, say, Ted Bundy, who tortured and killed all those women and sometimes went 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 his dick when he was four.’ That behavior was persistent. Evil is within us. The older I get, the less I think there is some kind of devilish outside influence; it comes from people. And unless we can address that problem, sooner or later we will commit suicide.”
11.22.63 is now streaming on Netflix.
