Carrie (1976)The cruelty of teenagers in school can be fierce indeed. Most of them don't count on retribution, let alone on the nigh-biblical scale which shy and soft-spoken, yet dangerously gifted, Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) delivers when pushed beyond the breaking point. Carrie (1978) is the story of a dogged young girl who is bullied and attacked by her schoolmates, abused by her overzealous mother, Margaret (Piper Laurie), and is discovering the onset of her latent psychokinetic talents as her body matures. Things begin to look up when one of her rueful former assailants, Sue Snell (Amy Irving), convinces her date to the prom, Tommy Ross (William Katt), to take Carrie in her stead. But the malice borne by the most vicious bully, Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen), means that the horror is far from over.
|
|
Most people with even a passing familiarity with modern literature know the name of the prolific author, Stephen King. "Carrie" was his first published novel, and the first of his works to be adapted for the screen. (Apparently director Brian De Palma's adaptation of Carrie left film audiences hungry for more, as over one hundred adaptations have been made from his works.) In what would become largely identified as King's metier, Carrie is a story set in an ordinary town, about a seemingly ordinary girl, who discovers a connection with the supernatural, ultimately leading to an inexorably terrifying outcome. Carrie's first apparent manifestation of her powers comes after a scene where she is savagely bullied in the girls' shower at school after gym class. She experiences her first menstruation, but due to her mother's overly strict parentage, Carrie has no idea what's happening, which causes her to panic. How do all of the girls respond? By pelting her with tampons, jeering at her and accosting her with such violent fervor, that if they were in the wild, they would begin to literally devour her on the spot out of raw frenzy. The only sympathy for her harrowing experience comes from Carrie's gym teacher, Miss Collins (Betty Buckley), but even she confesses that she also felt an inner compulsion which made her identify with the bullies and their cruel act, even though her responsibilities as a teacher managed to overcome this urge. This early confession laces through the veins of Carrie, as do similar instances of feigned sympathy or contrition, such as Sue's attempt to set right her own involvement in joining in to torment Carrie in the locker room, as well as her ill-conceived and hollow efforts to pressure Tommy to make it up on her behalf, regardless of her best intentions. We want to believe that even after such a terrible event, and Carrie's altogether puritanical and abusive home life, that things will get better for her, and she can live happily ever after in the Cinderella promise of her date to the prom with Tommy. But there is a pervading sense of cruelty and of the devilishness of humanity throughout Carrie, how people treat someone they don't understand, driven by their base instinct to cull the perceived weak from a herd--not allow them to play their reindeer games. This is what possesses the sinister Chris to coerce her dim boyfriend, Billy (John Travolta), into participating in a terrible prank, involving slaughtering a pig without remorse--a surrogate for Carrie--an act which drives Chris into a bloodlust of hatred for her intended victim. This sinking feeling that the illusion of happiness will disintegrate at any moment haunts Carrie, like a lump in the throat, as if we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop...and then it does and proves us right.
There are two kinds of ways to interpret the portrayal of the world in Carrie. One is that not everyone in the world is horrible, and that Carrie just had an awfully rough break in life. That people like Sue can be repentant, and that Carrie's perception that everyone is laughing at her during her most explosive of humiliations is a mere hallucination. The other, and far less comforting view, is that deep down, each of us has a festering cruelty, an inner need to subjugate others to feel better about ourselves, because we are all full of doubt and anxiety, and only by tearing someone else down can we really sate that opportunistic craving. As cynical as it is, I favor the latter interpretation, because it highlights that Carrie's tragedy is not simply some one-off experience to be conveniently shelved away once the last page is turned or the credits roll; it is a cautionary tale to force us to self-examine how we treat others, because the slope is slippery. For those who consider her bullies to be overly hostile or unsympathetic, you must not have been bullied in school. The experience is a form of torture inflicted upon the ill-prepared, those naive (no, innocent) to the pecking order constructed by the castes and cliques in that warped microcosm of society that school is. It's possible that Carrie might never have manifested her deadly powers were she not abused at school or at home, meaning that her cruel victimizers are ultimately the architects of their own destruction, crafting a deadly witch from a sweet, shy girl. Carrie's attempts to control and understand the changes taking place within her is a parallel for the kinds of anxiety about maturity which all teenagers seek to comprehend at this formative time in their lives.
There is a luminescence in many of the shots in Carrie, and there are moments which appear happy and light, slow-motion sequences which look as though filtered through a dreamlike nostalgia, memories of a glorious time. But this is not Carrie's past, and we know this; it feels inauthentic and disingenuous by design, making Carrie appear as much an outsider to this world as she is perceived to be by its inhabitants. If Carrie wasn't a part of this story, this film might just as well be another high school melodrama, concerned with such vapid plot points as detention and the high school prom. Consider how superficial scenes without Carrie generally are, and it become apparent that everyone else is living in an artificial existence, one whose falseness is tenuous, revealed when Carrie emerges and these two-dimensional caricatures of humanity can only react with hostility or a veneer of civility, their true feelings toward her always lurking beneath the surface. So Carrie's psychic rebellion is the ultimate pushback against this facade, against this social construct which is willing to sacrifice her to fulfill its own fantasy. One could say that her retaliation is a reply to this subhuman, instictive behavior, an evolutionary response to quashing the barbaric lower life forms which fight back like repressive antibodies, perceiving Carrie as nothing more than a virus in their shallow ecosystem. So when the moment finally comes for Carrie to strike back against her oppressors, we can only sympathize with this so-called "movie monster"; the viciousness of her assault is cathartic, and even darkly satisfying, a kind of Old Testament-level flood of fire and blood.
Recommended for: Fans of an intense and harrowing combination of vicious bullying and supernatural repercussions stirred together in a volatile brew, announcing the thrilling horror which would henceforth become synonymous with Stephen King adaptations.
There are two kinds of ways to interpret the portrayal of the world in Carrie. One is that not everyone in the world is horrible, and that Carrie just had an awfully rough break in life. That people like Sue can be repentant, and that Carrie's perception that everyone is laughing at her during her most explosive of humiliations is a mere hallucination. The other, and far less comforting view, is that deep down, each of us has a festering cruelty, an inner need to subjugate others to feel better about ourselves, because we are all full of doubt and anxiety, and only by tearing someone else down can we really sate that opportunistic craving. As cynical as it is, I favor the latter interpretation, because it highlights that Carrie's tragedy is not simply some one-off experience to be conveniently shelved away once the last page is turned or the credits roll; it is a cautionary tale to force us to self-examine how we treat others, because the slope is slippery. For those who consider her bullies to be overly hostile or unsympathetic, you must not have been bullied in school. The experience is a form of torture inflicted upon the ill-prepared, those naive (no, innocent) to the pecking order constructed by the castes and cliques in that warped microcosm of society that school is. It's possible that Carrie might never have manifested her deadly powers were she not abused at school or at home, meaning that her cruel victimizers are ultimately the architects of their own destruction, crafting a deadly witch from a sweet, shy girl. Carrie's attempts to control and understand the changes taking place within her is a parallel for the kinds of anxiety about maturity which all teenagers seek to comprehend at this formative time in their lives.
There is a luminescence in many of the shots in Carrie, and there are moments which appear happy and light, slow-motion sequences which look as though filtered through a dreamlike nostalgia, memories of a glorious time. But this is not Carrie's past, and we know this; it feels inauthentic and disingenuous by design, making Carrie appear as much an outsider to this world as she is perceived to be by its inhabitants. If Carrie wasn't a part of this story, this film might just as well be another high school melodrama, concerned with such vapid plot points as detention and the high school prom. Consider how superficial scenes without Carrie generally are, and it become apparent that everyone else is living in an artificial existence, one whose falseness is tenuous, revealed when Carrie emerges and these two-dimensional caricatures of humanity can only react with hostility or a veneer of civility, their true feelings toward her always lurking beneath the surface. So Carrie's psychic rebellion is the ultimate pushback against this facade, against this social construct which is willing to sacrifice her to fulfill its own fantasy. One could say that her retaliation is a reply to this subhuman, instictive behavior, an evolutionary response to quashing the barbaric lower life forms which fight back like repressive antibodies, perceiving Carrie as nothing more than a virus in their shallow ecosystem. So when the moment finally comes for Carrie to strike back against her oppressors, we can only sympathize with this so-called "movie monster"; the viciousness of her assault is cathartic, and even darkly satisfying, a kind of Old Testament-level flood of fire and blood.
Recommended for: Fans of an intense and harrowing combination of vicious bullying and supernatural repercussions stirred together in a volatile brew, announcing the thrilling horror which would henceforth become synonymous with Stephen King adaptations.