Carrie (1976)

I saw Brian De Palma’s Carrie many years ago and hated it. I saw it again a few years later and still hated it. But here I am watching it again.

There’s no doubt that much of my dislike for the film stems from my intense dislike of Stephen King’s books. The one Stephen King adaptation I truly love is The Shining and that’s because it’s much more Kubrick than King. As far as I’m concerned the less of Stephen King there is in a Stephen King adaptation the better.

The first thing that strikes the viewer about this movie is the overwhelming all-pervasive femaleness. That tone is set right at the start with the infamous shower scene. While some feminist critics got sniffy about the copious quantities of female frontal nudity that abundant unselfconscious casual nudity serves to establish the overwhelming atmosphere of femaleness. This is the world of women. It is a world entirely separate from the world of men. The girls’ locker room is like a pagan temple reserved entirely for priestesses and female acolytes. Or a meeting of a coven of witches, with the witches all sky-clad. The casual relaxed nudity serves to emphasise the exclusion of men from this world.

This world of women has its own rules and its own rituals. It has its own stages of initiation. Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is about to experience one of those rites-of-passage.

Carrie’s first period has just started. She is terrified. Her mother had not told her abut such things. Carrie is mercilessly mocked by the other girls. This is a normal female rite-of-passage and the fact that Carrie was not prepared for it marks her as an outsider. Acceptance in this world of women depends on having a proper knowledge of the various rituals. This women’s world is a world of rules and codes of behaviour enforced by other women.

Carrie is ruthlessly persecuted by the school’s Mean Girls. One of the girls, Sue (Amy Irving), who isn’t really a Mean Girl, comes up with a plan. She will persuade her boyfriend Tommy Ross (William Katt) to take Carrie to the Prom. As it happens Tommy is a major heartthrob. Sue’s motives are, surprisingly, well-intentioned. She and Tommy really are trying to help Carrie to come out of her shell. Their plan would have worked but for the evil machinations of Chief Mean Girl and Uber-Bitch Chris Hargenson (Nancy Allen) and her sleazy boyfriend Billy Nolan (John Travolta). The Prom ends up not just in disaster but a bloodbath.

Carrie has a gift. Telekinesis. At first her gift is inly moderately destructive but the more upset Carrie becomes the more destructive her power becomes.

There are so many interesting and surprising aspects to this movie. This is entirely a woman-centric movie but it’s not a feminist movie - it has no ideological axe to grind. Carrie’s problems are not caused by the patriarchy. There is no sign of a patriarchy in this movie. Carrie’s problems are caused by the Matriarchy - the world of women in which women enforce the rules on other women. Men play no part whatsoever in this world.

There are only three male characters and only one is significant. That’s Tommy Ross, and he’s a really nice guy. Billy Nolan is a swine. The high school principal is well-meaning but ludicrously out of his depth dealing with Carrie’s very female problems. Tommy Ross represents healthy masculinity. He has so much self-confident masculinity that he has no problems being sensitive and gentle toward women. At no point does Tommy need to do anything to assert his masculinity. It’s just there.

We are half-expecting the plan cooked up by Sue and Tommy to turn out to be a cruel joke on Carrie but it isn’t. Tommy really is trying to help Carrie. She’s at the point in her life when a girl needs to negotiate several rites-of-passage - her first kiss, her first dance, being told by a man for the first time that she’s pretty. Tommy really is trying to guide her gently through these steps. And he has no intention of sleeping with her. He knows she’s not ready for that step. He is not manipulating her. Carrie isn’t stupid. She knows Tommy is not in love with her and that he doesn’t want her to be his regular girlfriend. Tommy knows that Carrie is not stupid. He knows that she knows these things. He is just offering her an evening that will be a beautiful memory for her, and a stage on her way to becoming a grown-up woman.

And it all works. So that when disaster strikes the tragedy takes on an epic quality. Carrie had made it through. Almost.

The relationship between Carrie and her mother is something I have mixed feelings about. The idea of her mother’s fundamentalist Christianity blighting her daughter’s life is trite and heavy-handed and seems out of place in a movie that otherwise avoids the obvious.

It is significant that despite frantic efforts Carrie’s mother Margaret has failed to suppress Carrie’s sexuality and her awareness of her own womanhood. When we see Carrie in the shower in the opening she is experiencing a very innocent sensual enjoyment of her womanness. Carrie is not afraid of the femaleness of her body. She enjoys, in an entirely non-sexual way, caressing her breasts and thighs.

In a later scene her mother expresses her horror of women’s breasts. To Margaret they are symbols of sin. But Carrie is proud of her breasts. She is a woman. Women have breasts. Carrie likes having a woman’s body.

It’s interesting that Carrie is not destroyed by her mother. By the time of the Prom Carrie has already triumphed. She has put on her glamorous prom dress, she has gone to the Prom with the hottest boy in school, she has allowed him to kiss her, she has danced, she has been romanced (in an innocent but enjoyable way), she has learnt to be confident about being a woman, she is ready to enter the grown-up female world. She has won the battle, and the war.

It is not her mother who destroys her, but a teenaged girl. Mean Girls are more formidable enemies than mothers. Carrie’s mother is not the villainess here. The villainess is Mean Girl Chris Hargenson. Nothing is more terrifying than a teenaged girl setting out to destroy another teenaged girl.

I liked Carrie much much more this time. There’s so much to admire in De Palma’s technique. I love the way everything is shot in a way that emphasises that we have entered a world of femaleness. I love the way this movie so often defies out expectations.

I liked Sissy Spacek and I liked Amy Irving as Sue. Nancy Allen is deliciously evil as Chris. I still don’t like Piper Laurie’s caricature of a performance.

This is still not my favourite De Palma movie but it is a remarkable movie that is much much more than the trashy gorefest it seems to be on the surface. Highly recommended.

Carrie is one of the handful of movies that explore the nightmare world of teenaged girls. The other truly great movie of this type, although it approaches the subject very differently, is of course Heathers (1989).