[Note: This is an installment of a marathon project of writing about all of the Stephen King adaptations for screen in chronological order. Spoilers probably follow.]
Carrie is the first Stephen King adaptation, and it might just be the best. In the immortal words of Carrie's mother (RIP Piper Laurie) describing the whiskey-breath of her drunk boyfriend, "I liked it!"
DePalma's Carrie (1976) combines the schlock of the teenage slasher with a careening aesthetic that steals, invents, and mashes up styles. It is both careful in the details (like the glass of milk Carrie has with dinner, or the be-glittered cardboard star adorning the bucket of blood), and unabashedly messy (at one point in a conversation, the film unaccountably fast-forwards, squealing like a VHS tape). The result is a teetering off-balance combination of fun and dread. In other words, high school.
There's so much to love in this film, but the mark of its effectiveness is that, no matter how many times I've seen it, I still hold out some belief that this time, Carrie will simply be Prom Queen, the pig's blood landing just to her left ("whoa, wtf, can you imagine if that landed on me??").
In the novel, King drenches the story with dread by interpolating newspaper clippings from the aftermath of the prom. In the film, the dread that Carrie just will never get that fairy-tale ending (though boy, she does get a gothic one) is just nearly fifty years of marketing like this VHS slip cover that I remember from every sojourn to the horror aisle at the video store, well before I got to taste all the terror of high school:
This story is not just about high school, but rather, about the world of women and girls. Or I should say a world of women and girls, because it seems like a male-fantasy/nightmare of what such a world is like. Yet, for all of its male gazey moments, the film still only barely passes whatever a male equivalent Bechdel-test might be called, as all of the major characters are women, and the story belongs to their interpersonal drama: Carrie's struggle to free herself from her mother's overbearing repressive Christianity, Sue's self-sacrificing display of generosity for embarrassing Carrie, the PE teacher's surrogate parenting of Carrie, and Chris's desire for revenge exist in a wholly separate, all-female, world.
And even if some of these motives are coded through a heteronormative sexual desire--the punishment of losing prom privileges, for instance--it never feels as though men are really all that important to the drama except as instruments to be used or trophies to be brandished. In fact, scenes like the locker room, in which we see a fantasized version of femininity, feel more parodic than exploitative (though it winkingly does both). The title card of the film plays over a girl brushing her hair, women cavorting playfully in the edenic steam in the background, yet this is a smash cut from the humiliating mantra of the film, Chris snarling at Carrie, "Eat shit, Carrie White." Beneath the feathered curls and embroidered tops of 70s high school femininity is an aggressive and uncompromising Hobbesian war.
Midway through the film, both Sue and Chris convince their boyfriends to do something that neither really wants to do. Sue gives Tommy the cold shoulder until he agrees to take Carrie to the prom. And Chris uses sexual favors to persuade Billy to kill a pig for what must be one of the most overwrought pranks ever.
The logic of this parallel is so convincing that it conceals just how flimsy Chris's plan to take down Carrie is. Remember, Chris's plan is to dump pig's blood on Carrie's head just as she is crowned prom queen. If any one of these contrivances fail, Carrie gets to have a decent evening!
Side quest #1: GET PIG'S BLOOD!
(1) Go down on Billy Nolan securing his loyalty to your petty revenge plot
(2) Convince Billy to break into a pig farm
(3) Have Billy kill a pig with a sledge hammer (not easy!) and harvest its blood in a milk pail (also not easy!)
(4) Drive blood, in milk pail, to school, without it sloshing all around and making a mess.
(5) Congratulations, side quest #1--GET PIG'S BLOOD--completed!
Side quest #2: GET CARRIE WHITE ELECTED PROM QUEEN!
(1) Infiltrate the prom committee with a shadow deep state prom committee.
(2) Create fake prom ballots.
(3) Replace real prom ballots with fake ones, kicking the real ones under a plant or something.
Congratulations, side quest #2--GET CARRIE WHITE ELECTED PROM QUEEN--completed!
Side quest #3: POSITION THE PAIL!
(1) Climb into the rafters with your pail of pig's blood.
(2) Aim pail
(3) Construct pulley system for the Pig Blood Trap
Side quest #4: SNEAK UNDER THE STAGE!
Well, you get the point. Dreamwork makes the team work! The fact that Carrie White happens to have godlike telekinetic powers is maybe less impressive than that Chris is able to assemble and carry out a Greek-tragedy-worthy Rube Goldberg machine of revenge.
But all the creakiness of that machinery is masked behind the parallel stories of Sue and Chris. Perhaps Sue's effort is altruistic (though one doubts--especially in King's novel), and perhaps Chris's is cruel (undoubtedly), but behind both are similar strategems of control, either for redemption or revenge. In Carrie, the women pull the strings.
And when the theme of control comes into focus, then we understand that Carrie's telekinetic ability, which really stays pretty dormant throughout the film until the grand finale, is the theme literalized. Carrie can straight up move things with her mind. If the other women in the film use and abuse their social power, Carrie's direct physical power is kept back until, of course, it isn't.
One especially key scene, easy to miss, is when Carrie has been taken to the Prom by Tommy and is about to get out of the car. However, realizing that he is coming around the car to open the door for her, she quickly shuts it so he can do it for her. It is an intimate moment, and one where we sense that Carrie is feeling "normal," and is learning to enjoy a certain kind of performance, but it is a performance that carries with it the implications of her growing awareness of her power.
In the book, Carrie's power is likened to nuclear weapons. The emergency air raid sirens go off at the ending, and the whole town is razed to the ground in a series of explosions and fire. But the movie largely dispenses with the cold war notes (there is one, where one of the pig-blood-harvesters tells the pig, "you won't have to worry about the bomb anymore,") and instead focuses on how Carrie's power emanates unconsciously, a literalization of the toxicity of high school bullying.
The film takes a bunch of liberties with the text, which in general is a good thing--as Joe's review points out. One of my favorite additions is the post hoc rationale that Tommy comes up with for why he's asking her out to the prom--"because you liked my poem"--which wasn't even his poem! Because, unlike almost everything else in the world of the film, Carrie is actually genuine (she gets ridiculed by the teacher for expressing her admiration for Tommy's poem). If Carrie never quite masters the performance of invulnerability and becomes the scapegoat for the insecurities of so many of the other characters, she discovers instead the power of genuine emotion. And murders with it!
And finally, a little detail that I never noticed until this re-watch:
1. If there were a male locker room scene equivalent to the one in Carrie, which wind instrument would be playing the background music?
A symphony question! Paul, you shouldn't have! The flute was used to present kind of a male idealized chaste and feminine locker room. I think men and women would have different ideas about the reality of such a place, whereas an idealized male locker room would probably be the same terrible place from both perspectives. Just tubas, trombones, and probably a few piccolos.
2. The final dream sequence was filmed backwards, with Sue walking backwards carrying flowers, and then reversed to seem as if it is going forwards (you can tell by a car that drives backwards through an intersection in the background). What other scenes might have been improved by filming backwards?
This makes me think of Bewitched where they would play a scene in fast reverse to show Samantha's magic cleaning up a mess. What if Carrie had just wrinkled her nose and the pig's blood flew up and off and none of that happened, with a wink?
3. The first scene is during PE and the final one is prom. Which is a better locale for using telekinetic powers?
My main memory of PE is pulling gym shorts out of my locker that I'd forgotten to take home the previous week. They were still damp from the last workout and they smelled BAD. And I fucking put them on. Maybe if I'd had telekinetic powers I could have just flung my entire body over the 20 foot high fence surrounding the schoolyard into someone's back yard and died.
On the other hand, at prom, maybe I could have used the powers to fast reverse my girlfriend puking all over me. It'd just come right back out again though. So that would probably have to happen like two or three times before it occurred to me to move. But I mean, between that and yeeting myself over a fence like a catapult, I think I'd go with prom.
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