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Page 1: Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For: Carrie - 1976
Page 2: Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For: Carrie - 1976

CARRIE 1976lecinemadreams.blogspot.com/2012/12/carrie-1976.html

Joan Rivers: "I wasn't invited to the prom. I invited the guy and I had to buy my own orchid. Carrie had abetter time at her prom than I did."

That Carrie can be referenced in the punchline of a joke without benefit of clarification is a testament to how deeplyrooted in our cultural consciousness Brian De Palma’s 1976 film (vis à vis Stephen King’s 1974 novel) has become.Indeed, contrary to the circumstances of her character in the film (she’s such a non-entity at her school that theprincipal repeatedly misidentifies her as “Cassie”) and the teaser ads for the forthcoming sequel (You Will Know HerName); I'd say that by now, everybody knows exactly who Carrie is.

Sissy Spacek as Carrie White

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Piper Laurie as Margaret White

Betty Buckley as Miss Collins

Amy Irving as Sue Snell

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William Katt as Tommy Ross

Nancy Allen as Chris Hargensen

John Travolta as Billy Nolan

I was just starting college the year Carrie was released and (cinema snob that I was) I really couldn't have been lessinterested in it. 1976 was an absolutely amazing year for movies, and the films that preoccupied my mind, my time,and my interest were the more high-profile releases: Taxi Driver, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Hitchcock’s FamilyPlot, Fellini’s Casanova, Marathon Man, Rocky, King Kong, A Star is Born , Polanski’s The Tenant, Network, TheLast Tycoon, Burnt Offerings, Sparkle, Lipstick, Logan’s Run, Bertolucci’s 1900, Altman’s Buffalo Bill and theIndians, and Bergman’s Face to Face. I hardly saw daylight the entire year!

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And then there was the woefully under-hyped Carrie. Here we had a film by a director whose only other work I’dseen at the time -Phantom of the Paradise - I remembered primarily for Paul Williams' music, and whose solemarketable cast member, John Travolta, was a fledgling teen idol from the execrable sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter(his whispery pop single, “Let Her In,” had turned the summer of ’76 radio-listening into an absolute nightmare forme). Everything about Carrie, from its no-name cast to its over-explicit poster art, gave me the impression it wasstrictly drive-in fare; a movie suitable for a double-bill with one of those low-budget releases from AIP or CrownInternational about Bigfoot or small town redneck serial killers.

Eve was WeakMargaret White's religious fanaticism adds an effectively ominous overlay of sin,sacrifice, and retribution to the story of a awkward teen and the coming-of-age

awareness of her powers of telekinesis.

It was only through the persistent badgering of my best friend that I even came to see Carrie at all. My friend, a sci-fi/ Dark Shadows buff, had already seen Carrie and used the excuse of wanting to see it again as an opportunity tocall in his marker for the time I’d pestered him into attending a screening of Barbarella with me. As I took my seat inthe packed San Francisco movie theater where Carrie was playing, I seethed with resentment over what I perceivedas my friend extracting a particularly mean-spirited payback for what, the heinous crime of exposing him to the sightof a naked, zero-gravity Jane Fonda? However, some 98 minutes later I emerged from the theater, red-eyed (fromcrying- that Sissy Spacek really gets to me in this movie...even today) and overwhelmed. Wow! I had NOT beenexpecting that!

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Macabre Martyrdom

Brian De Palma is known for his employment of the literal split-screen,but Carrie is also full of sequences in which the natural framing of a shotencourages the audience to take note of the dual /conflicting experiences

of the characters as they occupy the same space.

Anticipating at best a run-of-the-mill horror movie,what I got was a surprisingly sensitive characterdrama that morphed into a kind of a nightmarishGrimm's fairy tale. A blood-splattered religiousallegory of sin and redemption that's a near-poeticparable on the inability of a legacy of pain and crueltyto beget anything other than more pain andcruelty. Just out of high school myself (an all-boysCatholic School, but let’s face it, high school is highschool) it felt more than a little cathartic to see a filmthat depicted everyday schoolyard torments with thegraveness of Greek tragedy, meeting out suitablycatastrophic retribution to the guilty.I was sold by Carrie’s first five minutes (the volleyballgame and the gym shower), both of whichestablished: a) the atypical horror film setting of ahigh school; b) the female-centric thrust of the story,wherein the concerns, actions, and motivations ofthe women in the film appeared essential topropelling the plot forward; and c) the obvioussubjective perspective the film was going to takeregarding Carrie herself. Carrie absolutely flooredme. I saw it three more times that month, and it hassince remained one of my all-time favorite movies. Amotion picture I’d readily list among the best horrorfilms ever made.WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILMGiven that adolescence was a living hell for the vastmajority of us, there’s something conceptuallyingenious about a horror film set in an Americanhigh school—a “house” as haunted by the ghosts ofthe tortured and suffering as anyEuropean Gothic mansion. The hierarchy of schoolcliques and the day-to-day cruelties teens inflictupon one another seem to me perfect subjects for ameditation on the banality of evil; a conceptexplored in many of the films that have proved mostinfluential in the horror genre (Rosemary’s Baby,The Stepford Wives, Invasion of the BodySnatchers).

Unlike Stephen King’s novel, which expands thescope of Carrie to include news and scienceinvestigations into what happened at the prom, DePalma’s film wisely maintains a much narrower subjective focus (few things happen outside of the scope of the high-schoolers), heightening our identification with and empathy for Carrie and her rather tragic existence. I’m remindedof a review of Carrie which made the sharply observation that it was so fitting for Carrie to have only destroyed herhigh school in the film (as opposed to half the town in the novel); because to an adolescent, high school IS the world

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School Days, School DaysCarrie was made at a time when "bullying" was largely seen as kids-just-

being-kids behavior

Adolescent trauma meets Grand Guignol

to a teenager. I honestly think the intimate scale of De Palma's Carrie is what makes it work so well.Carrie's nightmare is merely every adolescent's anxieties (public humiliation, social ostracism, the desire to fit in)writ in blood.PERFORMANCESDefying accepted Hollywood logic that holds horror films don’t get Academy respect, the two (and only) Oscarnominations afforded Carrie were for the impossible-to-ignore performances of Sissy Spacek and PiperLaurie. Taking wildly divergent acting paths—Spacekplaying her keyed-up naturalism off of Laurie’sidiosyncratic stylization—the actresses share asymbiotic chemistry in their scenes together thatelevate Carrie far above what is usually consideredpossible in a horror film. (Never cut any slack toanyone who tries to get a poorly made horror film offthe hook with the excuse, "Nobody goes to horrorfilms for the acting. They just want to be scared!" -we don't always luck out, but good acting in horrorfilms count.)Spacek's Carrie doesn't amp up the cliche actingsignals that would indicate an outcast character.Rather, Carrie's awkwardness appears to emanatenot out of any innate strangeness (she's actuallybetter adjusted than most of her peers) but out ofperhaps an overabundance of feelings and aninadequacy of emotional outlets. Carrie's slowlydeveloping telekinesis is a perfect metaphoricalrepresentation of what happens when rage isrepressed.

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Born Into Sin

And Piper Laurie...I can't say enough about the amazing risks she takes with her role and actually makes themwork! It seems as if by grounding her character in a reality deeply felt and understood by her mentally unstablecharacter, she allows herself to inhabit this monster of a woman and prevents herself from regulating any part of herperformance by external "sane" standards. Laurie makes me believe in this broadly-drawn woman, and, moremiraculously, she terrifies me even when she's making me laugh at her (as Ruth Gordon did in Rosemary's Baby).

One of the great unsung performances in Carrie is that of Betty Buckley as thesympathetic gym teacher. De Palma must have really appreciated her incisiveportrayal, because he always seems to leave the camera on her just long to

capture the brief flickers of emotion that play across her face at the end of sceneswhere she's forced to be tougher than she'd like to be, or when she's saying

something she hopes to be true, but doesn't really trust in. Ironically orinevitably, depending on how you look at it, the sweet-natured Buckley assumed

the role of Carrie's mother in the ill-fated 1988 Broadway musical of the film.

THE STUFF OF FANTASYThe trademark Brian De Palma bag of tricks (slow motion, swirling camera, split screen, complex tracking shots,subjective sound, Bernard Herrmann-esque scores, Pino Donaggio's sensual music used as violencecounterpoint, copious bloodletting) have never been put to as effective use as in Carrie. And no sequence in Carriebetter illustrates the seamless blending of visual style with narrative theme than the bravura prom sequence. One ofthe most amazing bits of film as storytelling as you're ever likely to see.

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Last Dance

A tour de force sequence that conveys tenderness, romance, joy, pathos, suspense, and terror in a seamless flowthat's close to operatic. Like my favorite scene from Hitchcock's The Birds (the Tides Restaurant bird attack) theclimatic prom at Bates High School is a sequence I never cease to marvel at, no matter how often I see it.

Contemporary filmmakers (especially those enamored of the excesses tolerated by the horror genre) who strive toblow us away with empty violent spectacle and CGI nonsense can take a lesson from De Palma here. If thissequence were all about the destruction and blood, Carrie would have gone the way of obscurity long ago. Carrieendures as a horror classic because De Palma takes the time to bring us into Carrie's dream come true before heturns it into a nightmare.

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Grand Grotesquery The eruption of the "curtain of fire" is one of my favorite film moments. It is so

horrifically beautiful...I recall getting goosebumps when I saw it on the bigscreen.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS NIGHTMARESIn speaking of Rosemary's Baby, director Roman Polanski is fond of saying that his intent was to make a horror filmthat looks like a Doris Day movie, but reveals itself to be something dark and sinister. To me, Carrie works in muchthe same fashion: it starts out like one of those teen-empowering After School Specials (a series of TV moviestargeted to adolescents in the '70s and '80s) and then throws us a nasty curve as the heretofore reassuring ugly-duckling wish-fulfillment fantasy turns into a nightmare. It's brilliant.I wish the 2013 remake a lot of luck, but just as Mia Farrow is and always will be the one and only RosemaryWoodhouse; Sissy Spacek's touchingly raw performance assures that there can only be, and only ever will be, onetrue Carrie.

"If only they knew she had the power."Movie poster tagline

2013 ADDENDUM: Saw Kimberly Peirce's Carrie remake. I found it forgettable and unnecessary, albeit better acted than I expected.The big prom scene finale trades De Palm's poetically nightmarish spectacle for protracted explicitness. It's well-done, if artless; the deeply felt tragedy of the first film being replaced by the ghoulishly cathartic pleasure of seeingthe guilty parties punished. De Palma's Carrie has haunted me for a lifetime. I struggled to remember the details ofCarrie 2013 a week after seeing it.

Copyright © Ken Anderson

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