It begins with an overhead view: a gaze too modest to be that of God, but still from above so that we’re looking down at a young girl in that very-’70s style of garb, shorts tugged high. We slowly, dramatically approach her; we expect inevitability. Then there’s the awkward flailing of lanky pale arms as she misses the volleyball, the inflated orb bouncing insolently along the asphalt out of frame, and the other girls are livid. “You eat shit,” the boss of the mean girls (Nancy Allen) spits at her.
Now to the sinuous, sensuous camera drifting with such grace and lyricism through a girl’s locker room, dream-swoon hazy and filled with naked rambunctiousness; then blood, and the bully-girls braying “Plug it up!” We get that volley of shots of faces clenched in cruel glee, a roulette of emotional abuse and the poor, undeserving victim begging for help, the cruel guffaws going on. Already, we think we know this girl’s pain, the bullying, not even knowing about her own menstruation because her mother is some kind of eccentric devout Christian—abject horror. And we haven’t gotten to the telekinesis yet.
In Carrie, Brian De Palma flaunts his virtuosity as a filmmaker (is there a passage in ’70s Hollywood as elegant as Carrie’s long, slow walk to the stage, culminating in the fall of the blood bucket, at which point the somnolent slowness goes from lovely to agonizing?) as much as he displays his bone-aching empathy for the tragic Carrie White (Sissy Spacek). Adapting Stephen King’s debut novel at the advent of King’s reign in the book world and in Hollywood, on his way to becoming the most pervasive presence in pop-culture of the 1980s (it was his endorsement that helped bring Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead success), De Palma creates a harmonious marriage of formal bombast and tender humanity, capturing the panic spread by the unusual and the pain of the daily banalities of being a teenage girl in America.
“Virtuosity” and “humanity” also describe Piper Laurie’s staggering performance as Margaret White, Carrie’s mother, a fervid acolyte of some notion of Christ whose beliefs and implementation of punishment for minute sins are unorthodox, but she believes with all her heart. Her faith remains unwavering. The film’s cast is an eclectic array of characters with quirks and personalities, some modest and “realistic” (Amy Irving’s Sue, afflicted with guilt) and some decidedly villainous (Allen’s queen bitch and her thuggish, beer-swilling, swine-killing boyfriend played by John Travolta) in that distinct, classic way of the pre-slasher horror picture, a genre founded upon fear of the strange (Baudelaire’s affinity for the anomalous is very much relevant here).
De Palma creates a harmonious marriage of formal bombast and tender humanity, capturing the panic spread by the unusual and the pain of the daily banalities of being a teenage girl in America.
Laurie’s God-fearing matriarch is outlandish, realized with some capital-A acting at the apogee of New Hollywood histrionics and opposite Spacek’s very internalized, kind-and-loving performance, emotions conveyed in meek terseness and downward-gazing eyes. With hair the color of sin sticking out all frizzy and unkempt, her makeup-less face wide in divine expression as she spreads the word of God translated into her own sui generis piousness, Laurie’s return to Hollywood after a 15-year absence (following her acclaimed performance in 1961’s The Hustler) is indelible and incendiary. Her presence in the film is exaggerated, a performance with an exclamation point, yet still steeped in humanity, strangled by the trauma of corrupted innocence and the desperation to make sense of one’s life. She had a kid and it ruined hers; you hear such stories all the time, hear the sanctimony of parents telling teens to abstain because the last thing they want is a kid too young.
When Margaret hurls her daughter into the closet for blaspheming, it’s not hatred of her daughter that has her quaking, but hatred of herself for birthing spawn that possesses the power of the Devil. There she is, poor Carrie White, her pallor skinny yet still too big for that small, candle-lit closet, accompanied not by God but a creepy Christ statue studded with arrows and the false warmth of wick and wax, the many little flames shivering in the darkness. She prays; she loves her Momma. And Momma loves her—as Stephen King wrote, “There’s no bitch on Earth like a mother frightened for her kids.”
Piper Laurie’s presence in the film is exaggerated, yet still steeped in humanity, strangled by the trauma of corrupted innocence and the desperation to make sense of one’s life.
Carrie is a horror story, yes, but it’s just as much a tragedy, a film that shows us beauty and then destroys it with fire and rage, the inexorable product of a return to that familiar embarrassment and after a too-brief glimpse of happiness. Now she knows what she’s been robbed of. But her vision has been clouded; she doesn’t see how, save for the cruel gaggle of bullies who conspired against her, everyone seems genuinely happy when she saunters reluctantly to the stage at the side of dreamy Tommy (William Katt), his blonde curls beaming like a halo. You understand their frustrations with the hapless, defenseless Carrie, and feel their joy when she finally gains self-acceptance, smiles glinting like the pieces of mirror on the disco ball. Someone who’s spent her life feeling alone, feeling unloved, feeling ostracized and maligned, gets her one glorious moment.
Her victims are not just the bullies, but the people who rooted for her, who loved her, who tried to help her. And then, having had the cathartic experience of massacring her whole school, she goes home to find in her mother not love or compassion or maternal comfort, but attempted murder. Hey, God let his own son die for our sins; why shouldn’t she sacrifice her daughter? The question remains: Does Margaret think Carrie will go to heaven, or to hell? And then, with her mother pinned cruciform to the walls of her own home, that spartan, ascetic domicile, not far from where she sews at night, she dies and is buried under the house as Carrie tears it down in one final gasp of life. She loves her Momma ’til the end. FL
