The Trouble with Carrie

I haven't seen Mike Flanagan's adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie, but going by what I've seen of his other work (namely Doctor Sleep and The Fall of the House of Usher) I assume that it sets things up rather nicely and then falls apart towards the end. Cultural continuity being what it is, Kim Newman once made a similar complaint about Brian De Palma's 1976 film version: according to Nightmare Movies (1988), the final dream sequence

may well be the best cheap shot in the cinema, but it cancels out the film that precedes it. Until the fade-out, audiences have been one hundred per cent involved with Carrie White. ... Suddenly her allegiance is transferred to Sue, at best a neutral character, and Carrie becomes the horrifying, malevolent witch the rest of the film has demonstrated she definitely isn't.

Amid a general indictment of the film's "unsympathetic" nature and "essential callousness," Newman questions why Carrie's only sympathetic teacher must be killed off in a "meaningless split-screen aside." In fact the split-screen has previously shown the teacher through Carrie's eyes, pointing and laughing with everyone else, while other shots have demonstrated this image to be false: Carrie's ordeal has caused her to lose her frail hold on reality and hallucinate the teacher as one more among her persecutors. Far from being meaningless, the teacher's relegation to an aside is one hundred per cent involved with Carrie White.

Obviously I'm not going to argue with anyone about which character they personally feel most involved with (and in the 2008 reboot of Nightmare Movies Newman says he now thinks better of De Palma's work in general), but full allegiance with Carrie is plainly not the intention of either the novel or the film. Even at worst, Sue is hardly a neutral character: she participates in the shower-room assault but then spends the rest of the story trying to atone, to the extent of giving up her place at the senior prom and persuading her hunk-with-a-heart boyfriend to invite Carrie instead. At the film's climax Sue is the first to detect the pig-blood trap and attempts to intervene and foil it. The story's essential callousness lies less in lack of sympathy per se than in diverting sympathy away from the gawky underdog in order to lavish it on one of the beautiful people.

Like the similar coda to De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980), Sue's final nightmare demonstrates that putting yourself on the side of the angels doesn't necessarily mean you will sleep any better. As with most of the film's changes, this is an improvement on the book, which afflicts Sue with a pregnancy scare and rewards her redemption with a menstrual flow that echoes and opposes Carrie's trauma at the beginning. Scarcely less crude, and common to novel and film, is the gross genre payback of having Carrie and her escort vote for themselves as prom king and queen and then win by a single vote, thereby ensuring the success of the bullies' plot. Admittedly this does have some thematic relevance: after her escort's humorous invocation of Satan ("to the devil with false modesty"), the débâcle presumably pushes Carrie into believing that she really is a horrifying, malevolent witch, her wallowing in worldly glamour punished with a rain of blood, and that she might as well deal with her enemies accordingly. Somewhere in there is also a potentially fruitful point about rejecting one brutal and insane value system (her mother's religion) only to be duped into another (acceptance by the mob); but the device as it stands seems more to imply that we shouldn't feel too bad about Carrie's fate since, after all, she helped to bring it on herself.

The book does invite us to feel pity for Carrie, if not much more than that; but as teenage heroines go she's an uncommercial proposition: "a frog among swans" as the third-person narrative bitchily introduces her. Hence the need for one of the swans to assume the role of flawed but fundamentally decent and far less ungainly identification figure; but the dodge is over-played and defeats itself. Sue is not only pretty and popular, but the most popular girl in the school, which endows her redemption with somewhat less realism than the telekinetic apocalypse that ensues. Surely such a character would be a more skilful politician than to concern herself with the town pariah, let alone to sacrifice a major social début because of remorse on the leper's behalf. In the book, Carrie is overweight and acne-ridden (until prom night induces a Cinderellic beautification) and her mother a moon-faced ogre; in the film, as played by Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, they are both far more attractive. This make-over essentially removes the need for a better-looking heroine to channel the audience's sympathy, and the film would have benefited by treating the story as King's more rigorous colleague Richard Bachman might have done: dispensing with Sue, concentrating on Carrie, and finding a more convincing way to get her under those buckets than the science-fiction contrivance of a repentant princess.

Woke Vanity

Cosmetics which are made and marketed without reference to Health and Safety rouge tape are likely to contain lead and mercury: ingredients which were widely used during the formative period of the British Empire. In those great days a few chemical burns or a touch of neurological decay and organ failure were considered a price worth paying for the duty and privilege of having a white skin. Alas, in these dark and decadent times when independent facial enhancement entrepreneurs are denounced and persecuted for taking British beauty back to the good old days, this high moral standard has been sadly subsumed.

Commercial Bodies

Apocalyptic levels of corporate tact continue to prevail in South Korea. Mere months after Starbucks' little gaffe involving some lazy executives relying on an infoslop generator, the manufacturers of a combat video game have committed another by not bothering to fake their own footage. Instead the game uses clips from the Seoul crowd disaster of Halloween 2022, which cost the lives of a hundred and sixty non-Caucasians. The intention was to evoke the consequences of an unauthorised reunification of the peninsula by the Democratic People's Republic, whose record of inflicting civilian casualties outside its own borders lags somewhat behind that of the Freedomising Powers and was therefore evidently in need of a vérité boost to its credibility.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin

It seems the Heathen Chinee have ascended so far into Britishness as to raise a generation of young adults without troubling to provide them with a viable future; and it remains as yet unclear whether even a world war over plucky little Formosa would be a fiscally responsible way of using them up. Hence a new craze for raising bricks, or more accurately raising the mosses that accumulate on them, whose undemanding tenacity provides a sense of stability without imposing strenuous obligations. In keeping with their clashing civilisational values, the Heathen Chinee media have dispensed advice about how to avoid the health hazards associated with the spores, while Britain's leading liberal newspaper has decided to have a bit of a snigger.

Mysterious Ways

Besides being a byword for political unworldliness, the Church of Rome is of course noted for its aversion to putting sex pests in positions of power, and is also famously fastidious about cosying up to fascists. Doubtless this explains the shock with which some Catholic bishops have greeted the Trumpster administration's use of a supposedly private occasion to create a campaign photo-opportunity. As befits a national Saviour, the Trumpster had invited twelve disciples for a discussion of "fertility treatment incentives, abortion-inducing drugs and tax credits for private schools" and other elevated matters, followed by a low-key violation of Matthew 6 vi - only for his team to take photos and video of the sacred affair and upload them on social media. Having been invited for "private prayer" a few days before some major elections, the simple servants could not possibly anticipate that the betribbled one of all men might have been plotting anything so crass and self-serving.

Defensive Decency

Whether inducing the poor towards greater thrift or empowering the disabled to earn their bare existence, British generosity is usually a prudent, penny-pinching affair; and rarely more so than in the matter of international aid. Once an extravagant seven-tenths of one per cent of national income, the master race's contribution has been cut to a bountiful three-tenths of one per cent, which now appears on course to be delivered after the time-honoured Team Starmer fashion. Being morally above considerations of soft power and pragmatically committed to profitable procurement for a third world war within half a decade, His Majesty's Government can hardly be expected to concern itself with dispensing pocket money to a lot of wogs who will just need bombing into proper economic values anyway.

Even the Saucers Aren't What They Were

Given that its chief executive is controlled entirely by the diarrhoeic defecations of a rabid radioactive head-tribble, it should come as no surprise that the United States monarchy is seeking to distract credulous subjects with less well-substantiated rumours of alien incursion. In keeping with the Trumpster's promises of full disclosure, the Pentagon's revelations about unverifiably asserted phenomena have become more meagre and less tainted by evidence, and the latest tranche includes an assertion by some redacted persons about some speedy black triangles which appeared over a redacted location and then vanished without trace. The witnesses are two senior military observers, and thus hardly less reliable than the greased and tattooed Secretary of War himself; and they have considerately provided artists' impressions of black triangles over a landscape to show what the phenomenon was like. Nevertheless, at least one academic expert has been cynical enough to dismiss this documentation as "little more than a black triangle shape superimposed on a landscape background," which just goes to show how unconstructively critical some people can be.

Blaze Up

Someone has burned down Hitler's retreat in the mountains, hopefully with less unfortunate consequences than when a certain Dutch dimwit set fire to the Reichstag. Most of Hitler's architectural legacy long ago succumbed to Bomber Command and the denazification process; but the Eagle's Nest was preserved as a monument to the "insanity of the régime," which seems to have made about as much moral difference as one would expect. Presumably the site's inaccessibility amid the Bavarian heights prevented its becoming a shrine to anything beyond historical complacency and holy commerce; its destruction will serve as yet one more gratuitous reminder that there is no lesson so elevated that it can't eventually go up in smoke.

Beating Time

Encouraging signs of cultural Britishness have emerged from the disorder in Paris, where riot police tear-gassed an orchestra at Place de la République, under the eyes of Marianne herself. The orchestra describes itself as anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, environmentalist and committed to de-growth, which is about as provocative towards the forces of centrist moderation as anyone could dare to get. Fortunately, orchestras in general are famously less perilous to assault than angry mobs and actual criminals, and it is only natural that the forces of centrist moderation should wish to avoid excessive risk of harm to their frères et semblables in the ever-sensitive fascist and looter communities.

Warm Welcome

Readers of H G Wells and listeners to Jeff Wayne will recall The War of the Worlds, in which the invading Martians deploy a Heat-Ray as their primary weapon. As the loyal servant of a still more alien overlord, America's greased and tattooed Secretary of State for War has apparently approved a similar weapon for use in the latest Mexican war. In fact, the American system is technically no more a heat ray than the greased and tattooed Secretary is technically a statesman: it emits waves of energy that penetrate about a sixty-fourth of an inch into the epidermis, presumably because the Department for Homeland Security doesn't care to get any deeper under the swarthy skins of the illegals. Initially developed by the Pentagon, the weapon was taken to Afghanistan and back without being used; but the current alien intervention may yet enable it to be tested in the battle to liberate the greatest country in the world from the marauding wetback empire, despite its capabilities falling considerably short of incinerating Woking. Tentacled crania dependent on mechanical exoskeletons, Wells' Martians represent a possible future human species; the hydrophobic head-tribble whose radioactive defecations control the Trumpster is an altogether less anthropomorphic entity, and its Heat-Ray accordingly less well adapted to the terrestrial environment.