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.