Carrie

When one watches Brian De Palma’s 1976 film Carrie, one could easily come to the conclusion that it is a revenge film. After all, the film’s most triumphant moment is when Carrie White lashes out at the people that have constantly berated her. While Carrie’s actions in the film are very much based on rebelling against her fundamentalist mother and the school community that mistreated her, this is not the only way to look at this film. In her article “Horror, Femininity, and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty”, Shelly Stamp argues that this is not a revenge film, but a film that shows the horrors of female adolescence and sexuality from a masculine perspective.

As soon as this film starts, the audience is immediately made a voyeur in the massively important opening scene, which is set in a female locker room. The camera rolls through the rows of lockers showing females both exposed and unexposed, before finally focusing on Carrie, alone in the showers. At this moment, the audience sees Carrie at bliss, but this tranquil moment is interrupted in a shocking way as she menstruates for the first time (Figure 1). Any sort of peace and tranquility is then completely stripped as the girls crowd around her, screaming “Plug it up!”, instantly portraying the onset of female puberty as ugly and a subject of shame. Stamp says that this scene intends to portray that “female sexuality announces itself with a particular violence”.

After this traumatic experience, Carrie is presented with two different ways of dealing with her new-found femininity by the two prominent women in her life: her fundamentalist Christian mother, and her gym teacher, Miss Collins. Mrs. White views her daughter’s burgeoning sexuality as a “transgression” and she forces Carrie to either repress all sexual tendencies, or suffer corporal punishment. Miss Collins is the opposite as the film portrays her as sympathetic to Carrie. She presents Carrie with a “liberating view of femininity”, that is achieved through “good posture, lip gloss, and curls”.

While these viewpoints seem to be direct opposites, they both tie into one of the main themes of the film, which is the masquerade. Both Mrs. White’s idea of sexual repression and Miss Collins’s view of confidence through things like makeup and pretty clothes attempt to cover up the true horrors of female sexuality. While Miss Collins’s work with Carrie can be seen on the surface as helpful to her, all it is doing is “stressing her body’s external surface, or her image”, while what she really is deep down gets covered up.

This film is very much goes full circle in a story that begins with Carrie’s first sexual awakening in the shower, and ends on prom night. When Carrie goes to prom, she fully wears the mask presented to her by Miss Collins. She wears a beautiful dress, lip gloss, curled hair, and at her side is Tommy Ross, the boy which all of her sexual desires are linked to. When she is at the prom, this mask stays on and “for a brief instant, Carrie seems to have recaptured the moment of ecstasy witnessed in the shower”, but that is ruined when Chris dumps a bucket of pigs blood on her head. This moment unveils her, taking away her comforting exterior, and revealing the true feminine monster (Figure 2). The horror that ensues, with Carrie using her telekenetic power to destroy everyone in the gym, is supposed to represent the true danger of unchecked femininity.