YOU SHOULD’VE

PLUGGED IT UP, CARRIE!

“I didn’t know the cost of entering one song was to lose your way
back. So I entered. So I lost. I lost it all with my eyes wide open”
– Ocean Voung
And God put a curse on Eve, and this curse was to be a
female character written by a man

It is a firm conviction of mine to believe that everything we see or think we see

in a work of art speaks in the first instance of us, as spectators and
deconstructors of the work, and in the second instance of the author, as the
official elector of what is told and how it is told. Thus when you come across
the random use of the n-word in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) or the
painfully long and explicit rape scene in Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible (2002), you
tend to think: first, obviously, ‘ugh’ and second, ‘why is this here if it does not
contribute to the narrative or to the aesthetics in any form?’; and my answer, in
both cases, focuses on the lack of artistic intentionality and the pure pleasure of
the author, meaning you see it because the director wanted to see it -not that he
wanted you to see it, which would be quite different-. Now, while it is true that
horror has women as protagonists more than any other genre, and that they
generally enjoy greater agency as well, their narrative construction as such is at a
high cost: that of becoming villains or, at the very least, identifying with the
villain in some way. In the kind of horror inaugurated by Brian de Palma’s
Carrie, in which victim and villain occupy the same body, we find the filmic
reconstruction of the mandatory shame structurally demanded of women,
victims of their own gender: monstrous womanhood. It is as such my main
objective with this essay, following the ideas of Abigail Lynn Coykendall and
Shelley Stamp Lindsey, to propose a feminist reading of Carrie and the bucket
sequence, and pose the latter as the punitive climax against Carrie's femininity,
a consequence of her failure to repress her feminine monstrosity. And,
ultimately, that this filmic frame is neither causal nor innocent, rather it refers
directly to Brian de Palma's choices as a director and, of course, as a man.
Carrie was Stephen King's debut novel, published in 1974, and his first work
adapted to the big screen in 1976, directed by Brian De Palma and adapted by
Lawrence D. Cohen. For the purposes of this essay, it is assumed that the
analysis is applicable to the novel because of its plot overlaps, but will refer
exclusively to the film and how aspects present in the book of the same name
are reinforced or recreated in the film through different filmic narrative
techniques.

The first deserter of the divine law

As said before, my main theses postulates that Carrie portrays a monstrous

condition of femininity and female sexuality, against which Carrie tries to fight
since the onset of puberty, with her first period, and which she ends up
accepting and enhancing, facing a punitive and recriminatory end for this act.
Female sexuality is to be repressed and objectified, never a site in which the
female gains itself but gains the other through his scopophilic desire -gains the
possibility of being possessed, not the ability to the possessed-. Achieving
agency in her own sexuality is for the woman an antichrist and monstrous act;
“puberty, the movie seems to tell us, makes monsters out of girls” (Yhara zayd,
2020, 3:22). In my view there are two main ways in which the film conveys this
idea: first, through symbolic associations between femininity and monstrosity
-especially how the latter begins with the onset of puberty-; and second,
through a cinematic gaze that objectifies women and Carrie and, finding no
male character sufficiently principal to carry the weight of 'objectifier,' i.e.
subject, offers this role to the viewer, through the identification with the
camera.
Encoding misogyny
The idea of femininity being monstrous is encoded in the passage of childhood
or girlhood to womanhood, simultaneous with Carrie's journey to accept,
understand and manage her telekinetic powers. “Carrie's adolescent body
becomes the site upon which monster and victim converge, and we are
encouraged to postulate that a monster resides within her” (Lindsey, 1991, 35).
This path begin in the initial scene, in which Carrie, totally unaware of what it
means because of the non-existent sexual education of her religious mother,
suffers her period for the first time, and frightened by the blood, goes to the
desperate help of her classmates, who instead of empathizing with her begin to
insult and make fun of her. This episode of youthful mistreatment triggers
such anxiety in Carrie that her powers make their first appearance, and she
explodes the light in the locker room. In this fragment the
femininity-monstrosity association is obvious, since her powers begin with her
period, the determining factor in women (excepting trans women, of course) of
abandoning childhood and entering sexual maturity. Another important aspect
is the violence Carrie receives, which can be interpreted as punishment for
becoming a woman. In this way, not only is femininity monstrous because it is
related to supernatural powers but also because of the recriminatory treatment
it receives. This idea of punishment is repeated throughout the film both from
the social axis, embodied by her high school classmates, as well as from the
religious axis, mainly starring her mother and her imperative limitation of
Carrie's sexual or feminine freedoms. Two scenes are interesting with regard to
this last aspect: first, when Carrie returns home after the shower episode and
her mother angrily chastises her for her first period, identifying her with Eve
and making her repeat Christian dogmas denouncing the indwelling sin in
women, thus elevating Carrie's condition to the mythological, a plane in which
misogyny is intrinsic and without escape ("And God made Eve from the rib of
Adam. And Eve was weak and loosed the raven on the world. And the raven was
called sin. Say it, the raven was called sin", says Carrie's mother); second, when
Carrie tries to convince her mother to go to prom with Tommy and in the face
of her categorical refusal, Carrie closes all the windows of the house with
telekinesis. This fragment is highly relevant because it is more or less the first
time Carrie uses her powers consciously and not stress-induced; and because
this, that Carrie has gained agency over her condition, causes her mother to
identify her as a witch ("Things are gonna change around here mama", says
Carrie, "Witch. You've got Satan's powers", responds her mother), an essential
archetype of the mystification of women as monsters, as witches exemplify the
idea that knowledge and autonomy corrupt women.

You know women’s locker rooms are not like that, right?
For the matter of the male gaze in Carrie my main focus is going to be the
shower scene. Without any visual limitations whatsoever, De Palma shows us a
totally idyllic and pasteurized sequence, contrasting with the aggressiveness that
follows. The teenage girls - let's remember that we are in a high school - run
around the changing room naked, playing, mischievous. “Diegetic sound is
replaced by a lyrical musical theme and slowed, steam-filled images sever
connections with temporality and materiality : these are ethereal creatures,
nymphs at the water pond” (Lindsey, 1991, 34). And then we face her, Carrie,
showering by herself although in line with the aesthetics presented above. The
detailed shots of her breasts, of her wiping her leg, of her face full of pleasure
are almost pornographic, but it is an extremely beautiful and pure eroticism, in
a confusing - and, honestly, alarming - way. And suddenly, it all breaks. The
blood trickles down her leg and the music fades, leaving us with only her cries
for help. The shots become rigid and change violently. From absolute
renaissance ideality we pass to the crudest violence. The trigger? The arrival of
femininity, and more importantly in this case, a femininity that becomes
public.

For Laura Mulvey, cinematically women reproduce patriarchal values by being

completely null and void as signifying agents and instead act as objects for the
male subject. In this way, the female character can only provoke or cause
actions, never carry them out: she is the damsel in distress, the dead wife for
whom the male character suffers, and millions of other examples. Mulvey calls
this property ‘to-be-looked-at-ness' and it comprises all male fantasies for which
the woman is stylised accordingly. (Mulvey, 2009,). Her reflection goes on to
determine the method by which cinema canonically constructs this value
structure: the male gaze. Male gaze is like a filter that makes us perceive every
scene through the eyes of the most important male character and with whom
we identify because he is portrayed as superior. But what about films like
Carrie, where there is no main male character? In her essay Bodies Cinematic,
Bodies Politic: The "Male" Gaze and the "Female" Gothic in De Palma's Carrie,
Abigail Lynn Coykendall writes:
 “The camera entangles the seen with the seer, its hallucinatory,
anesthetized magic simultaneously engendering and consuming
-transporting and transfixing- the viewer without itself offering a source
to ‘cite’ the origin of that embodiment or consumption” (Coykendall,
2000, 340)

As we see the pre-menstruation sequence, we have the feeling of being induced

by the male vision, yet there is no male subject to attribute that look to and
identify with in turn, which Mulvey suggests happens in hegemonic cinema;
what the spectator encounters in fact is that the camera acts as another
character, a male character in this case. Because the objectifying gaze cannot be
carried out by a male character it is written on Carrie’s body and reinforced by
the camera, by how it portrays femininity and female sexuality. Moreover, if in
a conventional film it would be the male agent acting as repressor of the female
gaining agency over her body, it is now the camera and its shift from purity to
violence when Carrie bleeds that conveys this idea.
Another scene, trivial in the first instance, perfectly represents the concept of
the camera as the main male agent. Chris, Carrie's biggest bully, and her
boyfriend Billy are in the car. She is putting on her make-up and he is driving,
enjoying the music on the radio. De Palma first gives us a close-up of Chris and
with a slight movement focuses on his chest. As a viewer the narrative logic
leads you to assume that it is Billy who is looking, however when the shot shifts
to Billy we see him singing and looking at the road, the logic breaks down, who
is looking then? The camera and consequently us, forced to objectify Chris.
I also have the desire to kill everyone when I get my
period

Finally, we come to the crux of this essay in which I will focus on the fragment
of the bucket of blood, proposing it as the climax of the conception of
femininity-monstrosity. The fragment begins with the collection of ballots for
prom queen and king. Carrie has gone to the prom with Tommy, in a silk dress
and make-up. She's having a good time and finally feels like she's starting to fit
in. She has accepted her telekinesis and has taken ownership of it as well as her
life, contradicting her mother and facing her fears. She seems almost to have
forgotten the frightened little girl in the showers. And then, she wins prom
queen. She gets on stage with Tommy and it all seems like a dream. “Again, the
action is slowed and filmed with a moving camera, while diegetic sound is
replaced by the now familiar lyrical theme. For a brief instant, Carrie seems to
have recaptured the moment of ecstasy witnessed in the shower.” (Lindsey,
1991, 39). And suddenly, the dream is broken again. Chris's final prank is
played and Carrie finds herself covered in pig's blood. “Equating pig's blood
with Carrie's menstrual blood, this inverted shower scene explicitly associates
female sexuality with violence, contagion, and death” (Lindsey, 1991, 39). The
image of the pure and beautiful woman falls and the monstrous feminine being
is reborn, the one who bleeds and, much worse, does so in front of everyone. If
the awarding of the prize is the consummation of Carrie as a sexual object, not
as an agent, the final joke is her punishment for having cheated; Carrie tried to
keep her powers and be prom queen, that is, she tried to occupy the hegemonic
feminine position without giving up her monstrous inner power, and that is
intolerable. Apart from the clear codification of the female explosion as an
explosion of blood, gore and violence (reminiscent of the red lights and hellfire,
here again the relation to Christianity), we find a shift in the scopopopohilic
gaze. As I said before, the camera acted in the course of the film as a male agent
in order to offer an objectification of Carrie in the absence of a relevant male
character. But when the bucket of blood falls and Carrie realizes that she will
never get the position she longs for, her gaze turns cold and direct and the
telekinetic massacre begins. The screen splits in two and we see Carrie and what
she is seeing, she is the gaze in that moment. This is not only a reinforcement of
her telekinesis, understood as action without action - the observant action - but
I propose to understand it also as the camera ceding to Carrie its objectifying
look with which not only to be able to murder other people but also, and more
significantly, to be able to see herself as monstrous. It is for this reason that
when she arrives home she goes to wash herself in the bathroom - without
referring to the initial scene, there is no beauty in this act - and repentantly tries
to get consolation from her mother. But her mother tries to kill her, believing
her to be a divine punishment for her own sexual desires (again the association
of female sexuality with mythological evil), and in self-defence it is Carrie who
ends up murdering her mother. She then destroys the house on top of herself,
committing suicide. She has seen the destruction she has caused and, aware that
it all goes back to her essence, understands that there is no other solution than
death. “Carrie is not about liberation from sexual repression but about the
failure of repression to contain the monstruous femenine” (Lindsey, 1991, 40)
References
Coykendall. (2000). Bodies Cinematic, Bodies Politic: The "Male" Gaze and
the "Female" Gothic in De Palma's Carrie. Journal of Narrative Theory, 30(3),
332–363. https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2011.0058

Lindsey. (1991). HORROR, FEMININITY, AND CARRIE'S

MONSTROUS PUBERTY. Journal of Film and Video, 43(4), 33–44.

Mulvey. (2009). Visual and other pleasures (2nd ed.). : Palgrave MacMillan.

Yhara zayd. (2020, October 16). A Monstress Comes of Age: Horror &
Girlhood [Video]. YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkUbP2KVVl8