Trapped in the closet

Rating: Null/10 (23 October 2007)

"I'm coming out, I want the world to know." - Diana Ross
In "Sisters", director Brian De Palma has a Siamese twin take on the personality of her homicidal "other half". In "Obsession", he has a daughter takes on an incestuous role (largely edited out by studios), usurping her dead mother and symbolically "marrying" her father. In "Dressed to Kill", he has a transvestite's "feminine half" killing women in an attempt to instigate a sex change operation.
With "Carrie", which revolves around the tumultuous life of a schoolgirl named Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), De Palma continues his kinky gender wars. Every woman in "Carrie" is understood entirely in terms of their own sexual frustrations. Carrie's mother and teacher are middle aged loners. One is a religious fundamentalist, the other a lonely romantic. On Carrie's prom night, both women vie for Carrie. One views the prom as a vile ritual, the other recalls her own prom as a moment of adolescent innocence.
The younger generation of women within the film represent a similar polarity. We have Sue, a well meaning monogamist who wants to help Carrie, and Chrissy, a mean nymphomaniac who wants to destroy Carrie. Both their boyfriends take on a similar duality. Chrissy's boyfriend (John Travolta) is an over-sexed alpha male whilst Sue's boyfriend is a kind-hearted poet. What's interesting is that both men are submissive to their women, as are virtually all male characters in the film.
Significantly, Carrie begins the film as a child, but pushes into womanhood when hen she menstruates in a shower. As Carrie's mother was sexually abused in the past, a fact which leads her to both reject femininity and transpose her fears onto her daughter, Carrie's own rites of passage is made to seem terrifying. Later, Carrie's peers seek to reawaken the woman "within" her, while others seek to destroy "it". At the prom, these two ideals - repressed femininity vs promiscuity - collide with Carrie in the middle. In either case, Carrie has no control over her own sexual identity.
Visually, De Palma's film is special, virtually every sequence idiosyncratically shot. Watch, for example, how he begins each act with grand brush strokes. In the first, he paints Carrie as a loner, his camera constantly "finding her" outside of the crowd. Epitomizing this is a crane shot which begins high above a girl's volleyball court and ends with the camera swooping down and finding Carrie ostracised from the group. The following scene is a dreamy shower sequence. Here various girls are portrayed as naked nymphs, in touch with their free-flowing sexuality, a far cry from the more repressed Carrie, who is once again alone. De Palma's next shot continues this pattern. We're floating through school hallways, watching kids go by, until we find Carrie, all by herself. When Carrie returns to school the next day, the camera will again probe the classroom, before finding her seated alone at the back.
With each act of the film, De Palma's camera adapts to reflect changes in Carrie's psychology. Act one, she's a loner at school. Act two, she's oppressed at home by her mother (and God). Act 3, she caught in a tug of war between various female characters. Act 4, Carrie is part of the group. Act 5, Carrie is betrayed by the group. Act 6, Carrie transcends and destroys the group with her newfound powers.
Each act is shot with an emphasis on different colours and with its own camera language. The crane shots in the first half mirror the crane shots in the prom sequence, only now Carrie is engulfed in crowds of well wishers. When pigs' blood falls upon Carrie, a mean prank which echoes earlier, humiliating menstruation sequences, Carrie is again quickly detached from the group. The film is also book-ended by two symbolic shower scenes. In the first Carrie attains womanhood (and is mocked for it), in the second she revokes it in favour for self-repression. Here she essentially becomes her repressed mother, which De Palma highlights by having Carrie put on her mother's gown.
But when her mother ALSO turns against her, Carrie is forced to break free. She rejects all these female characters (all the school girls are female archetypes) and blazes her own trail. Say hello to next generation femininity: empowered and answering to no one.
Carrie's mother is also a fairly interesting character. As Carrie prepares for the prom, her mother prays to herself, sexually rocking back and forth with a rosary. Because the absence of sex in her life is replaced by an exaggerated obsession with spirituality, her repressed sexual energy is released through this hallowed symbol. The rest of the film is similarly awash with sexuality and overt phallic symbols. Close ups of red lips, phallic shower heads, carrots, castration, thin gowns and gym shorts etc.
What's also interesting is De Palma's use of the famous music shriek from Psycho. Critics accuse De Palma of stealing from Hitch, but the sound effect also makes an interesting statement. Hitchcock's film dealt with an oppressive mother and focused on her damaging effect on her grown son. "Carrie" is a film devoid of men or sons - though a wholly patriarchal religion weights heavily on Carrie - and instead focuses on oppositions within a kind of female collective.
The film's final scene (a dream sequence), shows the only self sacrificing (she gave up her man to help another woman), conscientious young woman in the picture (Sue), haunted by the actions of both herself and womankind as a whole. Of all the dream sequence endings in De Palma's films - and there are many - this is perhaps the most optimistic.
8.5/10 - An early De Palma classic.