a glimpse of the bitter cosmic gumbo ya ya personified

Rating: 10/10 (7 March 2003)

The fortieth anniversary of the release of this masterpiece has come this winter. Many people know this work and many less remember how jolting it was when it appeared on the big screen that year, and much of its impact is lost in the age of audience addictions in the United States that require constant jump scares, endless action clichés and cgi. But CARRIE was released in a time and moment when plot and character development mattered a lot more than they do now, and it is small wonder that this little grand guignol garnered as many academy award nominations as it did.
It is safe to say that everybody knows the story, what with the popularity of the original King novel and the many poor remakes that have been made. So I won't recount any of that here. But even now, some of us still marvel at its subtle depiction of an ugly side of U.S. character that manifests in public schools, a sense of entitlement that magnifies the organic tendency of adolescence to unwarranted cruelty. Stephen King's CARRIE is an exercise in terror, but under Brian DePalma's masterful cinematography and pacing the story line developed into a meditation not only on the given story-line but a reflection of who we were becoming as a people long before the emergence of one Donald Trump.
Consciously or otherwise, CARRIE is a masterful satire on that ugliness, the bland acquiescence of middle class life, the vast limitations of orthodox faith,enforced isolation and the death of curiosity in our culture. That seems a lot to claim for the work, and I would never say that this was the director's intent. It wasn't. It's just that, as the Situationists used to say, certain home truths come creeping out in popular form/expression, whether we would have it so or not. However, this sort of dialogue was alive and thriving when the film was made in those post Vietnam and post Watergate years, which gave us a genuine look at where we were headed. And it is for this reason that all of the remakes have been so unsatisfactory. The latter films focus on social ugliness and revenge and have no sense of subtlety or wit. The big money that backs film making in the United States today would have us believe the absolute worst about ourselves, but that's not what's going on with the original.
CARRIE is pure fantasy, a nightmare, but one that has a rigorous unspoken underpinning. Her character even at its most malevolent is far from the "evil bitch" caricature that people laugh about, it is actually the rage of an energy some "primitive" cultures called the Corn Goddess. It is sweet and benign when not insulted by the ugliness of who we can be, but wrathful when pushed to the limits. And though I am sure this is far from any of what the director consciously intended, all of those things are there for those with eyes to look. The work is marvelous, a glimpse of the bitter cosmic gumbo ya ya personified, and this is why if our sad world is still alive a thousand years from now, people will still be talking about this film.