I Finally Watched Carrie (1976) / Let the Weird Girl Be Weird
“You have to know the rules to break ‘em.” — John Waters
What you guys have to understand about me is that in third grade I pretended to hex a boy on the playground because I thought he was trying to bully me. Everyone was so weirded out I didn’t have friends for the rest of elementary school.
That was kind of my modus operandi in high school too; the way I remember it is I didn’t have a lot of friends and the friends I did have I don’t speak to anymore. I felt like an outcast, I was scared to speak, I was convinced everyone thought I was weird — because people told me I was weird. (And yet I was still performing poetry in front of my entire graduating class so, go figure.)
While there are moments in Carrie that felt true to my experience as a teen girl, especially internally, I cannot separate that this is still a story written by a man. What does Stephen King know about the experience, the cathartic horrors and intense joys of being a teenage girl? King talks about writing Carrie in his memoir On Writing — what inspired it, how he almost gave up on Carrie White entirely. He talks about how he didn’t like Carrie at all, thought she was pathetic and thick and that no one would like her, especially not his female readers. And yet, it was the book that launched his career. He was a high school English teacher writing short stories for men’s magazines when he finally sold the manuscript, which began as three single-spaced pages his wife, Tabitha King, pulled out of his office trash can and told him to keep writing, that he had something.
He writes of Carrie: “The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s.” Carrie White was inspired in part by a real life high school classmate of King’s, a girl named Dodie, who was relentlessly bullied by her peers. Why? For being poor, essentially, but he also notes: “Dodie was everything they were afraid of.” Despite showing up one day with new clothes, the teasing from her classmates, who had “no intention of letting her out of the box they’d put her in,” only became more brutal; Dodie was “punished for even trying to break free.”
“I never liked Carrie, that female version of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, but through Sondra and Dodie I came at last to understand her a little,” King writes. “I pitied her and I pitied her classmates as well, because I had been one of them once upon a time.”
Here’s where I take issue with the author’s understanding of his own character; the character that made him Stephen King.
He describes Carrie as a “female version of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.” Carrie was published in 1974, long before the 1999 Columbine massacre which, at the time, was the deadliest school shooting in the history of the United States. His comparison to Harris and Klebold is a connection that could only come years after Carrie was even written. So, between 1974 and 2000, that’s ultimately what he took away from it.
Let me tell you something: King’s fundamental misunderstanding of his own character is what made him throw those first three pages out in the first place. I guess behind every “great man” is a wife pulling his first best-seller out of the trash. What happened at Columbine was a real-life, premeditated massacre that stemmed from two neo-Nazi psychopaths who craved power and control through violence. They didn’t “snap.” It wasn’t some twisted reaction to prolonged bullying (Harris and Klebold were also bullies). It took planning, premeditation, and time.
Carrie is fictional. Carrie is an allegory for puberty and adolescence. Carrie is a fucking girl.
In an essay titled “Carrie White and All of Our Monsters” for Night Tide Mag, writer Cynthia Gómez speaks to the kinship that young, weird outcasts — particularly girls — find in a character like Carrie White, that “hating our own bodies isn’t just some regrettable, ancillary fact of life for teenage girls, by the way: it is a mandatory hazing ritual, a required initiation into adulthood. Because how much easier is it to oppress an entire group of people when they begin their adult existence by hating themselves?”
When children attack and torment each other, it is because of an ever-growing self-hatred blooming within themselves, facilitated by the society they’ve been raised in; “Children work to punish any deviation from adult society’s roles, without knowing just what they were doing, or why, much less how to escape that role-play entirely, how to escape the twin metal frames of tormentor/victim, destroyer/destroyed (Gómez).”
And this, Gómez writes, is without any consideration in “demolishing a society that produces these roles, again and again, that stretches or slices us into conformity and punishes those who deviate and then tells us that this cruelty is just human nature, and can’t be helped.”
You have to actively resist to break free, but not without being punished first; not without retaliation from the herd.
Here’s how I see it: Carrie’s powers are an extension of her emotions, and her bullies represent her deepest insecurities. When she attacks them at the end, she is attacking her own worst fears. It is, in turn, what they were doing to her in the first place.
Carrie perhaps is an allegory for the sheer power of the mind, particularly the mind of a teenage girl going through puberty, the capacity for emotional depth almost to the point of insanity that a teenage girl is capable of. Tabitha King saw something in those pages worth pulling from the trash — maybe it was herself.
In an interview with Angel Fire, Carrie director Brian de Palma said he wanted to use her telekinesis “as an extension of her emotions — her feelings that were completely translated into actions, that only erupted when she got terribly excited, terribly anxious and terribly sad.”
“It was always a little out of control, almost like FORBIDDEN PLANET where the Id monster is an intellectual man murdering people because he subconsciously wants to. I never wanted to use it arbitrarily, floating stuff around. In a movie that's kind of boring,” he said. “I only ever wanted to use it as an emotional expression of her passions.”
If you’re not familiar with the opening scene of Carrie, here’s the short version: naked teen girls in a locker room. Pan to Sissy Spacek as Carrie, she gets her period for the first time and, not knowing what it is or what’s happening to her, sees blood and assumes she’s dying. Carrie freaks out, gets her bloody hands all over her classmates, who reject and taunt her. Nowadays that happens around a group of girls and everyone’s reaching into their pocketbook to give you a tampon. Someone’s running to get a teacher. What the hell were you all doing in the ‘70s?
Is this human nature? To reject each other in favor of conformity to a higher power?
Carrie is less about Carrie, but about everyone else’s attitude and behavior toward Carrie. These people could have just left her alone to read about her weirdo psychic powers in peace. But when you’re 16, your world is essentially limited to what’s around you. Carrie is learning how to be a woman, mimicking how she sees it represented in the women and girls around her, in the world around her — and so are her peers. They didn’t learn that behavior out of nowhere. Carrie confronts her mother repeatedly, begs her, “talk to me, hold me,” asks, “Why didn’t you tell me?” about her period. But she’s asking, “Why didn’t you tell me how the world works? Why don’t I know who I am?”
Her mother promptly punishes her, and Carrie is rejected for even the most basic of experiences — from her first period to, eventually, buying a prom dress.
It wasn’t intended to be a story about girlhood, though Carrie herself, as a symbol, has transcended and become somewhat of a symbol for a Teenage Girl’s Revenge. What King is doing, perhaps, is setting up the scenario as an allegory — society rejects what it can’t, or won’t, understand.
I was also struck by Nancy Allen’s incessant, almost obsessive, hatred of Carrie. It’s indicative of a larger problem in our culture — this girl, who already had everything you’re “supposed” to have in high school (beautiful + popular + boyfriend), had no real reason to hate Carrie. And still, she is willing to give up going to prom rather than accept the punishment she has been dealt. She wanted the freedom to be cruel.
In many ways, I think Carrie represents a fantasy that weird girls often entertain, which is that our weirdness makes us special, that we’re not “like this” for no reason; there is something more going on here. (You’ve tried to move things with your mind, don’t lie to me.) The Weird Girl is weird because she exists outside of societal norms. She does not fit into the accepted forms of femininity and/or personhood that have been presented to her.
I think often of Allison Reynolds in The Breakfast Club — I always thought she was so cool, and when I was 16 it made me feel very cool when adults would compare me to Ally Sheedy in what, at the time, was one of my favorite movies. And so it felt like a betrayal of sorts when she assimilates at the end. She is an example of the weird girl becoming feminized and now accepted. Sure, the popular girl accepts her and teaches Allison the Ways of The Girl, and now she can get The Boy, and so there we go. It’s an act of kindness. It’s all very nice and neat. Come on, Emily, don’t be so negative.
Carrie, meanwhile, is so excited to become “a girl” because it is her opportunity to become like everyone else. When you do not fit in, you are ridiculed. When you try to fit in, you are beaten back with a stick. But it’s like, can we get the weird girl a stick, please? Or, how about this — can we just let her be weird?
For many of us, our weirdness became a defense mechanism. If we embrace what we are ridiculed for, it can no longer be used against us. Ultimately, I believe that society rejects what it finds difficult to understand – but it can understand. It has the capacity. The issue is that a lot of people don’t want to understand because it’s hard. “Cruelty is just human nature, and can’t be helped.” But it can be helped. You can help it; cruelty is always the lazier option.
Let’s look at a more modern example of the Weird Girl — I Am Not Okay With This was one of the best shows to come out of 2020, and it’s a great tragedy of the pandemic age that we missed out on season 2. Yet the story works as a standalone season; Sophia Lillis plays Sydney Novak, a 17-year-old lesbian girl who begins to realize she has telekinetic powers. In an interview with Variety, show writer Christy Hall spoke about “prized female characters like Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Stephen King’s Carrie, the very beloved Eleven from Stranger Things,” with Sydney being “her own version of this celebrated landscape.”
“I have always seen the powers as a creative metaphor for what it just simply feels like to grow up, and every single thing is under that umbrella,” Hall said. “At the end of the day, it’s a story about a young girl just trying to grow up. And the powers themselves — her abilities — are just a really heightened reflection of how every human feels, male and female.”
I wanna point our attention to the ending of I’m Not Okay With This. Like Carrie, Sydney gets to go to prom. She has friends. A crush! She’s finally feeling normal.
But then here comes the bully whose name is Brad because that’s what bullies are called who, like most bullies, would likely grow up to become a United States senator. He humiliates her, reads her diary, reveals her most private inner thoughts, and calls her a dyke in front of the entire school. He is saying her worst fears out loud: “Everyone in her life thinks she’s a piece of shit. Everyone.”
What happens next is bloody and shocking and no one, not the audience and certainly not Sydney, expected to see Brad the Bully go down like that. And who among us hasn’t daydreamed about having that kind of power, about enacting revenge on your tormentors? That we might hurt our bullies the same or worse than they’ve hurt us? We’re only human and, at one point, we were only kids. Carrie simply let her fury free in the most immediate direction — because she is only a kid, because kids can’t fully grasp the weight of the society they’ve grown up in. Their anger gets turned inward, outward, or both, and it manifests in different ways — eating disorders, self-harm, isolation, self-destructive behaviors, the list goes on and, jeez, can the kids catch a freakin’ break?
“I just wanted him to stop talking, that’s all,” Sydney says in a voice over. “I tried to be normal. But I’m just not wired that way.”
Part of our deepest fears is that finally, once we have been accepted, it can be taken away as quickly and as arbitrarily as it was given. When taken away, it proves our worst fears to be true: that we never deserved it in the first place. But is something so easily revoked even worth having?
In Carrie, the Weird Girl is punished. She dies with her mother in the same house, her same prison, swallowed up by the Earth. Carrie, please: society is never going to accept you. And even if it does accept you, it will be at the expense of yourself, of what made you unique in the first place.
Carrie, please: BE A FREAK.
Carrie wanted nothing more than to be accepted. But maybe it’s not the town, the students, or her mother that should have left Carrie alone — maybe it’s Carrie who should have let go of the need to be accepted by them in the first place. It begs the question — why would you want to be part of a society that values cruelty over kindness? Why not, instead, try something different?
Carrie doesn’t have a weapon. She is the weapon. She becomes the weapon, the tool for her own survival; the thing she uses to sow destruction in the end is the same thing that came from deep within her, that scared her so badly in the first place. This applies to a lot of young kids, but I can only speak to my experience of being a girl, and this is what we have to remember: we live in a violent world, and so we have to become the weapons — in our minds, our bodies, our words — in order to survive it. But once you have survived, what happens then? What version of yourself do you become when there is no one trying to take it from you?
