The Problematics: ‘Carrie’ Explores Teen Sexuality Through Brian De Palma’s Overtly Male Gaze (And Lots Of Pig Blood)

Is teen sexuality a topic into which any film critic should wade? No. Film critics should not wade into this morass. Nobody should wade into this morass. This should be obvious right now, if you’ve got any grasp into social media. The prevailing ethos, one might discern, is that while exploring and modifying gender identity is good for all ages, anything resembling actual sexual activity is less so.

Admittedly, this is a rather roundabout way of bringing us to Carrie, the now-sorta-classic 1976 Brian De Palma horror film celebrating its 45th anniversary today. In my recollection, the breakthrough 1973 Stephen King novel about high-schoolers was pretty popular with actual high-schoolers back in the day; I remember many upper classmen carrying around the paperback and comparing juicy bits, much as they did with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather a couple of years prior. The King book was one that gave pop culture a proper and explicit introduction to telekinesis, that being the move-things-with-my-mind power that poor Carrie White uses to fix both her religious-fanatic mother and her peer prom-ruiner’s at the story’s wild climax.

Then hotshot director De Palma, most of whose films up to this one reveled in a snarky, sometimes perverse subversive streak, brought not-inconsiderable irreverence to this project, which he definitely sensed could be a commercial hit that would sharpen his studio-filmmaking profile. Look at a dinner scene between Sissy Spacek’s Carrie and her unbalanced mom, played with pitch-perfect awareness by Piper Laurie. When Carrie reveals “I’ve been invited to the prom?”, Mom raises an eyebrow and says “Prom?” At that moment, lightning flashes like something out of a Universal Frankenstein movie.

The virtuosic director goes all-but-kitchen-sink in orchestrating effects to achieve maximum shock and horror: diopter shots, shock cuts, rack focusing, you name it. The way the movie hews to the time that it was made is in its matter-of-fact treatment of how high schoolers got it on, supposedly.

Here Carrie’s tormentors here are both super mean and super horny. John Travolta’s Billy, boyfriend to Nancy Allen’s gum-cracking, eye-rolling horror show Chris, is both dumb and physically abusive. There’s shot-reverse-shot bit in which Billy leers at Chris’s braless breasts under her sweater that shares the character’s joy of ogling. In the same scene, Chris uses fellatio to inveigle “dumb shit” Billy into taking part in her evil scheme to avenge herself on Carrie. And here too, De Palma can’t resist a joke, having Chris interrupt her efforts to exclaim “I hate Carrie White,” much to Billy’s confusion.

The 1976 movie’s opening scene, in which the horrified Carrie experiences menstruation for the first time in the girl’s locker room shower post-gym class, is shot in a gauzy, dreamy, slow-motion, and literally steamy male-gaze fashion that De Palma would use again in the opening of Dressed To Kill, with Angie Dickinson (and her body double) fantasizing rhapsodically about sex with a hunky stranger. Nancy Allen — director De Palma’s future wife, it’s worth mentioning — bounces by in the altogether, and De Palma lingers on Spacek’s Carrie soaping up her breasts, belly, and thighs. (The score by Pino Donaggio has a flute melody that suggests some kind of ad concerning the “special times” of one’s life.) But as much as De Palma luxuriates here, the strategy is to overturn whatever pleasure the male viewer might derive by depicting Carrie’s “plug it up” humiliation in excruciating detail.

The 2013 Carrie remake, directed by Kimberley Peirce, maintains the period of discovery — or, rather, the discovery of period — in the girls’ shower, but also keeps the taunting teens in towels or underwear. And it shows Carrie mostly from the shoulders up, certain shot choices paying homage to the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho as she goes. (Why didn’t De Palma think of that?) As for sex, popular kids Tommy and Sue are sufficiently reflective characters that they interrupt their (very briefly depicted) coitus to discuss Sue’s guilty feelings about throwing tampons at Carrie. There’s more time devoted to the ins and outs of how Chris and Billy get all that pig’s blood than to the details of their fraught relationship. (Cell phone videos are added to the mix, too.) But as Manohla Dargis pointed out in her mostly favorable review of the remake in The New York Times, “the dread of the female body that deepens Mr. De Palma’s version somehow goes missing.”

That dread is not unrelated to a less specifically gendered trend that was brewing in genre movies in this period, eventually termed “body horror.” Carrie can nestle comfortably — or uncomfortably, as the case may be — between David Cronenberg’s 1975 and 1977 films Shivers and Rabid in this respect. And Julia Decorneau’s new, provocative French film Titane is a proud and prominent inheritor of what De Palma and Cronenberg were up to. Whereas Peirce’s remake re-centers the movie around Carrie’s relationship with her mother (in the newer film, Carrie is played by Chloe Moretz, and the mom by Julianne Moore), and the theme becomes twisted family relations, for better or worse.

A large part of what makes De Palma’s Carrie potentially problematic is also a source of its unsettling power. The girl’s shower scene notwithstanding, the treatment of teen sexuality isn’t intended solely to titillate; rather, it makes a mordant commentary on the use of sex as a weapon, leaning heavy on a female vamp stereotype. While we now consider that a retrograde cliché, it’s not a condition without real-life precedent. As good art sometimes ought to do, the whole mix renders the viewer uneasy.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.

Where to stream Carrie (1976)

Where to stream Carrie (2013)