What Everyone Got Wrong About Carrie
Carrie is a story of revenge against your bullies. But it's also a lot more, and you deserve to hear the full story.
Okay, so, this year I embarked on my mission of reading one Stephen King book every quarter until I catch up. (Which will take about 25 years because he’s published about 100 books. See you when we’re all dead!)
The plan is to read the books I haven’t read chronologically, which means starting with Carrie. There’s obviously mystique around the book, partially because it was King’s debut. He claims he threw the manuscript away, barely started, when his wife fished it out of the trashcan and encouraged him to finish. If that never happened, we might have never got Stephen King.
I read the book and then watched all the movies (including the 2002 made for TV version) and none of the movies have given a faithful representation of the story that’s on those pages. They all suffer for it.
King’s analysis of popularity’s limited power is central to the Carrie narrative, and is flattened in every movie so far. What’s missing in the movies is that, leading up to the prom, Carrie’s social status rockets. By the time she walks into to prom, she is no longer a social outcast, she could almost be considered popular. But she’s too traumatized to see it for herself. The remorse and repair of her bullies is imperceptible to her. That inability to see it is what kills her fellow students. It is a profound commentary on status, self-perception, and social imagination1.
The book famously starts with Carrie getting her first period in a group shower after gym class. The menstrual bleeding triggers a meltdown. Carrie believes she’s bleeding to death (her hyper-religious mother hasn’t told her about puberty), and the other girls jeer, throwing tampons and pads at her, screaming “Plug it up! Plug it up!” The most popular girl in Carrie’s school, Sue Snell, soon regrets her role in this episode and works to socially rehab Carrie, surrendering her own boyfriend as a prom date. It’s at this prom where the story’s main antagonist, Chris Hargensen (who is not quite as popular as Sue), enacts a plot to humiliate Carrie by drenching her in pig’s blood in front of the whole school. Enraged, Carrie uses her telekinetic powers to kill everyone in school and then destroy the town.
This is the story that most know, that appears in all the movies.
But lost in distilling the story into a single paragraph: before Carrie decides to burn the town and kill over 400 people, the kids at her school are falling in love with her. Her trauma of being bullied doesn’t shift as quickly as her peers’ opinions do. So they all end up dead.
In the book, when Carrie lashes out and destroys the town, Stephen King has worked his ass off to make the audience unsure of who to root for. In the movies it’s all very clear: the other students are irredeemable assholes, Carrie is understandably pissed, so we should let her do what she needs to do. In the book, the students are still jerks but a third of the way into the book, all the other students have been chastised except Chris. And even Chris’s mind will change by the end. When Carrie walks into the prom, the students are falling in love with her. (You can glimpse this in the 1976 De Palma film: Carrie’s ethereal experience and the kiss she shares with Sue’s boyfriend, Tommy.)
Critical to Chris’ plan is that Carrie must win prom queen to get her on the stage and within the target for the bucket of blood, so Chris rigs the votes to ensure Carrie’s victory. Each movie does it exactly the same: Chris and her cronies toss out the legitimate ballots and replace them with votes for Carrie. But in the book, the efforts are opaque. Chris’s friend manipulates some votes in a way that’s never described and it doesn’t really work. On a first vote there is a tie, and on a revote Carrie and her date win by only a single ballot. The voting isn’t decisive, and the efforts ultimately succeed - but mostly by chance.
In the movies, the power and efforts of the popular are direct and overwhelming. In the book that power is soft, limited, and mostly imaginary.
Then, by the time Carrie is on stage, even Chris no longer wants to humiliate Carrie anymore. She has softened, but her abusive older-than-high-school boyfriend Billy pushes her. When the blood finally drops on Carrie, the only person who wants to hurt her is a young man who doesn’t know her, and he does it to express his own violent pathology.
These seemingly innocuous changes make the stories sharply different. In the book’s version the grip of social class is more imagined than it is real. It lives in the mind of the victim, not in the wielding of the popular class. Because of Carrie’s trauma and her internal entrenchment of the power dynamics, she cannot perceive or believe that the dynamics are shifting. Maybe the dynamics haven’t shifted enough, maybe it’s all happened too quickly, maybe Carrie cannot believe that she’d be anything but a victim. When the blood drops on her, pushed by the one person who hasn’t accepted her, she operates from the position of revenge. As the audience we know the revenge is no longer explicitly warranted, but the train has understandably left the station.
As readers, we can imagine that if the plan to humiliate Carrie was never enacted, things might have been different. It’s not that Carrie would suddenly be awash with friends, but it’s easy to believe that her status would at least rise to permissible existence, even if invisible, rather than the focus of derision.
And the plan to humiliate Carrie almost wasn’t enacted. Chris decides at the very last moment not to pull the rope that drops the blood. But Billy forces her. Everything was reversible, until it wasn’t. It wasn’t inevitable. 400 lives hung in the balance. The deciding factor was the chaotic pathology of an interloper.
With these elements, Carrie becomes a story about how the actions of a few influence the behavior of more but not all. That when people connect on a human level, social order can change. That trauma and bullying flow unidirectionally: once bullying happens, the repair cannot only be punishment of the bullies. The victims must also be embraced.
That is far more profound than “bullying is bad and can lead to satisfying, if deadly, retribution.” It’s a softer message and one that is more complex. It’s certainly harder to distill into a movie’s logline. The book’s version makes it harder to side entirely with Carrie, our protagonist, which is what a multimillion dollar movie’s producer might imagine their movie needs, especially to recoup a budget with a limited audience.
It’s been announced that Mike Flanagan is taking on Carrie. As the master behind shows like The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, Flanagan is excellent at managing subtleties and dynamics like those described here, so I have hope he’ll include this complexity. And Carrie isn’t a terribly long book. He’ll have to add a significant amount of story to stretch it into a series. My big hope is that he’ll find a way to wrap King’s Rage into it.
Rage was written under the pen name Richard Bachman and understandably disowned after appearing in the libraries of a few too many school shooters. Rage is my favorite King book (so far), and its handling of adult supremacy in children’s lives is a topic that is central to the teenage experience that is almost never dramatized. It would dovetail beautifully into an extended telling of Carrie. (fwiw: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Carrie movie sequel was titled The Rage: Carrie 2.)
Here’s hoping Flanagan does as expert of a job as we are right to expect, and gives us the Carrie that we deserve. The Carrie that Carrie deserves.
There are more elements that all the movies miss or change! Notably: Carrie is overweight in the book, which changes a lot of bullying and its tone. Also, the structure of the novel is rife with interviews, magazine articles, and clips from books published long after the events of the infamous prom (the 2002 made for TV movie version accounts for this some).