CARRIE 1976

Joan Rivers: "I wasn't invited to the prom. I invited the guy and I had to buy my own orchid. 

Carrie had a better time at her prom than I did." 

That Carrie can be referenced in the punchline of a joke without benefit of clarification is a testament to how deeply rooted in our cultural consciousness Brian De Palma’s 1976 film (vis à vis Stephen King’s 1974 novel) has become. Indeed, contrary to the circumstances of her character in the film (she’s such a non-entity at her school that the principal repeatedly misidentifies her as “Cassie”) and the teaser ads for the forthcoming sequel (You Will Know Her Name); I'd say that by now, everybody knows exactly who Carrie is.

Sissy Spacek as Carrie White

Piper Laurie as Margaret White

Betty Buckley as Miss Collins

Amy Irving as Sue Snell

William Katt as Tommy Ross

Nancy Allen as Chris Hargensen

John Travolta as Billy Nolan

I was just starting college the year Carrie was released and (cinema snob that I was) I really couldn't have been less interested in it. 1976 was an absolutely amazing year for movies, and the films that preoccupied my mind, my time, and my interest were the more high-profile releases: Taxi Driver, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Hitchcock’s Family Plot, Fellini’s Casanova, Marathon Man, Rocky, King Kong, A Star is Born, Polanski’s The Tenant, Network, The Last Tycoon, Burnt Offerings, Sparkle, Lipstick, Logan’s Run, Bertolucci’s 1900, Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, and Bergman’s Face to Face. I hardly saw daylight the entire year!

And then there was the woefully under-hyped Carrie. Here we had a film by a director whose only other work I’d seen at the time -Phantom of the Paradise - I remembered primarily for Paul Williams' music, and whose sole marketable cast member, John Travolta, was a fledgling teen idol from the execrable sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter (his whispery pop single, “Let Her In,” had turned the summer of ’76 radio-listening into an absolute nightmare for me). Everything about Carrie, from its no-name cast to its over-explicit poster art, gave me the impression it was strictly drive-in fare; a movie suitable for a double-bill with one of those low-budget releases from AIP or Crown International about Bigfoot or small-town redneck serial killers.

Eve was Weak
Margaret White's religious fanaticism adds an effectively ominous overlay of sin, sacrifice, and retribution to the story of an awkward teen and the coming-of-age awareness of her powers of telekinesis.

It was only through the persistent badgering of my best friend that I even came to see Carrie at all. My friend, a sci-fi / Dark Shadows buff, had already seen Carrie and used the excuse of wanting to see it again as an opportunity to call in his marker for the time I’d pestered him into attending a screening of Barbarella with me. As I took my seat in the packed San Francisco movie theater where Carrie was playing, I seethed with resentment over what I perceived as my friend extracting a particularly mean-spirited payback for what, the heinous crime of exposing him to the sight of a naked, zero-gravity Jane Fonda? However, some 98 minutes later I emerged from the theater, red-eyed (from crying- that Sissy Spacek really gets to me in this movie...even today) and overwhelmed. Wow! I had NOT been expecting that!

Macabre Martyrdom

Anticipating at best a run-of-the-mill horror movie, what I got was a surprisingly sensitive character drama that morphed into a kind of a nightmarish Grimm's fairy tale. A blood-splattered religious allegory of sin and redemption that's a near-poetic parable on the inability of a legacy of pain and cruelty to beget anything other than more pain and cruelty. Just out of high school myself (an all-boys Catholic School, but let’s face it, high school is high school) it felt more than a little cathartic to see a film that depicted everyday schoolyard torments with the graveness of Greek tragedy, meting out suitably catastrophic retribution to the guilty.

I was sold by Carrie’s first five minutes - the volleyball game and the gym shower, both of which established: a) the then-atypical horror film setting of a high school; b) the female-centric thrust of the story, wherein the concerns, agency, and motivations of the women in the film appeared essential to propelling the plot forward; and c) the obvious subjective perspective the film was going to take regarding Carrie herself. Carrie absolutely floored me. I saw it three more times that month, and it has since remained one of my all-time favorite movies. A motion picture I’d readily list among the best horror films ever made.

Brian De Palma is known for his employment of the literal split-screen, but Carrie is also full of sequences in which the natural framing of a shot encourages the audience to take note of the dual /conflicting experiences of the characters as they occupy the same space.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Given that adolescence was a living hell for the vast majority of us, there’s something conceptually ingenious about a horror film set in an American high school—a “house” as haunted by the ghosts of the tortured and tormented as the dungeon of any Gothic mansion. The hierarchy of school cliques and the day-to-day cruelties teens inflict upon one another seem to be perfect subjects for a meditation on the banality of evil; a concept explored in many of the films that have proved most influential in the horror genre (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, Invasion of the Body Snatchers).

School Days, School Days

Carrie was made at a time when "bullying" was seen mainly as kids-just-being-kids behavior

Unlike Stephen King’s novel, which expands the scope of Carrie to include news and science investigations into what happened at the prom, De Palma’s film wisely maintains a much narrower subjective focus (few things happen outside of the scope of the high-schoolers), heightening our identification with and empathy for Carrie and her rather tragic existence. I’m reminded of a review of Carrie that made the insightful observation that it was so fitting for Carrie to have only destroyed her high school in the film (as opposed to half the town in the novel); because to an adolescent, high school IS the world to a teenager. I honestly think the intimate scale of De Palma's Carrie is what makes it work so well. Carrie's nightmare is merely every adolescent's anxieties (public humiliation, social ostracism, the desire to fit in) writ in blood.

Adolescent trauma meets Grand Guignol

PERFORMANCES

Defying accepted Hollywood logic that holds horror films don’t get Academy respect, the two (and only) Oscar nominations afforded Carrie were for the impossible-to-ignore performances of Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. Taking wildly divergent acting paths—Spacek playing her keyed-up naturalism off of Laurie’s idiosyncratic stylization—the actresses share a symbiotic chemistry in their scenes together which elevates Carrie far above what is usually considered possible in a horror film. (Never cut any slack to anyone who tries to get a poorly made horror film off the hook with the excuse, "Nobody goes to horror films for the acting. They just want to be scared!" - we horror fans are not often rewarded on that score, but solid performances in horror films contribute more to the "scare" than some directors seem to realize.)
Spacek's Carrie doesn't amp up the cliche acting signals that would indicate an outcast character. Instead, Carrie's awkwardness appears to emanate not out of any innate strangeness (she's actually better adjusted than most of her peers) but out of perhaps an overabundance of feelings she doesn't understand and lack of emotional outlets. Carrie's slowly developing telekinesis is a perfect metaphorical representation of what happens when emotions are repressed.

Born Into Sin

And Piper Laurie...what risks she takes! And she makes them work! Grounding her performance in a reality alien to normal behavior yet familiar and accessible to the deeply disturbed character she plays, Laurie inhabits this monster of a woman and finds a way of tapping into a kind of twisted truth. I wind up not only believing in this broadly-drawn woman, but recognizing her. Her religious fanaticism comes from a genuine source, and Piper Laurie's performance makes Mrs. White a truly terrifying character. One who makes you shudder even when her eccentricities are making you laugh (Ruth Gordon pulled off a similar miracle in Rosemary's Baby).

One of the great unsung performances in Carrie is that of Betty Buckley as the sympathetic gym teacher. De Palma must have really appreciated her incisive portrayal, because he always seems to leave the camera on her just long to capture the brief flickers of emotion that play across her face at the end of scenes where she's forced to be tougher than she'd like to be, or when she's saying something she hopes to be true, but doesn't really trust in.  Ironically or inevitably, depending on how you look at it, the sweet-natured Buckley assumed the role of Carrie's mother in the ill-fated 1988 Broadway musical of the film.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

The trademark Brian De Palma bag of tricks: slow motion, swirling camera, split-screen, complex tracking shots, subjective sound, Bernard Herrmann-esque scores, Pino Donaggio's sensual music used as violence counterpoint, copious bloodletting--have never been put to as effective use as in Carrie. And no sequence in Carrie better illustrates the seamless blending of visual style with narrative theme than the bravura prom sequence. One of the most amazing bits of film as storytelling as you're likely ever to see.

Last Dance

A tour de force sequence that conveys tenderness, romance, joy, pathos, suspense, and terror in an uninterrupted flow that's close to operatic. Like my favorite scene from Hitchcock's The Birds --the Tides Restaurant bird attack--the climactic prom at Bates High School is a sequence that has retained every bit of its impact over the years. It's such a marvelously effective scene. It grabs me each and every time.  

Contemporary filmmakers (especially those enamored of the horror genre's tolerance of excess) who strive to blow us away with the spectacle of sadism or a reliance on CGI,  can take a lesson from De Palma here. Were this sequence all about the destruction and blood, I think Carrie would have gone the way of obscurity long ago. Carrie endures because De Palma has taken the time to bring us into Carrie's dream come true before he turns it into a nightmare.

Grand Grotesquery 
The eruption of the "curtain of fire" is one of my favorite film moments. It is so horrifically beautiful...I recall getting goosebumps when I saw it on the big screen.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS NIGHTMARES
In speaking of Rosemary's Baby, director Roman Polanski is fond of saying that his intent was to make a horror film that looks like a Doris Day movie, yet reveals itself to be something dark and sinister. To me, Carrie works in a similar fashion: it starts out resembling one of those teen-empowering After School Specials of the day (a series of TV movies targeted to adolescents in the '70s and '80s), only to throw us a nasty curve as the heretofore reassuring ugly-duckling wish-fulfillment fantasy turns into a bullied teen's worst-case scenario. 
I wish the 2013 remake a lot of luck, but just as Mia Farrow is and always will be the one and only Rosemary Woodhouse; I've got a hunch that Sissy Spacek's touchingly raw performance will wind up being impossible to beat. Perhaps there only needs to be...and only ever will be...one true Carrie.

"If only they knew she had the power."

Movie poster tagline

2013 ADDENDUM: 
Saw Kimberly Peirce's Carrie remake. I found it forgettable and unnecessary, albeit better acted than I expected. The big prom scene finale trades De Palma's poetically nightmarish spectacle for protracted explicitness. It's a well-done if artless sequence; the underlying, deeply-felt tragedy of the first film being replaced by the superficially cathartic pleasure of seeing the guilty parties punished. De Palma's Carrie has haunted me for a lifetime. I struggled to remember the details of Carrie 2013 a week after seeing it.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2012

3 WOMEN 1977

Films that invite repeat viewings are my favorite. If the complexities of plot and character are authentic (and not simply incomprehensibility posing as profundity), each viewing unearths new pleasures and a deeper understanding of the film's themes.

Robert Altman's 3 Women is such a film, and it is, quite literally, a dream.

Shelley Duvall as Millie Lammoreaux

Sissy Spacek as Pinky Rose

Janice Rule as Willie Hart

Altman claimed that much of the basic structure of this genuinely mesmerizing discourse on identity theft came to him in a dream. There is little reason to doubt this assertion, given that 3 Women unfolds in the same shifting rhythms and fluid, non-linear logic of a dream half-remembered.
Altman regular Shelley Duvall plays Millie Lammoreaux, the Palm Springs femme non-fatale of the Purple Sage Apartments: a garishly mauve modernist complex that looks to have sprouted out of the ground like a cactus flower in the flat, arid landscape of the desert. Millie is an attendant at a spa for the elderly and fancies herself an irresistible man-trap.

Oblivious to the fact that to almost everyone, she is either invisible or insufferable, Millie blithely floats around on a lemon-colored cloud of delusion fueled by romantic longing and women's magazine clichés.
The lone dissenting voice is that of Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), the childlike, slightly spooky new spa employee who sees in Millie "The most perfect person I've ever met."

If Millie's personality is overdetermined, Pinky's is as unformed as an infant's (she has so little in the way of history or possessions that she could be a visitor from another planet). But since she is the only person to ever reflect back to Millie her own image of herself, the two enter into a mutually beneficial roommate/friendship relationship that has the "worldly" Millie giving the unrefined Pinky lessons in life. Lessons she learns all too well, as it turns out.

Lemon Satin and Tickled Pink
Millie's apartment is an overwhelming medley of sunshiny yellow and white.
It gives the impression of living inside an egg

The 3rd woman of the title is Willie (Janice Rule), the enormously pregnant, mostly silent artist who spends all of her time painting cryptic, luridly violent murals of anthropomorphic reptile people.

Willie is married to the hyper-macho Edgar (Robert Fortier), a swaggering, womanizing, former TV stunt double ("He knows Hugh O'Brian!") with whom she shares ownership of The Purple Sage Apartments and the town's lone hot-spot, Dodge City: a run-down, western-themed bar/ghost town where off-duty cops come to drink beer, shoot guns and ride dirt bikes.

Robert Fortier as Edgar Hart

With the introduction of the almost spectral character of Willie, 3 Women begins to take shape as something grounded increasingly less in reality, yet something more chilling and unsettling than fantasy. As the ad copy on the poster read: "1 woman became 2, 2 women became 3, 3 women became 1."

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
This one is a true original. There is something so fascinating in Altman's use of magic realism in exploring the twin phenomenon of personality and identity as things both contagious and fluid. He creates unique characters and a world that is real but jarringly off-kilter (not in that self-conscious, Cohen Brothers way, mercifully). And in the finely observed details, 3 Women is often heartbreakingly funny while being downright eerie.

Craig Richard Nelson (A Wedding) and Sierra Pecheur portray Dr. Maas and Ms. Bunweill, the unrelentingly practical-minded operators of the health spa. Displaying inverse traditional male and female characteristics, the pair appear to have undergone a personality transference of their own.

What gets me about 3 Women is that no matter how unusual the characters and how off-rhythm their interactions are, everything feels as if it comes from an emotional and human truth. The characters may be amplifications...their traits and behavior given a surreal, dreamy oddness...but weirdly, it's that very quality that makes them come across more genuinely. It's as though you're watching people who have had their most hidden, inner selves moved to the surface.
For example, no one has probably ever met a person as rabidly devoted to the "Cosmo Philosophy" of femininity or those loopy "Kraft Kitchen" home economist credos as Millie in real-life (at least I hope not). But her embodiment and complete faith in the "How to Catch a Man" propaganda women have been fed for generations makes her character less an object of ridicule than someone we recognize and perhaps even empathize with.

The "fixin's" for one of Millie's characteristically indigestible socio-gastronomical nightmares

PERFORMANCES
Shelley Duvall gives one of the best performances of the 70s and certainly what I consider the best of her career. She can take a character comprised almost exclusively of derisible (if not absurd) characteristics and finds the humanity within. Though audiences are encouraged to laugh at Millie's ever-thwarted attempts at maintaining an air of sophisticated insouciance at all times (try as she might, she can't seem to prevent her flowing skirts from getting caught in her car door), one can't help but feel empathy for her poignant quest to mean something to herself.

Sissy Spacek, an actress able to project earthiness or other-worldliness at will, is remarkable in a role that requires her to be an enigma, but not a blank slate. Her ability to convey a childlike innocence without coming across as mentally challenged is attributable to Spacek's questioning; she seems to be taking information in like a computer. I love her transformation(s). She has inhabited three distinct women by the film's conclusion.

There's something a little terrifying in the kind of woman Pinky "becomes" after her accident

Janice Rule really surprised me in 3 Women because, prior to this film, I had only ever seen her in the truly atrocious Dean Martin Matt Helm film, The Ambushers -1967  (it's a Matt Helm film, did I really need to add the "atrocious" part?). If you ever want to see the definition of "reluctant sexpot," check out that film. Rule, decked out in a comic assortment of skimpy, mod outfits, is the glummest, saddest-looking sexist eye candy you've ever seen. In each scene, her every glance seems to transmit her wish to be anywhere else but there. 
Given that as a first impression, I was pleased to see her in what appears a more comfortable environment as the most puzzling member of Altman's trio. The same solemn sadness so distracting in The Ambushers is present here, but to infinitely more pleasing effect.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
The recurring motifs of water, mirrors, and other reflective surfaces give 3 Women a hallucinatory quality well-served by its haunting score and the flat, dried-out Palm Springs locations. The expansive emptiness of the land takes on the look of  Dali-esque dream landscapes.

3 Women

 

Clip from "3 Women"  1977

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

Pinky- "I wonder what it's like to be twins...do you think they know which one they are?"

"Perhaps we are the same person. Perhaps we have no limits. Perhaps we flow into each other, stream through each other, boundlessly and magnificently."  Ingmar Bergman  Fanny and Alexander 1979

For years Woody Allen has been knocking himself out superficially channeling Ingmar Bergman, and here Robert Altman hits a bullseye his first time out with this incontestably American nod to Bergman's Persona.

What I've always related to in 3 Women is how it so poetically speaks to the need to connect and the essential human desire to be acknowledged. Looking at the film through the eyes of the college kid I was when the film was released, I'm aware of what I shared with Millie: pretentiousness, the need for self-invention (or re-invention). Also, what I shared with Pinky: a fear of growing up and a wish to remain childlike; a longing to care for and be cared for by someone.
Watching the film now as an adult, I find myself stunned by the keenness of its observations and touched by how gently Altman treats these damaged characters. Ultimately, I find 3 Women to be one of Altman's most humane works. And, after all these years, it remains, hands-down, my favorite of his many excellent films.

Pinky- "I had a bad dream."
Millie- "Dreams can't hurt you."

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009