Carrie
Stephen King
Stephen King’s Carrie: Our Anti-Hero, Our Target, Ourselves
In 1974, when Stephen King published his first novel, Carrie, he crafted an appropriately shocking way to introduce himself to readers: an epistolary tale of an outcast, bullied girl who, pushed to the breaking point, uses her telekinetic powers to kill her classmates and lay waste to nearly her entire town. That girl's name was Carrie White. But of course you know that already.
The book was such a hit that within two years it was an Oscar-nominated movie, and in the years since it has spawned a Broadway musical, a television movie, a sequel, an Off-Broadway spoof starring a drag queen, and soon a remake, set to hit theaters October 18. Carrie and her tale have become so ingrained in our collective popular consciousness that "to Carrie" someone instantly translates to "public humiliation by pig's blood," as in "Let's Carrie Liz Lemon."
To some, Carrie's climax is a gag, one that’s been repeated and parodied so many times over the years that it's lost any humanity. To others, Carrie is a folk anti-hero. Those kids got what they deserved for picking on their quiet, awkward, and – up until then – harmless peer. But really, that's over-simplifying the Carrie White matter. King’s tale makes for a thrilling, scary, sad, and troubling book; it's anything but easy, particularly in a society marred by mass shootings and fatal bullying.
Let's be clear: Carrie is not a hero. But she's also not a straight-up villain. The black-and-white analysis of Carrie projected in full color and played by Sissy Spacek in 1976 is grayer these days. As Kimberly Peirce, director of the soon-to-be-released remake, said, "[You] can’t turn Carrie into a calculated killer – not in a post-Columbine, post-Virginia Tech, post-all-these-campus-tragedies world." The real world has become too much like fictional Chamberlain, Maine.
"On the subject of Carrie White, we're all relatively misinformed," reads the transcript of a fictional inquest into that fateful prom night. Doctors, authorities, and survivors plead for more inquisitions and understanding of Carrie White's emotional state, potential powers, and what went wrong that fateful Prom Night. We, the reader, with all of our familiarity with real-life violence, are just as mystified: we reel at the abuse Carrie faces, yet there's also an uncomfortable recognition in gym teacher Rita Desjardin's frustration with Carrie. "I understand how those girls felt," she says, after Carrie's infamous first period. "The whole thing just made me want to take the girl and shake her."
We want Carrie to be redeemed, or at least to be redeemable, but are astonished when she, realizing her powers, doesn't care if they're light or dark. She's just happy she finally has something special. There's no good or evil or even a clear cause and effect in the book, nor is there any nice and neat conclusion. Was Carrie really pushed over the edge? Are her tormentors to blame? Or did she fling herself over the edge, so eager to take charge of her own life that she doesn't mind killing over 400 people? We're left to wonder, powerlessly, whether this fictional tragedy could have been prevented, and whether the next one, here in this world, can be stopped, too.
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