Analysis of the Heroine of Carrie from the Based on Stephen Kings Book - Movie Review Example

03 October 2008 Carrie (1976) The movie Carrie is based on Stephen King's book depicting a high school girl with telekinetic power. The heroine of Carrie, no more mature than most of her fellow teenagers, nevertheless tries to understand herself and particularly her mother. Many of his youthful protagonists come to represent the moral centers of his books and from them all other actions seem to radiate. Some represent the nucleus for familial love. Thesis Carrie is based on a misogynistic approach which helps the author to unveil and portray women as weak and powerless creatures unable to resist temptation and accept social norms and principles. In Carrie, the author works from a bifurcated perspective in analyzing this setting for adolescent violence. On one hand, he understands that Carrie White's night of revenge is motivated by the brutality of her classmates. On the other hand, his exoneration of Carrie is equalled in his contempt for the boy-men, girl-women who torment her. King's truest sympathies are always with the high school rejects; they are not only victimized by the cruelty of the majority, but because of their status as pariahs they often possess a level of intelligence and sensitivity sadly missing in their more popular peers. Carrie becomes doubly pitiful, because ... she can only wait to be saved or damned by the actions of others. Her only power is her telekinetic ability, and movie eventually arrives at the same point: King seems most unfavorably inclined toward the superficially well-adjusted, popular student with an overly active libido and a underdeveloped value system. His class presidents, football quarterbacks, and prom queens bear an unmistakable resemblance to the street punks who attend the same school system as a stopover on their way to jail: both groups of adolescents have completely severed their bonds with childhood innocence. In their vicious lust to exploit sex, alcohol, and violence (for they inhabit an exclusively physical plane of existence), their behavior is modeled on an extreme conception of adulthood. They want all the pleasure of worldly experience, with none of the responsibilities. Thus, they are simply young versions of the corruption which animates King's adult society. Horror films like Carrie is, primarily, produced and consumed by men. Why should this be It would seem that the experience derived from horror fiction (as opposed to the experience of horror in "real life") is peculiarly fascinating to men, or rather to the masculine subject, i.e. the subject constituted as masculine through the particular nature of his/her experience, particularly in early childhood. For the masculine child, the movement away from the mother, expressed as it is through abjection and the passage through the Oedipus complex, seems to be more traumatic than for the feminine child. For the feminine child there remains at least a possibility of reunion with the mother through identification; also, the feminine subject is actively encouraged to retain links with the maternal semiotic through the cultivation of such qualities as "intuition." The masculine subject by contrast depends for his very identity on the effectiveness of his repression of the maternal semiotic and of desire for the mother. Carrie is dominated by those images of waste, putrefaction and decay which can be associated with abjection: these are, so to speak, the staple of horror. When we think of "the horrid" we picture blood, corpses, the violation of bodily limits. Via these images horror fiction returns us to the scene of primary horror in the abjection of the mother, a scene which, however, particularly for the masculine subject, possesses fascination, the power of the taboo. Images of abjection lead the masculine subject back not only to the movement away from the mother but also to the original repressed desire for the mother, which returns with all the force of the repressed, of that which can be allowed no place in adult life. Carrie seems to be designed to work for the masculine subject as an exorcism: it offers a way of repassing through abjection and of distancing oneself once again from the power of the mother. Carrie works in this sense as a kind of obverse of romance. For the feminine subject, the most painful aspect of early development is not the abjection of the mother but the movement into the masculine symbolic. It can and has been argued that romantic fiction exists precisely in order to "cover up" the painful nature of the female insertion into the symbolic/patriarchal order. Carrie has a similar compensatory function, giving the masculine subject the opportunity to revisit and to "repass" the crisis points of his early development. he masculine subject is thus allowed, via horror, to revisit forbidden realms in recompense for the day-to-day repression of certain desires. Carrie is a movie which is tied to gender: awareness of its gender bias and of the role which it plays in social- terms is long overdue. In sum, Carrie follows misogynistic approach constituted of images designed precisely to stir "memories" of the early abjection of the mother and of the later traumatic passage through the symbolic. Images of the monstrous feminine are common in movie. The profound dualism in his attitude toward naturalism is what allows him to examine its attractions and failures. In much of his work he seems to be suggesting that one must first realize one exists in a naturalistic universe, and then give up that realization in favor of a more expanded sense of reality that includes the supernatural as well. Although that supernatural is usually presented in a horrifying, even inhuman manner, it paradoxically points towards more traditional value systems. Women characters get into trouble when they will not open up their minds to extra-normal phenomena that call for moral choices. Indeed, his suspense is largely due to the characters' reluctance to face up to such possibilities. The old horror movie trick of a disbelieving hero's sudden and long-delayed confrontation with complete evil is employed by King to create, a greater effect than just suspense. He is using the supernatural to intrude on our everyday awareness of ourselves in order to shock us into awareness of a deeper moral reality than that to which viewers are accustomed. Works Cited Carrie (1976). B. De Palma. DVD> 1997 Read More