Film Comment 1977

Carrie & Sally & Leatherface Among the Film Buffs

By Roger Greenspun

Published in Film Comment Magazine

January-February 1977

NOTE: The first half of this article was entirely about THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. In keeping with the CARRIE theme, I've omitted the first part in transcription below and jumped directly into the final part, which dealt with CARRIE. If you're interested in the TEXAS CHAINSAW portion, click the scans.

"After the blood comes the boys!"

THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE has none, but Brian DePalma's CARRIE has almost all the attributes Koch would like in his buff's ideal movie - including a homage to the trashy past, since its roots go back especially to the teen-marker monster madness of the late fifties. It also has violence, and an uncommonly powerful eroticism, and lots of blood (the underside to its eroticism), and God knows it has its fans. Some of my college students saw it three times within a month of its opening last fall. But then a magazine editor I write for and greatly respect saw it four times with undiminished enthusiasm, and he became an expert on all the minor character's motivations in a way that might put DePalma and his screenwriter Lawrence Cohen to shame. I don't know where DePalma stands with the most serious film people, and I can appreciate what could have been their uneasiness with him over the year. Recently, my own uneasiness has diminished. The "serious" DePalma, from SISTERS (or maybe even from DIONYSUS in '69) through CARRIE simply begins to make too much sense to be dismissed as the aberration of displaced satirist. I'm not at all sure that he has ever stopped being a satirist, but his satire now encompasses a cosmos peopled with dupes and demons, and nobody thinks it is a joke.

That the girl, that shimmering vision of innocent grace and hopeful sensuality dancing her way to the apocalyptic climax of CARRIE, is really first cousin to the passion-seething reptile women of our fevered adolescent Saturday afternoon doesn't tell the whole story about the movie. But it's a start. You must recognize a desirable monster when you see one. That Keats scholar deep in Lamia should be prepared for all this, because DePalma continues the traditions of the Romantic Agony. In SISTERS, or OBSESSION, or now in CARRIE, he sees his women double - divided (and multiplied) by something powerfully ambiguous in their sexuality. The two sides of Carrie, the side she longs for and the side she can't avoid, come together in the potential of her physical being. I can't imagine feminists will care for this, but it seems logical that an action beginning with Carrie's first menstrual flow (itself seen virtually as the result of her own self-gratifying caresses) should climax in an inferno of blood-become-fire. At its crudest, the film's basic proposition might go: "Make Carrie bloody and see what happens." At a level slightly less crude, it would be to prove the dreadful pronouncements of Carrie's sex-obsessed, God-crazed mother are never wrong. She knows a young girl's adolescence contains the potential for the destruction of the world.

CARRIE develops its meaning (I'm assuming you know the film's story) precisely along the line where sentimental psychology and supernatural mumbo-jumbo meet. DePalma's penchant for overhead shots now make sense, because the threats to Carrie all strike from above - beginning with the lobbed volleyball she fails to return in the pre-credits sequence (the camera essentially descends into the movie on that) and ending with the marvelous implosion that destroys Carrie's house, incinerates her martyred mother, and sends the girl herself down to her just rewards. Conversely, Carrie's own strengths seem to come from below, from between her legs in the case of the flowing blood, from the low associations of the film's graffiti ("Carrie White eats shit;" "Carrie White burns in Hell"), and from the unhallowed ground under which finally she doesn't rest. A lot of the film's effectiveness derives from the way it uses or upsets the forces of gravity and inertia, and a lot of its authority derives from that too. CARRIE has a cosmology of sorts: a Heaven (the high-school prom where you can dance "Among the Stars") and of course a Hell. It is like the presence of the two cities New Orleans and Florence, that DePalma used in OBSESSION, or like his reading of a man's life in that film out of Dante and an awareness of architectural styles. Not an ironclad program, but a lose range of reference that is very clever and that seems to me the most Hitchcockian thing about DePalma - more Hitchcockian than the employment of a Bernard Hermann score or the appearance of a shower scene that may (or may not) remind you of PSYCHO.

If THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE takes on the rationalized progress of a nightmare, CARRIE keeps turning the dream into a nightmare by a process somewhat more complex. The initial shower sequence, the whole ironic progress of Carrie's late-blooming from school wallflower to prom queen, the marvelous epilogue that actually is dreamed by Carrie's would-be benefactress - again and again these subvert our expectations, only to show that the subversion is part of a broader perception of things that we should have held all along. We actually do hold such perception for the prom sequence, during which Carrie becomes an angel before she turns demon, and during which we keep hoping for the best while surely knowing that the worst is the only end in view. The gaging of that sequence - really the bulk of the movie - from Carrie's first moonstruck response to Tommy's idiotic ecology poem through her tentative and then magical ascension to the glories of typical American girlhood, through the concommitant (and basically comic) plot against her by the evil Chris and Billy, to her transformation into a bug-eyed creature of revenge; all that (and Spacek's performance accompanying it) may rank as the most brilliant tour-de-force in years. But it counts as something more than a tour-de-force because it connects to an order in which a young girl's romantic aspirations become part of an upward-wishing/downward-doomed interchange that is the central dramatic activity of the film.

In ambition, if not in concentration, CARRIE is more violent and much bloodier than THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. But both combine a vitality derived from their delight in horror with an intelligence special to some individual points of view. Neither signals a trend (though CARRIE capitalizes a bit on THE EXCORCIST and JAWS) but both identify possibly major talents. In the contest of last fall's big openings, from THE FRONT to NETWORK to VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED, DePalma's film especially begins to look like one of the few recent achievements in American movies. Both films cater mainly to an audience who know what they are seeing - not necessarily film buffs, whose attention tends to lie elsewhere, but the remaining heirs of the unsophisticated moviegoers in Manny Farber's great "Underground Movies," that seminal article that twenty years ago celebrated all the virtues that Stephen Koch in his new articles wants to attack. We have no genres left in which movies can be made unselfconsciously (De Palma and Hooper hardly rank as innocents in their fields), but we do have this one genre in which movies still work over a spectrum of responses and actually develop a meaning through the pleasures of scaring you out of your wits. Critics like Koch seem to with they were always seeing ELVIRA MADIGAN or THE SEVENTH SEAL - and perhaps someday they always will be. Meanwhile there is work for the unwashed others. The buff hot-line tells me I've just missed something special in a nameless Times Square exploitation house. So will MOMA please review VIGILANTE FORCE and MASSACRE AT CENTRAL HIGH?