Jump Cut No. 14

RAGTIME: The Horror of Growing Up Female

Carrie Meets the Marathon Man

RAGTIME: The Horror of Growing Up Female

By Serafina Kent Bathrick

Published in Jump Cut Magazine #14

March 30, 1977

From its beginnings, classical Hollywood cinema has relied on and reinforced the "natural" characteristics of women (reproductive or destructive) in order to motivate and propel its closed narrative structures. Certain coded behavior onscreen could represent a woman as ideal mother or as lustful vamp: if she tells bedtime stories to children, she'll never be seen smoking cigarettes in her negligee. However, Hayes Codes and culture industry politics often permitted a fallen woman to die - so that her last minute suicide allowed for the rescue of her little son (THREE ON A MATCH, 1932). Or an innately possessive nurse could finally be treated for her murderous tendencies after collapsing, suffering, and surrendering to a forgiving husband and a psychiatric ward full of experts (POSSESSED, 1947). Until recently, with the advent of the disaster film, in which "Mother Nature" herself wipes out whole cities, the individual woman has mostly been spared the capacity for large-scale destruction. But now, in the age of crazily-mixed genre films, where confused narrative tell us that humans are decadent, technology doesn't work, and nature has been ravished, there emerge whole new possibilities for ways to explain the rationalization of life and the destruction of community - again in terms of the nature of women. As Carrie White comes of age, she discovers that "she's got the power." With earth, air, fire, and water at her command, she annihilates a generation of all-American teenagers.

From the outset of CARRIE, Brian De Palma's latest film, the telekinetic abilities of the central character are intimately connected to her newfound physiological functions: she discovers her menstrual blood and her unnatural powers begin. The film is divided into two halves that ultimately reinforce the biologism that is used to describe Carrie's destructive nature: first her self-discovery brings the entire high-school to know of her private ignorance and fear; this culminates with the central, most public incident (the senior prom), in which her precarious self-confidence is again shattered by the bloody revenge of her classmates. Thus, the second half of the film simply traces Carrie's rampage, in which her crazed mind and body join to produce the complete destruction of her community. This simple narrative gives the film audiences new and not so new ways to consider the reification of women through their physical attributes. Sociopolitical contradictions can still be covered with the ritualized esthetic of female biology. It is ironic and fitting that DePalma can exploit the new openness with which the media have attempted to demystify women's sexuality. His film style reveals encounters and twists the subject - at his most flamboyant he can weave fear and self-hate into a spectacle of female destruction. There is an urgency in his desire to prove the impossibility of community among women.

In order to examine the implications of DePalma's esthetic and his use of the naturally destructive woman, it is important to look closely at exactly how he averts the any analysis of the social causes for the narrative development of the film. From the outset, the image of blood plays on our senses, creating the kinds of fears of women which prevail in most pre-industrial cultures. The witch-healer in Medieval Europe was a triple-threat to Church and state. Contemporary analyses have pointed out the significance of her function, along with its threat to the social order.

She appeared to be part of an organized underground of peasant women. And she was a healer whose practice was based in empirical study. In the face of the repressive fatalism of Christianity, she held out the hope of change in this world. - Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, a History of Women Healers," The Feminist Press, 1973, p. 15.

DePalma exploits the position of women in this tradition of healers and rebels, and by systematically witch-hunting for social wrongs through the sexualizing of women's nature and bodily functions, he upholds and contributes to the kind of scapegoating that keeps capitalist culture in the service of the state. Every woman in CARRIE is understood entirely in terms of her sexual frustration or potency: Carrie's mother and teacher are middle-aged loners - one a neurotic fundamentalist, the other a lonely romantic. For both women the focus on prom night reinforces DePalma's central icon, and Mrs. White cannot consider the occasion anything but an orgy, while Miss Collins recalls her own prom as a moment of adolescent innocence. Carrie's two peers represent a similar polarity - sweet Sue Snell is a well-meaning monogamist and Chris is a spoiled nymphomaniac. From prom night, they both get favors and affirmation from their boyfriends. Carrie herself is limited and defined by this repellant culture of women, but tops them all in her capacity to destroy and be destroyed. In recent studies on the history of menstruation, fears connected with witch-women are associated with the belief that at the time of their monthly periods, women are their most self-aware, most powerful, and most destructive. In many cultures, the menstruating woman threatens male virility, contaminates the crops or poisons the food she cooks. Thus her reproductive powers are linked to destructive ones: "Menstrual blood, the outward sign of her duality, could be her weapon to annihilate the society she was responsible for preserving." -- Janice Delaney and Mary Jane Lupton and Mary Toth, "The Curse" (New York, 1976), p. 10.

DePalma's career as a film director suggests his own desires to reconcile or flatten this dangerous dualism. In SISTERS, the surviving Siamese twin takes on the personality of her homicidal "other half" who had died during their surgical separation. In a more recent bomb by DePalma, OBSESSION (1976), his Hitchcock homagery thinly coats the same concern with a woman whose posthumous mystique gives proof of her duplicitous nature; this time she leaves her double, a daughter, behind to do the necessary damage. In CARRIE the same director further reveals his bewildered fascination with female power; and as he described it in his earlier films, he once again denies the operation of class or institutional force by focusing on the biological determinism of women.

To look closely at DePalma's style - its often fatuous display of filtered images, overstuffed frames, and floating cameras - is to understand further the modes by which he has developed his own brand of sexism. Though the film opens with a brief pre-credits scene, shot from high angle to show the mechanics of a girl's volleyball games, there is neither the director's flamboyancy nor any of the real interest in this activity to tell us anything about high school, gym classes, or girls as athletes. The camera quickly locates Carrie and cranes down toward her fumbling figure in the corner, and, as the fame ends with her miss, a surge of angry schoolmates run past her towards the gym, calling to the gawky girl: "You eat shit."

The credits begin with a cut to another more delightful stage in post-game ritual. Coyly hidden behind the words and obtrusively blurred by filtered lenses, the camera drifts into the girl's locker room like a male fantasy. It tracks slowly amidst their steamy bodies as they proliferate, repeating each other's gestures and turns, bending and lifting to dress their nude bodies. The process is prolonged to slow-motion, the better to see them, the better to expose their narcissism. Again, DePalma's camera leaves the group to find Carrie alone in the shower: last because of her modesty, or because she's the most self-adoring of them all? There is a cut to a closeup of her upturned face with the shower nozzle spraying her, eyes closed, succumbing to pleasure. Surely the sequence recalls Marion's shower in PSYCHO. Is the intent to prepare us for a wound, a rush of blood? DePalma cuts to close-ups that reveal all the self-touching gestures soap-ads use, and more for when the bar drops on the floor and bounces in slow-motion, he cuts to subjective shot that invites more intimacy, as Carrie's hand now touches her inner thighs. Her body is most her own at this point and yet most fetishized, most erotic for us. It is at this moment that the blood appears, dripping down her leg, to be discovered by her hand. We saw it before she did, and again DePalma plays with our voyeurism and our privilege to be curious and horrified. Marion was slashed by a knife in the shower: Where is Carrie's wound? In this key scene we are taunted by her self-discovery - by its isolation and the way it is prolonged and sexualized - so that its trauma becomes all these things, and none of them. Finally, in medium shot, Carrie is permitted to connect mind and body. Yet at this point her isolation is complete. Her body itself has punished her: "Help me," she screams at the nymphets, now shocked out of their stupors. The camera tracks toward them as they assemble - spontaneously militants chanting in unison: "Plug it up." They bombard Carrie with Tampax and sanitary napkins as she crouches in a corner.

It is at this moment of Carrie's self-hate and the collective barbarism of her peers that her eyes flash for the first time. Her defiant magic explained by a cut from her crazed face to a subjective shot of the lightbulb on the ceiling overhead. The bulb shatters inexplicably, the mob is quieted, and the rescue of Carrie by the gym teacher begins. Miss Collins can only threaten to deprive her girls of what they want most to do - attend their senior prom. Now the teacher can use her authority to prevent her students from attending what is for her a fondest memory. This gesture - motivated by what we come to see as this older woman's loneliness - propels the narrative to its bloody end. The film makes no effort to suggest that her authoritarianism results from her job, her relationship to it and to the organization of her work place. Her loneliness itself seems to be a kind of inborn flaw - she couldn't keep that high-school sweetheart on a string. The locker-room scene, with its scapegoat-mob interaction stemming from adolescent self-discovery, thus gives impetus to Carrie's telekinetic powers as a form of revenge and to the punitive blindness of a teacher whose misguided rage simply fits another kind of female stereotype. Essentially, it is the sexuality of a woman that controls her. Furthermore, it separates her from other women and is the very reason why neither role models nor close relationships are possible. From the outset of this film, DePalma systematically eliminates the possibility that female behavior can be understood in terms of socioeconomic phenomena. His narrative relies on images of blood and fetishized body parts (the prom night bloodbath occurs just after an extreme close-up of Chris's lips as her tongue hungrily caresses her red mouth) that serve to remind us that the primacy of a woman's fragmented sexual identity is only a microcosm of her social desolation.

DePalma's subjection of women to the ravages of their physical, physiological nature is also articulated in the ways by which he structures the film around the opposition of two institutions which influence and ultimately control the adolescent Carrie. Through elaborate mise-en-scene and rococo camera the film pretends to distinguish home from school, contrasting and finally denying those spheres which women may control. Carrie and her mother share a tiny, oddly non-suburban turn-of-the-century bungalow. Another clunky comment on Norman Bates' (PSYCHO) more massive mausoleum, this little house is stuffed with relics and grim knickknacks - a parody of the crazed collector in woman. Property chokes and clutters the mad mind of Mrs. White, providing another pretext for DePalma's virtuosity. She is never understood as anything but a freak who took the Bible too seriously for her own good, and is finally killed by her own Bean-ex in the heartland of her little home. Like all the women in the film, she brings on her own destruction: she is punished for being a woman. There is a day-glo Last Supper on the wall and candle-lit suffering wax figurines on every surface. This private world of kitsch is our explanation of Mrs. White's fanaticism - all necessary for her pardon from God: first for the "curse of blood," then for her own lust and submission. Carrie is thus her mother's shame personified, and by some extraordinary leap (involving our notions of women-in-the-home, spiders waiting for their own self-made traps), we are manipulated to believe that self-ignorance and telekinetic powers are her environmental and genetic inheritance. Rather than explode the real horrors of family dogma and parental authority, DePalma again relishes the sensual self-destruction of women who are ultimately privatized out of the productive world and into their own craziness. The baroque lighting, the weaving of the camera imply the final stages in the ritual of "homemaking," but we learn nothing about the workings of that institution.

In the public sphere, where Carrie is a senior at Bates (ugh) High, again the film averts the possibilities of exploring another mode of institutional authority. The repressive aspects of this place are most specifically focused in the person of Carrie’s gym teacher, Miss Collins. And while she is the opposite of Mrs. White, who wears long shrouds that hide even her ankles, this tall athletic woman who trots about braless and in track shorts is another victim of sexual frustration. There is no attempt to characterize the school hierarchy beyond typing the principal as a foolish lecher and the English teacher as a prissy baby. Once we associate Miss Collins lithe body with her authoritarian commands over her female students, we are invited to fit her into the pattern as another woman whose lack of heterosexual fulfillment explains her entire identity and behavior. DePalma’s tracking camera moves past the sweating girls lined up for their punitive work-out and records their puffing chests and tired thighs with the same relish he had displayed for the lockerroom vision. Miss Collins’ voice controls and coordinates their movements – she is angry and so are they. It becomes more and more clear throughout the narrative that her desire to “rescue” Carrie has more to do with her own sense of unhappiness with being a woman and teaching women than with any understanding of what society has done to them all. Miss Collins’ special punishment for the blood-thirsty Chris – forbidding her to attend her own prom – brings on the final catastrophe that eliminates the senior class. Thus these two seemingly opposite women must share responsibility for the Hellish night. The gym teacher’s institutionalized authority which victimizes her students and herself, is explained purely in the terms of her physical nature. Neither Miss Collins nor Carrie’s mother feel anything but loathing for the sexual awakening that takes place among the adolescent girls who surround them. Their mistrust forms the basis on which we are asked to accept the impossibility of positive female relationships.

Carrie Meets Marathon Man

By Michelle Citron

Jump Cut #14

March 30, 1977

John Schlesinger's MARATHON MAN is a slick Hollywood thriller, another in the long line of male rite of passage films in the tradition of THE GRADUATE, STRAWDOGS and THE GODFATHER. As such, it is boring and trite. CARRIE is Hollywood's latest psychic horror film. It follows in the tradition of THE EXORCIST, THE OMEN and PSYCHIC KILLER. As such, it is mildly interesting in that Brian DePalma, the director, has a good visual eye. CARRIE is also a female rite of passage film, and this is very unusual and also very interesting. Taken together, MARATHON MAN and CARRIE offer two cultural artifacts that clearly spell out what it means to grow up male and female in American culture. MARATHON MAN concerns Babe Levy (Dustin Hoffman), a brilliant graduate student in history. Emotionally immature and experientially naive, he is trying desperately to exorcise the demons of his past: his father, a brilliant historian, who committed suicide amidst the pressures of the McCarthy witch hunts and an older brother, Doc (Roy Scheider), who is suave, sophisticated and successful -- all the things that Babe is not. Unknown to Babe, Doc is a CIA-type agent whose death plunges Babe into a web of international intrigue involving Szell (Laurence Olivier), arch-evil Nazi dentist war criminal.Szell murders Doc and then goes after Babe for information, which Babe doesn't even possess, with delicate dental torture perfected in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. After torture, escape, killings, and a final confrontation with Szell himself, Babe changes from an innocent child to a man, the world's evils and childhood devils purged by the process. Carrie is also innocent and naive, a shy high school student who one day gets her period in the gym shower room. Since her neurotic oppressive mother never told her about menstruation, she panics at the sight of blood flowing down between her legs. The women in her class, who dislike her anyway, viciously make fun of her, bombarding her with Tampax and ridicule. After the young women are punished by Miss Collins (Betty Buckley), the kind gym teacher, they plot revenge on Carrie. They get her invited to the Senior prom, have her crowned Prom Queen, and then as she stands in all her radiant glory before the senior class -- accepted by them for the first time -- they dump a huge bucket of pig's blood on her. But Carrie possesses telekinetic powers and, at the height of her humiliation, she unleashes this power in a horrifying revenge destroying students, teachers, Miss Collins, her mother and even herself.

These two films are clearly about rites of passage. At first Babe and Carrie are childish in comparison to other characters in the films and to themselves at the end of the films. Although Babe is a 25 year-old grad student at Columbia University, he is a 'babe' in the ways of the world. Some of his child-like traits are cute. For example, when he finally get a date with mysterious, beautiful Elsa (Marthe Keller) after a pursuit in which his incompetence with women is apparent, he walks down the hall clicking his heels, jumping for joy. Later he defiantly and playfully gargles with wine to annoy the more sophisticated Doc. When confronted with a difficult situation, he often slips into memories of his unresolved past or fantasies of the great marathon runner Abebe Bikila. He dreams of being a hero. On the other hand, Babe is powerless. He lacks information -- he doesn't know what Doc really does. He is easily intimidated: by his history seminar professor when being questioned about his dissertation, by Janeway, Szell's double-crossing associate/lover, during interrogation after Doc's death. He is naively trusting to a dangerous extent and thus he is duped by everyone as seen in both Janeway and Elsa's manipulation of him. But by the end of the film, all these traits have been replaced by more "adult" ones. Through the obligatory acts of violence of a rite of passage, Babe learns to live in a real world, self-assured and trusting no one but himself. Carrie too is naive, insecure and powerless at first. She is completely uninformed about sex and normal bodily functions. She looks like a child with her long, straight hair, loose-fitting, baby-blue jumper, and short-sleeved white blouse. She deals with the taunts of her peers by cowering in the corner of the shower like a wounded animal. When approached by Tom for a date, she looks terrified and runs away. And even though she suspects that the class is making a fool of her, she does not trust her instincts.

Getting her period is a very tangible passage from childhood to womanhood. Afterwards, we see subtle and continuous changes that suggest Carrie is becoming and adult. She begins to stand up to her mother, going to the prom against her mother's wishes. She becomes more 'womanly' in appearance, buying lipstick, curling her hair and wearing a clinging satin gown to the prom. With her period also comes her power (the breaking of the light bulb in the shower), which increases in strength as the film unfolds until it reaches its apex when she brings the heavens crashing down upon her house.

Both Babe and Carrie have sibling/mentors -- Babe had Doc; Carrie has the gym teacher, who care for their younger counterparts. However both mentors are limited. Doc underestimates Babe and never tells him his true profession or why he distrusts Elsa. Thus Babe has no reason to trust Doc's actions; he doesn't understand them. Miss Collins' shortsighted judgment underestimates the students' strong reaction to their punishment and she mistrusts Sue's attempt to stop the blood prank. The teacher's motives are good, but she is ineffective. Doc and Miss Collins serve the same function only superficially. Doc's limitations lead only to his own death, which functions as the catalyst for Babe's growth. Miss Collins' death shows us that Carrie really is vicious in her revenge. POWER

The definition of power differs radically for the male and female protagonists in the two films. The films' general structures are the same: both Carrie and Babe start off powerless and then grow into adulthood and power. What differs is the power's source, its use, and treatment within the films.

Carrie's power comes from without: it is mystical and supernatural. Telekinesis is something we do not understand, so Carrie's power seems awesome and overwhelming. Thus is it is much easier to identify with the victims of this esoteric power than it is to identify with its owner. Its cinematic manifestation, filmed in split-screen with red filters, increases our alienation. In one sense, Carrie never gains power; rather, she is an unwilling victim of it. Unlike Babe, she cannot be credited with the power she possesses. She is just its vessel.

As a mysterious power, i

t also reinforces the myth of the fearful power of women (especially because the power is linked to menstruation and sexuality). The "teeth in the cunt." The all-consuming vagina. Babe's power is entirely different. He is placed in a world where people have power, the sources of which are readily understandable: money (diamonds), government (the CIA, Nazi Germany), guns, physical strength, intellectual knowledge. It is the type of power, the film tells us, a powerless male can attain if her is moral and strong. Babe is the source of his own power; it is very human and always there. As Szell says, "Your brother was incredibly strong, sometimes strength is inherited." Babe has only to release it by being himself. Professor Biesenthal told him, "You can't fill his (your father's footsteps. I'm sorry to tell you. You may end up leaving larger tracks, anything's possible, but they will be your own, not your father's." Babe's tracks do end up being larger, for he displays courage his father lacked. Babe's powerlessness is something we can identify with, and so his attainment of power at the end of the film perpetuates the myth that we too, as individuals, can become powerful. The film's central metaphor of the marathon is appropriate because the marathon is a very individualistic, private sport, and Babe's heroism is very individualistic. The recurring marathon sequence we see in the film is of Abebe Bikila, the Ethiopian cop who won the marathon in the Japanese Olympics running barefoot against the favored runners from Russia and Germany, countries with big athletic machines. Babe also wins against large forces. He single-handedly kills four men and rescues himself despite many traps and false friends. He embodies the American myth of everyman as lone hero. If Babe can do it, so can we.

This myth of individualistic fulfillment is further reinforced by a contrast made throughout the film between Americans as symbolized by Babe, and Europeans, as symbolized by the more continental Doc and Szell. Szell's first view of America is the result of a baggage strike at the airport. Luggage is strewn all ove

r the ground and the passengers are poking around for their belongings. In the center of the frame are Mr. and Mrs. America coming home from their South American vacation with straw hats, bright shirts and souvenirs. They are loud and frivolous, especially juxtaposed to Szell and what he represents. Szell sneers about America, "Land of plenty. Always so confident God was on their side. Now I think they're not so sure." Ultimately, of course, God IS on our side for Babe is victorious over Szell. The airport is chaotic, just like Babe's messy, chaotic room, which Doc calls an "armpit of a place." The dirty sheets and dirty glasses contrast strongly with the impeccable style of Doc's room. When they go to a very classy, continental restaurant for lunch, Doc talks of truffles and wine, suggesting Babe would prefer to eat at McDonald's, the ultimate symbol of America. Babe's power is very male, hooked to government, politics, WWII and money. And its maleness is symbolized by his father's gun. At first Babe keeps it wrapped in a white towel, hidden in a desk drawer, a symbol of his father's and his own weak manhood. In his showdown with Janeway and Elsa after his torture by Szell, Babe arrogantly cocks the gun and holds it straight out at arms length like a rigid phallus. At the end of the film, when he is safe and secure in his proven manhood, he is able to throw the gun away. The women of MARATHON MAN reflect this point of view of male power. Elsa is the only significant woman in the film. The treacherous, deceiving woman, she first facilitates Babe's mugging and later leads him into a trap.

THE END

Finally we must ask: what does it mean to be a man or a woman in this culture? For Babe, a man is defined as someone who is both moral (capable of making correct choices) and courageous (both being worldly intelligent and being able to act). Throughout MARATHON MAN Babe is surrounded by male models, each of whom presents a piece of the male definition, none of whom are complete themselves. Babe's father is moral but not courageous, brilliant but unable to survive. Doc is courageous but not moral. He is strong, as even Szell admits, barehandedly fighting off his murderous assailant early in the film. He is also cunning, able to sense the evil in Elsa. But he is not moral.Szell also has a strong moral code, but one which is evil. Babe's final test is his confrontation with Szell in the pump house. He does not sell out, refusing Szell's bribe of diamonds. Neither is he able to kill Szell (despite his evilness) in cold blood. Only when provoked by Szell, "You're too weak. Your father was weak in his way, your brother in his. And you're weak too. You're all so predictable," does babe have the motivation to kill. His newfound manhood has been challenged and he must prove himself by killing Szell. When Szell dies, Babe is able to leave the pump house, throw away his father's gun, the symbol of his unresolved manhood, and turn around and walk in the direction he has always run from. For Carrie, to become a woman is to unleash evil, not to destroy it. Prior to the menstrual scene we see a long sequence in which Carrie washes herself in the shower. Seen through diffusion filters and in slow motion, Carrie is a luscious, sensual creature, innocently soaping her breasts, rubbing between her legs, turning up her face to catch the water flowing from the phallic shower head. The shots linger over her body in voyeuristic close-ups. Suddenly there is blood. Carrie has just entered the world of the adult woman.

Carrie's world also exhibits various female roles. Her mother is a psychotic, evil woman who cannot deal with her own or her daughter's sexuality. Susie's mother is a bored housewife leading an empty life watching soaps and drinking scotch. Miss Collins is a kindhearted (well almost, she does admit to identifying with the hatred the women in the gym class feel toward Carrie for acting so foolish about her period) but not very wise. Carrie's peers are selfish nymphs, sexually teasing young men into helping with a particularly vicious prank. There is one genuinely nice woman in the film, Sue, who tries to help Carrie. But we, like Miss Collins, are duped into not trusting her actions until it is too late. It is all summed up with blood. Blood is very central to the rites of passage for both characters. For Carrie it is the horrifying, unexplained menstrual blood dripping down between her legs in the shower as if from an open wound. The pig's blood of humiliation. The oppressive blood of the Christian martyrs dripping out of the wounds of the St. Sebastian statue which adorns her closet sanctuary. For Babe, blood is Doc's courage in overcoming his deadly assailant barehanded and bleeding. And the regrettable but necessary deaths of Doc and his father out of which Babe's manhood rises. And Babe's strength of purpose is proven when he kills real people and not just paper targets.

The moral is clear. To be a man is to become moral and courageous, to rise up victorious out of the evil of the world. To become a woman is to become that evil: uncontrollable and destructive. Throughout MARATHON MAN, Szell keeps asking Babe, "Is it safe, is it safe?" No, women, it is not safe.