{"id":57927,"date":"2013-11-01T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2013-11-01T17:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=57927"},"modified":"2014-06-09T20:59:31","modified_gmt":"2014-06-10T01:59:31","slug":"the-blood-of-carrie-a-feminist-review-of-the-re-make","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/11\/01\/the-blood-of-carrie-a-feminist-review-of-the-re-make\/","title":{"rendered":"The Blood of Carrie: A Feminist Review of the Re-Make"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Carrie<\/em>\u00a0is largely about how women find their own channels of power, but also what men fear about women and women\u2019s sexuality. Writing the book in 1973 and only three years out of college, I was fully aware of what Women\u2019s Liberation implied for me and others of my sex. Carrie is woman feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book.”<\/p>\n

\u2013 Stephen King,\u00a0Danse Macabre<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Screenshot_1\"<\/a>Most feminist criticism of Stephen King\u2019s\u00a0Carrie<\/em>\u00a0has focused on the male fear of powerful women that the author said inspired the film, with the anti-Carrie<\/em>\u00a0camp finding her death at the end to signify the defeat of the \u201cmonstrous feminine<\/a>\u201d and therefore a triumph of sexism. But Stephen King\u2019s honesty about what inspired his 1973 book notwithstanding,\u00a0Carrie<\/em>\u00a0is as much an articulation of a feminist nightmare as it is of a patriarchal one, with neither party coming out on top.<\/p>\n

The rise of Second Wave feminism in the \u201970s posed serious threats to the patriarchal order — as well it should have. But even for those who think change is not only necessary but good, change can be pretty scary. This, with a hat tip to the universality of being bullied, is one of the reasons\u00a0Carrie<\/em>\u00a0scares everyone.<\/p>\n

While men in the \u201970s felt threatened by the unprecedented numbers of women standing up for themselves and attempting such radical social changes as being recognized as equal under the law, women themselves must have felt some anxiety that the obstacles to fully realizing themselves might be too big to conquer. The story therefore resonates with men in terms of the fear of (metaphorical) castration prompted by changing gender roles, and with women in terms of the fear that no matter how powerful we become, social forces are still so aligned against us that fighting back might destroy not just the patriarchy but ourselves.<\/p>\n

Feminism was not the only thing on the rise in the \u201970s: so was Christian fundamentalism. In 1976, the year that the original movie debuted, 34 percent of Protestant Americans told the Gallup Poll that they had had born-again experiences, leading George Gallup himself to declare 1976 the\u00a0Year of the Evangelical<\/a>. In fact evangelism, then as now — when\u00a041 percent<\/a>\u00a0of Americans report being born again — was one of feminism\u2019s more formidable foes, one of those very social forces that would rather destroy women than see them powerful.<\/p>\n

The triggering event of\u00a0Carrie\u2013<\/em>the infamous shower scene\u2013is a product of the meeting of these two forces. Because of a fundamentalist Christian worldview in which menstruation is not simply a biological process but rather evidence of Eve\u2019s original sin being visited upon her daughters,Carrie<\/em>\u2018s mother does nothing to prepare her for getting her period. When she starts bleeding at school, Carrie naturally panics, and as a result faces the scorn of her peers — who laugh at her for not knowing what\u2019s happening —\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0the scorn of her mother, who believes that \u201cAfter the\u00a0blood<\/em>\u00a0the\u00a0boys come<\/em>. Like sniffing dogs, grinning and slobbering, trying to find out where that smell is.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t believe I\u2019m about to go all Freudian here, but for the male viewer the shock of seeing unexpected blood between one\u2019s legs clearly represents a fear of castration\u2013a literal embodiment of King\u2019s anxieties about feminism. From the woman\u2019s perspective, the menstrual blood obviously signifies Carrie\u2019s maturation — coming into her power — which has been marred by fundamentalism.<\/p>\n

\"10304319383_31b0b70ec7\"<\/a>Without making the new remake of the movie any more violent, director Kimberly Peirce emphasizes the imagery of this inciting event by adding waaaaay more blood to her\u00a0Carrie<\/em><\/a>. When Carrie gets her period in the shower, there\u2019s more blood than in Brian De Palma\u2019s\u00a0film<\/a>. When Carrie gets some of that blood on her gym teacher, which happens in both films, Peirce adds more of it, and the camera lingers on it longer and returns to it more often.<\/p>\n

When Carrie\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>mother locks her in the closet, Peirce has the crucifix bleed\u2013something that doesn\u2019t happen in the first movie. The blood of the crucifix connects Carrie\u2019s first period to the suffering of Christ, deepening the relationship between debased femininity and religion.<\/p>\n

Then, when Carrie gets pig blood dumped on her head at the prom, there\u2019s not just more of it in the second film: Pierce shows the blood landing on her in slow motion\u00a0three times<\/em>. This final deluge of blood echoes a scene that Pierce added to the beginning of the movie, in which Carrie\u2019s mother endures the bloody birth of her daughter. Carrie, then, is essentially born again at the prom, and the devastation she wreaks can be read as a result not of her feminine power but of the corruption of it by religion.<\/p>\n

Peirce told\u00a0Women and Hollywood<\/a>\u00a0that her goal was to make Carrie as sympathetic as possible. She removes the male gaze aspect of the original shower scene, in which many of the girls are naked and the long, slow shots of Carrie\u2019s body are rather pornified. She makes sympathy for Carrie\u2019s primary nemesis at school pretty much impossible by changing her from an angry girl in an abusive relationship to a sociopath without a conscience. In the new film, Carrie even has the strength to challenge her mother\u2019s theology. Her prom date is more likeable and Peirce uses his death\u2013something De Palma doesn\u2019t reveal until the end — as further motivation for Carrie\u2019s rampage.<\/p>\n

None of this changes the fact that Carrie dies at the end, but it does foreground the idea that the message doesn\u2019t have to be that powerful women are indeed dangerous. It can be that fundamentalism is dangerous to women.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a feminist, I say go see\u00a0Carrie<\/em>. Watching her be destroyed — but not without taking out a lot of the patriarchy with her — and then, as a viewer, emerging again into the sunlight unscathed, allows feminists to process some of our deepest fears about what we\u2019re up against. Then we can get on with making the world a place where religious beliefs don\u2019t corrupt our sexuality, where women don\u2019t have to destroy themselves to be powerful and where women\u2019s equality doesn\u2019t trigger men\u2019s fear of their own doom.<\/p>\n

Holly L. Derr, MFA, is a feminist media critic who writes about theater, film, television, video games and comics. Follow her\u00a0@hld6oddblend<\/a>\u00a0and on her tumblr,\u00a0Feminist Fandom<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>For more of the Feminist Guide to Horror Movies, check out Parts\u00a0One<\/a>,\u00a0Two<\/a>,\u00a0Three<\/a>, and\u00a0Four<\/a>\u00a0at the Ms. Magazine blog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Cross-posted at\u00a0Ms. Magazine<\/a>. \u00a0Photos courtesy of\u00a0Jade<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0thefanboyseo1<\/a>\u00a0via\u00a0Creative Commons 2.0<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Carrie\u00a0is largely about how women find their own channels of power, but also what men fear about women and women\u2019s sexuality. Writing the book in 1973 and only three years out of college, I was fully aware of what Women\u2019s Liberation implied for me and others of my sex. Carrie is woman feeling her powers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":58101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[664,55,2095,2102,253,343,868,42,120],"class_list":["post-57927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biology","tag-gender","tag-gender-feminismactivism","tag-gender-history","tag-history","tag-tvmovies","tag-power","tag-religion","tag-sex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/11\/Screenshot_11.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57927"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62928,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57927\/revisions\/62928"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}