King's Highway pt. 71: Carrie

Stephen King gives a pretty detailed account of how Carrie came into existence in On Writing, but I first read the description of  its conception in George Beahm's The Stephen King Companion. I read that for the first time in 1987. King was well on my radar by that point, hence my getting a copy of The SK Companion for Christmas that year. Carrie was one of those films in heavy circulation at sleep-overs or parties or what not, but I somehow avoided seeing it until I was seventeen.

I didn't read the book until just last week.

Anyway, the first time I learned what this one was about was from the aforementioned Companion. Here's its description, as accompanied by some images from the movie:      

“As Holden Caulfied in Catcher in the Rye tries desperately to become part of the world around him and it refuses him, so Carietta White longs to become part of the in crowd, but can't.

“Alienated at home by her mother, Margaret White, a fundamentalist Christian...

“and alienated at school by her peers,

“Carrie is finally befriended by Susan Snell, who takes pity on her.

“Snell asks her boyfriend Tommy, on whom Carrie has a crush, to take Carrie to the prom.

“He agrees, and at the prom, something terrible happens.

Carrie, a wild talent, unleashes her powers as all hell breaks loose.”

Having now read the book, I wouldn't summarize the events quite the same way Beahm does. I don't know if Holden Caulfield is really an apt comparison, and Snell doesn't quite befriend Carrie. She acts behind the scenes in a manner somewhat friendly to the “idea” of Carrie, but in her own way, she's playing with Carrie (albeit benevolently) via proxies the same way Chris is. In a speech familiar to King characters throughout his career (and echoed as recently as Dreamcatcher and Under the Dome) she explains to Tommy:

“'But hardly anybody ever finds out that their actions really actually hurt other people! People don't get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don't stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it. (...) Someone ought to try and be sorry in a way that counts... in a way that means something.” 

King mentions it as “a young book by a young writer. In retrospect, it reminds me of a cookie baked by a first grader — tasty enough, but kind of lumpy and burned on the bottom.” Fair enough. For me, it suffers mostly in its final act. Sue's psychic bond with Carrie comes out of nowhere and strains credibility (not to mention deprives Sue's “just an all-too-human girl”ness of some of its power), and the supplementary material (from “the White Commission” and books examining Carrie' telekinetic attack and isolating the TK Gene, etc., including a fictional post-event memoir of Sue Snell's,) while cool, dilute some of the suspense. The reader is never in doubt of the tragic outcome of Carrie's story. 

Of course, neither was I, having seen the movie a dozen times and its being one of the more well-known modern points-of-reference for people of all walks of life. “Carrie at the Prom” is cultural currency that is widely accepted, like “Shaka, When the Walls Fell,” or something.

A scene not in the book.

I suspect if this was King's only published novel, (with no film version) it'd be known only as a curiosity of the seventies and not an underground classic. (Of course, who can know such things? Ergo, Ur-Kindle.)

Which is not to say it is isn't eminently readable. Kev (among others) mentions in his review that it's really a twisted update of the classic fairy tale: The Cinderella aspect: “Carrie White is the tragic Cinderella character, a shy, socially awkward teenager at the lowest rungs of the high school caste system. When Carrie experiences her first menstrual period following gym class, the other girls - fulfilling the roles of the wicked stepsisters - torment her, cruelly asserting their superiority.

 

“King's clever re-imagining of Prince Charming and the ball yields some surprising results:

“when forced to accept Carrie even as a temporary member of their society, her classmates find her surprisingly easy to like.

“The cruelty doesn't end there: in place of a wicked stepmother, we find Carrie's biological mother, driven to the point of madness by an unbalanced personality and religious fanaticism.

“Just as the onset of Carrie's period seems to trigger her own dormant telekinetic abilities, it also heightens Margaret White's instability. The theme of a parent being threatened by a child's encroaching adulthood here is twisted and heightened to horrific extremes.” 

Twisted Fairy Tale or Rite of Passage Gone Wrong; either way, it gets you where you live. I think we all look back upon adolescence - whether with fondness or dread - as a tour of duty we're just fortunate to have survived.

One of the survivors interviewed for the White Commission mentions that Teddy Duchamps, one-time-proprietor of the Amoco station that blows up during Carrie's rampage through town, has been dead since 1968. (His son runs the station now.)

Had to look this up to make sure, but not to be confused with Teddy Duchamp, no-s, of “The Body.”

I wanted to mention: in Beahm's book, there is a match-the-origin-story-with-the-novel-it-became chapter (or quiz), and the one for Carrie always stuck with me. Paraphrased, it's “King meets a woman reading Scripture at the laundromat and wonders what kind of children she might raise.”

This anecdote has been expanded, and altered somewhat, over the years. (Probably, Beahm is mixing together strands of the official inspiration for Carrie King relays in On Writing.) But to a young Bryan McMillan, this was the first time it occurred to me you could look at people and ask such questions and write about it. Like I said, I was thirteen or fourteen. I'd been reading for years and loved stories and fancied myself a writer of them, but this description of King's inspiration for Carrie activated something in me at the time.

Brian De Palma's film adaptation, according to King, made his reputation as an author.

Although he sold the book's paperback rights for a hefty sum, it was the film's popularity that brought King the national attention he's never relinquished. And while both De Palma's reputation and fortunes have ebbed and flowed since Carrie, King's have only improved on both counts.

I often find myself championing unpopular viewpoints, and my affection for De Palma's films might qualify as one. But this one is easier than most, as I genuinely enjoy De Palma's work and am as fascinated by the best of it as I am bemused by the worst of it. Few filmmakers have left such a varied body of work.

But let's stick with Carrie. Easily one of his more accessible pictures. As noted here: “Technically, the film is among De Palma’s most accomplished, with great binary compositions achieved through the use of a split-diopter lens (...)

and the long crane shot that “moves through the crowd at the prom and shows the actions of several significant characters, then moves up into the rafters of the gymnasium to show the suspended bucket of pigs’ blood, and finally zooms back to the point where it began.” Agreed. Nearly every film in his catalog has one unbroken shot sequence that calls attention to itself, and while all are agreed on the difficulty of pulling them off, De Palma fans debate which work for the story and which seem out-of-place. I consider myself a more-than-casual De Palma fan - his films and I have upgraded to “It's Complicated” from “Casual” - so I've got my own nominations for each of those, but this was the first time I really grokked how good this sequence really is. Like Scorsese mentions in his (excellent) Personal Journey Through American Movies, these long crane shots are the hardest to pull off. (How Max Ophuls did it so routinely, with the equipment he had, still blows my mind.) This entrance to the prom definitely belongs in any serious discussion / ranking of them.

And it keeps getting technically more and more impressive after this shot, is the crazy thing. And they fit the story/ subtext perfectly.

Billy and Chris are bathed in red, (right) as Carrie is, albeit with blood instead of via a camera filter, on her side of the frame; she is lit by the purple, blues and glows of the prom-design.

Carrie's frame moves from left to right, and the camera zooms in on her face.

Incidentally, the theme of the prom is changed from Springtime in Venice in the novel to Love Among the Stars for the movie. This gives it a mythological feel, as if she (the wild-talent-demigod) looks up at her fixed tragedy as a constellation.

Boom. Her vengeance replaces said stars, and the lighting/ split-screen changes accordingly.

Everybody Go Dead Now.

Carrie's exit is one of the most beautiful bits of the film and is not adequately conveyed by the below. We see her momentarily against a dark blue background before it is transformed into the yellow and orange by the rising flames, and Carrie's silhouette turns from dark to red.

Masterful stuff. All possible credit, as well, to Jack Fisk, art director extraordinaire. When Terence Malick, Brian De Palma, David Lynch and Paul Thomas Anderson want to keep working with you, you know you've met a high standard of mise-en-scène. Like or dislike their films, no one can fault their acuity with visuals.

From that Pajimba review, hyperlinked above,  “I think of Carrie as a sort of precursor to Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Both play out the traumas of adolescence by literalizing and extending them to extremes that are both funny and chilling. The film is full of deadpan jokes about the inherent melodrama of adolescence — note how thunder clatters outside the window and lightning splashes across the face of Mrs. White when she first exclaims, “Prom?!” ”

Not to mention the tuxedo scene, which is distinguished by a brief burst of sped-up audio amidst the typically-zany “dudes getting tuxes” trope. (De Palma is nothing if not wink-tastic about such things. If the viewer is ever meant to raise an eyebrow at the signs-and-signifiers aspect of anything he films, the soundtrack / audio, for better or for worse, will often strongly suggest which way to 'read' it.)

But I like this tuxedo scene, as it suggests a knowing wtf response to how teenage life is depicted onscreen. I grew up on Growing Pains and Corey Feldman's “Later for you, man - LATER FOR YOU, FOREVER!” after-school specials, all of which were dated (like most depictions of high school life) five seconds after they aired. Carrie, despite the horrendous costumes and some other “dated” aspects, is pretty instantly familiar as a sincere representation of high school Hell. Its metaphors and imagery continue to connect with audiences today.

Speaking of sped-up audio samples, the sound effect given to manifestation of Carrie's powers recalls rather pointedly the four-note violin theme from Hitchcock's Psycho. Which brings us face to face with one of the criticisms that has dogged De Palma throughout his career, his appropriation of Hitchcock. 

As discussed here “De Palma does not copy Hitchcock, he follows him, and his films (specifically Dressed to Kill, Blow Out and, to a much lesser extent, Obsession, Body Double, and Raising Cain) are not imitation Hitchcocks, they are rather authentic and ingenious developments of the same themes that once obsessed Hitchcock... De Palma took the threads that Hitchcock laid, and then ran with them.”

Depending on how you feel about that explanation will determine how willing you are to roll with the punches, I think, on De Palma's Hitchcock explorations. I don't suggest any “roll” is the right one, here, of course, just such a thing is either impossible to defend or relatively harmless, depending on your point of view. (shrugs) That's-a De Palma.

Regardless, the casting is just about perfect. 

Nancy Allen and P.J. Soles are great as the bad girls.

You really, really hate them.

And is that...?

Yep.

I was surprised to discover P.J. Soles had a bit part in this Cheers episode in 1984. She had memorable roles in Halloween and Stripes after Carrie, then primarily worked in TV, according to her imdb. Anyway, not that she was this huge star, just her character in this Cheers episode has one or two lines that could have been delivered by practically any actress, then that's it.

Travolta's Billy Nolan makes a less successful transition from the novel. But Billy might work better as he is in the movie: an inept guy manipulated by a stronger female than he does in the novel, where he shares many character traits with other smack-'em'up-and-work-on-the-car King villains.

Piper Laurie is amazing. She lost to Beatrice Straight from Network for the Academy Award. The conflict between Carrie and her mother...

...and between Carrie and Creepy Jesus

is just about as harrowing as has ever been explored onscreen.

It's a little dated (as evidenced here) but it holds up rather well.

I'm actually not really looking forward to the 2013 remake. Kimberley Peirce isn't a favorite. But! I'll give it a whirl, of course, and hope for the best.

In closing, the novel isn't bad, but the film is a classic. De Palma (like Kubrick or Cronenberg) never returned to King's material for any other films, but he knocked it out of the damn park here. 

And with that, I suspend Reading Operations for the King's Highway.

(Squeal of brakes, radio blaring AC/DC...)

NEXT: THE FINAL CHAPTER!

52 BOOKS ENTER, ONE BOOK LEAVES...

King's Highway pt. 70: Under the Dome

Spoilers ahead - sailor be warned. I flirted with the idea of upholding the novel's secrets for this blog but nah. Too much to discuss to keep it spoiler-free.

Under the Dome is “1100 pages of localized apocalypse,” says James Parker at the NY Times.  It “is the work of a master storyteller having a whole lot of fun,” says Jedediah Berry on the other coast. And the cover to my edition has this assessment from Jack Reacher author Lee Child:

“Seven words: The Best Yet from the Best Ever.” King returns the favor (or perhaps this was the quid pro quo) a few times in the text, having Colonel Cox and others refer to “the toughest goddamn military cop ever known, Jack Reacher.” So, apparently, the Jack Reacher novels take place in an America where Chester's Mill, ME was encased in a dome. At least on one level of the Tower.

I listened to most of this on audiobook. It was interesting switching between hearing the story (as read by Raul Esparza) and reading it. Raul gave Big Jim Rennie a rather out-of-place Southern accent for a town selectman who's lived his whole life in the most northeastern state of the union (ie Maine), and perhaps lingered a little too long over Junior Remmie's Baaaarbies (though in fairness, so does King, in the text; I could have used a few dozen less of those), but he did a commendable job. 

(I listened to him read me this story while cooking, mainly. It will be interesting to see if watching the upcoming TV show activates an associative craving for omelets and roasts or makes me want to chop some peppers and onions. Due to a job I had years back, I always crave a turkey-and-melted-swiss-on-rye when I read the New York Times, as that's what I always ate/ read on break. So the precedent's been set.)

UK Edition

Anyone looking for a non-partisan tale of good and evil will undoubtedly be disappointed. This is a world where Republicans are necrophiliac fascists who run meth factories under guise of fundamentalist Christian radio and exploit immediate tragedies to frame, bewitch, and rape those dumb enough to trust them. They are opposed only by a few beleaguered Democrats (mostly women,) internet-savvy teens, and that staple of American 21st century fiction, the “ex-military special ops” bad-ass, one whose feminized name, “Barbie,” underscores his sympathy for the One True Religion. 

(True, one of his allies, Julia Shumway, is described as “Republican to the core” in the plot synopsis on the first page, but she is the sort of Republican 100%-Democrat writers like King (or Aaron Sorkin) often create: i.e. not-very. One gets the impression her political affiliation is driven by marketing concerns, an attempt to not alienate “the faithful” more than a sincere attempt at parity. Her newspaper, aka the town's organ of truth is even named The Democrat.) There's even some Our Fearless Leader stuff with President Obama stepping into the novel to personally pledge his support and concern, and attendant teeth-gnashing from the crooks at that “cotton-picking terrorist-named blackjack summabitch” for doing so. 

Normally, such stacking-the-deck bugs me, but I have to admit, I was thoroughly entertained by it. Because (the President Obama stuff aside, which I assume was a late-in-the-game addition to the text, as most of this was written before his administration) as satirical indictment of Bush/Cheney War on Terror America, it's pretty damn spot-on. Most of our fictional reactions to the War on Terror Age seem to go in the 24 or Zero Dark Thirty direction; not so, here. One thing you cannot accuse King of is offering up justification for more torture, terror, and propaganda. Under the Dome is an indictment, a howl of anguish, and ultimately, as King the Eternal Optimist likes to provide, an expression of hope that there is a way out from under it.

I almost wish they would cast Dick Cheney as Big Jim Rennie for the forthcoming TV show. I mean, what the hell; if Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Newt Gingrich can play themselves on Thirty Rock and Park and Rec, why the hell can't Dick Cheney join in the fun? The heart arrhythmia wouldn't be too much of a stretch for him, actingwise.

Let me give you some examples while recounting the plot:

Things begin with a plane crash on Rte 119. (Redrum!) A force field (the Dome of the title) suddenly and inexplicably traps the inhabitants of Chester's Mill, ME. In an instant, their lives are changed forever. Dale Barbara aka “Barbie” almost makes it out of town before the Dome comes crashing down, but no luck. Luckily, he's an ex-military-interrogator with a heart of gold, and Colonel Cox (outside the Dome) taps him with the mission of finding whatever device is generating the dome. Opposing him is the town's #2, running the show from behind the scenes, “Big” Jim Rennie, who also owns one of the town's used-car dealerships as well as runs one of the country's largest crystal meth factories, hidden in the always-running Christian radio station on the outskirts of town. 

US soldier guarding Afghan poppies.

Having illegally appropriated most of the town's energy for this meth operation...

(It's propane in the novel, of course. Look out, Iran!)

Big Jim exploits the Dome to maximize his political power. He is aided in this by many of the town's thugs, who he (through his puppet on the police force, Peter Randolph) promotes to deputies.

“Main Street was full of people staring up into the sky with their mouths gaped open. To Rennie, they looked like sheep in human clothing. Tomorrow night they would crowd into Town Hall and go baa baa baa, when'll it get better? And baa baa baa, take care of us until it does.” (...) “Really, there was nothing like a scene of destruction to get people playing follow-the-leader.”

Among those deputized is his son Junior Remmie, he of the perpetual Baaaaarbie, whom we first meet after he kills his girlfriend and her friend who has the bad timing to show up in the immediate aftermath of the murder. After orchestrating a few false-flag operations to justify this expansion of police presence and provide cover for his own machinations, Big Jim has Barbie arrested. Barbie's got a posse, though, and they break him out. They find what's generating the Dome: (last chance to remain spoiler-free for that... three... two... one...) a device left by alien children, who are doing to Chester's Mill what earthling children have been known to do to antfarms, namely put them under glass and watch them cook. But, they are unable to turn it off. Meanwhile, at the meth lab, Chef Bushey has “gone native” and sees himself as Soldier Numero Uno in the Army of God. Having recruited the easily impressionable political figurehead, Andy Sanders, Chef Bushey initiates a standoff with those Big Jim sends to reclaim the propane. As has been known to happen a time or two at the end of King-novels, the town goes up with a bang:

A still from Herzog's amazing (and hypnotic) Lessons of Darkness.

Most of the town (including Big Jim Rennie, eventually) die from the result of this toxic storm. Having anticipated this and arranged for huge fans to blow fresh air through the semi-permeable Dome, Barbie takes his group of survivors to its edge. They manage to make contact with one of the children from the galaxy far, far away, convince it of their sentience (the way, several characters ponder, ants may have begged for mercy to activate the empathy of any children who burn them for kicks), the Dome is lifted, and God Bless America. 

I won't spoil the novel's very last line, which works exceptionally well as thematic payoff for the arduous word-trek leading up to it, but the last couple of acts contain many of the novel's best moments. 

There is lyricism (“A reddish moon finally clears the accumulated filth on the eastern wall of the Dome and shines down its bloody light. This is the end of October and in Chester's Mill, October is the cruelest month, mixing memory with desire. There are no lilacs in this dead land. No lilacs, no trees, no grass. The moon looks down on ruination and little else.”) 

There is profound truth (“Sorrow for a wrong was better than nothing, Barbie supposed, but no amount of after-the-fact sorrow could ever atone for joy taken in destruction, whether it was burning ants or shooting prisoners.”) 

There is humor (“God turned out to be a bunch of bad little kids playing interstellar X-Box,” says Reverend Libby at one point.) 

And there are horrors galore (Big Jim's death, especially, which is just some great and exceptionally-effective horror writing, too much to recount here, but also within the wave of fiery death that sweeps over the innocent and guilty alike.)

For me, this novel is King doing what he does best. Large cast of characters, villains sketched in broad but effectively characterized strokes, a town brought vividly to life, a cautionary tale of the hierarchies that form in a post-“event” world-in-miniature, and a kinetic pace that belies its nearly-1100 pages. I referred to Duma Key as a mountain-range of a book, and the same goes for this one. As with DK, I'll miss walking its trails with the characters created for the journey. Most of the reviews I've read concur, but some take issue with the novel's big reveal re: where the Dome comes from.

Not to mention its similarities in plot to The Simpsons Movie. Which, while understandable, are just coincidental; King started writing this story in 1976. He responded to the similarities by saying he was just as surprised by them as everyone else, but that “stories can be no more alike than snowflakes, as no two human imaginations are the same.” Good enough for me. It's not exactly unheard of for the same plots to be explored and conceived independently of one another.

A few reviewers noted some of its similarities to The Midwich Cuckoos. These similarities are found mainly in the novels' respective beginnings; King has wrotten about Wyndham's tale in Danse Macabre and elsewhere.

John Dugdale, in a review for The Sunday Times wrote: “King's inability to raise his game—to relinquish the methods of his more straightforward tales of the paranormal—prevents you taking his socio-­political vision seriously. The simple division of characters into goodies and baddies, the use of magic, the homespun style, the sentimental ending, the vital role played by a dog in defeating the forces of evil—all of these belong in fiction for older children, not the grown-up novels he's bent on emulating.”

To each his own, of course, but come on, John, why you got to pick on Horace Greeley (the Corgi?) I for one wouldn't mind a spin-off series of his further adventures with Julia and Barbie. King's love for his real-life dog Marlowe has never come across better than it does, here. (Although having him receive telepathic instructions in aid of the plot from a deceased Brenda Perkins might be a bit much.)

As for the aliens, what can I say? I love that part. What else could it have been? I want even more, actually. We've seen King bring aliens into things before, and equally-as-peripherally, in The Tommyknockers and From a Buick 8 or way back in “I Am The Doorway.” How about a story set actually in outer space or on an alien planet? Take it to the next level. I doubt he will (King's novels seem wholly-terrestrial, even when aliens are brought into it,) but I'd love to read it. Anyway, the aliens reveal, particularly that it's just a group of children playing around with humans like the intergalactic ants we very well may be vs. the shocktroops of an all-out invasion a la Dreamcatcher or residual presence a la The Tommyknockers, works better than the alternative, i.e. the Dome is the creation of some force-field-division of The Shop or something.

Psyched as hell for this tv show, now. The last sentence of the Author's Afterword is a thank-you to Constant Reader: “if you had half as much fun reading as I did writing, we're sitting pretty.” Indeed we are, sir, and you're welcome.

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS

- Some lines I enjoyed: “His balls tingled like tuning forks” or “the internet... that electronic galaxy of endless possibilities...” or “that wasn't just mail in those diapers, it was Federal Express and UPS combined in one.”

- I'm probably among a minority of readers that got this in his head each-and-every-time I picked up the book:

What can I say? I absorbed a lot of hair metal at an impressionable age. I hope someone makes a highly-unlikely song parody. You're un-der the Dome! Whoooo-oooah-oh! Un-der! The! DOME...

- It's safe to say King was enjoying himself some Lost during the writing of this one. He not only refers to an invented sequel for it but also created (or had created for him) a fake website for the town. Not that Lost was the first thing to provide invented-supplementary-material for itself, but it certainly took advantage of it in a comprehensive fashion.

- Finally, I was listening to “The Map Room” from the Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack (I won't even provide a link because if you don't have it already bookmarked, then shame on you) while reading the section of Rusty's initial approach to the Dome Generator. Just a little gift from the God of Random, and one which delighted me.

NEXT:

Carrie: our penultimate stop on the Highway!