When I was in college, sometimes we’d ask each other what high school was like and a common jokey answer was, “Did you see Carrie?”
I suspect that we’re going through a kind of “dark age” of movie and television writing because the idiotic writing and total lack of good sense behind the new Carrie, which I really wanted to like, can only be because a writer, somewhere, doesn’t understand what drama means. Or what drama demands.
Drama — storytelling basically — must flow the way a child understands it. When I kid says to their parent, “read it the right way,” to a story they’ve heard a zillion times before, they are demanding something that is rooted in our unconscious need. Because we have memory, because we live in time, and because we have words to describe those memories of time, this other “thing” cropped up which Jung probably had a name for — the collective unconscious — but I don’t think that’s right.
Anyway, when we get to the scene in Carrie where they succeed in drenching her in pig’s blood, Carrie, played by a marvelous young actress, looks out across the field of fellow students and teachers and chaperones and — you can see it in her eyes — decides to kill every single one of them.
And then the screen goes back with sounds of screaming and terror and so on. Cut to some woman that is questioning one of the survivors and demanding to know — I don’t know — something. It doesn’t matter. From then on, he keeps cutting away from the revenge scenes and going back to the talking heads. This is just absolute stupidity. It sucks all the drama and all the suspense out of the story and gives us something that is absolutely unessential. For one thing, we don’t know who these questioners are. For another, it tells us who survived Carrie’s revenge. And third, we wanted to SEE it — in “real” time, from start to finish. This is something Brian DePalma understood intuitively, although I think he dragged it out for so long it was almost as if he didn’t trust us to understand anything at all. But once he got going, he didn’t cut away. All eyes were on Carrie and the bloodshed. One magnificent scene in the DePalma Carrie was when Sissy Spacek is standing there on stage, arms slightly akimbo, and the curtain behind her just ripples with this gorgeous flame. Another that was seared into memory was when Betty Buckley, the gym teacher who was slightly sympathetic, pressed against the bleachers by Carrie’s telekinetic abilities, looks at Carrie and screams, “Carrie, no, don’t.” And then you see a massive thing — I don’t know what it was — swing down and slam right into her stomach — almost instantly killing her and nearly cutting her in half — I think today they would probably show that.
Unless you don’t know how to write drama. So it was just too bad. I know Stephen King approved it, but cutting away to talking heads — especially ones we haven’t met — is not why people want to watch a movie.
Fjord. This movie is well made and can be infuriating at times. But I wondered if it wasn’t really a Christian right wingers wet dream — because it essentially depicts the modern evangelical Christian family (5 children, ultra disciplined as in no phones, no tv, Bible studies, and I think home schooled but I wasn’t 100% on the plot) vs. Ultra liberal do-gooder socialists who only exist to torment God loving people.
There’s a kind of utter absurdity to the movie which is why, although I found it interesting and I like the actors and directors, I felt a little bit betrayed. The central conflict between the man and the state of Norway, (and it’s interesting that the state is represented almost entirely by women), is that the man routinely spanked his children on the butt and in Norway, that is illegal and considered child abuse. The children are taken away and put into foster homes. The nursing baby is even taken from them. There is going to be a civil trial, to see if the children should be allowed to return to their family. Then after that there is going to be a criminal child to determine whether or not the parents should be jailed for having spanked their children. Even more absurd, is that there is scant evidence of anything. There is a bruise on one of the girls which she may have gotten from wrestling. The whole trial and ordeal is based on the father signing a statement that he “slapped” his children, when what he actually claims is that he gave them a spanking on the rear end. But what’s written is written and that’s the basis for what will eventually become a criminal case until, the end of the movie, he and his wife, decide to escape from Norway and make their way to Denmark and then, presumably, somewhere else.
I just didn’t get what it was actually about, in the end. Except that it was a movie that could have been shown by one that Fathom Events company that is always broadcasting “christian” movies which supposedly show the truth of the bible. In this case, it shows a good Christian family bravely facing the Socialist devils (they even make one of the women look especially angry — like she absolutely hates Christians), and succeeding by escaping.
It didn’t, for example, show anything good that might have come out of a Children’s Welfare Agency, like the show Judging Amy did with Tyne Daley’s part. (Amy played a judge so she wasn’t really part of the agency that was tasked with overseeing these cases.) The prosecuting lawyer was allowed without objection to make false insinuations and wildly misinterpret the character of the family and actions of the parents.
Most annoying, from the writing view, was when the family’s main lawyer suddenly, and inexplicably, tells them that they are going to get the children back, but they are also told that they have to arrange visitation for the foster families as part of the agreement with the state to return the children. What does the foster families wants have anything to do with whether or not these kids can be returned to their parents?
It was stuff like that, plot points basically, that made me feel this was entirely made up out of whole cloth, and then you start to see the parallels with Christian Nationalism stories and movies and right wing paranoia about progressive people.
Child welfare agencies exist because we, as a society, in almost every part of the world, recognize that parents will sometimes kill their children, or that parents can be fucked up and should not be around children, even their own. They do not exist to persecute Christians — but that is what Christians like to think because they are, basically, a persecution religion. So are the jews and so are the muslims. The entire branch of what they call Abrahamic religions (I’ll look that up later), are persecution narratives. It’s like Russia and Putin — always chasing that dream of being great. Maga, in other words.
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I’m saving this here because I think it helps explain why I’ve always felt the need to write, and why I’ve always loved reading. It is by John Berger. The essay is called Between Two Colmars. 1978. Or possibly from “About Looking”
[the dominance of images] “creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: Memory ceases to be necessary or desirable. With the loss of memory, the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us.”
He’s also a novelist and his book is taught in art schools. I think it’s called Ways of Seeing. Might be worth reading.