Half a century fearing ‘Carrie’ | Culture

At first it was only three pages. Three pages that the writer Stephen King, at that time a regular literature professor, had thrown into the trash can. The protagonist of those three pages was a dull and apparently stoic girl who was tormented by her classmates in high school. The girl was dressed strangely. Her mother was excessively obsessed with religion. She was obsessed with the battle between good and evil. An evil that she herself exercised by suffocating her own daughter without caring in the slightest. “She seemed like the typical scapegoat, the perpetual butt of jokes, the girl capable of swallowing the most implausible stories, the object of all the bad tricks. And she was.” This is how King describes her in her first appearance in the showers of the girls’ locker room at Ewen High School. This is Carrie. Carrie White, the protagonist of the novel who has just turned 50 and, if it continues to be so powerfully indispensable, it is because when it was published nothing like it existed.

Because it’s not just that Carrie treat, in an immersive, empathetic, and extremely real, bullying, is that it is done from a place of non-victimhood. That is, it does so by granting him what everyone who has ever suffered that kind of daily and invisible torture, socially accepted and perpetuated by the complicity of an environment as guilty as the harasser himself, would like to have had: power. Or, rather, enough strength to hit back.

And what kind of strength could someone who is being bullied have that does not go through conventional confrontation, completely unthinkable in someone who has lost self-esteem to the point that he does not dare to raise his voice? A mental strength. That with the desire for something to end, for the suffering to stop, a kind of real earthquake can be caused, capable of protecting you from abuse, is almost a dream come true. And one that would have no place in a realistic novel, one that uses the fantasy genre to turn reality around, for once and in a terrifying way for the stalker.

King was 26 years old when he published the novel, and in while I write, that kind of memoir that is at the same time, and above all, a writing manual, he says that the idea occurred to him while he was cleaning the rust from the showers in the girls’ locker room at the Brunswick High School, where his brother Dave worked. summers as a janitor. Until then, King had not noticed the containers of pads and tampons, which, of course, were not in the boys’ locker rooms, and he also did not know that the girls’ showers had “pink plastic curtains hung with rings.” He wanted to know why, and Harry, the guy he was cleaning the locker room with, told him that the girls needed more privacy and explained that those trash cans were for “when they have the days.” An idea instantly formed in his head. And it was a terrifying idea. One of those trash cans was being unloaded at someone who, at that moment, was having “one of those days.” What was more terrifying than being attacked with your own privacy? What if she hit back? But how was she going to do it?

“A few years ago I had read an article in life where the hypothesis was raised that certain cases of poltergeist They were telekinesis phenomena. Some evidence, the article argued, suggested that young people were more likely to have these kinds of powers, especially girls in early adolescence, when they have their first… whoosh! Two previously unrelated ideas have just come together, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, and I thought it could be the basis for a good story,” says King, who, however, found himself displaced from the beginning by the character of Carrie White —” “I didn’t like him,” he wrote, “partly because Carrie herself knew that he couldn’t understand her.

It was Tabitha King, the writer’s wife, who rescued those pages from the trash can and told him that she would give him a hand in what it meant to be a girl. And that, she would say, was the fundamental ingredient. Because, from the innocence of those who do not know but want to know, not only the taboo of female adolescence—and its cruelty—but also that of periods was broken.

Blood was associated with the power of the feminine ever since. That is to say, Carrie He reversed that too. The period, that periodic relationship with blood, was not a weakness, but something powerful. Desirée de Fez, author of the juicy and fundamental book halfway between memoirs, chronicle and essay scream queens (Blackie Books), and renowned horror film critic, considers that the “iconography of blood associated with the power of women who break the system” is a constant in cinema since the premiere of the film version of Carrie.

The novel was published in 1974 and just two years later Brian De Palma forever turned Sissy Spacek into the queen of cursed adolescence in fiction, also audiovisual. “What happens with Rawby Julia Ducournau, that cannibalism that has adolescence as its starting point, the girl who leaves childhood behind, has something of Carrie. In fact, female horror film directors, since Issa López (True Detective: Polar Night) to Karyn Kusama are deeply influenced by both the aesthetics of the film and the character,” he adds.

Kusama, responsible for such an iconic film about cursed adolescence as Jennifer’s Body, he confessed not too long ago “how powerful” the film is, without which, evidently, the book would not have had the impact it had, and continues to have, something that King himself admitted at the time. “The last time I saw her, the moment she comes off the stage, when the destruction begins, I screamed Yes! The story is tremendously cathartic, in some mythological sense. The beginning, that terrible humiliation, the protagonist’s lack of knowledge of her own body, is tremendously cruel, and for me it has something to do with the rotten soul of the United States. That everyone is with her, that they accompany her during that revenge, that they understand the rage at repression, is terribly beautiful to me. “It’s telling me that we are all Carrie in some way, or we have felt like her at some point,” the director said about the character, that ordinary girl who, King wrote, seemed like “a frog among swans” and who will forever be the one who could hit back, all the blows.