Review of Carrie (2013) by Shiira — 17 Nov 2013

In Julie Taymor's Across the Universe(the 2008 musical that recounts the late-sixties by making narrative use of the Beatles' songbook), a high school girl expresses an unrequited love for, presumably, the golden boy, the star quarterback, in a languorous version of "I Want to Hold Your Hand", as she walks away from her thronged colleagues, the football players and cheerleaders.

Because the audience is well-versed in the symbiotic relationship between these teenage kings and queens, it comes as a shock when Taymor cuts to the comely blonde decked out with school spirit, a P.O.

V shot from the Asian brunette's perspective, sitting in the grandstands, making her erotic longings known through Paul McCartney's rock and roll poetry. When football practice starts, the lovesick cheerleader proceeds to walk through the busy field, untouched by a collision of male bodies who display complete indifference to the female presence, a set-piece in which the sports arena is juxtaposed against musical art that recalls the "Is There Anybody Here for Love" sequence in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, when a similarly ignored(but straight) Jane Russell maneuvers her way through all those kinetic and self-involved Olympians going about their training.

The intertextuality between these filmic texts posits that the closeted teen would have longed for Marilyn(not a swimmer or a gymnast); she prefers blondes, too. A lesbian cheerleader, of course, upsets the whole prep sports ecosystem.

Sue Snell knows this. The filmmaker, a woman, who helmed Boys Don't Cry, remakes Sue, or rather, appraises the Amy Irving character's true nature, since she would understand the interior lives of girls better than the source material's male creators.

Sadly, the filmmaker, barely strays from the narrative template laid down by Brian DePalma in the 1976 original(adapted from the Stephen King novel). Still, arguably, the filmmaker manages to resolve a plot point involving Sue and her boyfriend Tommy Ross that, to this day, leaves, for some, an aftertaste of contrivance; the plot point in which the "nice" girl, as atonement for helping corner Carrie against the shower wall with pelted tampons, asks her prom date to accompany the school misfit instead.

Miss Collins is suspicious, and so are we, because no high school girl alive could possibly be that altruistic. Rightly so, the gym teacher tells Tommy, "Don't you think you're just gonna look a little ridiculous when you walk into the prom with Carrie White?" Now with the remake, Sue's charitable gesture makes sense.

Not willing to put her image at risk, she sends Tommy as her surrogate. On a subtextual level, the filmmaker outs Sue, even though, in all likelihood, it never crossed King's mind that he was creating an ambiguous girl.

The writer, however, has no control over how a story will be interpreted by the reader after its deliverance. As a commodity, a novel to be sold on the marketplace, the artist knows that it now belongs to the people, with a life of its own.

Naturally, an aggressively straight male like DePalma would have a different take on the King novel than a lesbian, who, perhaps, knowing what it was like to be different at such an unformed age, wouldn't want Carrie to self-immolate in a fire, alone and unloved.

But this production isn't an indie like her auspicious debut. Expected to meet the commercial expectations of profitability demanded by a major studio, she keeps the film in the closet, too, and goes through the motions of shooting a routine horror flick.

You have to look closer for the movie that could have been. Right away, the filmmaker establishes a connection between the clandestine possibles, during P.E. class, when Carrie errantly serves the volleyball straight into Sue's back, whereas in the original, Carrie is isolated in the back row, unable to dig the incoming kill.

Instead of raising her voice in anger, Sue just looks back at Carrie, a look that transcends physical pain. This time around, in the ensuing lock room melee, Sue is more of an onlooker than an instigator, considerably less pro-active; she doesn't tear off the tampon dispensary cover like her 70s-era counterpart.

Later, in the backseat of Tommy's car, Sue looks distracted during intercourse, as if she's undergoing an epiphany about her sexual orientation, akin to Lana(in Boys Don't Cry), who knows Brandon is a girl when they have sex near her spinach-canning factory jobsite, because in a P.

O.V. shot, she sees "his" clevage. Just before Chris dumps pig's blood on the prom queen, she texts Sue, and refers to Carrie as "your girl". Conspicuously, Sue doesn't clamor her way back into the flaming gymnasium to check on Tommy.

In retrospect, we now realize that she doesn't love him enough to risk her life. This misplaced love, after 37 years, finds purchase in a burning house, where Sue, quite pointedly, bravely treads with the goal of saving her secret love.