traumatised girl is bullied by her peers and relentlessly religiously abused by her mother and just wants to be a normal well liked girl? faces an event no one warned her about that scares her and in reponse her peers and mother terrorize her? and begins developing powers she doesnt understand and cant control? and another girl employs her boyfriend to help her feel normal except the girls that bullied her continue to traumatize her on what she felt was the best night of her life by killing the boy she was with and drenching her in the thing that rehashes the initial, horrific catalyst? carrie white didnt do anything wrong
Carrie White: *brutally kills all of her tormentors with her psychic powers*
Me:
So I reread the book lately for my podcast, and what’s interesting is that Carrie doesn’t even set out to kill anyone at first. She wants to make the sprinklers go off so that everyone else gets drenched the way she did. Carrie actually leaves the prom, goes and lies on the front lawn, then thinks, “Hey, I have psychic powers, and I can totally accomplish this reverse prank.” The only thing is the use of her psychic abilities degrades her ability to reason (no, really, that’s something King explicitly wrote out). So when she locks the doors on everyone and then sets off t he sprinklers, it causes an electrical fire. But Carrrie’s doing so much psychic work (you could say “carrying such a heavy mental load”) that she’s unable to reason beyond the fact that the fire will also punish these people who just laughed at her for getting covered in blood. And once that happens, Carrie’s like, “hey, fire’s such a great idea. You know who could use more of it? This entire fucking town.”
Anyone who ever was (or who was ever perceived as) a Weird Girl understands that Carrie is 100% a story of a teenage Weird Girl finally being able to make sure that those who Fuck Around truly Find Out.
…I’m sorry, did you READ the posts above you? Carrie is the story of a deeply abused child who is also bullied relentlessly at school having a good night for once in her life before being humiliated in front of her school while being viscerally reminded of a traumatizing event that triggered more abuse in her home and from her classmates AND seeing one of the few people who’d been kind to her recently killed in the process (the boy who took her to prom was hit in the head with the bucket the pigs’ blood had been in and he died amidst the chaos of blood loss and I must also assume head trauma).
She then retaliates the only way she knows how, in a way that increasingly deteriorates her ability to be rational and reasonable, and many people die even though that wasn’t her ultimate goal. After this, she goes home and doesn’t even attack or kill her abuser until her abuser LITERALLY TRIES TO KILL HER.
This is a story about abuse and trauma, and how it can hurt people to the point that they can’t respond in a fully rational manner and can only lash out, hurting others and themselves in the process, and ultimately how that abuse can destroy the victims utterly, even if they manage to get their (deserved or not) vengeance. Carrie dies at the end, calling out for her abusive mother, because her mother was the closest thing to someone who loved her that she was familiar with. This is a tragedy, it is not some empowering “don’t fuck with the weird girl” story of vengeance and come-uppance.
Like, yes, I’m on Carrie’s side here, but that doesn’t make this story in any way victorious. This is a story of why no one should Fuck Around with anyone, because you are hurting them, and that hurt matters.
As a former zookeeper we would hear this a lot. “If you don’t study hard you’ll end up cleaning poop for a living.” It’s the one time we’re allowed to go off on the visitors. I once heard my boss rant for five minutes at a lady, in front of her kids, about how he had a Master’s degree, how people literally worked there for free, and how dare she judge people without bothering to know anything about them. Later that day his boss came by and said, roughly, “She told us what happened. Thanks for not throwing anything this time.”
I can count on one hand the amount of times I have gone off on people, but employment snobbery gives me the rage. I was showing the new kid how to use the fry scoop at McDonald’s “.. like this, and then just sort of hold it perpendicular and give it one tap..”
And the new kid sniggered “isn’t perpendicular a bit of a big word for McDonald’s?”
Something in me was just so annoyed by this 16yr old who was learning to work right next to me and somehow felt above us? Fuck that shit. I pointed at the people just on the floor and went off, “she’s a 4th year law student, she’s the primary career for her terminally ill daughter, he raises 100,000 for charity every year, she manages 3 stores and more than £16mil in turnover a year. What the fuck do you do?”
He just sort of mumbled “I didn’t know”
“you shouldn’t have to know, you’re not better than us. So. You tap it once and then move it here to release…”
