This Isn't My Carrie White, and I'm Glad of It (Spoiler Filled)

The Carrie White in Mike Flanagan's new adaptation is not my Carrie White.

This is not the Carrie White I grew up with. This is not the character of the novel I was introduced to as kid, and read multiple times since. She's not the Carrie White embodied so remarkably by Sissy Spacek in Brian De Palmas horror classic.

Mike Flanagan's adaptation of King's novel doesn't involve my Carrie White, and I'm fine with that. My Carrie is still there for me. King's novel sits on my shelf. De Palma's movie sits on another. I can go back to them at whatever moment I want, and the chances are good I will do so again, in the not too distant future.

I can understand deciding Flanagan's adaptation isn't for you, because yet again, this is not a novel accurate depiction of the character, and you think it's important that we at some point get a screen adaptation of the novel that puts someone who isn't conventionally attractive in the role. If you have decided you won't have time for a Carrie adaptation again, until they cast a fat Carrie, and the production makes sure to do their magic with hair, makeup and costumes to make her appear as frumpy and unattractive as the book depicts her, that's valid. I get it. I'd also like to see that.

If you've decided you just aren't interested in another Carrie adaptation until there's a woman running the whole thing, as director or show runner, I get that too. Considering the fact that Carrie White is a female character that has become part of that pantheon of characters that are in our collective cultural consciousness, I'd also really love to see how a woman's perspective might change the approach to the character, story and ideas it touches on or directly addresses.

The thing is, those aren't my Carrie White either. My Carrie White already exists. My Carrie White was the one waiting for me when I was old enough to start engaging with the different mediums she was created in. Even though King's Carrie is a frumpy, unattractive girl, she's still created by King, so unless she's slavishly loyal to his novel, it's going to be a different Carrie than even the one in his novel. My Carrie has been with me for four decades, at least. She's been part of my cultural consciousness for longer than that, as I was aware of King's novel before I read it, and the iconic image of Sissy Spacek's blood covered prom queen was already embedded in the culture before I saw De Palma's movie. Any Carrie White that has come along since, hasn't been and can't be my Carrie White. I didn't really get to choose my Carrie White though either, she was already here. When I found Carrie, she only existed in King's novel and De Palma's movie, but that's why she's mine. She's the Carrie White I was first introduced to, the Carrie White that's lived in my imagination and memory since. She's the Carrie I've returned to at so many different points in my life, because her story is compelling, and it's amalgamation of tragedy and catharsis has been reliable through all those years.

I can also see she gave birth to a whole pantheon of other characters who've made their way to being part of our cultural consciousness. I can see her DNA in the ways Jean Grey changed in Marvel comics over the years. Sadie Sink's Jean Grey in this year's Spider-Man: Brand New Day was influenced by the story of Carrie White, even if it's not a direct or conscious. Millie Bobby Brown's Eleven in Stranger Things, is definitely influenced by King's Carrie White. I can't exactly fault people who see the show as little more than King fan fiction, because his influence drips from it at least as much as the blood does in it. Someone could, and I'd be surprised if they didn't soon, fill an entire book on the ways Carrie White's influence on culture can be seen in hundreds, if not thousands of other characters, who are also women with extraordinary powers.

But my Carrie White wasn't born of magic and cut whole from the cloth of King's solitary imagination and De Palma's lens either. She comes from a whole, much longer history of women who are made monsters because of how the world around them perceived them, and it's rigid, strict, often deadly standards. In many ways, what King really did was to transpose a secular worldview onto the age old story of the witch. My Carrie White wasn't a monster from the beginning, she's made one by the world around her, but... she is a woman with an extraordinary power, a thing every nation or culture grown from the history of Western civilization has always feared, and a thing that called her to deal in death, destruction and pain. As Stephen King imagined her, the power Carrie White has isn't something she wields as an extension of an otherwise free will and autonomy. It's a thing that pulls, pushes and cajoles her toward the dark side or her nature, the dark side of human nature. It's a foundational part of what the tragedy of King's Carrie is. It's part of why Carrie White's ending is both cathartic and tragic.

This is also why the sequel to De Palma's movie, shot and released many years later, was called Carrie 2: The Rage. The power itself is the product of rage. It's accessed and at its most potent through rage. It's never been my understanding of the character that the finale of King or De Palma's Carrie, that Carrie White has become psychotic, in the sense of losing her faculties, becoming delusional and so on. It's always been more like giving in. Carrie gives in to the thing that power has wanted since its first tendrils started to swirl around who and what she is. It is, unto itself, dangerous, a thing of blind destruction and vengeance. The story told by both King and De Palma was one of inevitability. It's the meeting of the world around her, with the power that lives in her, promising it will give her freedom through domination. King and De Palma's Carrie is cathartic, because it lets the audience access an experience we all come to have some secret desire for, in the world as we've known and experienced it. The cruel and the indifferent pay, and as they are both required to create the experience Carrie has, the experience of the kind of cruelty so many of us experience at one point or another in our lives, it feels good to watch her exact her bloody vengeance. The source of that torment, is in no small part is that the systems that dominate our lives, politically, economically and socially and their indifference to the cruelty they create or allow. Fantasies of power and the revenge we might seek are a natural outcome, but they are at base, fantasies about being able to use power in the way we've experienced it. Our ideas of what power is and could be, are shaped by our experience with it as part of our lives and the environment we experience those lives in.

It's also why that story, the story of my Carrie, is a tragedy. Carrie becomes exactly the monster her mother has believed she is, all of Carrie's life. It's why she returns to her mother, and brings the house down, literally, on both of them. We love Carrie White, because she has been a container, into which torment by domination has been poured, all of her life, and when that container spills, it all comes out. The town that's tormented her through it's rigid enforcement of its social expectations and beliefs, is destroyed. Carrie's final act is to destroy the other force in her life that's been tormenting her through its domination, her mother. Understanding she's become the monster her mother believes she is, no less monstrous that the world that's tormented her all of her life, and if that world wouldn't accept her before, it certainly wasn't going to accept her after seeing her power enables her to reject its domination and respond to its cruelty in kind, she chooses to end her mother and herself.

The early promotional material related to this new adaptation of Carrie have been focused on the way it brings the story into a contemporary world. From a promotional standpoint, it's a smart thing to do, for a number of reasons. First, it's part of what makes this a different Carrie than those that came before. Second, that aspect is extremely well conceived. What is often referred to as sentimentality in Flanagan's work, I think is more accurately described as interrogative, and this may be his most successful piece of interrogative work. The interrogative bend of his work comes from not being satisfied with sitting in judgment of the characters in it. He's not satisfied to just say, "These are bad people who make bad decisions, because they're bad." He's also interested in the why, and is willing to dive into that. What he comes up with in Carrie is a nuanced, complicated mix of the world human beings inhabit, and the ways our selfishness interacts with it, sometimes very blatantly, and others more opaquely, and how that selfishness is simultaneously pushed by our environment and we are compelled by it with our environment, to both accept and create permission to make bad decisions, as well as excuses and justifications for them.

In this, Flanagan's Carrie is insightful and incisive about the ways the experience of childhood has been changed by what we now accept as normal. The depiction of our world, whether one might call it accurate or not, is at least emotionally and psychologically realistic. What we see these characters doing through the course of the series, is acting on the beliefs and the histories they have from before the story starts. It depicts a reality being made, as they make their decisions, but one that is also the result of the beliefs and ideas those characters have inherited, both directly from parents and family, but also less directly, by the way that world expects them to act, and how the factors changing the experience of childhood are doing so through a near totality. They effect the social environment of the school, the community the school exists in, parenting, the entirety of the world Carrie is portraying.

This has been the focus of most of the promotion, press and no small part of the critical response. But it's not just childhood either, is it? By nature of King's original novel being the foundation for this adaptation, this is a story about girls and girlhood. For all our talk of progress and empowerment since King's novel was released, it's hard not to come away from Flanagan's version and deny that girlhood was not a very positive experience in the time King's version was published, and it's an even more complicated, difficult experience now. Flanagan uses social media and its influence as the avenue to talk about this, but it's woven through the whole season too.

Flanagan is interrogating the narratives of girlhood, womanhood and what empowerment means, simultaneously, and this is what I believe is most challenging to audiences. He's inviting us to ask ourselves questions about how we think of power and women/girls/femininity, and using the Carrie White he's created to interrogate the Carrie White we've lived with, the one whose become a kind of avatar for the secularized archetype of the witch.

If King secularized that archetype, Flanagan is suggesting it's opposite can be just as meaningful and instructive. The witch is the result of a Christian worldview. As an archetype/character, she's the embodiment of the fear of patriarchy being undermined by women having or gaining knowledge and/or power, and by extension, the reason to fear women having or gaining knowledge and/or power. King replaced a deal with the devil and worship of him with a story of extraordinary powers having some biological root, being genetic inheritance. Part of what's satisfying about his version of the story, is that this secularized exposition of magic as the result of concepts we associated with science, crushes the symbol of the repressive religious worldview in the story, Margaret White. Carrie doesn't make any deal with the devil. She's born with this power, and part of the tragedy and catharsis of the story, is Margaret White because she refuses or is incapable of believing the devil has nothing to do with any of what is happening to her daughter, gets exactly what she deserves. At the same time, it is a power that calls to what we otherwise recognize as the darker part of our humanity. It's not a deal with the devil, but it is a relinquishing of all the things that hold those darker parts of ourselves in check and/or accountable. So, it's not directly a deal with the devil, but it's still suggesting by nature of this young woman having power, the darker side of her humanity must be its fulfillment. Carrie is, in many ways, a witch without a devil to make a deal with. The devil's already inside her, in the form of her powers.

What Flanagan is instead asking of us as an audience is, "What if Carrie White was never a witch?" If Carrie White was never a witch, what other story of extraordinary women exists in our collective conscious, as a result of how long it's been influenced by a Christian worldview? The saint. Part of what Flanagan is doing, is calling attention to the fact that the difference between the witch and the saint, is the judgment of the Church. Witches and saints are both associated with persecution. No small number of saints were persecuted in their time, as being in league with the devil, and then later recognized as saints long after their deaths, and the stories of those saints also usually involve some extraordinary ability, accessed through their faith in God, instead of making a deal with the devil. One of the requirements of sainthood, is never losing faith. In fact, saints tend to die specifically because they don't lose their faith.

Flanagan is pointing to the way we've seen Carrie, and the degree her story has been the legacy of the witch. My Carrie, the Carrie so many of us have had in our lives for so long, is a witch. We've all spent our lives looking at Carrie through the lens of the fear of women gaining or achieving knowledge and power. The story of the witch and the stories of basically every woman canonized in our cultural history as the saint or equivalent, are stories about how power reacts to women who in some way challenge it. Whether a woman is a witch or a saint, is imposed on her, by the story we tell about her.

Everyone in this version of Carrie is acting on the assumption of the righteousness or practicality of the story they believe of what the world is and who they are when this story begins. Everyone, clearly including the audience, is imposing their ideas of who Carrie White is on her. As an audience, we're imposing the story of who we've been told Carrie is. The character's around her are imposing their understanding of what their world is and who they are in it. Margaret has her odd, but realistically portrayed combination of far right paranoia and religious zealotry on Carrie, a worldview Margaret learned from her husband. Chris Hargensen is imposing her sense of entitlement, fear of inferiority and sense of self preservation on Carrie, which Chris learned from her father. Emmaline is imposing her belief in what Carrie is and has to be, which she's learned from her mother. All of these are stories about, and reaction to stories about women, power and what their place in the world is.

No one, including a large portion of the audience, has bothered to ask Carrie who she is and who she wants to be, as a person with this power. We, the audience, and especially those of us who won't let her be something other than what we've been told she is, expect her to be a witch, but this Carrie, the Carrie on screen throughout this first season of Flanagan's adaptation, is just as likely to be a saint. Flanagan's taken away the idea that her power itself is something out of and inextricably connected to our darker nature, something she can only access so fully when she let's it be her driving motivator. Emmaline, the story of women who've been persecuted for possessing power, and their choices about how to use that power are a force outside of Carrie, imposing their idea of who she has to be. They want her to embrace the witch, the monster, the idea of empowerment being domination and the ability to return the worlds cruelty as a show of that strength and power. Emmaline has been pushing her toward it, and is there to step and at the moment of opportunity she's been pushing Carrie toward, taking advantage of the degree to which not only are Carrie's power's still new to her, but when her experience with the rest of the world is new, and it's reached the most overwhelming pitch it could. Emmaline is just the embodiment of what the novel treated as the consequence or a feature of Carrie's power itself.

We've embraced the story of Carrie as a witch, as a story of empowerment, but that also means we've embraced that Carrie is a witch. What if she's not? What if that's not the use of her power that she embraces? What if she's not a witch or a saint, and what happens if a young woman has power? How does the world around her, including the other women with power, who've experienced how the world treats them, react to her? What does it mean for autonomy, if we're always imposing the same stories of women and power on women who have or have access to power? How, exactly, do we come to better stories, including better expectations of how power is used, if we keep imposing our ideas about power as an extension and force of domination? How would we react to someone whose power is utterly unrelated to our opinion of them and it's use, if they wouldn't conform to those? How is a woman empowered if the only thing she's allowed to be, is the fulfillment of the story we tell about who she is and who she should be? Do we have room for an idea of womanhood that isn't the witch or the saint, the harlot or the virgin, and somehow a complicated mixture of both/and more?

This season of television is about the reaction of the world around her, to the plain fact of Carrie's existence, in both its realistic elements and its fantastic elements. The strangeness, oddness, the thing that makes this Carrie a focus of cruelty, is her lack of inculcation to cruelty. Her openness, her curiosity, her earnestness, her lack of a sense of need to compete are all part of what brings the ire of Chris Hargensen, as well as all of what transpires from the existence of the carriered social media account.

Margaret White's parental abuse is the culprit for a good degree of this, like not telling her daughter what menstruation is, and hiding the fact of school shootings from her. It's a form of neglect, really. This Margaret White isn't the plain out, cartoonishly evil religious psychotic and as a result of this, as well as not making Carrie's conception being the product of spousal rape, she doesn't hate Carrie. Margaret White loves her daughter, clearly and fiercely. She's horrified when she meets Katee Sackoff's character, who speaks to Margaret as if killing Carrie is a foregone conclusion. Carrie also clearly loves Margaret. She's willing to accept Margaret's failure to tell her about menstruation, about school shootings and accept it as Margaret's desire to protect her resulting from that love. It's the moment Carrie understands her mother's selfishness has become primary, that she's not putting Carrie's well being and what Carrie wants for herself first, that the bond is broken. Margaret isn't sold on the idea she needs to kill Carrie, until she's experienced a dominance and control not dissimilar to what she's exercised, which Carrie undertakes in the realization she has to parent herself. Power, domination, autonomy... in a constant dance.

In a way, Carrie and Chris Hargensen are also mirror images. Both of them have had the life they knew and thought was going to be their future transformed, due to nothing they've done or chosen themselves. Both of them lose or have transformed the most important relationships in their lives, the relationships that have made them who they are. Chris lashes out with the only power she has, through social media. Carrie spends the series exploring the power she has, and resisting lashing out with it. Chris wraps that in a pseudo-philosophical/intellectual justification. Carrie is exposed at the moment she expresses regret for using her power in the same way. She's punished, by way of being portrayed as hallucinating, for that expression of regret, something Emmaline has more or less orchestrated, knowing how the accusations of being mentally ill would effect Carrie. Carrie again expresses regret when she realizes what's happened in giving herself over to Emmaline to use that power.

Though I was initially underwhelmed by the ending of this season, in thinking about all of this, I'm interested to see where it goes. Whether it's intentional or not remains to be seen, but in structuring the characters and story this way, the writers (Mike Flanagan, Jamie Flanagan, Justine Ireland, Alexandra Magistro, Elan Gale, Rebecca Klingel, Elizabeth Padden and Dani Parker) are commenting on the way we've thought about power, how it should be used, what its good for, what uses can be justified and excused. Our conception of power has been formed by and in a patriarchal world, and what this all leaves open, should more seasons come to be, is the possibility that Carrie can become an example of a model or a perspective on power not simply accepting these as the only ideas, perspectives and justifications for the use of power. That's interesting, and where the season leaves us certainly points to Carrie headed toward some situation or circumstance where she's going to have to choose what she believes about all of this in relation to her power.

For all of these reasons, I'm glad this isn't my Carrie White. I have that Carrie White, still. I also find this adaptations challenge of my assumptions, my beliefs, my sense of what empowerment means as storytelling worth engaging with, and I hope that if the series gets more seasons, it continues in this direction. Hopefully, Carrie White tells us who she is, through the process of getting to see how and why she makes the decisions she does, and what she's learned in response to the events of this first season.