directed by Brian De Palma
screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen
after the novel by Stephen King (1974)

I’ve got a backlog of nearly a month’s movie-watching to address. Luckily, a lot of it was pretty trashy stuff, so I’m hoping to zip through it quickly.

Carrie is pretty trashy stuff. Actually, the word I want to use is “sleazy.” This is the word that has come to mind for every Brian De Palma movie I have seen. Granted, I’ve only seen a few, and they didn’t include Scarface or The Untouchables, his “good” movies. But having seen The Fury (1978) and Snake Eyes (1998) to completion, and, on TV, most of Body Double (1984), Mission to Mars (2000) and Femme Fatale (2002), and some of Mission: Impossible (1996)… and now, of course, Carrie… I can say with some confidence that the man’s oeuvre is, on average, totally sleazy.

Or wait, is it “trashy” after all? What is the difference between sleaze and trash? To me, “trash” is something that aims shamefully low because it doesn’t care, or doesn’t know any better, whereas “sleaze” is something that aims shamefully low because its value system is actually inverted. Someone is sleazy if he does something low knowingly, and likes it. Sleazy movies are the ones that proudly say “some fuddy-duddies out there might think that it’s not right for us to put this in a movie – well, sorry, grandma, ’cause that’s the way it is!” The archetypal example would be onscreen nudity that the filmmakers dare you to write off as prurient, which is, in fact, blatantly prurient. That’s the first shot of Carrie, and the rest of the movie lives up to it nicely.

People who defend Brian De Palma will say that in his movies he “plays” with exploitation, “refers” to it, and that part of that “play” is dipping down into it a bit, which, yes, is a little bit sleazy, but knowingly so. That’s some pretty darn generous benefit-of-the-doubt. When I watched The Fury, a real live proponent of De Palma was present, and afterwards said that the movie had clearly been intended as a parody-criticism of action movies. When asked about John Cassavetes COMPLETELY EXPLODING INTO GORE at the very end of the movie, he said that it had obviously been a joke because it had been so outrageously tasteless. “Come on,” he said, “he showed it from six different angles. That’s not moviemaking, and of course De Palma knows that. There’s no other explanation.” But I think there is: sleaze.

My main thought while watching Carrie was that the flamboyant “Hitchcock Rulez!!” visual style managed to render trash out of the images themselves. You can call it “over-the-top” if you want, but that suggests someone who has taken good aim and gone too far in an otherwise reasonable direction. Whereas I didn’t feel like this movie took particularly good aim to begin with. The odd compositions and split screens and excessive camera movement didn’t seem like they were motivated by any kind of respectable impulse – they were directorial quirks that didn’t serve the material – something that could never be said of Hitchcock. The movie just seemed like a collection of seriously junky details that the filmmakers happened to think were cool. The story as filmed, which is pretty sparse to begin with, just felt like an excuse to show a girl get blood poured all over her. Stephen King obviously had some sexual repression/awakening/coming-of-age schlock in mind when he wrote it, and De Palma was certainly happy to put that stuff in the movie, film-school style, but it seemed extremely clear what his real interest was.

Umberto Eco has a little essay where he says that pornographic films are characterized by the need to waste our time with incredibly boring stuff, so as to set off and heighten the porn itself. He sums up: “If you are in a movie theater, and the time it takes the protagonists to go from A to B is longer than what you would like it to be, then it means the film is a porno.” I would add the more obvious reason that pornography is full of mindless tedium: filmmakers know they need a certain amount of material to create the sense of involvement that comes from a full-length form – this goes for romance novels too – and because they really don’t care that much, they do it in the laziest possible way. This movie felt like porn – a lot of time-killing and then something sleazy. Or trashy.

And it sounded like porn, too – a really astoundingly bad score by Pino Donaggio.

That the high school in the movie is called “Bates High School” is a good indication of both De Palma’s self-indulgence and level of sophistication.

I intended going to talk about the specifics of the movie, and also about apocalyptic endings in general, but I seem to have spent most of my time here complaining that Brian De Palma is sleazy and/or trashy. Hey, did you know he had a daughter named Lolita with James Cameron’s ex-wife? Seriously.

I still want to see Scarface.

Given that I still have SpaceCamp to write about, I think this has been plenty.

Oh but of course first: the pre-movie book covers. From left to right: first edition, first paperback edition, crazy first UK edition.