00:00:24.320Yeah, we're calling this Powers of Horror Movies.
00:00:27.480I had powers of like feminist horror also like where are we putting the parenthetical is I think a nice little game we can play because what we're looking at I think in these films that we're taking some like classic films not really new ones we're looking at the sort of peak of the horror genre from the late 1970s through the mid 1980s.
00:00:51.340and we're looking at what is scary about gender
00:00:55.720or what is gendered about fear in these films.
00:05:48.280But, you know, you watch these movies, especially from the 1970s.
00:05:51.780And I think this is true in basically all the movies we watched for this episode.
00:05:55.900They have these like lingering shots of women's bodies, including like women's bodies that are being tortured and murdered.
00:06:02.280They have, like, really explicit comparisons of the weapons that the killer uses to, like, murder and dismember these women to, like, penetrating phalluses, right?0.78
00:06:13.780The knife, the gun, the chainsaw, these all become, like, penises in, like, really heavy-handed ways.
00:06:19.260Yeah, I mean, like, there is in one of the Friday the 13th scene where a cheerleader does splits on a trampoline and Jason is underneath it with a machete.
00:06:30.100So, like, yeah, it's not particularly subtle.0.98
00:06:33.100Yeah, you're being, you know, penetrated with a knife, with a gun, often in the actual vagina, right?0.99
00:06:41.720And something that is also characteristic of this genre is, like, stylistic references to pornography.
00:06:46.740It is shot in often the same kind of, like, color saturation, the same sort of, like, lingering gaze on the body that is being, like, opened, right?
00:06:57.520That's something that I think critics of horror now or, like, a lot of fans of the genre sort of, like, roll their eyes at that interpretation.
00:07:21.820And I think, like, a pretty, like, intense part of their draw, right?
00:07:24.960There's a reason that men go to watch women being dismembered, and it's not, like, a reason that we have to read in flattering terms for those men, right?
00:07:33.640And then that's also, like, where I think we can bring in Carol Clover.
00:07:37.840And this is a book you actually recommended to me, Adrienne, a long time ago, and I finally got to, like, look at it and read, to be honest, not all of it, but, like, big chunks of it for this episode.
00:07:49.900And that's her 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws.
00:07:52.980Do you want to give like a brief synopsis for our listeners?
00:07:57.100So the book is basically an inquiry into what she calls the male viewer stake in horror spectatorship.
00:08:02.840And I should say when she says horror, much like Maura just did, I think she's mostly thinking about the slasher film or the extended slasher film genre, which really is sort of like, as Maura was saying, the defining horror vernacular of the late 70s, early 80s.
00:08:19.740Although a lot of the movies we're going to be talking about are not, in fact, slasher films, right?
00:08:24.000So she does a kind of a tweak on Mulvey.
00:08:28.840She sort of wants to think about visual pleasure, which is what Mulvey's great insight,
00:08:34.820but like what the affordances are of perspective, of whose point of view we're seeing the events through,
00:08:41.460and the fact that like there's still a story being told, right?
00:08:44.520So she thinks that the female victim in horror movies is not just this object, right, of sadistic fantasies, domination, violence, etc., but also very crucially a side of identification through which male viewers can work out their own repressed fears sort of of bodily vulnerability, inadequacy, and exclusion.
00:09:06.720That is to say, just because there's a woman on screen doesn't mean that a male viewer is supposed to only see her as an object.
00:09:15.460There is an offer here of identification.
00:09:18.160This is why she thinks horror movies tend to provoke its audiences into a shift of loyalties, right, halfway through.
00:09:25.700First, you judge and resent these people who are going to get picked off by the machete or by the chainsaw.
00:09:32.000And then you switch over to kind of cheering identification with the phrase that she sort of, I think, introduced into the critical vocabulary, the final girl, right?
00:09:43.380The one who's going to survive at the end of the film.
00:09:46.540Right. The victims transform into these objects of resentment and contempt from the first acts into the final act.
00:09:54.980You come to identify this victim who also becomes a kind of a hero, right?
00:09:58.740That's sort of like the standard horror genre's like shift in audience loyalties between, I would say, like X2 and 3.
00:10:07.440And, you know, I would push back on you a little.
00:10:09.700I do think Clover is kind of saying that Mulvey is wrong.
00:10:14.740But like we have these two readings that I think we can integrate or we'll try to integrate into like our own analyses of these films.
00:10:24.340Right. You have the Laura Mulvey reading that identifies the horror film as like a site of misogynist sadism for the viewers, you know, where like women are sort of marginalized and made into these like quasi ritualized objects of contempt.
00:10:38.320And then you have the Clover reading that identifies the horror film as a site of this kind of like secret, unconscious identification with women for its male viewers. Right. So like a site of sort of like sadistic domineering power in Mulvey and a sort of like a site of reckoning with the male viewers own like bodily vulnerability in the Clover.
00:11:02.500And I think you can, like, fairly call one of these readings, like, reparative in the Eve Sedgwick sense, right?
00:11:07.640Like, Clover is trying to sort of avenge horror audiences or, like, give a more sympathetic account of their motives that brings them into, like, a kind of reconciliation with these women characters, which initially seemed to be the objects of, like, their cruelty, right?
00:11:26.100But I think a more honest or thorough or like, I don't know, interesting account of the horror genre might sort of combine these two ideas. Right. So it's the misogyny and domination that's present in the male horror viewers pleasure towards the victimized women on screen.
00:11:47.280It's both sincere. I do think there's like what we can kind of simplistically or like definitively at least call a misogynistic, sadistic pleasure in these viewers.
00:11:58.320But that misogyny serves as a necessary disavowal and distance that then allows those viewers to like engage morally, maybe like more unconsciously with the ways that they see themselves in these women. Right.
00:12:15.680So it's like kind of ironic, I guess, like through misogyny that men sort of can encounter and at the same time sort of reject their own sense of vulnerability.
00:12:26.340This isn't like, I'm not like breaking new ground here.
00:12:29.260This is like, this is like the pretty standard, like psychoanalytic interpretation of misogyny, right?
00:12:34.880I mean, the other thing I would point out is that like, we didn't mention Mulvey wrote Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in 1975, or at least it came out in 1975.
00:12:42.920meaning that the horror wave was sort of just getting started.
00:13:27.260Often there's a rage in the final girl.0.99
00:13:29.100Yeah. I often think that like the figure that most resonates with in the mid 1970s is not a woman, but is going to be a soldier returning from Vietnam. And I think she kind of thinks that like the way that the trauma myth around soldiers and around male victims sort of starts fucking with gender categories.
00:13:51.300That is something that I think for Mulvey was not quite as central,
00:13:54.920but like I think Clover is sort of seeing that.
00:13:57.440She sees almost the forebears of Reaganism there, I think.
00:14:00.160There's a kind of like sense of rage and desire for revenge often in the final girl, right?
00:14:05.620Yeah, but at the very end, like the very final shot, she's also just exhausted, right?
00:14:09.860It's another moment of identification because we're exhausted.
00:14:22.940And I think the question of the post-traumatic hero sort of in the 70s, I think, is pretty important here.
00:14:28.520And it is one where I think Clover would say that one really cuts across gender lines, meaning we can't assume that women on screen are women in the audience and the camera is male, right?
00:14:39.620Like there's some kind of slippage happening because of the power of trauma in some way.
00:14:44.900I will also make here the comparison psychologists, feminist psychologists in the 1970s made, which is the comparison between the traumatized Vietnam veteran and the traumatized rape victim, both of whom are having their suffering disavowed or like refused of like recognition or mirroring in the society around them.
00:15:07.680That's a kind of politically tricky subject because the rape victim has been the object of violence and the Vietnam veteran has been the person committing a lot of violence.
00:15:16.940Yeah. But that's that's something that I think conventional like psychological understandings of trauma don't really grapple with because as the feminist psychologist noted to their both interest and I think disturbance like a lot of the the psychological symptoms are very similar among those groups.
00:15:37.280And maybe just as a very brief note, in offering people movies to pick from as my homework, I did avoid, there's an entire subgenre of horror film in the 1970s, which are rape revenge films.
00:15:51.500And I was like, I'm not fucking watching that.0.98
00:15:53.340So if you're thinking Moira sort of being like, oh, it metaphorically represents rape.0.99
00:15:56.520It's like, no, it often graphically represents rape.
00:15:58.700Well, I mean, there's rape symbolically in a lot of these slasher films.
00:16:03.340And then there's BAM, like 10 years ago, did a whole series on like female revenge movies, many of whom were the rape revenge genre, like Miss 45.
00:16:16.800Some of them resist, I think, like sort of the pop feminist reclamation.
00:16:21.680They are often like really like misogynist exploitation films in which the rape revenge is sort of cast as simultaneously horrifying.
00:16:33.740You know, the thing that like women's repressed rage that requires their domination and exclusion from power.
00:16:41.180And then also sort of like ridiculous or more voyeuristically interesting, morally interesting.0.81
00:16:47.280Yeah. While Moira will remain resolutely on the analyst's couch, I will say that a materialist or historical reading of this is also that we're starting to get the grindhouse kind of pushing into the multiplex.
00:17:00.600Like sexual assault had always been a plot point in sort of like Roger Corman cheapies and that kind of stuff. But in the 70s, this all sort of gets much more mobile. And then with home video, you start getting that stuff at home.
00:17:13.480So this is also about horror audiences kind of shifting, right?
00:17:18.620There was a kind of horror film that was just pure sexploitation, but you had to go to a weird movie theater on 34th Street to see it at all.
00:17:27.240Well, in the 70s, that sort of breaks up, right, with famously Deep Throat being distributed very, very widely.
00:17:32.440Like, these boundaries kind of break up, meaning you're also kind of watching everyone kind of – like, I'll talk about this when we talk about the British film market.
00:17:40.920And you're watching people who make these movies kind of cast about for like, what do these freaks actually want?
00:17:46.020So I think it's interesting how like gender sort of enters also into that.
00:17:49.880Like it's also a way these movies make themselves solicitors of new audiences, right?0.99
00:17:54.380And sometimes they seem quite canny and sometimes like you're just working out your own shit.1.00
00:17:57.780Like there's no way someone, you know, in a Topeka multiplex wants to see this shit, right?1.00
00:18:02.560Yeah. Something Clover says that I think is really interesting is that the horror film is similar to like the folktale in that its authors and producers often seem to be working more on instinct than on conscious understanding of how the genre works.0.99
00:18:21.380So on the one hand, it's a genre with very strict conventions. And on the other, it's one that doesn't always seem aware of itself. Like famously, Alfred Hitchcock didn't know why Psycho was such a big hit.
00:18:35.440Yeah. And he went to some Stanford scholars, I guess Stanford mentioned some Stanford scholars to be like, why do people love this so much? Because he didn't understand exactly what he had made himself.
00:18:50.380And there's something about the sort of ad hoc nature of the horror film that can make it very, like, compellingly revealing that way about, like, the things that are operating sort of beneath the surface.
00:19:02.840And that also, I think, makes it a really great and, like, furtive place for audiences to, like, work out some sort of, you know, the repressed stuff they've got going on.
00:19:48.460Okay, so I've never seen The Wicker Man. I have seen Midsommar, which I understand is sort of like a riff on The Wicker Man. But I had actually never seen either of the movies that I watched for this one.
00:20:01.340I'm going to be honest with you, Adrienne.
00:20:05.000I feel like I spend so much of my life terrified anyway, you know, just in a state of, like, trembling anxiety at all times that I don't really need to feel that also in my leisure hours.
00:20:19.160So I am not actually very well-versed in horror.
00:20:22.360Yeah, I should say I am likewise quite squeamish, but I have seen a lot.
00:20:28.960Well, you're our genre expert, right? Like you really have sort of a grip on this stuff.
00:20:34.760I love genre cinema for exactly the reason that you outlined, which is that when filmmakers operate more on instinct and in kind of an instinctive relationship with a particular audience, more sort of can make it onto the screen than if it's all pushed through the straining sieve of like awards baiting and multiplex appeal.
00:20:56.940Maybe I should start us off then because I have the first one and you haven't seen this one, The Wicker Man.
00:21:03.060So this is like a movie about the horror of folktales in the sense that there is something like sort of creepy in like sort of a cultural id, right?
00:21:14.400Yeah, The Wicker Man, for those of our listeners who like more are a little squeamish, it's intense.
00:21:21.640But if you are not looking to be completely grossed out, there are literally, I think, maybe 60 seconds at the end of the movie that you might want to look away from.
00:22:07.940It was written by Anthony Schaefer, who also wrote Alfred Hitchcock's serial killer film, Frenzy.
00:22:14.000The plot is basically we follow a officer of the Highlands police in Scotland who gets an anonymous letter saying there's this girl that has disappeared, a young girl of 12, on an island.
00:22:26.960So she can't have left the island by herself.
00:22:29.460And her mother seems to be totally unconcerned, right?
00:22:33.320And so he decides to investigate and he flies to a place called Summer Isle, which appears to be somewhere in the Hebrides from sort of context clues.
00:22:42.120The aerial shots make it look like the Isle of Skye to me, but I think it's supposed to be further out.
00:22:47.260And basically the islanders are immediately and comically hostile, right?
00:22:51.520He lands his seaplane and is like, can you roll out with the dinghy and get me?
00:23:00.460So they're rural people who are suspicious of outsiders.1.00
00:23:05.560Well, it's not even that they're suspicious.
00:23:06.900They're polite, but like never forthcoming, which makes the movie, if people are not ready for it, it's extremely repetitive because this guy named Howie will constantly sort of ask the same questions and keep probing and keep like hitting the same thing.
00:23:23.640And they all basically lie to him constantly in the dumbest ways possible, right?
00:23:28.520So like, he's like, oh, there's a picture missing.0.94
00:23:32.800And then he finds the picture ends of the girl, right?
00:23:34.700Like, oh, the mother claims that she doesn't have a daughter.
00:23:38.560And then, like, you know, obviously it turns out she's registered at the school or whatever.
00:23:41.960Like, every lie just, like, pulls him deeper and deeper into this plot.
00:23:46.600And at the same time, he, like, starts exploring this island, which is this, like, yeah, this very, well, insular commune where everyone is completely weird, won't talk to him.
00:25:53.300to keep this guy chasing his own tail, right?
00:25:56.580He keeps asking the same questions over and over again.
00:25:58.500He seems to be working the same theory over and over again.
00:26:01.240He thinks that these people basically sacrifice this girl or planning to sacrifice her as a virgin sacrifice to their earth goddess, right?
00:26:09.720Like they love earth goddess like pagan revival, working out their own impulses through the pretext of a communing with nature kind of a thing.
00:26:21.640This sounds like, I don't know, I'm like maybe a little less squeamish about sex in public than this guy is.0.99
00:26:27.920But this does sound like something hippies would do in his defense if you're like, God, the fucking hippies, like they're up to something creepy.0.99
00:26:36.760The film features literal hippie punching, yes.1.00
00:26:42.460He's like me annoyed about Burning Man, you know, he's like, God damn it.0.99
00:26:48.840But yeah, so he meets Lord Summerisle, played by the wonderful Christopher Lee, who explains to him that basically what happened on this island is that one of his ancestors sort of returned everyone back to the old ways, the old religious ways.
00:28:05.620I think it's a really interesting movie.
00:28:08.780I mean, it really sort of along with I think two or three other films that have started the folk horror genre.
00:28:13.520Like there really wasn't such a thing beforehand.
00:28:15.600And I think in the British context, you can sort of tell why this existed, right?
00:28:22.400The folk horror genre sort of emerged in the 70s as a reaction to gothic horror, right?
00:28:28.940So gothic horror is all about, like, dark corners, falling down ruins, etc., etc.
00:28:35.640Folk horror, by and large, and if people have seen Midsommar, they've seen this,
00:28:39.360largely has horrible things happen in beautiful sunlight, surrounded by flowers,
00:28:42.820Like trees swaying in the breeze, bees buzzing ominously or whatever, right?
00:28:47.920And you can sort of tell it's meant as an antipode to the gothic horror where it's like there's a bat in the belfry, you know?
00:28:55.540And like this is much more like, oh, there's a cute kitten.
00:28:58.280Oh, no, what's happening with the cute kitten?
00:29:01.080And historically, that's exactly how it emerged.
00:29:03.580I looked at this article by a historian named David Sanjek, who pointed out that, like, the folk horror genre can be seen as responding to a crisis in gothic horror.
00:29:14.320Because, of course, gothic horror through the Hammer Horror studio in the UK had been sort of what the UK film industry had always done.
00:29:22.460I don't know if people have seen a lot of these, but these are, if you think about the basic setup of a Hammer Horror film, they are a small Dartmoor community is set upon by a monster, right?
00:29:33.420So you have the community, which is sort of Christian, which is sort of healthy, which is sort of normal.
00:29:38.640And then you have this monstrous outsider that has to be pushed away.
00:29:42.000And as Sanjic points out, that really kind of breaks down under the sort of assault from the United States.
00:29:50.100Like after 1968, American horror cinema starts really swerving towards like a situation where it's unclear who the monster really is and where community often is figured as monstrous.
00:30:00.660Sanjay is mostly thinking of something like Night of the Living Dead, right?
00:30:04.700Where like the whole point is your own child, your own spouse, your own neighbor could turn on you and kill you, right?
00:30:13.580But you might also think of something like Rosemary's Baby, where it turns out the kindly neighbors who bring you, you know, some rhubarb cake are like actually Satanists.
00:30:23.180And also then the evil that is being spawned is literally inside of your body.
00:30:29.820Yeah. And your husband's in on it. Yeah. Yeah. So basically the argument is that like, yeah, there was something here that really destabilized the way Hammer films tended to work. And Hammer really was having a hard time at that, you know, sort of commercially as well. It was really wasn't connecting with the zeitgeist.
00:30:45.900Folk horror tends to nuance the formula even a little differently
00:31:51.220And the victims will always, like, have it coming at least a little bit.
00:31:57.220You know, there's a like a kind of moral verisimilitude there, but it also is something that evokes in audiences the sense of like shifting and divided loyalties, as well as sort of like a gruesome pleasure that might, you know, provoke a little bit of like reflection or like reflective self-disgust.
00:32:15.660Maybe if you're walking out of theater and you're like, man, I probably shouldn't have liked watching that guy burn alive quite so much as I did.
00:32:22.420And that's the other thing, right? Like when we're thinking about movie and visual identification or narrative identification, too, right? Like if an outsider comes into a community and wants to find out what happened, we identify with that person because we as film viewers obviously want to know what happened. Right. And the Wicker Man is interesting in the way that it's like, oh, you're going to burn for that fucker. Right. Like it's very funny in that way. But also, of course, at a certain point, you sort of figure it out and you're just like, oh, look at this fucking asshole sort of bumbling around.
00:32:50.140Like, the twist is good, but the fact that he, like, kind of keeps tilting at the same windmills does become quite obvious.1.00
00:32:57.000So, like, it is, as you say, like, there is a shift when we're like, ah, fuck this fucking guy.0.99
00:33:01.040I should say that this movie was remade.0.99
00:33:03.600Have you ever seen this remake of The Wicker Man?
00:33:07.940So, it was remade by Neil LaButte, a very problematic filmmaker, not a very good one, in 2006.0.91
00:33:13.760It is famous, nay infamous, for the sergeant role is played by none other than Nicolas Cage, an absolute fucking Nicolas Cage, at his cage-iest, let's say.0.88
00:33:25.680He's going to steal the Declaration of Independence.0.97
00:33:28.120He's going to get inside that big wicker man, yeah.
00:33:30.840Well, he doesn't even get into a wicker man.1.00
00:33:32.340He gets bees poured all over him during which he shouts, killing me won't bring back your fucking honey and not the bees.1.00
00:33:42.380But in the 2006 version, Labute, as is his wont, makes subtext text and has Cage kind of run around a island off the coast of, I guess, Puget Sound or something like that in a kind of matriarchal commune run by Ellen Burstyn, which leads to endless scenes of Nicolas Cage in a bear suit for reasons that really don't need getting into, punching little girls in the face.
00:34:12.380I mean, it's like, do not watch this movie, but there are great clip compilations on YouTube and you owe it to yourself to check those out.
00:34:20.620This might actually be a good moment to transition to Carrie, my first movie, which I think is our temporal next one.
00:34:29.080So I'm glad you mentioned this sense of like mixed frustration and identification and rejection of the main character in The Wicker Man, because I think that's something that like really characterizes the early parts of Carrie, like the first act of Carrie, which is a 1976 Brian De Palma film based on a Stephen King novel.
00:34:53.980And it's like early Stephen King. He said he wrote this when he was like right out of college. And Stephen King is basically like, yes, this is how I dealt with being afraid of feminism. Right. He's like very forthcoming about his own political and psychological investments in a lot of his work.
00:35:11.120And I think, like, maybe particularly in Carrie.
00:35:13.580So he wrote this, I want to say, in, like, 1973.
00:35:19.140And in the first scene, Carrie, who is this, like, really exaggeratedly sheltered and, like, victimized and shy high school senior, gets her first period in a gym shower and doesn't know what it is.
00:35:35.660And this is, like, a very, like, straight Laura Mulvey scene.
00:35:38.380It's a girl's locker room with like way more nudity than the high school girl's locker room ever actually had, you know, just like very young, like very like 1970s skinny actresses sort of like running around topless in this scene.
00:35:54.940and carrie is in the shower after gym class and there's like a very lingering shot of her thigh
00:36:03.140that starts bleeding and like sort of these saturation with blood is something that happens
00:36:10.080sort of recurringly through carrie so we're meant to understand carrie as almost preternaturally
00:36:16.500passive right she is the scion of a single mother who's like really religiously obsessed0.75
00:36:24.460and extremely, like, potently and visibly sexually repressed.0.94
00:36:30.540And she has not told Carrie what menstruation is.0.97
00:36:34.480So Carrie, you know, when you're bleeding from your insides
00:36:37.340and you don't know what it is, that's actually quite scary.
00:36:41.120I can always tell when a menstruation scene has been, like, written0.99
00:36:45.440or directed by a man because they always make menstrual blood look like ketchup.0.70
00:36:53.180And like not to gross out you, Adrian, or any of our more squeamish listeners, but it does not look like that. And so the sort of like gushing like bright red blood of this scene, it can only be evoking violence, right?
00:37:08.040And there's this traumatic incident where all the other girls who are sort of always mean to and rejecting Carrie, with like a level of investment and attention that like the shy Christian girl doesn't really get, like more than like obsessively bullied, that girl, at least in my own experience, like mostly got ignored, right?
00:37:28.160It's not that there wasn't any contempt.
00:37:29.780It was that, like, she was just sort of outside of the social world.
00:43:28.160Oh, The Transsexual Empire. I'm sorry. I'm like, I'm mixing up my references.1.00
00:43:32.360Yeah, The Transgender Menace is a response to The Transsexual Empire.0.98
00:43:35.920Yeah. And so there's this sense of like, well, what if menstruation wasn't gross?0.98
00:43:42.060What if it was, you know, kind of like ritualistically powerful? What if it was a source of women's quasi-mystical positive difference? And that's something that King is doing in a different valence by making menstruation the source of like the onset of Carrie's powers, right?0.79
00:44:00.700And so what happens is Carrie is, you know, if you have been living under a rock since this movie came out and don't know the plot of Carrie, Carrie gets lured to the prom by her like popular girl tormentors, one of them in what like might be sort of like a condescending bit of pity actually gets her boyfriend to invite Carrie to prom.
00:44:22.260And then these other girls and her boyfriend, John Travolta, sort of stage this like humiliation moment where they rig the prom queen election so that Carrie will win.
00:44:35.680And then they dump a bucket of pig's blood on her, recreating the humiliation of her first period on, like, a much more public stage and, like, ripping away, like, offering and then ripping away this moment of, like, social acceptance and integration into, like, mainstream acceptable femininity, right?0.96
00:44:54.400Something that her mother had predicted in the famous line, they're all going to laugh at you.0.59
00:45:04.020Yes. But Carrie then uses her psychic powers to lock everybody inside the high school and burn it down.1.00
00:45:12.160And she then goes on this spree where she's covered in blood, her blood-soaked prom dress, and she kills her tormentors.0.99
00:45:19.720And then she goes home and her mother is like, I'm so tormented with guilt at how I loved the sex that conceived you that now I'm going to murder you.
00:45:30.540So her mother is also having this sort of like psychic unraveling about, you know, feminine sexuality and Carrie now endowed with the power of rage and also the power of like female sexual maturity.1.00
00:45:46.040spoiler alert compels the knives of the family kitchen to fly across the room and pierce her1.00
00:45:55.800mother in exactly the same pattern that the statue of saint sebastian in the prayer closet is pierced1.00
00:46:00.980right so her mother sort of is sexually penetrated and has this kind of like ecstatic orgasmic death0.71
00:46:07.960scene in a way that also sort of like just takes her off of the page right so like the sexual
00:46:13.900politics of Carrie are very 1970s, right? It's the idea that sexual repression is the enemy and
00:46:22.680sexuality is a source of power. And we should say that like Carrie doesn't defy her mother0.97
00:46:27.380until she gets asked to the prom. But it's like kind of angelic looking guy, the like popular
00:46:33.920guy that asked her to prom is like tan, but he also has like this like cherubic blonde hair.
00:46:40.740And who's not ultimately like he's in on some of it, but not all of it. That's a very typical King thing, too. That's what's different from the Wicker Man. The community is never just one group that's all the same. The bullies sort of range in their level of sadism and their investment in this scheme. Some of them don't seem to know exactly what's going on or what's about to happen.
00:47:04.880And I think that's very common with his high schools, too, that he really is quite attuned to the gradations of power and of malice that you can find in the average 17-year-old.
00:47:17.120Yeah, that's something that's really particular about Carrie is that you have a range of responses to Carrie from her community from like outright contempt, like really sadistic contempt from like some of the popular girls to, you know, condescending and pity, like pity mixed with frustration from like the gym teacher, right?
00:47:39.120who is initially frustrated with Carrie,
00:49:29.960And, like, she, like, literally orgasms as she expires, right?0.99
00:49:33.280So this, like, sexually repressed crone as a figure of scolding sadism and violence whose problem could be solved if she just got fucked is, I think, something that's, like, also a recurring theme that, like, has a little misogyny in it.0.98
00:49:51.900Well, we should say, though, I think this is where we have to be careful.0.99
00:49:54.960I mean, there's King and then there's De Palma, who is just, like, a raging misogynist.
00:50:00.100I don't know anything about Brian De Palma.
00:50:02.660Oh, my God. Yeah. No, I mean, like, this is the thing. Like, he's someone who indulges in kind of misogynistic tropes. I mean, probably more so in his later output, but like, he basically takes Hitchcock and dials up the misogyny is, I think, sort of his general M.O. King also presents the book. I don't know if you've read Carrie. It's more what we would call a heteroglossia. Like, there are different people get to speak.
00:50:26.760It's almost someone trying to piece together what happened with this girl, Carrie, meaning a lot of the things where De Palma sort of creates this sort of obviousness in the book is sort of like a little contested.
00:50:38.160Like one person may think this is true, the other may not, right?
00:50:41.300So it's not entirely about King's proclivities.
00:50:45.660It's really much more about De Palma's.
00:50:47.460At the same time, it is true that King seems to, I mean, he's in some way like a comic book reader in that way.
00:50:55.100He wants to say, hey, these things can be bad, they can be dangerous, but trying to tamp them down can be even more dangerous.
00:51:02.820But because he's a horror writer, he's not like, oh, they're not cuddly, right?
00:51:25.100That reminded me a lot actually of Frankenstein, the sense of the social outcast who is made monstrous by their social rejection, right?0.53
00:51:36.940Like the monster is a very empathetic creature who nevertheless like murders a little boy and several other figures whose sense of like frantic loneliness as being the source of his monstrousness, right?
00:51:55.100Like, the loneliness of the monster is what makes him monstrous and also what keeps him away from what he needs for his flourishing.
00:52:04.520And that's something that you see in Carrie, right?
00:52:07.060Carrie is made into this, you know, subject of, like, rage and fury and dark power by the same forces that, like, could have prevented that.
00:52:23.020But then the attempts to sort of heal her or integrate her into a social world in which she can be an equal and experience like companionship, love, like these are also thwarted by the very monstrousness that's been, you know, inculcated by her initial rejection.
00:52:41.480Yeah, I think that's right. There is a sense that, like, trying to contain what Carrie is about to experience is kind of a fool's errand to begin with, which is like this interesting thing. Like, is she a victim of liberation? Like, is that what ultimately King is talking about? Or are we supposed to cheer on liberation? Like, it's a deeply ambivalent text about a woman's liberation.
00:53:02.620At the same time, we should also say that King himself is kind of, in interesting ways, and this is something I think Clover actually quotes in her book, is actually kind of ambivalent about like the gendered aspects of that liberation.
00:53:15.340There's an interview, I think, where he says, quote,
00:53:18.200Carrie's revenge is something that any student who has ever had his gym shorts pulled down in phys ed or his glasses thumb rubbed in study hall could approve of.
00:53:27.780And Clover, I think, is really right to say like, sure.
00:53:31.180In the mid-1970s, someone says he, we might think he's thinking of that universally, but who has their gym shorts pulled down and their glasses thumb rubbed?
00:53:40.700King is imagining a boy in that moment, right?
00:53:43.480Like, there is something about Carrie's rage that, like, makes her more of a stand-in for, like, set-upon, like, boys.0.51
00:53:51.860Like, as you say, the relentlessness of these girl bullies kind of feels homoerotically tinged in a way that, like, feels more appropriate to high school boys, to be honest.0.53
00:54:02.740Oh, Adrienne, you would be surprised.0.98
00:54:06.700No, but there is something where I think, you know, this is the Clover sort of paradigmatic example, right?
00:54:13.080She compares, in a very, like, heavy-handed Freudian way, the, like, blood of menstruation and Carrie's terror at menstruation is, like, made a one-to-one analogy in Clover to, like, the male fear of castration.
00:54:29.900I always sort of, like, I'm like, when Freudians start talking about castration, they always lose me a little bit.0.99
00:54:35.280I'm just like, I just don't think men are that afraid of having their balls cut off.0.98
00:54:39.640I mean, I'm afraid of having any part cut off.0.99
00:54:51.340I mean, can't we just say that, like, having a party cut off feels like it would be real bad?
00:54:58.000But, you know, she is the stand-in for the socially ostracized and victimized in a way that I think in our own era,
00:55:04.980We're like really, I mean, like quite literally oppressed by the psychology of people who are like mad that they weren't cool in high school.
00:55:22.740Yeah. And they're like their exclusion from, you know, social metrics of like status and cool has now been like revisited on all of us in like a really terrible revenge.0.98
00:55:34.460And that's a very male paradigm that is now given here like an unusual, like, female avatar.