[Pride 2021] Performative Femininity and Normative Sexuality in Carrie

By Halloween night in my second year of undergrad, I hadn’t really been interested in scary movies before. I’d gone and watched The Woman In Black in middle school because of Daniel Radcliffe, grew up on The Twilight Zone, and dabbled in some Stephen King, but the world of horror films had never particularly drawn me. I was, however, experiencing a classic college nightmare: I was mourning a rough breakup at a party where I barely knew anyone, having gone out in an attempt to get in the spooky spirit and distract myself only to discover that I was somehow the only one dressed in costume (an improvised Dustin Pedroia look, made from Red Sox merch that I happened to have in my closet). Clinging to the kitchen island, I sipped a mixed drink and nibbled on handfuls of chips, my bad vibes seeping out into a small surrounding radius until a friend of mine who was visiting for the weekend and seemed similarly underwhelmed circled over to me and asked “do you want to just...head back to your place? Maybe watch a movie or something?”

In many ways, this is the perfect priming ground to watch Carrie, but our choice when we got back to my apartment was almost entirely random. Neither of us had seen the 1976 Brian de Palma classic before, and it was one of the first movies in the horror category on Hulu to flash across the screen. I had a vague recollection of hearing about the infamous prom scene, and a strong desire to rescue my night with something Halloween-y. We made some popcorn, and I shed the Fenway digs in favor of pajamas. We pressed play.

Quite a few people have written about the queer liberation that seems to be an undercurrent of Carrie, both in its original glory and the various offshoots and adaptations that have been produced ever since Sissy Spacek fixed the camera with that characteristic possessed look in her baby-blue eyes. The themes of sexuality, repression, and self-acceptance are such a direct allegory to queer youth that it’s almost impossible to not see them, and Carrie’s own treatment of these themes has led to more openly queer homages in the 2013 remake and the Netflix TV miniseries I Am Not Okay With This. But there’s another piece of Carrie that’s pretty queer, one that resonated with me deeply and began a fascination with horror that I’ve had ever since I found myself sitting up dead straight on the couch that night, my eyes glued to the screen.

Carrie preoccupies itself with the anxieties of performing femininity and normative sexuality, and wanting other women to accept you through both. As soon as gym ends and Carrie’s class hits the showers in that incredible first scene, the camera pans languidly across the other young women in the locker room—brushing and drying their hair, dressing in their perfect 70s outfits, running around naked and throwing their towels at each other with abandon. This all plays out over a perfectly serene score, making clear to the audience that Carrie’s classmates are assured and confident in their femininity, their easy nakedness not exactly a display for the male gaze (as much as can be, of course, in a film from 1976), but a marker of the comfort of being in a community that won’t judge you, in a social role of belonging that you feel totally at home in.

This is true for everyone, of course, but the awkward, virginal Carrie, who is hidden away from the rest of the girls by a cloud of steam and the walls of her shower, and who doesn’t know what a period is until it starts happening to her. Even if you’re warned ahead of time, a first period can be pretty horrifying. It’s also uniquely tied, socially speaking, to taking up some kind of mantle of femininity—how many young people have had periods explained to them as a “girl thing,” a topic that’s “not for boys,” a symbol of “becoming a woman?”

But Carrie is thrust into this body-horror symbol of socially-ascribed womanhood without any guidance into it. Suddenly, there’s blood all over her body and all over her hands, and when she turns to the other girls begging “help me,” they all laugh at her. Not only that, they pelt her with pads and tampons to remind her just how much she doesn’t understand. Even the adult women in the film aren’t exactly sympathetic—her proselytizing mom, of course, is a unique kind of repressive parental horror, while the gym teacher who banishes the other girls from the locker room for jeering at Carrie confesses later to the principal that she understands how they felt.

To correct Carrie’s isolation from the other girls after this embarrassment, and to assuage her own guilt for opening up the vending machine of sanitary products to give them literal ammo against her, Carrie’s classmate Sue Snell comes up with the perfect solution. She gets a nice, hot boy to ask Carrie to prom, a time-honored (and often incredibly heteronormative) cultural coming-of-age ceremony for American teens. Through this, Carrie gets the opportunity to perform normative young femininity for her peers, a way to get the approval of her community for the way she “does” gender even if she still doesn’t get it from her mom. She curls her hair, does her makeup and dons a flowy pink dress, then goes to the dance only to find out that she’s been voted Prom Queen, the ultimate endorsement of feminine fitting-in. 

As the famous cataclysm at prom reveals, however, this entire thing is a farce. By publicly pranking her by dumping blood on her when she takes the stage, the whole class, even Sue, has in effect conspired to parade Carrie across the stage of normative gender performance before calling grotesquely back to her old humiliation to remind her that she never truly belonged there anyway. Sure, they weren’t all working against her, but to poor Carrie, who’s had one shining glimpse of acceptance before seeing it taken just as swiftly away, it only looks like her mother’s horrible prophecy of “they’re all gonna laugh at you” has come true. One bucket of pig’s blood later, and Carrie is literally tearing down the entire cruel community that’s shunned her, ultimately killing her mother, most of her classmates, and herself—a violent, gory excavation of the norms that society ascribes to femininity, and the inevitable anguish of failing to live up to them.

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