Movie Carrie Review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Carrie - Movie Review Example On one hand, he understands that Carrie White's night of revenge is motivated by the brutality of her classmates. On the other hand, his exoneration of Carrie is equalled in his contempt for the boy-men, girl-women who torment her. King's truest sympathies are always with the high school rejects; they are not only victimized by the cruelty of the majority, but because of their status as pariahs they often possess a level of intelligence and sensitivity sadly missing in their more popular peers. Carrie becomes doubly pitiful, because ... she can only wait to be saved or damned by the actions of others. Her only power is her telekinetic ability, and movie eventually arrives at the same point: King seems most unfavorably inclined toward the superficially well-adjusted, popular student with an overly active libido and a underdeveloped value system. His class presidents, football quarterbacks, and prom queens bear an unmistakable resemblance to the street punks who attend the same school system as a stopover on their way to jail: both groups of adolescents have completely severed their bonds with childhood innocence. In their vicious lust to exploit sex, alcohol, and violence (for they inhabit an exclusively physical plane of existence), their behavior is modeled on an extreme conception of adulthood. They want all the pleasure of worldly experience, with none of the responsibilities. Thus, they are simply young versions of the corruption which animates King's adult society. Horror films like Carrie is, primarily, produced and consumed by men. Why should this be It would seem that the experience derived from horror fiction (as opposed to the experience of horror in "real life") is peculiarly fascinating to men, or rather to the masculine subject, i.e. the subject constituted as masculine through the particular nature of his/her experience, particularly in early childhood. For the masculine child, the movement away from the mother, expressed as it is through abjection and the passage through the Oedipus complex, seems to be more traumatic than for the feminine child. For the feminine child there remains at least a possibility of reunion with the mother through identification; also, the feminine subject is actively encouraged to retain links with the maternal semiotic through the cultivation of such qualities as "intuition." The masculine subject by contrast depends for his very identity on the effectiveness of his repression of the maternal semiotic and o f desire for the mother. Carrie is dominated by those images of waste, putrefaction and decay which can be associated with abjection: these are, so to speak, the staple of horror. When we think of "the horrid" we picture blood, corpses, the violation of bodily limits. Via these images horror fiction returns us to the scene of primary horror in the abjection of the mother, a scene which, however, particularly for the masculine subject, possesses fascination, the power of the taboo. Images of abjection lead the masculine subject back not only to the movement away from the mother but also to the original repressed desire for the mother, which returns with all the force of the repressed, of that which can be allowed no place in adult life. Carrie seems to be designed