Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [81]
So did King. Carrie was rooted in his experience teaching high school and his childhood anxieties about sex, puberty, and the popular crowd. The novel follows a fat, ugly outsider, Carrie White, with uncontrollably violent psychic abilities to make objects move through the power of her unease and anger. As it happens, she has cause to get upset. Her mother is a dominating religious scold, and her classmates are impossibly cruel, mocking her for bleeding on herself when she has her first period. After the gym teacher chastises the class for cruelty, one of the girls, Sue Snell, gets her boyfriend, Tommy, to ask Carrie to the prom. Less charitable classmates use this as an excuse for more hazing, fixing the election of prom queen for Carrie and then dumping a bucket of pig’s blood on her head after she accepts the honor onstage. King invites you to identify with Carrie and be vicariously thrilled when she destroys the school and everyone in it. It’s a vigilante revenge fantasy that anyone who felt like an outsider in high school could indulge in.
While many girl readers surely sympathized with Carrie, King has written quite candidly that he was reacting to the rise of feminism in the early seventies. Battles over the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights were heating up, and the increased popularity of the Pill was giving women more power and making some men nervous. King described this anxiety as “an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality.” In the novel, Carrie repeatedly jots down lyrics in her notebook from Bob Dylan’s song: “Just Like a Woman,” a sardonic attack on a powerful woman from the perspective of a bitter ex-lover. If the unknown is the scariest thing, as King learned from Lovecraft, what’s more esoteric and thus unsettling to a young man than the blossoming sexuality of a teenage girl?
White men have always dominated the horror genre, and coming of age in an era when the women’s movement challenged traditional gender roles was a source of anxiety for many directors. In his novels Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin was the exception in locating the horror in traditional gender roles. More often, the terror derives from fear of a shift away from tradition. One articulate example from the same era is Duel, Steven Spielberg’s 1971 debut, which began as a television movie before being released in theaters. Adapted from a short story that appeared in Playboy magazine written by Richard Matheson, another of King’s major influences, the movie imagines the American highway system as a wild Darwinian struggle. On this battlefield, a simple narrative plays out of a truck stalking a beleaguered salesman in a much smaller car. You never see the driver at the wheel of the truck. The point of view stays with the victim, and in the film, the subtext of this cat and mouse game is the challenge to the protagonist’s masculinity.
David Mann (notice the name) is an ineffectual worrier who goes to work before his wife wakes up. On the radio, in between baseball scores and a weather report, a talk show host chats with a caller who describes himself as a member of the silent majority. He appears flummoxed by the question by a member of the Census Bureau: “Are you the head of the family?” He responds, “I lost the position as head of the family. I stay at home and she works. I stay at home and do the housework and take care of the babies. I’m really not the head of the family, and yet I’m the man of the family.” At this point, Mann’s face appears for the first time in a reflection in the mirror. The anxiety of the talk show, we later learn, reflects his nervousness. He’s been having trouble in his marriage. This is the face of the terrified man who doesn’t know his place in the world.
Four years after this man-versus-car story, Spielberg gave us the man-versus-fish version in Jaws, and his friend Brian De Palma visited the set on the first day of dailies. At the time, a killer shark was B-movie territory, the kind of thing William Castle