Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [83]
The slap was dramatically important, since it was designed for the audience’s approval, an echo of what was to come. Chris is the kind of bully who is easy to hate, so having the audience feel good about her getting hit prepares them for the much grander assault at the end. The prom, like the locker room, looks like a dream. When Spacek enters the dance at the end of the movie, De Palma films her from below with decorative stars hanging in the background. From this point forward, De Palma shows why Steven Spielberg calls him the “most experimental director of our group.” To give the event a fractured, poetic lift, he uses slow-motion, split-screen (which he eventually scaled back, after protesting from the studio), and a highly manipulative score that pushes the romance in loud, lilting music and then gets quieter in moments of horror. Miss Collins shares a tender moment with Carrie, telling her a story about her own prom that Buckley improvised. Though the movie was meticulously storyboarded, De Palma built in these moments of spontaneity. It’s the kind of thing few horror movies make room for, but slyly fool an audience into a state of relaxation. For a few moments, it looks like everything will work out for Carrie. Tommy (William Katt), her date, charmingly convinces her to dance. De Palma films this romantic twirl in a complicated shot, putting the actors on a rotating platform and spinning the camera around in the opposite direction to create the effect of dizziness. Cohen recalls being worried. “When he said he wanted to do a 360 shot for the prom, I wanted to throw up,” he says. “Too show-offy.”
Every directorial decision, however, had a purpose: the world of the film shrinks down to two people losing control of their emotions, illustrating how the thrill of engaged, involved love puts you in a precarious position. De Palma is slowly setting us up, and when Tommy and Carrie win the Prom King and Queen, his camera pans from the bucket above her to the rope connecting it down to Chris holding it, ready to let it go. This is where he begins his most dramatic shift from the book. Inspired by the fight in the audience at Dionysus in 69, De Palma boldly shifts perspective away from Carrie and the crowd. He’s building tension, but that’s not all he’s doing.
The clapping of teachers and students becomes silence when Chris pulls the rope and the bucket of blood falls. There’s a close-up of Sue Snell anxiously noticing the disaster about to unfold. Then Miss Collins sees Sue charging the stage and thinks she wants to harm Carrie. She races to save Carrie. Here is a classic De Palma move, shifting focus away from the stage and toward the observers who both have good intentions. They both try to save the day and fail miserably. The gym teacher violently grabs Sue and drags her out of the room. The blood falls, and Carrie begins killing everyone.
Unlike in his real life, where De Palma quite enjoyed overhearing conversations in coffee shops and staring through telescopes or binoculars at strangers, his attitude toward voyeurism is much more ambivalent on film. Carrie encourages its audience to cheer for these killings. To emphasize the point, De Palma gives us Carrie’s cracked perspective with a screen of cackling faces and her mother’s warning echoing in her head: “They are all gonna laugh at you.” So when kids go flying and the room becomes engulfed in flames, it relieves the tension. It’s what we’ve been waiting for. But De Palma doesn’t let the audience off