Below is the lecture script for a lecture from my series 'The World of Pop Culture With Thomas Carruthers'...
With over 350 million copies sold worldwide and still writing and still selling, along with an incredible array of awards nominations and wins, it’s pretty easy to see how Stephen King became the King of horror. But where did It all begin? It is pretty undisputed nowadays that not only is Stephen King one of the most successful authors of all time, but also one of the best. The snobbery of genre I feel is long gone and all that remains is a cultural respect for one our great creative’s. I would like, if I may, to look at King’s whole career today, or as much as I can, however that is a feat that is difficult with 50,000 words never mine around the 8,000 mark. So I would like to use his first decade of published materials, the 1970’s, as a microcosm for what would come next. For in the 1970’s I find that we find the fingerprints of the chief eight concepts and types of novel and prose King would mark the rest of his career penning...
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The
supernatural character study
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The small town epic
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The Bachman books
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The haunted location
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The writer as lead character
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The tale of addiction
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The HUGE epic of biblical proportions
- The human drama with the supernatural twist
With Carrie, published by Doubleday in 1974, King introduced the world to Carrie White, his original supernatural character study, set in the then future of 1979, King has referred to his debut novel before as a piece “with a surprising power to hurt and horrify”. From the flap; “Carrie White was the odd one at school, the one whose reflexes were always off in games, whose clothes never really fit, who never got the point of the joke. And so she became the brunt of teenaged cruelties that puzzled her as much as they wounded her”. Carrietta White, under the religious zealotary of her mother goes about the world almost entirely unawares of the modern era. Her mother Margaret hides her from so much in the world that the opening of the novel and the classic Brian De Palma 1976 film depict a horrifically shocking encounter where Carrie is bullied by her classmates in the shower upon her having her first period and not understanding the nature of it, with her mother sighting it as a sign of impurity, Carrie has no choice but to believe that she is bleeding to death. From the flap, the synopsis continues; “One act of kindness, as spontaneous as the vicious jokes of her classmates, offered Carrie a new look at herself the fateful night of the senior prom. But another act of furious cruelty forever changed things and turned her clandestine game in to a weapon of horror and destruction”. Part of the legend of Carrie is that the iconography is so justly iconic, so it’s very hard for a modern viewer to head into it without understanding the aspects of the finale that Carrie is invited to the prom as an act of misguided kindness, only to be the subject of a despicable prank, when pig’s blood is poured upon her from above as she is crowned prom queen. Thus inciting the psychic mania that leads to the destruction of the town and the murder of many, many of her fellow students. Knowing these classic facets of the novel leads to repeated reads and viewings of the film to be even more cemented as one of the great tragedies of modern horror literature. The book with its graphic nature regarding sex, religion and violence has been a book frequently banned, even become one of the most banned books some 20 years after its release. Around the time he was writing the novel King himself was a high school teacher and so would bear witness time and time again to the absolute brutality of teenagers to one another, this was clearly one of his biggest influences for his writing here. King described Carrie as a “sadly mis-used teenager, an example of the sort of person whose spirit is broken for good in that pit of man and woman eaters that is your normal suburban high school”. King said once the character was a composite of two girls he knew in high school, he recalled one experience in which one of these girls “came to school with a new outfit she’d bought herself... And everybody made worse fun of her because nobody wanted to see her change the mould”. King puts all this into Carrie White, and so I ask, was there ever a more haunting and tragic figure than Carrie White?
The book, despite being the first to be published was the fourth book King actually wrote. He wrote it on a portable typewriter, whilst living in a trailer with Tabitha, his wife to this very day. The piece began like many of King’s earliest works as a possible short story, this time for Cavalier magazine, where many King stories would be printed in the early days before his major successes. The tale has become legend that king did indeed throw out the first three or so pages of the book into the bin, only for Tabitha to pull them out and tell him to continue. King said “I persisted because I was dry and had no better ideas... my considered opinion was that I had written the world’s all time loser”. The book is dedicated to Tabitha, with King penning “This is for Tabby, who got me into it – and then bailed me out of it”. At the time the novel was being written the King family could not even afford to pay phone bills and so when the novel was picked up Doubleday, the editor there William Thomas had to send King a telegram, the telegram read; “Carrie officially a Doubleday book. $2,5000 advance against royalties. Congrats, kid – the future lies ahead”. Who would have ever figured what an immense future that would be? A factor that can’t be ignored for me in the Carrie mythos is that of the Cinderella quality of the novel, Phillipa Pride, the UK publisher of the novel, has commented on this before in fact; “part of the enduring appeal is the universal, timeless tale of a lonely girl wanting to fit in, be liked and go to the dance. Part of the underlying impulse for Steve’s writing Carrie was to take the Cinderella fairy tale and twist it by its tail... Steve once told me that he had intended for Carrie to leave one of her dancing shoes at the prom, as a tip of the hat to Cinderella, but he simply forgot it”. Despite all this acclaim and conjecture, King himself sees the novel in less of a glowing light, commenting on the novel as being not unlike “a cookie baked by a first grader – tasty enough, but kind of lumpy and burned on the bottom”. Such is the toilsome life of the creative that perhaps they never truly understood without objectivity their own brilliance. Another influence on the text according to King, but also something that he was wary about once he actually began writing, was that of the female perspective; “some woman said ‘you write all those macho things, but you can’t write about women’. I said ‘I’m not scared of women. I could write about them if I wanted to’”. King’s track record with depthful female characters is not the constant, however here in Carrie, a collection of the leads still remain for me some of his most complex heroines and female villains, particularly in the titular Miss White and her violent and horrifying mother. Critics throughout the years have often been very positive with the piece. Leigh A. Ehlers for instance cites the brilliance of King’s structural choices to not only depict the story through third person narration, but also through a series of newspaper articles and fictionalised book extracts, aswell as police interviews and other devices. She believes this choice was made to represent that there is frankly no way to rationalise, write about or explain for that matter the tragedy of Carrie White. Although the book was a moderate success upon release, it’s sales were boosted with immense success to around a total of four million sales with the release of Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation.
As a huge fan of both King and De Palma’s work, Carrie has always held a soft spot in my heart, however this is not a love blinded by an adoration of the chief creative’s, Carrie’s film adaptation from 1976 is one of the more finely crafted and taut of King’s adaptations and as time has proved to us, frankly one of the best. Where I feel this film works better in some ways than the original novel, and of course it goes without saying far better than either future remake, is in the characterisation of the lead role. For in the novel and other adaptations one can make the argument that the tragedy of Carrie White is entirely up to interpretation and that in actuality the nature of Carrie’s ultimate retaliation is more of a grey area than anything else, however the greatest strength of De Palma’s film and ultimately that of Sissy Spacek’s ungodly powerful and effecting Oscar nominated turn, is that her outbursts of violent telekinesis are seen as not entirely revenge based, or entirely for that matter of her own volition, they are often spurned or frantic reactions to the horrors of her life. All in all the tale being told in the film of Carrie manages for me to have a far greater impact in removing some of the ambiguities of the novel, this of course may be the exact reason a constant reader would hate the film, however for me in almost every case it works for the better. In making Carrie a complete victim and her actions of violence be based more so around retaliation than revenge, one finds a deeper heartache to the tragedy of the piece. In making Amy Irving’s Sue Snell and William Katt’s Tommy Ross wholly understanding and truthful in their attempts to make Carrie’s prom the best they can, bolstered by two wonderfully sweet and loving turns from the two actors, the tragedy of what occurs to Carrie is made all the more horrifying. In making Nancy Allen and John Travolta’s hardened bullies the most virile and purile combination of horniness and wicked teenage villainy, we get to the root of the unfortunate nature of who brought Carrie to her end. And last but not least of course in the films second Oscar nomination, Piper Laurie as Margaret White offers us a turn of complete performance on the character’s behalf, it is the absolute rarity that the sheen of Christian goodness is dropped, Laurie’s Margaret is perhaps the most horrifying thing of all – a villain who doesn’t for one minute believe that they’re in the wrong.
With Carrie is where
my 70’s as a microcosm theory begins in fact, for this is one of several
supernatural character studies that would pave the way in King’s career. The
novel that this perhaps shares most with is 1980’s Firestarter, with our lead character of
Charlie McGee being that of a young girl coming to terms with her own powers of
telekinesis, chiefly here pyrokenesis. However that story ends up one of
triumph overall, in comparison to the terrible ultimate tragedy of Carrie, not that Firestarter doesn’t too have its share of death and destruction. 1983’s Pet Semetary is
not only one of King’s best books, but is also one of the prickliest for my
slightly reductive system of paring these novels down into seven or so
categories, however in the end I figure it to be a character study of a father
coming to terms with immense grief in a supernatural world that he utilises to
terrifying conclusions. Much like with most of King’s books, it has that
incredible one line question hook; if you could bring back your dead loved
ones, no matter the consequences, would you? Of course what makes that book so
brilliant is its structure of having first a simple pet cat be brought back,
only for us to see the horror that that has become, so we understand the weight
of the decision when it comes to deceased family. You could even to some extent describe 1992’s Gerald’s Game as a form of supernatural
character study, with a victim of sexual abuse coming to terms with her life as
she is trapped by unfortunate circumstance facing death in a remote cabin. The
supernatural element may actually be the weakest element of that book for me,
mainly because in the end it’s revealed to not be supernatural at all, and in
fact instead a far-fetched real event. Thus also begins a signpost for another
typical Kingian trope, that of the let-down ending.
This article containing the script of my lecture will continue next week.
- Thomas Carruthers
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