Last week I found time to watch a few flicks, among them 1976’s Carrie, the coming-of-telekinesis story of Carrie, who is bullied relentlessly both at school and home.  Her mother’s Pharisaical view of redemption (essentially, there is none) makes Carrie’s life sheltered; meanwhile, Carrie’s classmates bully her in part because of her mother’s insanity.

Family lore has made this film legendary.  According to legend, my parents went to see this film on their honeymoon in 1977.  I don’t know exactly when it occurred, but my dad—who was raised Pentecostal (Church of God – Cleveland, Tennessee) was so beside himself, he walked out.  My mom (raised Southern Baptist, and, therefore, a bit less bee-hived in her hairdos) was a fan of Stephen King—then an emerging author in many respects—and it apparently was a shock to her that my dad reacted as he did.

Having just seen the film, I can see why my dad got so uncomfortable.  It literally opens with a quasi-pornographic shot of Carrie showering herself after gym class—and then receiving a visit from Aunt Flo.  There’s also the iconic “prayer closet” with a Jesus sporting menacing, glowing eyes.  The anti-Christian messaging is pretty strong.

That said, the film is not, I would argue, primarily a screed against religion, although that is a part of it.  Carrie’s mom is a nut, but anyone with even a passing familiarity with Christ’s Teachings would realize that her religion is not Christianity.  It’s some kind of perversion of something resembling Christianity into a legalistic tangle of extreme ascetism coupled with brutality.

Instead, Carrie is very much a coming-of-age story, in which the sheltered Carrie attempts to spread her wings and become her own woman, but instead is met only with resistance at every time.  Having developed no healthy relationships—and faced only mockery and scorn from her mother, her schoolmates, and even the principal—she lashes out in the film’s fiery conclusion.

What strikes me about every Stephen King novel and film adaptation is that bullying is severe in a way that seems—at least here in the twenty-first century—unrealistic.  Don’t get me wrong—kids are awful to each other, especially online.  But the kind of theatrical, violent, directly lethal bullying (Carrie’s bully attempts to run Carrie over with a car!) in King’s works seems like something out of time.

Maybe we’ve just grown more sensitive as a society.  Maybe we screen for sociopaths better than we did.  As a kid in the 1990s, I had some kids pick on me for my weight.  I learned to either ignore them or (when I was surprisingly little) to sock them good and they’d stop (I don’t advocate punching people, but I was a little kid).  That said, there was never a situation in which some would-be-bully plotted my downfall because, say, I popped them or told on them.

Stephen King must have had a terrible childhood, because his literary bullies are downright villainous.  When the girls in Carrie’s gym class receive detention for pelting Carrie with feminine hygiene products (!!!), one of the girls plots Carrie’s humiliation with the iconic bucket of pig’s blood.

I work with teenagers.  They aren’t that motivated or creative.  They also aren’t that evil!  It probably helps that they’re distracted with their phones—which is probably where they conduct most of their casual wickedness—but they aren’t concocting elaborate pranks.  Granted, I work with a pretty tame population of teens; I know that some in the public schools are stabbing, shooting, and otherwise maiming each other for the slightest offense.

So, maybe things are as bad as they appear in Carrie.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that Stephen King needs aggressive, evil bullies because the point of most of his stories is that “humans are the real monsters.”  Carrie herself is interesting, because she does end up being monstrous—she kills a lot of innocent people.

Perhaps there is a message there about the failure of the school and her social cohort and her teachers in protecting and nurturing her.  Even the good gym teacher “betrays,” in Carrie’s mind, the vulnerable girl, exposing her to the risks of teenage social interaction.  No good deed goes unpunished, after all.  Regardless, there is a systemic failure on part of the school to take Carrie or her problems seriously, as even the principle repeatedly refers to her as “Cassie”—even after Carrie meekly corrects him multiple times.

Ultimately, I love this film.  It’s a bit much at the jump, but it’s a classic.  Sissy Spacek delivers a compelling performance as Carrie, moving seamlessly between the erratic highs and lows of high school.  Her transformation from wall flower to prom queen to telekinetic killer is devastating to witness, but every time I see this film, I hope things will end differently.