Carrie (2002) Pt. 1

Rik Tod Johnson: Boy, are we ever bad at meeting our own announced schedule...

Welcome back to the next installment of We Who Watch from Behind the Rows, our spotlight on the writings of Stephen King and the filmed adaptations of those works. My writing partner, Aaron Lowe, and I were originally intent on using the month of October 2016 (that’s almost an entire year ago, folks!) to post a series of discussions about King’s novel Carrie and the three feature films and single TV movie adapted from it. We were able to get more than half there, but just barely. The month started out well with the discussion of the book, and we jumped right into Brian De Palma’s Oscar-nominated 1976 classic, and then leapt to The Rage: Carrie 2 from 1999. Then things went wonky for us, one in a positive way and negative for the other. Aaron had to devote more time to the family once his wife gave birth to their second child, while I had medical issues once more when I sustained a truly obnoxious hip injury that led to months of tests and therapy, and basically made it impossible to sit and write for any length of time.

Everything has worked out now though, where we are both itching to get this site (and our other sites) chugging right along again. For We Who Watch, it is especially important for us to be on our game for the remainder of the year, as we have some catching up to do thanks to the spate of brand new Stephen King properties that have hit us in the past couple of months (the first Dark Tower film, the new It movie, and a new TV series built around the world of The Mist; coming up, another series built around and named after King’s legendary town of Castle Rock). You will find a series of recent posts where we have discussed some of these projects after watching the trailers, but first, we need to get these last two Carrie discussions closed for good. Let’s go!

The Film: Carrie (2002, NBC-TV) Director: David Carson

Rik: Before I went into the fiction-reading wilderness for a few years, new Stephen King adaptations (or even original films) were a big thing with me. It was probably the early 2000s where I started to having a falling out (and had already mostly stopped reading his books by then). I am not quite sure where I burned out, but it is a good bet that projects like the 2002 television remake of Carrie was one of the reasons I pulled away for a short while.

I watched this three-hour (with commercials) version live on NBC in the fall of that year. I was really excited that they were doing a new Carrie as well. If there is one area where a television adaptation can definitely excel over a theatrical one, it’s in the ability to have more time (as many dedicated readers often dream) to have the full story told as the author intended. Whether such intentions are really taken to heart by the producers and creators of the film or not, I am always going to be one of those people who takes it as a good sign when more scope is granted to a project.

The biggest surprise with the 2002 TV movie is that an actual attempt is made to whisk in details that had been left out of the De Palma version (and would be in the eventual 2013 theatrical remake as well). Right in the opening scene we are shown the character of Sue Snell being questioned by authorities about her involvement in the Carrie White incident, which is modeled after the regular points in the novel (partially told in epistolary style) where her testimony (and that of others) deepens the information we have been given through other sources in the story.

There are some other small bits from the novel ignored by De Palma and his team that have been added to the rendering this time around, but before we get any deeper into them (or even consider if such additions were really necessary), I need to know something. Aaron, did you watch this TV movie when it originally aired on NBC in 2002?

Aaron: Not only did I not watch it, I’m not even sure I was aware of its existence at the time.

Part of me wants to make a joke here about trying to figure out which one of us had the good delay, and which the bad, but yes, I am, for the second time, father to a beautiful baby girl. It’s been wonderful, and time-consuming, and so far we’ve only had to deal with a tiny hail of stones. Sometimes she gets fussy, but we’ve got a nice altar to St. Sebastian in a closet, so we can lock her in there until she calms down.

You know what? I felt mildly uncomfortable writing that down, when talking about my daughter. This book, and these movies, definitely have a new weight that my younger self would not have considered when first encountering the De Palma film.

As for this version, I only first watched it in October of last year, when we had originally hoped to finish this piece. It’s possible that I had seen TV spots for its initial airdate or read about it in Entertainment Weekly. In fact, those two things almost certainly happened, yet I have no memory of such. The timing may have been off for me. In November of 2002, I was in the first year of my relationship with my then-girlfriend, now-wife, and I recall I wasn’t watching a lot of television at the time. While you were about to fall out with Stephen King for awhile, I already had, and wouldn’t really get back into paying attention to him for another year or so.

I should say that I didn’t actually “fall out” with Stephen King. That implies that I grew to dislike him as an author, when that isn’t actually the case. It’s simply that my literary obsessions moved to a wider array of authors, with a whole new library of titles to read, and I just didn’t keep up with King for awhile. One area where I did most certainly fall out with Stephen King, however, is in his filmed adaptations. It’s well known among Stephen King’s constant readers that the films based on his works are for the most part not very good. That’s nothing new; people are always negatively comparing films to their written counterparts. What really turned me off, however, were the television adaptations of his books. The ‘90s saw a whole slew of TV movies or miniseries based on Stephen King novels and stories, and while they served as an important gateway into his work for me, the novelty quickly faded and the general quality of the films was, to put it generously, suspect. So, even if I had seen some ads or read some articles about this new version of Carrie, I wouldn’t have paid them much mind. It should also be noted that at this time I hadn’t yet read the original novel, which might have had something to do with my apparent lack of interest.

During the opening credits to this version, I began to think I had been ignoring a lost classic, something that had fallen through the cracks and had simply been put out at the wrong time and in the wrong place (i.e., network television in the early 2000s). The film was directed by David Carson (a veteran of Star Trek: DS9 and director of the series-bridging Star Trek: Generations film, though I won’t hold that one against him), but what was most interesting to me is that it was written by another alumnus of the Star Trek family: Bryan Fuller. At the time, Fuller was in the early stages of his career, but following this he would create Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Hannibal. Definitely a writer with some interesting visions and macabre tendencies that are right up my alley. On the other side of the camera you’ve got Patricia Clarkson as Margaret White, a pre-Lost Emilie de Ravin as Chris Hargensen, the lovely Katherine Isabel (sadly underused) as Chris’ friend Tina, and Angela Bettis, so charmingly disturbed in May, as Carrie herself.

With so many interesting names attached I was sure that I would at least find a lot of worthwhile aspects within this adaptation (as a fan of horror films, I believe you get used to seeing the forest for the trees and grabbing on to anything interesting within even the worst films). Ultimately, I believe that my modest expectation was met, yet nowhere near the levels I was hoping for. A lot of this is the product of its time and venue; early 2000s network television was probably not the best place for this story to be told, and like many films of the time, the producers’ faith in CGI was greater than its limits. The story also feels needlessly padded out. You mention that the longer runtime afforded by television can give the medium an edge over the somewhat more constrained feature film, and yet three hours is more than such a slim novel needed, if we’re being honest.

Rik, you said that this adaptation played a part in your general move away from Stephen King for awhile, so I can assume that you found yourself similarly underwhelmed by this version. But, as you say, this version allows for a lot of the stuff edited out of the De Palma film, like the scene with the hail of rocks from the sky crashing into the Whites’ house during one of Carrie’s frequent punishments, and some of the novel’s epistolary elements. Did any of these moments, or even any of the additions to the source material, liven things up for you?

Rik: There’s the rub. It is simultaneously really cool that the producers of this version did add things missing from the first film that seem so vital in telling the story in the novel and also completely disappointing in that the additions really add very little to the story. And the hail of ice and rocks? Once more, a cool scene in the book that just really plays pretty cheesy in this film, and seeing it onscreen made me wonder if perhaps the scene is just a little too ridiculous in the book as well. [Note: it’s not. It works just fine in the novel.]

You realize in watching the 2002 Carrie (or at least I realized) that De Palma made all the right decisions in slicing the story down to its most primal, necessary elements for relocation to a visual media form. The epistolary style of the original novel is nothing more than basic structure; you can throw out the template if you like and hang the story on some other frame, and as long as you shift the important details and motivations of the characters correctly to the form you have adopted, you could tell the tale however you’d like.

To my point, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein are two of the most famous epistolary novels, telling their stories mostly through a series of letters to other parties. Both books have seen extraordinary success in being adapted to other media: stage, radio, television, and most especially, the movies. While hardcore fans (such as even myself at times) long for a version of either book that completely captures each story perfectly in the manner portrayed in their texts, there have been very few attempts overall to do so (though some have tried to varying and debatable degrees of success). The epistolary structure may work on the page for many novels, because it is easy for someone to imagine they have been given a stack of letters and they are discovering some amazing story by reading them in order (or even out of order. But letter reading (or even reading scientific articles about telekinesis, such as in Carrie the novel) really does not allow a story to breathe or open up on a movie or TV screen. Part of this lies in the flashback nature of such writings; the stories are being told of past events, and therefore have no sense of immediacy to the viewer. This can often be deadly in keeping an audience on the edge of their seats, especially to modern audiences.

As a result, most versions of either classic novel keep the basic details – most of the characters, locations, settings, and sometimes the time period – and adapt them to whatever structure the filmmakers wish to pursue to tell their version of the story. It may not give us either Shelley or Stoker in undiluted form, but on some occasions, such as the original Universal attempts at both stories in the early 1930s, the results can be staggering and exceedingly popular with audiences for nearly a century. Universal’s Frankenstein threw out the letters and history of the book, mixed in a large dose of German Expressionism, and thrust the viewer directly into a harrowing night of grave-robbing and scientific madness that would have made Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley crap her knickers had she lived long enough to see such a film. (She would have had to be 134 years old to pull that one off though…) While the 1931 Frankenstein may have taken place in the past, within itself sans the letters, that past was “the now,” and the viewer was immediately part of the horrifying adventure. By comparison, the first Universal Dracula is notoriously more stage-bound in its approach and rather threadbare, winnowing down the stage play version of the story, which itself already mostly threw out the epistolary trappings of the book. But still, while the play’s story also takes place in the past, it is not told in the past tense. What is happening on stage and in the film is happening now, and the film’s sets and costumes were modern enough (for 1931) that many of the scenes look like they could have wandered in from a party scene in a Norma Shearer movie… well, apart from the blood-sucking Continental who shows up and ruins nearly everyone’s lives. (Then again, he could have wandered in from a Shearer flick too…) Once more, the letters of the book are disappeared, and the characters transported to a world more directly in line with the viewer’s need to be involved in the story.

The makers of the 2002 version of Carrie seem convinced that they needed to hew as closely to the novel as they could to differentiate themselves from the De Palma version. There are always large groups of fans that want their favorite books transferred wholesale when adapted, but the structure of a novel scrambled about in epistolary form (though roughly half the novel is still told in prose) is hard to replicate onscreen. Instead of jettisoning the somewhat unwieldy (though successful) structure that contains the story and just making sure they hit the beats of the story and maintain the character arcs properly, the filmmakers boldly tear off chunks of the epistolary sections, such as the post-event interviews of Sue Snell, but ignore the bits where we read documents and news articles related to the case. Excising those last bits is the right move, because it would be extraordinarily hard to adapt such a novel to the big or small screen in satisfactory fashion, but the interviews were really a wash for me as well. The film never really commits to the sections in such a way that they ever convince me they were right to include them, nor do they add much of anything to the film except time. The interview sections don’t work for me at all, serving instead to muddle the pace, and especially in the film’s opening, slowing the proceedings to a deadly crawl almost from the start.

It seems hardly fair at all to compare this version to De Palma’s, but that is why we have this website. De Palma’s film surges forward on kinetic energy throughout; even when opening his film with a seemingly slow, soft focus shower sequence with orchestral accompaniment, there is still a nervy, suspenseful edge to everything. Something is going to snap us out of this haze, and it does, instantly with screaming, crying, taunting laughter, and a girl covered in her own menstrual blood. The De Palma version sets viewers into a nervous state from the start and never lets them go, even up to the climax of the film. In this TV adaptation, director David Carson plunges us right into an interview with a survivor of the Carrie White incident, Sue Snell, as she talks to the authorities. “Tell us about Carrie White, blah, blah, blah”... none of this really needs to be seen. You said earlier that nearly three hours of length may not have been necessary for such a slim novel, and you are right. This viewer felt every extra minute of the stretched out running time, and most of that time was devoted to scenes that could have been better shorthanded by letting the audience simply learn what is happening through the actions of the characters, not by underlining everything with Snell’s testimony.

Aaron: I think it would be impossible to not compare any of the subsequent Carrie films to the De Palma original. That film just throws such a long shadow over everything else that it’s impossible to not think about it, to weigh the choices against each other and, for the most part, find the other films wanting. I tried my hardest to divorce my reactions from my feeling for the 1976 version, and sadly failed miserably. That’s not to say that I won’t be fair in my critical analysis, because each of these films deserves to be viewed as its own distinct entity (well, aside from The Rage, which is of course, a derivation of De Palma’s film), but when discussing what makes the translation from page to screen work it helps that we’ve got a prime example of what to do, and a few examples of what not to do.

The thing we seem to keep coming back to is the pace of this version. I rewatched the film this morning, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that two hours twelve minutes (the runtime minus commercials) is too damn long. That’s longer than both of the other versions by over half an hour, and while that may not initially seem like much, you really do feel every minute of it. The infamous shower scene, which opens the other two films (minus a few seconds of volleyball or water polo, and some attempted matricide in the 2013 version) arrives eight minutes into this film, after some schoolroom business setting up the daily ridicule Carrie faces, some gym time (they play baseball this time around), and of course some of that interview nonsense.

You bring up those interview segments, where a detective (played by David Keith) interviews various survivors of the prom night disaster. Most of these scenes feature Sue Snell, although other survivors show up to offer their two cents as well. We’re in complete agreement as to their uselessness, as they don’t do anything to create anticipation or flesh out the world of the film. One thing that really bothered me about these segments is that they seemed curiously removed from the film itself. Of course, the detective would ask questions which would be related in some way to the scenes we’re about to see, and yet they never really tied together. You would think the obvious format choice would be for the detective to ask a question, and then the scene that followed would take the place of the interviewee’s response, but that isn’t at all how it works here. If this film is meant to be a visualization of the survivors’ recollections, we get way too many scenes that no one would have been around for other than Carrie herself. It feels like the interview segments were just slotted into the existing film rather than the film being built around them. Or perhaps they’re simply a byproduct of this film’s origins on television, because I can see the interview scenes being used to recap things for an audience coming back from commercials, or to create some drama heading into the break.

There is, actually, another reason for the interview scenes, although I don’t think they were particularly successful in this regard either. The detective initially accuses Sue Snell of being part of the disastrous prank played on Carrie (which is in keeping with the book), but eventually it’s revealed that Carrie’s body was never recovered. We find out in the final moments of the film that Sue Snell, having gone to Carrie’s home and reviving her from nearly being drowned in the tub by Margaret, has helped Carrie fake her death and leave the state. The final scene is Sue Snell driving Carrie to Florida, while Carrie has some disturbing visions in the passenger seat. That’s right, in this version Carrie lives and plans to relocate to Florida, where presumably she’ll only have momentary peace before having to go on the run from The Shop, or something. I think those interview segments were meant to act as a misdirect, to make the viewer (most likely already familiar with the basic story) think that it was all leading to the same familiar ending.

After thinking this over, I think the only real way to make a version of Carrie that incorporates the epistolary elements of the novel is to excise a lot of Carrie herself. Imagine a Rashomon-style film that is told only from the viewpoints of Carrie’s classmates and neighbors, where each person tells their own story and Carrie is this mysterious girl at the fringes that suddenly explodes with a fury no one knew existed. It would mean getting rid of a lot of what makes the original novel and film so memorable (i.e., it would be difficult to squeeze in the scenes of Carrie alone with her mother, or practicing her telekinesis). This seems like a storytelling form that would lend itself well to television, where each act break could be devoted to another little vignette. Again, I just think it was the wrong place and the wrong time, as we had only just entered what is now considered the new golden age of television, with shows like The Sopranos and The Wire elevating the form, and network television hadn’t yet caught up. A few years later, with much of the same cast and crew, I think this would have been much more successful. Of course, the Rashomon-influenced style would not have been easily replicable, on a week-to-week basis, as this was intended as a backdoor pilot for a potential weekly series, which the final scene implies.

I say most of the same cast and crew could have made this successful, because after watching the film a second time I’m fairly convinced that David Carson was the wrong director. I’ll admit that he fits pretty well into the style of early turn-of-the-century television, but this version of Carrie is very visually nondescript, and a lot of his choices just threw me off whenever they came up. Almost every scene is full of canted Dutch angles and wobbly handheld camerawork, seemingly without rhyme or reason, whether the scene calls for it or not. He also has the habit, which seemed to be more popular once upon a time, of repeating moments of action from multiple angles and in multiple speeds or with different filters. And not just for big stunts, but for the scene of Mrs. Desjardin throwing a bag of feminine products around in the gym, we get to see her emptying the bag three or four times. David Carson also has a predilection for ridiculous excess that comes out in fairly mundane ways. When Carrie White opens her locker to find it full of tampons, the avalanche that comes out goes on and on to almost comical lengths. Or when the bucket of pig’s blood finally falls on prom night, the tiny bucket seems to have been made out of old TARDIS parts, as gallons upon gallons of blood pour out of it.

When I think about this movie, and when I say it could have been successful if they had made it a few years later, I guess I’m mainly thinking about Bryan Fuller. In a few years the writers and show-runners would have much more artistic control over their works, and knowing Fuller’s baroque, Grand Guignol style, I think he would have made a much more personal work than what we see here. I want to see the movie made by Bryan Fuller, creator of Dead Like Me and Hannibal, not the Bryan Fuller who was a Star Trek staff writer.

[That's all for Part 1 of our discussion of Carrie (2002). We will post the second part on Monday, September 11, 2018. Honest... we will. It's already written. We swear...]