The Travolta/Cage Project #3 Carrie (1976)
Perhaps Clint and I should have named Travolta/Cage, our obsessive, multi-media (podcast, online column and eventually book) exploration of the complete filmographies of John Travolta and Nicolas Cage PromCast because weirdly but wonderfully enough, 1976s Carrie and 1983’s Valley Girl , the films that introduced these charismatic young audiences to moviegoers, are all about the brutal, inhuman crucible of high school social politics and climax at the prom in very different ways.
Before they were Vincent Vega or Castor Troy, the Fanatic or Ghost Rider John Travolta and Nicolas Cage were pouty-lipped high school hunks in classic teen movies that cost but a pittance but broke wide and made a fortune thanks both to their riveting and iconic take on the joys and horror of teen life and their copious nudity.
In Carrie and Valley Girl, Travolta and Cage’s characters are defined by their pouty, potent, incandescent sensuality but where Travolta’s Billy Nolan uses his handsomeness for evil, Cage’s big-hearted rocker rebel Randy uses his gorgeousness for good, to fight against the tyranny of high school conformity and strike a blow for authenticity and true love.
Randy helps make the prom a dizzy, giddy romantic fantasy for his Valley Girl soulmate. Billy, beautiful, stupid, nasty Billy, meanwhile, uses his crude understanding of pulleys and pig’s blood to help turn a prom into a pyrotechnic nightmare, a telekinetic bloodbath with the body count of a small war and one VERY pissed young lady getting revenge on a world that treated her with unrelenting cruelty in the biggest, boldest, bloodiest possible fashion.
Travolta and Cage even receive similarly leering introductions that posit them not just as unusually handsome young men with healthy libidos but rather as fucking studs to be leered at. In Valley Girl , Cage’s punk Romeo is a vision of masculine perfection running on the beach in just a skimpy bathing suit to the delight of her heroine and all of her horny friends as well.
Travolta’s Billy is fully clothed throughout Carrie but that does not keep director Brian DePalma’s camera from ogling him in a blatantly sexual way. Carrie borders on soft-core porn in its gauzy, vaseline-smeared, slow-motion depiction of the dewy, frequently unclothed world of high school girls as sexy as they are cruel but if DePalma is not anything close to an equal opportunity voyeur he sexualizes Travolta and William Katt as the prom king just as intensely as he does the many beautiful naked young women in his cast.
They have fun!
Billy Nolan, sexy, shitty popular kid is introduced riding around in a car with girlfriend Chris Hargensen, who Nancy Allen plays as the meanest of mean girls, a popular girl who isn’t just nasty, she’s a fucking sociopath. In Carrie, as in life, being sexy and being a sociopath go hand in hand; look good enough and people will let you literally get away with anything, with the notable exception of vengeance-crazed telekinetic outsiders.
The whole world wants to fuck Billy and Chris here or to hang out with them on the chance that it will dramatically increase their chances of getting laid.
A shit-eating grin on his gorgeous punim, Billy is driving with his girlfriend in the passenger’s seat, Martha & the Vandella’s “Heat Wave” blaring on the car radio. Even the soundtrack seems to be lusting after these kids. First up a pair of dumbass bros try to get Billy to join them in the pursuit of some “hard stuff” but Billy leers at his girlfriend’s breasts and decides that he has better things to do but happily accepts the beer they toss into his car.
Next an entire car-full of beautiful young women holler their appreciation of Billy’s precocious beauty, either oblivious to his girlfriend’s presence or unconcerned about any lingering romantic or sexual attachments the beautiful young man might have.
Next up the police pull up to the side of Billy’s car but even they let him pass but when he spills his beer on his passenger she calls him “Stupid shit”, an insult she tosses his way with such frequency that it threatens to become a pet name. Billy and Chris have a toxic relationship: she continually calls him a stupid shit for behaving like a stupid shit and he continually smacks her in retaliation.
It seems safe to assume that every time Billy and Chris have sex it’s hate-sex. That’s who they are. They are bad people who bring out the worst in each other. Then Chris goes from icy cold to white hot and begins sucking sensually on one of Billy’s fingers before going down on him.
Billy unzips his pants before Chris reveals the real purpose of the automotive seduction. “Oh Billy, I hate Carrie White” she seethes pre-blowjob, to which Billy can only manage a simultaneously perplexed and enraged, “Who?”
Travolta plays the moment perfectly; he is a callow creature of pure need with a distressingly sadomasochistic relationship with a girlfriend he clearly kind of hates and who clearly kind of hates him. All that matters is the moment, in satiating his single-minded lust. Chris upends the erotic intensity of the moment by bringing mean girl high school politics into the equation at the worst possible time.
The scene is funny and dark and bracing but it also sets up the movie’s climax. Chris is filled with incoherent rage towards Carrie for getting her into trouble with gym teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) so she convinces her asshole boyfriend to play a prank on the poor girl that will lead to their own violent deaths and plenty more.
In Carrie sex and violence are inextricably intertwined. So it’s fitting that a strategic blow job plays a crucial role in getting an awful young man to do something unspeakably sadistic even by high school standards.
Carrie opens on a note of sensuality so over the top, and pervy, even by DePalma standards, as to be parodic. We open on a very slow shot of a girl’s locker room full of beauties in various states of undress. We arrive, finally, at the naked body of our heroine/anti-hero/villain Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) as she caresses her nubile naked form in a way that would lead to an orgasmic masturbation scene in a different, more “European” kind of film.
In Carrie, however, the scene famously climaxes with Carrie, whose psychotically Christian mother has gone out of her way to keep ignorant and afraid, about her body and everything else, feeling and seeing menstrual blood leave her body from the first time. A sensual paradise for people who like to ogle naked young women morphs instantly into high school hell as the mean girls, led by Chris, torment their awkward peer, taking brutal delight in her helplessness and naivety.
Carrie’s life is, if anything, even worse at home. Carrie’s religious freak mother Margaret (Piper Laurie in a scarily committed, Oscar-nominated performance) terrorizes her in the name of Christ, forcing her into a prayer closet whose defining feature is a representation of Jesus on the cross that is the single most potent nightmare fuel I have consumed since the hideous mime doll Deborah Foreman sleeps with in Valley Girl, apparently because she wants to experience bad dreams so shattering and intense that they make her never want to wake up.
Sue Snell (Amy Irving) , the rare popular girl with a conscience, convinces her boyfriend Tommy Ross (William Katt) to ask Carrie to the prom as penance for being part of the gaggle of cruel girls who mocked Carrie’s distraught, overwhelmed response to her first period.
Carrie occasionally appears to be on the very of devolving into a She’s All That style romantic comedy about a handsome jock who asks an awkward, unpopular, but absolutely stunning outcast to the prom under false pretenses but ends up falling for her all the same.
There’s a fascinating element of ambiguity to Katt’s performance. At first it is achingly apparent that he is only asking Carrie to the prom because his girlfriend asked him to do so. He is not very good at pretending otherwise, or pretending at all.
But he genuinely seems to warm to Carrie. The pity date to the prom threatens to become something realer and more authentic. The hint of kindness and mercy makes the rampant cruelty and violence to follow all the more powerful. The world of high school is unfathomably but realistically cruel in Carrie, just as it is in the real world.
So while Sue and Tommy go out of their way to make the world a little kinder to Carrie, Chris and Billy have a surprise of their own. They shamelessly rig the prom king election system, an act of pure evil in its own right, to ensure that Tommy and Carrie win but that Carrie has a bucket of pig’s blood dropped on her head during her cruel, mocking coronation.
Carrie’s ostensible moment of triumph becomes one of ultimate humiliation and the psychic powers she has struggled to keep at bay all film long are unleashed in a furious, fiery symphony of destruction and devastation. Carrie is no longer a shy, scared little girl but an apocalyptic force for destruction.
The look of anxiety, fear and vulnerability she has sported all film long is replaced by the steely, purposeful gaze of someone who knows exactly what they must do and how to do it. There is no more uncertainty. There is no more doubt. All that is left is the will to destroy a world that destroyed her fragile spirit, turning her into a monster.
The horrors of Carrie are rooted at once in a very Stephen King combination of the spooky and supernatural and the relatable and banal. It’s about the sadism and brutality of high school conformity as well as the ugliness and brutality of religion when used to oppress and torment rather than liberate and save.
Carrie is a villain but she’s just as unmistakably a victim. In Carrie, DePalma created a female version of Psycho with a similarly heartbreaking, multi-dimensional killer at its core who fascinatingly blurs the line between hero and villain, victim and victimizer, monster and monstrously relatable flesh and blood human being.
Carrie and Valley Girl turned out to be weirdly simpatico projects about the cruelty of high school politics and peer pressure and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of escaping the inexorable horrors of peer pressure distinguished by attention-grabbing performances by future Face/Off stars at their youngest and sexiest.
I’m not sure if future Travolta/Cage pairings will align so beautifully, or pair so perfectly, but I am excited to find out.
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