Forget about identifying with Carrie Bradshaw. The original Carrie had far more relatable problems, chief among them being a misunderstood social pariah. Yes, Carrie White (Sissy Spacek), the awkward, plain-looking teen of Brian De Palma’s (arguably) most iconic work, possesses a trait that afflicts us all at some point or another: being persecuted for no apparent reason, for mere existence, as it were.
Sure, she’s not “like” other girls for more than just aesthetic reasons, but, largely, there’s nothing so offensive about Carrie as to warrant having a slew of tampons thrown at her just because she’s the daughter of a Christian fundamentalist and has no idea of the remote possibility of what a period could be–let alone that it could come at the most inopportune of times.
Carrie’s perpetual state of torment most overtly stems from the combination of every collective body of people needing some sort of scapegoat to take out their aggressions, frustrations and latent inner self-loathings on, paired with Carrie being an easily targetable persona for such a phenomenon in part thanks to her perceived weakness. The more passive and vulnerable a person appears, the more others want to tear her down, gnawing away at the very last thread in her fabric of faith. Her lamb-like nature is too easy to take advantage of, too irresistible not to lead to a slaughter (pardon the mixture of lamb with reference to pig’s blood). In this respect, even when one doesn’t identify with being prototypically similar to Carrie, it’s safe to say that, for the most part, each of us starts out inherently innocent before our surroundings and the supporting characters in our lives drive us to telekinetic madness.
Carrie’s soft-spokenness and irksomely sweet aura is what compels those around her to destroy any spark of hope she might have left within her to believe in humanity. But as the saying goes, some people are simply too pure for this world. That is, unless they have the supernatural powers to cope with the staving off of assholes. But those of us who don’t must exist as Carrie does before reacting to the drop of the bucket on her head: in an effluvium of constant humiliation and horror, wondering who is going to betray us next.
