Friday Ephemera (838)

There was an attempt to buy more beer.

And in progressive schooling news:

That is hard for most people to grasp because, in the real world, we expect rules to establish how we should behave and consequences to fall on those who break them. Yet public education is not the world you know, but one of Orwellian contradictions: follow the rules, but do not enforce them. Address student misbehaviour, but do not report it. Have high expectations, but do not inconvenience anyone by maintaining them.

We Can’t Have You Upsetting the Gang Bangers.

Further to recent rumblings about Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of Carrie, and because Daniel will be waiting for one, a post-mortem of sorts.

The opening episode is solid – I enjoyed it – and hints at potential, but things do sag quite noticeably from then on, with a fairly steep downward trajectory. By halfway through, I found that any interest, any hope things might improve, had pretty much evaporated.

There are nice touches here and there – an intoxicated Carrie inadvertently and intermittently levitating the car in which she’s being taken home – but these are brief moments and nothing comes anywhere close to the intrigue or economy of the first episode. Most of the series is slow and underwhelming, almost boring – there’s a lot of padding out of the runtime with generic high-school drama. Things of little, if any, interest.

Much of the new, modern-day material – the adaptation – feels superfluous and flat. The fleshing-out of secondary characters, which takes up a lot of screentime, didn’t make me want more of it. The whole social-media bullying thing doesn’t deliver the punch it promises, and the ‘imaginary friend’ twist, when revealed in episode five, and which some may see coming, is similarly lacking in oomph.

The narrated prologues to the episodes – about the history of witchcraft and burnings and supposed telekinesis, and about how throughout history ‘gifted’ women have been treated badly by men – are often clunky and, more to the point, thematically dissonant. Not least because Carrie’s tormentors are overwhelmingly female. Her woes are a result not of patriarchy, but of matriarchy and the competitive spite of Queen Bee bitches.

This is not a trivial error. And at which point, one might note that the majority of the episodes’ writers are women. Oh, and one supposedly “non-binary” man.

Insofar as they intrude at all, the male characters are secondary, peripheral and often portrayed as ineffectual, unable to cope, even with everyday issues. Which makes the aggrieved sisterhood theme of the prologues clumsy and inapt. So much so that at first I assumed they were a red herring of sorts and would later be subverted, but no. It’s just bad.

The strongest aspect of the series, beyond the performances of Summer Howell and Samantha Sloyan, is the portrayal of Mrs White as not entirely unsympathetic, and indeed as having a point about the godlessness of the world outside. A welcome nuance that some reviewers found ideologically annoying. (“A craven attempt to keep MAGA-minded viewers on side,” as ScreenHub‘s reviewer put it.) 

But the performances of the two leads are outweighed by the bad writing and general tedium, the sense of filler. There’s a school protest-cum-riot scene in episode six that’s flat and unconvincing, and then, as it goes on, and on, just excruciating. Seriously misjudged, almost to the point of feeling like a parody.

The protracted, nihilistic finale, in which the uninteresting subplot about a shadowy group of other ‘gifted’ women comes to the fore, is not a high note. More schlocky and silly than scary, and much too long, stretching over an episode and a half. Despite the pig’s blood and telekinetic mayhem, the addition of this group diminishes the central character, reducing Carrie almost to a passenger in her own story.

During much of the finale, she’s literally robbed of agency by one of her paranormal ‘sisters’ and, consequently, of responsibility. “You didn’t break anything… except your shackles,” she’s told in the closing moments, after being used to kill or maim half the town. (And yes, shades of WandaVision. Insert joke of choice about women and accountability.)

And so, we’re teased – if that’s the word – with the possibility of some kind of morally evacuated all-girl X-Men for the Stranger Things crowd. Which just feels naff, frankly. A doubling-down on the weakest additions, the bits that didn’t work. And which obviously didn’t work.

So. Alas. Can’t recommend. That’s two big fails in a row for Mr Flanagan.

That bad?

Um, yes.

I mean, it’s not clear to me what any moral of the story might be, assuming there is one. The nearest I could come up with is that it’s totally okay for women who feel disgruntled or mistreated to kill hundreds of people indiscriminately. And then to escape any legal or practical repercussions, instead being literally driven away into the sunrise. Because, being a woman, it’s never your fault.

Something empowering like that.

That bad?

It’s curious how, despite the very pointed hiring of female writers, many of whom are self-styled activists of an entirely predictable kind, and an all-female team of directors (excluding Flanagan himself), the story somehow struggles to address certain, often mocked aspects of female psychology. 

And so, we get the lumpen grumbling about patriarchy in a story with no patriarchy – in fact, quite the opposite – and the women-with-no-accountability thing, again, despite it being rather jarring and an obvious issue.

[ Waits for someone to comment on the dynamic vagina video. ]

We can check flying cars off the list now.

I did have to check that it was real.

I knew a girl at school who could do it pretty much at will.

He said, boastfully.

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