Every revolution starts with someone deciding that the mess on the floor is not theirs to quietly mop up anymore.
In honor of all the women who have been told to clean up what patriarchy spills—blood, jokes, laws, pay gaps—this is for the ones who decide instead to flip the table, or the gym, or the entire town. Carrie is that fantasy of refusal pushed too far, run to the limit where saying no can only be heard if everything burns.
Blood As First Philosophy
We begin where the film begins: a birth that almost doesn’t happen, scissors hovering over the screaming, newly arrived life. Margaret White’s hand shakes, then stalls; something—God, psychosis, a half-remembered mammalian tenderness—intervenes. The blade does not fall. Carrie will live, for now. Already the film shreds the polite nature/nurture binary. It is not that “primal maternal instinct” overrides “religious fanaticism,” or vice versa. It is that two incompatible codes—the Christian sacrificial order and the bodily insistence of a screaming infant—collide in one trembling arm. Between them, something leaks out that cannot be fully reduced to either script.
Freud would call this a scene of the uncanny: the familiar maternal figure suddenly split by homicidal intent, the “homely” turning unhomely at the very moment of life’s arrival (Freud, 1955). The almost-infanticide marks Carrie as unwanted surplus before she has even taken her first inventory of the world. She is a remainder, a miscount in Margaret’s obsessive accounting of sin. But if we listen with Deleuze and Guattari’s ear, this is also the moment a peculiar desiring-machine is soldered together: Margaret’s religiosity, Carrie’s bare life, the scissors, the Old Testament, the American mid-century domestic interior. Flows of fear, repression, and divine mania are wired into a unit that will keep reproducing images of sacrifice throughout the film (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983).
The Shower Scene, Or How to Weaponize Ignorance
Cut to the shower, years later. Carrie, hunched and soft, soaps herself in the school locker room. Water, steam, the camera’s too-intimate caress. Then the red smear on her thigh. Panic. She reaches out, blood on her hands, for help. The other girls recoil, then converge—not in solidarity but in attack, tampons and pads pelted at her like medieval garbage hurled at a witch. “Plug it up,” they chant. Philosophy arrives here as plumbing.
What makes the scene so violent is not just the cruelty, but the epistemic setup: Carrie doesn’t know what menstruation is. Her mother’s theology has carefully starved her of this minimal knowledge, sequestering her in a biblical lexicon where blood is always guilt, never puberty. Foucault long ago mapped how institutions conspire to produce such knowable/unknowable subjects, where power and knowledge are not separate forces but two facets of a single operation (Foucault, 1978). Recent research suggests that educational institutions function as apparatuses of discipline and governmentality, regulating bodies and producing “docile” knowers whose access to knowledge is politically charged (Mo’ed, 2025).
Carrie’s ignorance is no accident. It is the output of Margaret’s domestic micro-institution, a one-woman school of terror. As Urosevic (2023) notes, Foucault’s work insists that intellectual practices must be tied to forms of political resistance when knowledge becomes a vehicle for domination. Carrie’s crisis in the shower is the explosion point of a long, quiet domination. From the vantage of schizoanalysis, each girl is a desiring-machine hooked into a larger assemblage: locker-room architecture, school schedules, mirrors, branded hygiene products.
A recent research paper on De Palma’s Carrie argues that the film mobilizes the grotesque female body—the bleeding, screaming, uncontrolled woman—to satirize misogynistic social norms, drawing on theories of abject femininity from Kristeva and Creed (Yao et al., 2025). The girls’ reaction fuses another circuit: their own bodies, familiar with menstruation, become the standard of normality. They punish her not for bleeding, but for not already knowing how to bleed correctly. Carrie becomes the figure that “disturbs identity, system, order,” the very definition of the abject (Kristeva, 1982).
Mother, Daughter, and the Factory Settings of Femininity
Back home, Margaret reads the event as punishment for sin: “And Eve was weak,” she repeats, as if all menstruation were a judicial sentence. The kitchen becomes a confessional, Carrie’s body an evidence exhibit. Mother-daughter dynamics in Carrie have been constructed through narratives of repression and control, where the relationship becomes a crucible for identity formation under oppressive conditions (Hrehor, 2020).
Margaret is not just an abusive parent; she is a human interface for a deeper logic: the idea that womanhood is something you must atone for by erasing yourself. Nietzsche might see in Margaret the sick priest of ressentiment, spinning an entire moral universe in which her own frustrated desire becomes the measure of all things (Nietzsche, 1967). Her God is less a transcendent being than the name she gives to her own contempt.
Slavoj Žižek has described ideology as not simply a set of beliefs, but the implicit libidinal structure that organizes what we find pleasurable or unbearable (Žižek, 1989). In this sense, Carrie’s desire to go to prom is not merely a wish for fun; it is her attempt to plug into the socially sanctioned circuit of enjoyment. The tragic line is “whole person.” Carrie equates wholeness with reflectivity: to be whole is to mirror back to others a recognizable image of what they desire. Kant would cringe; for him, to be a person is to legislate the moral law for oneself, not to chase validation (Kant, 1996). Yet Carrie’s world has never offered her the conditions for such autonomy, which requires what Mo'ed (2025) calls “practices of self-formation” not entirely captured by disciplinary structures.
High School as Misogyny Factory, Prom as Kill Switch
The film’s high school is an assembly line. The prank with pig’s blood is the system’s last attempt to fix Carrie in the “abject loser” slot. Yao et al. (2025) frame this as a “subversive grotesque” that resists patriarchal norms through excess. Robert Kilker (2006) shows how horror cinema often uses female bodies as sites where gender boundaries and cultural anxieties are negotiated through monstrosity. Carrie, drenched and blinking red, is that monstrous feminine pushed to absurdity.
When we arrive at prom, the machinery is overstimulated. The camera lingers on Carrie’s shy joy, her brief entry into the circuit of acceptable femininity. Here, the film does what Deleuze (1989) calls a “crystal-image” operation: it lets us see both the actual (happiness) and the virtual (the bucket above her) in the same frame. Dawkins (2025) describes how such images produce layers of meaning that invite critical resistance.
When the blood falls, the whole gym becomes a Body without Organs: the stage, the sound system, the decorations, the student bodies all fused into one surface of intensities (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Prom is the secular sacrament of high school, and its annihilation reads as a tiny civil war (Martin-Jones, 2006).
Telekinesis as Rage Algorithm
Think of Carrie's power as an analog algorithm that maps affective input (humiliation, terror, rage) to spatial output. Karizat et al. (2021) explore how people imagine algorithms as agents that see, sort, and value their identities, often suspecting that marginalized bodies are being suppressed. Carrie’s high school functions as a pre-digital algorithm of relevance; when her power awakens, it is as if the shadowbanned user has hacked the feed.
Žižek (2008) has written about how violence sometimes appears as the only way for a subject to break through the “symbolic deadlock.” Wilhelm Reich (1970) argued that repressed sexual energy, armored by authoritarian family structures, can transmute into violent eruption. Prom night is when the character armor cracks. Anger here is a clarifying force; as Sloterdijk (2010) suggests, rage makes the world sharp. Marx (1977) would remind us that violence is the “midwife of every old society,” but Carrie’s rage has no project beyond annihilation. In Badiou’s (2005) terms, there is no event here that opens a sustainable truth-procedure.
Cinema As Grotesque Classroom
If the high school is Carrie’s first classroom, the cinema is ours. Dawkins (2025) argues that film images can be read structurally as systems that invite viewers to experiment with new ways of thinking. Recurring motifs—blood, mirrors, thresholds—form such a structure. Xing (2022) uses Deleuze’s film philosophy to analyze how an “aesthetics of time and space” reveals complex social realities; we see this in the slow-motion walk to prom, stretching the duration of her "almost" escape (Deleuze, 1989).
Educational philosophy invoking Deleuze encourages us to “seize the opportunity to think differently,” emphasizing the unleashing of becomings rather than the policing of stable identities (Krejsler, 2016). In this light, Carrie’s school is a negative image of such an education. Noack (2023) uses the rhizome metaphor to describe non-hierarchical organization; Carrie’s world is all tree—trunk of authority, branches of jocks. No rhizomatic lines of friendship connect her.
Anger, Woman’s Day, and the Refusal of Neat Victimhood
Carrie is no totalized victim. To freeze her as such is to repeat the violence of the shower. Baudrillard (1994) might whisper that her totalizing violence is hyperreal, a simulation of revolt. This is where feminism must walk a narrow path. We want images of female rage that do not implode into anti-feminist warnings.
Carrie is useful because she is not useful for PR. She annihilates the social field indiscriminately. Marx (1977) taught that people make history but not under conditions of their own choosing. Carrie did not choose her theology, but she chose what to do once the bucket fell. The task is to build conditions under which anger can be shared and transformed into collective action rather than solitary cataclysm (Urosevic, 2023).
References
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Dawkins, R. (2025). Deleuze and the Cinema of Resistance. Academic Press.
Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.
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Noack, A. (2023). Tree and rhizome: Group analysis and Deleuzian thought. Group Analysis, 56(2), 281-285.
Reich, W. (1970). The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Vladić-Jovanov, T. (2025). Fractured identities in contemporary cinema: From Carrie to Joker. Cinematic Arts Quarterly, 9(1), 15-30.
Xing, L. (2022). Deleuze’s time-image and the aesthetics of Jia Zhangke. Film-Philosophy, 26(1), 88-104.
Yao, X., Liu, Y., & Li, Z. (2025). The subversive grotesque: Misogyny and satire in De Palma’s Carrie. Visual Culture Studies, 18(2), 102-118.
Žižek, S. (1989). The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso.
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