She's painfully shy, she's seventeen and she's sweet. She's so unbelievably
sweet in a way that it sometimes seems only girls who grew up on farms in Iowa can be. So maybe she isn't the brightest bulb in the marquee, she just can't seem to understand why she's here, but she's here just the same, and it may be the one place she never thought she'd be: at the prom.
Never, not in a million years, could she ever even dare dream of gazing at that spinning sparkling ball just above the dance floor, feeling the music's bass punching and pulsating through her belly like a wet dream, or being greeted openly -
warmly - by all these beautiful people who say things to her that nobody had ever said to her before, that she is herself beautiful, that they love the dress she'd made for the occasion, that they love her hair. It's almost as if they were saying they loved
her, and this would most definitely have been a first.
Never, not in a million years, could she ever dare dream of shuffling around under that spinny sparkly ball with her arms around
him, the guy with the letter on his jacket, the guy who called the English teacher an ass because he'd humiliated her for wistfully calling his poem "beautiful", the most popular guy in school and probably the principal in countless pounding, pulsating wet dreams of just about all the girls in the school - herself included. But, she's here just the same, and his arms are around her, and he's saying things to her. He's not just escorting her to the dance like a bored bodyguard, he's here, too, with her,
for her. She can huff his English Leather and his Irish Spring, take comfort from the warm strength in the arms surrounding her and be lulled by the muffled sound of his voice through his chest as she listens to his heart beat.
He'd never been anything but nice to her that night - maybe he'd always been at least civil and respectful towards her for as far as she can remember - but he was warming up. He was finding that she could be very powerfully attractive, that he could honestly enjoy her company. She was finding that she could be open and vulnerable in his arms because he doesn't have any problem being patient with her. He was just going to keep on being easy and relaxed the whole night through, and he was making her be easy and relaxed with him.
When he told her she was beautiful, he said it a firm, factual kind of way. He wasn't mocking or deriding her in any way, and he wasn't trying to cozen her into yielding up the fruits (but if he had, would this also have been a first?) - if she'd said "the spinny ball is so bright", he might have said "Carrie, the
sun is bright" with the same tone of voice. She'd said something about all the other girls being so beautiful, and he informed her with dead finality "Carrie,
you're beautiful".
She didn't know what to do with that. For a moment, it looked like she didn't know what to do or say about anything at all.
---
Spartan, I think you may be both right and wrong at the same time. There's an inherent sweetness to Carrie that makes everything that happens to her seem just that much more awful. Her home life is oppressive, school is worse in many ways, and there's nothing else in her life. Thing of it is, if she'd not been the girl with Something Extra but the rest of the story remained unchanged up until the idgits dropped a bucket of blood on her, the story wouldn't have had an ending. Everybody would have just gone on home, a few people might have wound up in jail for a few days, and Carrie might have spent the rest of her long life in something resembling catatonia.
It happens all the time. For a great many of us, this is just what life is: a dream that comes so tantalisingly close you can hear it, you can feel it, you can
smell it, and then it just vanishes, and we spend the rest of our lives living in shadow of that memory.
Maybe Margaret White is right, and the first sin really is intercourse; it condemns so many of us almost automatically to death by exceedingly slow rot. Carrie White was born doomed no matter how you look at it. Maybe it's because Margaret White liked it (oh, my, yes, she really
liked it) when Mr. White laid his filthy paws on her, maybe it's because Carrie was just born in the wrong spot in the Zodiac that year or because she lived in Chamberlain and not in Bangor or Boston or some other nexal passion pit.
Was Carrie's revenge over the top? It was certainly morally indefensible - at a couple of levels - but if there's a "defeated argument" in this thread, it's in the assertion that moral reasoning could or should trump any other consideration. The wonderful thing about moral standards, after all, is that they're a bit like other kinds of standards: there are so
many to choose from! There are at least three different levels of moral reasoning, and they work for (or against) individuals and communities in different ways. They often conflict, and this is the bottomless wellspring of moral dilemma.
In another treatment of the Carrie story (was it the 2013 remake?), the survivor Sue Snell (Carrie's date's actual girlfriend) told a board of inquiry that Carrie had a power that she used because "you can only push people so far before they snap" (I believe those were the words). This is what happens on the other side of the moral equals sign, and it's something we're learning oh, so very, very slowly: what goes 'round, comes 'round. Sometimes what comes around isn't what any particular person or group of people carried around or sent around because the "it" making the rounds has neither mind nor volition, it has only mass, momentum and stored potential energy.
It came around for Carrie, and she exploded. It came around for Eli, and
she exploded. It came around for the Frankenstein monster, and we're supposed to lose all sympathy for him because his explosion happened in slower motion? I seriously doubt he stopped being intelligent, sensitive, articulate, caring and whatnot when he broke, but it's an error to conflate intellectual reasoning with emotional. In a very real sense, Dr. Frankenstein exposed his family and friends to unknown danger when he rushed heedlessly into areas he didn't fully understand. In further fact,
Wikipedia wrote: [Elizabeth Frankenstein's] death is significant because it gives Victor a unique understanding of his creation; he now knows what it feels like to be completely alone in the world, with nothing to live for but revenge.
I personally find no "moral" dimension to the Frankenstein monster's remorse at the end of the novel. It exonerates nothing, it condemns nothing, and the monster didn't "refute" his foregoing moral faux pas by repenting. It (he) simply recognised that his primitive "eye for an eye" reasoning conflicted with the "greatest good for the greatest number" kind of reasoning, and drew from that recognition the conclusion that the world at large would be better off with his absence... and that maybe he would be, too. The concern for the world's benefit is an example of a relatively high level of moral reasoning, and the concern for his own emotional well-being was... well... emotional reasoning.
In the novel, Carrie discovered in her last moments that Sue Snell had nothing to do with the "prank" pulled on her at the prom, and forgave her for the part she'd played in the "plug it up" scene. She then died calling out for her mother.
In every treatment of this story I've seen or read, Carrie had killed her mother out of self-defense; the
one person in the whole story who probably
did deserve death by slow suffocation would otherwise have been spared and even
protected in perpetuity. Margaret White wasn't part of Carrie's campaign of bloody revenge. Carrie had already been dying, and may even have realised this, but the simple fact that her mother had already killed
her didn't stop Carrie from hastening her own destruction out of guilt.
I sometimes think that the only real reason we could compare the Frankenstein monster, Carrie and Eli and find Eli a clear winner is that between these three, Eli is the only one who could honestly be said to have won. We do so love our winners, don't we, and hate the losers? Still, there's always going to be that loving, warm soul who, seeing the movie for the very first time, is going to ask with horrified surprise "wait... Oskar ran away with the
vampire!?"
Annoy me will you?..slash,rip and tear. 
