drawing of a girl easy
Horror movies accept consistently been badly accepted with gay audiences, for affidavit that accomplish a lot of faculty aback you anticipate about it. There’s the address of the alien (sometimes that’s the “final girl” protagonist, sometimes it’s the monster); the allure to outré, taboo-breaking thrills; sometimes alike aloof the abject admiration to see heteronormativity taken bottomward a peg (take that, canoodling affected counselors). It gets real accessible to draw parallels amid horror-movie characters and a subtextual gayness. We aloof spent the accomplished summer axis the Babadook gay because it seemed funny, but that meme was based on article real: abhorrence characters allege to outsiders in a way added characters adeptness not.
Carrie, the 1976 Brian De Palma adjustment of the Stephen Baron novel, is a abundant archetype of this. Carrie’s absolute adventure could be apprehend as a gay allegory. Carrie White is abandoned and abandoned at her school, afraid at home by her hyper-religious mother, and abashed of her own sexuality. And there’s article altered about her. Special. Article she has to hide. Like the X-Men, one of pop culture’s abundant gay metaphors, Carrie has a all-powerful adeptness that she can’t absolutely control, but it makes her aloft to the added kids.
But as abundant a allegory for gay adolescence as Carrie White is, she’s not the film’s best enduring gay icon. Neither, improbably, is Chris Hargensen, the queen-bee high-school villain with immaculately feathered beard played by Nancy Allen. Gay audiences tend to army to the aftermost babe in the cine (Regina George; Miranda Priestley; the aloft Babadook), but Chris isn’t the gay figure here. Nor is it Oscar-nominated Piper Laurie shrieking about “dirty pillows.” Nor is it over-invested adult gym abecedary Miss Collins, admitting the actuality that she’s played by approaching Tony Award-winning Broadway fable Betty Buckley. Nope. The accurate gay figure is there appropriate from the actual beginning, acutely the focus of De Palma’s zooming camera, afore it pivots to our appellation actualization …
There she is, in a red hat that, if you attending closely, has a bubble on it. Okay?? Our accurate gay figure is Norma.
I wasn’t able to accord Norma her due until my best contempo examination of Carrie, at a Halloween-week scary-movie affair a few years go, busy about alone by gay men. After a about absonant screening of Scream (the gay figure of Scream is Gale Weathers, but you knew that), we transitioned to Carrie, a abhorrence archetypal that some of us has apparent but all of us at atomic knew about. We were not able for Norma.
As you can see from the aloft gif, Norma is unmissable from the start, with her red hat ambience her afar from the blow of her classmates. There are no annoyance queens in Carrie, but Norma represents the artful of a queen anyway: dress to angle out. Norma’s red hat (with analogous red gym shorts!) were a signature attending that meant that alike while accepting progressively drunker and chattier, the gays in actualization never bootless to alarm her in a scene. Not while the girls were affected to do castigating jumping jacks (punishment for barrage Carrie with tampons in the gym shower)…
Not while accepting her beard did for the brawl …
I do not charge to go aback Susan Sontag to acquaint you why the aloft angel is affected greatness, and that’s not alike accepting into Edie McClurg, the approaching secretary from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off, as adolescent beggarly babe Helen.
So what fabricated Norma such a alluring actualization for our bound admirers of lit-up homos? The actualization faculty was absolutely allotment of it. The red hat was so brazen! Social norms be damned, Norma was activity to abrasion that hat, abuse it. She was branding herself decades afore Instagram accustomed every halfway-handsome gay to about-face his accord into a #goals hashtag.
Actress P.J. Soles didn’t apperceive it at the time, but she was on her way to acceptable a band admired amid abhorrence fans, for her roles as Norma in Carrie and then, two years later, the original Halloween, area she played Laurie’s sex-positive best acquaintance who ends up accepting memorably collapsed by Michael Myers dressed up as a ghost. Soles told Vulture aback in 2013 that the iconic red hat was a blessed blow of her own making:
I went into this allowance and it was George Lucas and Brian De Palma at one desk, and Brian looks at me and afresh looks at George and he says, ‘I’ll put her on my list.’ I said, ‘Okay,’ and as I angry to go — I was cutting my red baseball hat because I was accoutrement my face from the sun accepting appear from New York to ablaze and brilliant California — and he said, ‘At the abutting audition, abrasion the hat.’ And I said, ‘My red baseball hat?’ He says, ‘Yeah, abrasion the hat.’ It was weird, he admired the hat. I was cutting overalls and a striped T-shirt — I was attractive actual tomboyish — and this hat with the pins on it. And afresh the consecutive three auditions, every time I would go, he’d say, ‘Next time accompany your hat.’
As far as anomalous readings of Carrie go, if you chase what’s accident on the periphery, there’s a adumbration account of the blur that boils bottomward to a action of wills amid Norma and Miss Collins, the gym teacher. Miss Collins is bent to abuse the girls for their shitty analysis of Carrie, and while it makes faculty that she would ambition agitator Chris — banishing her from brawl and accidentally active her to concoct the pig’s claret animus on Carrie that would ultimately doom the accomplished boondocks — she additionally never bootless to alarm our Norma, who to be best of our knowledge, was alone one of several followers who were beggarly to Carrie.
Miss Collins, why are you so obsessed with Norma?? Far be it from us to allow in the average of the sapphic gym teacher, but article is accident here.
As abundant as the adventure focused on Carrie and her mother and her telekinesis, we all started anticipating Norma’s abutting appearance. Would she appearance up to add a little artifice to an contrarily addled claiming of Carrie’s -to-be brawl date?
(Notice how Norma cautiously undermines Miss Collins in this scene. The adumbration warfare continues!)
As the brawl approaches, the capital anecdotal of the cine is ratcheting up the tension. Will Carrie go to the ball with Tommy Ross? Aloft the more agitated objections of her mother? Will Chris’s angry artifice to abase her go down? And how will Carrie and her barely-controlled admiral react?
Meanwhile, our gay acquisition was on pins and all-overs apprehensive one thing: would Norma abrasion her red hat to prom? The cut to the gymnasium, with De Palma already afresh craning his camera through the crowd, feels about intentional. Searching. Is he attractive for Norma too? As it seemed like he was in the movie’s aperture shot? It was like Where’s Waldo at first, as we all darted our eyes about the screen, scanning for Norma.
Can you atom her?
How about now?
HEY GURL HEY!
This adherence to alone expression! This affront of brawl norms! This moment of sartorial #RESISTANCE! In this moment, Norma is all of us.
As with any horror-movie villain, you could altercate that Norma deserves her fate. After all, it’s she who manipulates the votes for brawl baron and queen in adjustment to get Carrie up on date for Chris’s pig’s-blood assault. Of course, you could additionally say that this was alone Norma abolition the heteronormative angle of brawl kings and queens, advertisement it for the blood-soaked artifice it is. A beneath accommodating array could additionally point out that it’s Norma who is the aboriginal and loudest to beam at Carrie’s misfortune. It’s Norma who ends up accomplishing Margaret White’s aphotic apocalypse (“they’re all gonna beam at you!”). But as anyone who’s gay can admit in Norma the actuation to beam at an cool world.
Norma meets her end via the business end of a blaze hose, beatific abolition into an chaotic table, her signature red hat beatific flailing by the water. She had it coming, sure. But she abiding fabricated her mark.
Carrie White’s binge would aftermost able-bodied into the night, and she’d alive on in Sue Snell’s nightmares for far longer. But there’s a association out there who should not let Norma be forgotten. Her blowing is not to be condoned. But as a actualization icon, queen of sass, and attention-grabber extraordinaire, Norma has becoming the appropriate to be not alone a abhorrence icon, but a gay figure as well. Shine on, you red-hatted diamond.
Where to stream Carrie
