Split Me Deadly
Jean-Baptiste Thoret
|
Split Me Deadly Jean-Baptiste Thoret |
|
|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Introduction
|
Two steps from Paradise and recognition by the Other, Carrie topples – caught in the image of blood that falls on her head and drenches her body. Suddenly, the soundtrack cuts out, and we hear only the sound of the bucket bouncing onto the stage. Carrie withdraws into herself and shuts off the outside world. The silence she imposes affects the soundtrack, as a prelude to the exteriorisation soon to come (in a split-screen) of her inner split. Another Carrie is about to be born – so De Palma films the few seconds before her revenge as a monstrous rebirth (Carrie’s foetal position, her reddened hands which rise up in the frame like those of a new-born child, her open mouth and the cry that we await, the passage from silence to strident sounds ...) Finally, Carrie metamorphoses, transforming her gaze into pure murderous energy. For her, to look at the Other (to frame them, in the cinematic sense of the word) is henceforth to kill them. The final scene of Carrie thus constitutes the perfect reverse-shot to the ending of Kiss Me Deadly (1955) – as if it took American cinema until 1976 to finally discover a possible response to the energetic question posed by Robert Aldrich’s film. In fact, the energy liberated by Pandora’s Box, which Lily Carver could not bear to look at, is the very same energy to which Carrie must now face up. But she makes this energy her own and learns how to use it. A boomerang-effect, and a redirection of energy: to the reverse-shot that is missing (because it is literally unbearable) in Kiss Me Deadly, De Palma’s film responds, logically enough, with a proliferation of reverse-shots (the split-screen extending Carrie’s own split), and a consequent suppression of any prior or master shot (the entire sequence is filmed from her sole point-of-view). And ultimately, isn’t Carrie the little sister of Daria – achieving in reality the pyrotechnical requiem that, six years ealier, the young heroine of Zabriskie Point could only dream of?
|
