How to Police Youths When They Get Furious

By Zach Campbell. Written for Spring 2005 Cinema Studies course, 'American Youth Spaces.'

After the success of Carrie in 1976, Brian De Palma released another film involving adolescent telekinesis, The Fury, in 1978. While it was still successful at the box office, The Fury sidesteps the horrific elements that doubtlessly helped to make Carrie so memorable. It can be more accurately described as a paranormal suspense film. And yet in keeping a safe (if not total) distance from the horrors of the body and sexuality, The Fury elides much of the baggage that Carrie—sometimes undeservingly— draws. (1) The mutual theme of both films, however, links the discovery of an awesome power to puberty and youthfulness, and situates the privileged-cursed characters within an arena where adults and peers struggle from multiple sides to enact some measure of control upon the telekinetic youth. This represents a loose (or “soft”) allegory of adolescence which restages the essential, actual, societal conflicts between parent and child, teacher and student, police officer and delinquent.

With the postwar emergence of “the teenager” in culture, affirmed by consumerism which saw to the growing attention of movie studios and exhibitors to youth markets, came the teenage problem films: for example Knock on Any Door (1949), The Blackboard Jungle (1955), and Rebel Without a Cause (1955). In the 1960s a further and more specific focus on teenaged audiences emerged, manifesting itself in films like the AIP Beach Party cycle. But while these pictures foregrounded differences between youth and adulthood, the “shared” culture between both groups remained. At some point in the 1960s youth culture and official, “adult” culture reached a violent schism. James Gilbert writes that “Teenagers, by erecting barriers of fashion and custom around adolescence, had walled off a secret and potentially antagonistic area of American culture.” (2) It was this autonomy that emerged after the presence of “the teenager” that adults found threatening.

A change occurred in the cinema about and for youth audiences that reflected this schism. The seriousness embodied in the earlier problem pictures and the pop genericism of the later “fun” pictured attached themselves to one another, and we have blooming by the 1970s a cinematic form that proves highly visceral through its sleek, energized surfaces and its underlying problematics of youth/adult struggle. This ur-form articulates itself in different genres: in horror movies (The Omen, The Exorcist), in comedies (Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Animal House), even in hipper rearticulations (thus, genericizations) of The Blackboard Jungle, like 1967’s Sandy Dennis vehicle Up the Down Staircase (which returned another generation later with seriously entertaining serious films like Dangerous Minds). It was in this context that De Palma made a pair of powerful, generic youth films himself: Carrie and The Fury.

The Fury begins with Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas) and his son Robin (Andrew Stevens) swimming at a beach in Israel. They are racing: right away, a conflict between youth and adult (though we don’t know its larger thematic reverberation until later). There’s respite as Sandza and Robin sit down for lunch, which is interrupted by an attack from Muslim gunmen in which father and son are separated. Carrie, too, begins with the same opening structure: competition, then a moment of false security and serenity, and a violent shock. In The Fury this particular parent/child relationship is amicable, well-meaning: the most positive of the “multiple struggles” which enact themselves on the youths-with-powers.

When the film introduces Amy Irving’s character Gillian not long after this incident, she is walking with a friend on a boardwalk. They both wear bikinis and we see them from behind first, their bodies blatantly “shown off” much like the women in the locker room in Carrie. However, Irving’s body remains modestly covered throughout the rest of the film. The focus remains on her mind, her ability, her subjectivity—more cerebral cortex than curve. This could very well be an intentional authorial choice; in order to de-objectify (if not necessarily de-corporealize) a beautiful young woman, the film puts her body on obvious display once, early, and then leaves it conspicuously unexamined for the rest of the running time. (Just as turning off music is more jarring if you turn up the volume quickly first; that is, you foreground its initial presence to “write” its subsequent absence.) (3) It is at this point that The Fury signals that it is not only the body at stake in the generic 1970s youth/adult films—it is also the mind.

If the body is a site of guilt and abjection, sensual excess, the mind is the site of production. In The Fury the adult orders wish to harness that creative power to reproduce their own “structures of production.” Quite simply this is the basic process of socialization (among adults and peers), dramatized to entertainment-seeking extremes in generic narrative forms (horror, suspense, teen comedy). Carrie and The Fury are among the most self-conscious and “artful” of these generic expressions. At the broadest level a film like The Fury, self-consciously or not, re-enacts the same narratives and conflicts to be found in the teen problem films of the earlier postwar era.

Because these later films work in a generic idiom, they must channel the problem of youthful rebellion and socialization into new, masking conflicts. So, in The Fury, this becomes a matter of international espionage and intrigue: large and vague machinations whose future apparently rests on the brainpower of two telekinetic youths. This ultimate conflict essentially takes place between John Cassavetes’ Childress on one side and Sandza, Robin, and Gillian on the other. But there are other conflicts because there are other groups who wish to gain control: tension between the Paragon Institute and Childress, for instance, or even tension between Robin and Gillian. Kirk Douglas (like the gym teacher in Carrie) represents the most well-meaning and “normal” competitor for the youths’ interests and loyalties. Childress, the secret government agent, wishes to control both Robin and Gillian and channel their powers for his (the State’s) interests. Of the son he says, “He’s being treated like a prince; he’s unique. The Chinese don’t have one, the Soviets don’t have one. He’s one of a kind.” (Childress’ analog in Carrie is of course the mother, who serves religion instead of the State: in both cases we see a maniacal adherence to the Law.) Peers too put pressure on the youths-with-powers, though this plays a much smaller part in The Fury than in Carrie, obviously. In The Fury Gillian’s destructive power first appears when she forces a cruel classmate’s nose to bleed. Thus complex sets of interested parties in The Fury are a generic exaggeration and dramatization of the ways in which a “normal” community might try to control, tame, and otherwise socialize a “normal” youth (or a “normal” delinquent). Clandestine government agencies, paranormal schools, spurious terrorist attacks: these play the same roles as high school authorities, parents, friends, friends’ parents, bullies, etc. And telekinesis is a reminder of a youth’s power and autonomy, particularly in sexual terms. This—not moving objects, nor teenage vandalism—is the very capacity for destruction and creation that must be policed in these types of films (and the winner of each competition isn’t always the same).

On the level of form, The Fury also iterates a certain sexual progression, which is important because sex itself is not absent from this film even if sexuality and the body are not its topical objects. Sex is used as a tool twice in the film: Sandza has a fling with Carrie Snodgress’ character Hester in order to gain access to the Paragon Institute; the Institute itself has “set up” Robin Sandza with another woman, older, a doctor, whose role is to satiate him lest he become uncontrollable or uncooperative. The Fury’s notorious final climax, in which Gillian causes Childress’ body to explode, is quite blatantly edited to suggest the visceral power of an orgasm.

This is why it’s all important, why The Fury (treatise on the power and horror of the mind) is part and parcel with Carrie (treatise on the power and horror of the body), for the central problem between youths and adults as played out in mainstream American cinema is not delinquency but sexuality, which is of both the mind and body, and it is with the productive (not only procreative) power of sex that the adolescent becomes a competitor to other adults, a competitor to other peers. The assertion of youthful power in The Fury, as in Carrie, can potentially be self-destructive and unwieldy (and indeed both Robin Sandza and Carrie end up dead). Amy Irving significantly plays the sole survivor in both of these films. In The Fury she is the youth-with-powers (i.e., the sexualized adolescent) who finally emerges victorious from the adult/youth struggle and passes into adulthood on her own terms.

Footnotes

1) See Lindsey, Shelley Stamp. “Horror, Feminity, and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty,” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. 279-292. Lindsey’s article attacks Carrie for presenting “a masculine fantasy in which the feminine is constituted as horrific” (281). No doubt she’s right about the fact that Carrie deals with the (female) body and horror; what’s debatable is whether Carrie is the blind and naļve pure genre narrative that Lindsey assumes it is.

2) Gilbert, James. A Cycle of Outrage. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. 15.

3) Sofia Coppola did the same thing with Scarlett Johanssen’s reclining posterior in her ‘non-romance’ Lost in Translation.