Some People Are More/Less Equal: Gender Inequality in the Carrie Viral Marketing Video

Old thesis paragraph

If Hunt is right, then it stands to reason that contemporary cultural artifacts, too, teach us how to be
human. What lessons do we find in, for example, 21st-century horror movies, such as Kimberly Peirce’s Carrie?
As demonstrated by the viral video marketing campaign used to promote it, the recent horror film Carrie shows
how the representation of emotion can serve, contrary to Hunt, not to connect the human community but to
divide it along gender lines. Drawing upon shopworn clichés that depict women as “more emotional” than men,
and less in control of those emotions, the video portrays “excessive” female emotion as a threat to the
community. Carrie is so ruled by her own emotions that empathy becomes “telempathy” — an uncontrollable,
ultimately destructive connection to and power over the physical world. In the Carrie video, women are
depicted as at once superhuman and inhuman — the enemy inside the (implicitly masculine) human
community. As such, the video does not teach us a new way of being human; rather, it reinforces a very old,
very sexist idea of humanity, one wherein women are held to be both less and, terrifyingly, more human than
men.

New thesis paragraph

If Hunt is right that the highest, most exalted political and moral values of the 18th century are the
unintended consequence of consuming some of that century’s most “lowbrow” cultural artifacts, then we might
ask whether contemporary pop culture artifacts, too, are teaching us new ways of being human today. Are our
psyches being rewired in bold new ways via our consumption of seemingly silly Instagram stories, schmaltzy
reality TV shows, and schlocky horror flicks? Consider the example of Kimberly Peirce’s recent horror film
Carrie, an even gorier remake of the infamous 1970s splatterfest based on Steven King’s first bloodstained
best-seller, All three tell the story of a teenaged girl who uses her newfound psychic powers to take deadly
revenge on her high school tormentors. On the one hand, the new version of the film seems, contrary to Hunt,
not to teach new ways of being human at all; it seems, rather, to reinforce old ways of thinking. Drawing upon
shopworn clichés that depict women as “more emotional” than men, the film portrays “excessive” female
emotion as a threat to the community, reinforcing a very old, very sexist idea of humanity. On the other hand,
however, a video created as part of the film’s viral marketing campaign has an altogether different effect on
viewers. By foregrounding the process whereby the elaborate practical joke depicted in the video are carefully
stage-managed for maximum effect, the Carrie video fosters in viewers a critical self-consciousness that reveals
how their own seemingly natural world and their own seemingly organic responses to it are in fact artfully
constructed, how our own lives are actually roles we have been cast to play in someone else’s script — and the
joke has been on us. This new critical consciousness is at the heart of some of the most important cultural
transformations of our time: from the Occupy movement to the Black Lives Matter movement to #MeToo,
contemporary activists are changing the world by refusing to play the roles assigned to them in someone else’s
script, instead writing counter-narratives of their own.