Sam Schuler

Sam.Schuler@du.edu
WRIT 1733
John Tiedemann

Some People Are More/Less Equal: Gender Inequality in the Carrie Viral Video
Marketing Campaign
Is human nature natural, or is it cultural? Historian Lynn Hunt argues that the
concept of the human underlying human rights philosophy is not grounded in a natural
human essence; rather, Hunt contends, in the early 18th-century people learned new ways
of being human through exposure to cultural artifacts, such as sensationalist journalism,
realist portraiture, and, especially, the epistolary novel (Hunt 2008). Through the use of
intimate, first-person narrative, novels such as Samuel Richardsons Pamela allowed
their middle-class readers access to the interior worlds of their working class narrators,
thus teaching those readers the emotion of empathy, i.e., the ability to imaginatively see
and feel the world as seen and felt by other people who are significantly different from
you. It was this new emotion, empathy, that enabled members of the 18th-century
European and North American middle classes to perceive, in Thomas Jeffersons words,
that all men are created equal, the newly self-evident basis for human rights to
liberty, political equality, self-determination, and so on.
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 Peirces 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 clichs 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.
The video records the results of a practical joke based upon the film. Two actors,
a man and a woman, stage a confrontation in a coffee shop, unbeknownst to the shops
unwitting patrons. The male actor inadvertently spills his coffee on the female actors
laptop, causing her to send people and furniture flying through the air, via what appears
to be a burst of uncontrollable psychic power. The other cafe patrons who arent in on
the joke are terrified by what they witness (CarrieNYC 2013).
The clip draws upon an old and dehumanizing understanding of gender
difference, wherein women are understood to be both weaker than men and,
paradoxically, more powerful. This trope underwrites the clip from the very start. When
the male actor spills his coffee on the female actors laptop, she becomes uncontrollably
angry too weak-willed to restrain her emotions and react reasonably. However,
this weakness turns out also to be a source of superhuman strength. When the actress

points her hands at the actor, he is cast back into the wall and raised up several feet. The
emotion that overpowers the actresss weak powers of reason also overpowers the laws
of nature: without laying a hand on the actor, she performs a feat of supernatural strength
that no man, no matter how physically strong, can replicate. As against the dynamic
described by Hunt, who claims that cultural artifacts gave rise to new emotional
structures that bind us together, the effect here is to tear us apart: it seems that female
emotions are so powerful that they weaken one of the defining characteristics of human
beings the power of reason while at the same time giving them superhuman
physical powers powers that are both more than human and other than human.

[HELP! I kind of like the analysis so far, but I think its moving away from the
prompt. Im talking about what I think the video is saying (i.e., that its reinforcing
a sexist worldview), but I dont really talk about how its doing so (i.e., how its
teaching viewers to be sexist). How can I do that? What film or storytelling
techniques is it using to wire its audiences collective psyche? Sam.]