Mike Flanagan’s Chilling Portrait Of A Decadent America

Tucked into the press kit for Amazon’s new “Carrie” series is a three-page memo from showrunner Mike Flanagan titled “Why?” He was smart to include it. In an entertainment landscape awash in reboots, sequels, and recycled IP, “Carrie” stands out as especially egregious. Stephen King’s 1974 novel has already reached the screen three times, along with a sequel and a famously disastrous Broadway musical, leaving fans to ask how many more times we have to watch poor Carrie get tortured. King reportedly asked Flanagan the same question when he came looking for a blessing, and that “why” hangs over the entire series.

“Carrie” is a short novel, a couple hundred pages in paperback. King wrote it while teaching high school, raising two children, and living broke in a trailer in Hermon, Maine. Money was so tight that the Kings gave up their phone. So when Doubleday bought the manuscript, King couldn’t be reached that way. During his free period he was called to the office, where he learned he had a telegram from his editor.

The paperback rights sold for $400,000, Brian De Palma turned the book into a now-legendary film, and the Stephen King we know now was born. That’s the American dream, or at least one version of it: A young father in a trailer gets rich overnight on nothing but talent and hard work.

That year, 1974, looked a lot like ours. The evening news ran stories about an energy crisis, and “stagflation” was entering the popular vernacular. Half a century later, the parallels are hard to miss, and many Americans sense something eerie in the echo. Ross Douthat diagnoses this condition well in his 2020 book “The Decadent Society”: decadence, a society rich enough to keep going but too tired to create anything new. From that depleted soil grow the endless remakes and reboots of our pop culture machine.

Mike Flanagan is a gifted director with a long list of successes behind him, exactly the kind of talent who should get his own shot at the American dream King lived. Yet almost everything he makes now is someone else’s story. That isn’t for lack of ideas; “Midnight Mass,” his most personal and original work, is proof he has plenty. His dream project, by his own account, is yet another King adaptation, “The Dark Tower,” and “Carrie” was the first show under the Amazon deal that might finally get it made. What Flanagan is up against is the stagnant society Douthat describes, where studios no longer bet on unknown properties and trust instead the reliable revenue of exhausted IP.

So I wanted to hate his “Carrie.” I sat down to watch it, frustrated by yet another trip to this well. But working inside a system that offered him little else, Flanagan has told a moving, fascinating, and frightening story, and he largely answers his own “why?” with a clear understanding of the horrors of life in 2026.

In the first episode, Carrie, raised in isolation by her religious mother, Margaret, attends school for the first time in her life. She walks in through a metal detector, and before the day is over she’s sitting through her first active-shooter drill. No one has told her it isn’t real. Huddled on the floor among strangers, she believes she’s about to be shot and screams. Lights explode, a television crashes down on the “gunman,” and we get our first glimpse of what she can do.

By the second episode, Flanagan has achieved something difficult: He organically brings in the horror of social media. The infamous shower scene, Carrie’s terrified first period, is reimagined as a Baudrillardian echo chamber. She is humiliated in the locker room, but the real catastrophe is that it’s caught on video. Bully Chris Hargensen films it and posts it on an Instagram meme account, where the copy becomes a larger tragedy than the event itself.

As the video spreads through Chamberlain, the account becomes a black book of the town’s sins. Students are branded “sluts” and “fatties.” In the show’s boldest turn, a teacher is exposed for abusing a 15-year-old student, and by the sixth episode, he has hanged himself in his living room.

Flanagan handles all of this with real grace, and it rarely feels schlocky. He takes a Carrie we’ve all seen before and uses her to show how a decadent society rots from the inside: sexual immorality, broken families, confused and institution-less faith, and a hyper-political zeitgeist, all treated as what they are: the symptoms of a people without direction.

If the show has a thesis, it lives in the character of Margaret White, and she is Flanagan’s most interesting break from King. King’s Margaret is a religious zealot who cannot reconcile her ideas of sin with her daughter’s arriving womanhood, and De Palma’s film made her something close to operatic. Neither gave her much dimension beyond a caricature of American vaguely-protestant-fundamentalism. Flanagan corrects this, building a Margaret who is not only devout but suspicious of the government, of every institution possible, and of modernity itself.

Early in the first episode we hear on the radio an Alex Jones–style voice warning that “we live in a dangerous, dangerous world, and it turns out the meek don’t inherit the earth; the meek are grist for the mill,” and this is the world Flanagan’s Margaret lives in. After her husband’s death, she is forced to enroll Carrie in public school, the very thing her skepticism had kept her from doing. Watching Carrie pass through a metal detector on her first day, we viewers find it hard to see this Margaret as irrational. She is being forced into a world she tried desperately to avoid. 

Her arrival in the real world quickly plays as tragedy when she is absorbed like everyone else. In “Hyperpolitics,” the historian Anton Jäger tries to name what feels so strange about politics now. He finds a gap between our intense interest in politics and our near-total abandonment of the large institutions, parties, churches, and unions that once turned that interest into change. Political life, he argues, becomes a series of solo missions, high on emotion and redundantly flaccid, changing nothing at all. Watching Margaret, it seems Flanagan agrees. 

After Carrie’s humiliation goes viral, Margaret, who has never owned a cell phone, buys an iPhone and a ring light and starts a crusade against the girl who posted the original video. From her kitchen table, she tries to rally the town to her cause. The effort is disorganized, is a little silly, and changes nothing. It only hardens positions that were already entrenched and turns Chamberlain against itself.

In the final two episodes, Flanagan finally gives us his version of the pig’s-blood prom, and the bubble bursts. The deaths of hundreds of people are the dark answer to Margaret’s hyper-politics. All her posting and crusading moved nothing; her daughter moves everything. Carrie does to the town what Margaret only postured about, and Margaret, now terrified of the child who can actually change the world, turns on her.

It’s an almost too on-the-nose picture of the project as a whole: a culture that can only posture and one artist inside it who can still make something happen. Between King’s 1974 “Carrie” and Flanagan’s 2026 “Carrie” stretches a long era of decay and depravity, leaving many Americans wondering what’s still possible. The $400,000 King and Doubleday got for the paperback rights would today be nearly $3 million, a sum few young artists can imagine receiving on their own terms.

Flanagan’s “Carrie” points a camera at this America, and what it shows is chilling. I’m not excited about the studio cajoling him into a second season, though I’ll certainly watch. Because if the type of success King experienced really is a thing of the past, at least Flanagan has proven that he can entertain us among the ruins.

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Bart Hutchins is the chef and owner of Butterworth’s in Washington, D.C. He’s on X @whiteguyfieri.

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