We just watched Brian De Palma's Stephen King-inspired 1976 classic Carrie for the umpteenth time. But it's the first time I ever saw it quite so clearly as a parable, or ever identified so completely with the film's most ineffectual character, the good, liberal, psychologically enlightened Sue.

The movie is about the defeat of reason, the laughable impotence of well-intentioned understanding. Poor Carrie reaches so eagerly for the deceptive bait of sanity and science, the mirage of a daylight world where breasts are only breasts, blood is a happy milestone, sex is healthy and good, and even telekinesis is just a natural phenomenon. But she hasn't got a chance, and she may be right to feel betrayed and mocked by those who seemed to offer her this refuge from her mother's firelit fundamentalist hell.

Brian De Palma is a Hollywood guy who, 30 years ago, already saw fundie fervor as driven by sexual shame and obsession, and its paranoia about Satanic evil as a self-fulfilling prophecy that created what it feared. Piper Laurie's over-the-top performance as Carrie's sin-maddened mama climaxes, literally, in her simultaneous crucifixion and orgasm, done in by the child of her lust, who proceeds to bring down the house. The petty evil of the mean teen slut, played by Nancy Allen, is in perfect league with the mother's dire expectations, and drives Carrie right back into her arms. The do-gooders are unknowingly conscripted into an enabling role in the scheme. They're too naïve in their well-meaning to do any real rescuing, to be anything but pawns. And, of course, if Carrie had escaped her fate, there would be no movie.

De Palma approves of the gentle good kids, Sue and Tommy, but as a filmmaker he adores the bad kids, Chris and Billy, and he sees that primal stuff like blood, sex, and telekinesis can't be tamed or demystified. Hellfire-and-brimstone may be a human fantasy, but it's one our species is fatally in love with. I'm beginning to think that if you don't naturally see through those blood-tinted lenses — and I don't — you're missing the real story, if only because so many people do, and by sheer force of numbers and starkness of vision they are creating the world we all have to live in. Maybe the real Fall was when we fell into their thrall. Now, in the spirit of fighting fire with fire, we need the fervor of one lot of them to defend us against the other, far worse lot. It's the war they were born for, and they are greeting it with great joy, like a long-lost friend. God help those of us who can't help feeling vaguely that none of it should even have been necessary. We're as clueless as Sue, and we will not wake up from the coming nightmare.