Was Carrie's mum right all along?

SMALL PRINT:A MUSICAL interpretation of Carrie recently made its stage debut off-Broadway. This new take on Stephen Kings classic rebrands Carries mother as a tragic anti-hero, not the monstrous religious zealot that appeared in the book or the film.

It makes sense. When Margaret White (played in the film by Piper Laurie) shrieks “They’re all gonna laugh at you!” to her daughter, she’s dead right. And lets not forget, Carrie (admittedly a victim of a high-school caste system), is ultimately a mass murderer.

Elsewhere, Wicked, the Broadway smash, is the Wizard of Oz told from the sympathetic point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West. It was Dorothy, remember, who squashed another witch with her house and went on to steal the corpse’s shoes.

The trend is catching: you can barely walk into a cinema these days without seeing a heroic Nazi officer (Tom Cruise in Valkerie); a classic comic villain fighting for the good guys (Magneto, played by Michael Fassbender in X-Men: First Class), or even one of the most iconic bad-guys of all time getting a pop culture re-trial (the Star Wars prequels showed Darth Vader as an innocent child, then later falling in love and taking gondola cruises). There was even talk, at one stage, of a mainstream Robin Hood film which showed the Sherriff of Nottingham as the good guy.

Why is this happening? One argument could be that its a post-Iraq-war development. Watching the poor American teenagers posted miles from home, many publicly opposed the war, while still supporting the troops. Another point could be that we’re looking at old stories through modern eyes and with different morals and attitudes. Also, real-world allegiances change so often that fiction sometimes has trouble keeping up. Rambo 3 saw its hero fighting alongside the Mujahedeen back in 1988 for example.

But Occams razor suggests that the simplest explanation is often preferable: producers often like to peddle old, reliable brand names, and re-evaluating famous villains is a handy way to do that.