I’d be naked and crying all the time, throwing my poop at the bubble and my parents and begging for something in the way of alcohol or hard drugs, if not merciful death. Similarly, John Travolta plays bubble boy Tod Lubitch as such a weirdly normal, well-adjusted, even chipper young man that I once again found myself thinking that if I lived my entire life in a bubble and could never touch other human beings there’s no way I would be holding my shit together at all, let alone be better adjusted than most. True, I like to think I wouldn’t have murdered everybody after things took a turn, even if I could, but for a while there Carrie was doing a whole lot better than a 17 year old me would. Yet watching Carrie’s title character at the prom I found myself thinking that if I were at the big dance with the most popular kid in school there’s no way I would have carried myself with the aplomb of Sissy Spacek’s rage-filled psychic avenger. These are, as you are perhaps aware, given their deeply iconic status, an abused, terrorized social outcast who wreaks apocalyptic telekinetic vengeance on the school bullies that have made her life a living hell and a teenager with no immune system who similarly grows up an outcast, blessed and cursed to live his life in a literal protective bubble that keeps him from touching or kissing, or even getting so much as a quick and dirty hand job from a classmate while his contemporaries lead lives of carefree freedom abandon, unrestrained by the restrictions that make his life a never-ending challenge, respectively.

I don’t know what it says about my self-esteem and how I see myself that I recently found myself envying the social graces of Carrie White of 1976’s Carrie and the lead character in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble from the same year.

The boy in the plastic bubble