Tommy Ross From “Carrie” Is One of the Most Underrated Heroes in Film History

Why kindness is the bravest act of all.

I cry every single time they kiss.

Every. Single. Time. Even though I know it’s coming — the lights soften, the music blooms, Tommy Ross leans in, and Carrie White’s face, for the first time in the movie, folds into something like astonished trust — it still hits me like a physical thing. It isn’t pity. It isn’t a stunt. It’s a tiny, defiant gift: tenderness.

That moment is why Tommy Ross, to me, is one of the most underrated heroes in film history.

We bank our hero worship on spectacle: battles, speeches, the loud victory. But Tommy does something quieter and far, far harder. He risks his place in the social order — his popularity, his reputation, his safety from peer scorn — to do an ordinary human thing: he treats someone who has been broken by the world as if she is fully human. That’s bravery. That’s moral muscle. That’s heroism nobody writes about because it makes for fewer headlines and it offers no medals. But it changes lives.

From Cruelty to Conscience: Sue Snell and the Spark of Redemption

Tommy’s kindness doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It starts with Sue Snell — Tommy’s girlfriend — who, after the locker-room ritual where the girls pelt Carrie with tampons and chant “Plug it up!”, feels it like a physical weight. Sue was part of the mob. She laughed. She followed the pack. But something inside her snaps. Guilt becomes action.

Sue convinces Tommy to take Carrie to the prom. On the surface it’s a small favor. Underneath it is a deliberate, moral reorientation: a refusal to accept cruelty as normal. Sue is the first to try to repair the damage. She is evidence that conscience can wake up late and still do something honest. Tommy listens. Tommy says yes. That permission — the consent of a popular kid to step outside cruelty — makes the kiss possible.

That’s the architecture of redemption. One person admits they were wrong. Another chooses to act. Someone else follows. It is not grand. It is not guaranteed. But it is utterly necessary.

Adults With Courage: Rita Desjardin and the Line in the Sand

Then there’s Rita Desjardin, the gym teacher, who is furious in a way most adults in these stories are not. She sees the cruelty clearly, and she does not equivocate. She punishes the students. When Chris Hargensen — the alpha of the cruelty — refuses to apologize, Rita slaps her. It’s a moment of moral clarity that, in a modern context, reads almost dangerously honest: an adult who refuses to look away and refuses to normalize brutality.

Rita’s slap would get her headlines and lawsuits today, and maybe even a termination. But that physical act — crude as it is — marks an ethical line. It says: enough. Enough humiliation. Enough indifference. In a world of adult Frank Murrays who would rather “maintain neutrality” than do the uncomfortable work of justice, Rita is a rare adult who protects a child. Her fury is, paradoxically, an act of care.

Sixth-Grade Glory, Seventh-Grade Hell

Maybe this cuts through for me because of what I know about being both visible and invisible. In sixth grade I was the kid who had it — basketball, grades, the glow of being liked. But we moved. Seventh grade hit like a wall. I was so terrified before the first day at the new school that I gave myself hives. And I was right: seventh grade was a kind of daily erosion. The bullying was relentless. My parents pulled me out.

There’s a cruelty to falling from adored to execrated that teaches you two hard truths at once: how fragile social status is, and how fast people can turn when the story changes. The boys who tolerated me suddenly saw me as other. And yet I dated Katie Mueller, the prettiest, most popular girl in the school. Popular with the girls, hated by the boys — I became an enigma, and that duality carved a space in me where compassion and risk could meet.

Sixth-Grade Glory, Seventh-Grade Hell

My best friend that year was Matt Gallo, a Latino kid who became the target of Brandon McLullan — a kid who swung his belt over a bathroom stall like a whip and screamed the n-word. The cruelty was overt, learned, and apparently consequence-free. And the principal, Frank Murray, did nothing. Not a suspension. Not even an intervention. He shrugged and sent us back into the storm.

Frank was the institutional coward in the story — the adult who calls silence “neutrality.” Brandon was the cruelty that requires no justification when adults fail to act. That’s the exact ecosystem that allowed Carrie’s torment to escalate in the movie: kids who practice horror because the grownups treat cruelty like a weather pattern, not a crime.

That kind of inaction is not distant fiction. It’s how systems calcify. It’s how cruelty grows teeth.

Vengeance Against the World

When we moved again and I started eighth grade at Christ the King, I watched a kid there be the only one who had no one. Every day they sat alone and kids did the easy thing: they looked away. One morning I decided I wasn’t going to look away. Maybe it was anger. Maybe it was a small, personal vengeance on the world for what it had done to Matt and to me. Whatever it was, it was decisive. I went and became their friend.

Not as charity. Not to harvest virtue. As a choice. We became actual best friends. We traded laughter and secrets. We took the beating together. It got worse for a while — the cruelty sharpened — but the friendship stuck. I would do it again. I would choose the humiliation with them, because being the person who reaches across the cafeteria is a form of resistance.

That impulse — to choose the outcast — is the Tommy impulse. It is not dramatic. It costs you. It matters.

The Weight of a Kiss

And so the kiss. It is not rom-com lightness. It is not a tidy rescue. It is a second-by-second collapse of the lie Carrie has been told her whole life — the lie that she is unworthy of tenderness.

Tommy had everything to lose. He was handsome, popular, athletic. He did not need this. He could have treated the invitation like a joke, or he could have used it for clout. Instead, he sits with her. He lets the smallness of the moment expand. He looks. He steps closer. He kisses her the way you would give someone clean water after they have had none for a very long time.

That is bravery because it is costly — socially, emotionally — and because kindness, in that world, is an act of defiance.

The Mother and the Modern World

Margaret White is the movie’s other monstrous force — the mother whose “faith” is a shrapnel-filled doctrine of shame, control, and violence. She is not some quaint relic. She is an ancestor of a phenomenon we are watching evolve in real time: religious performativity turned into political rage. Margaret’s devotion to fear maps, almost uncannily, onto the American theater of flag-and-cross Christians who quote Scripture on their bumpers while cheering bans on books about queer lives, supporting “Don’t Say Gay” laws, tightening restrictions on trans health care, or celebrating politicians who cage migrant children.

They place Ten Commandments plaques in classrooms while supporting book bans. They talk “family values” while cheering the criminalization of people who are different. They weaponize scripture into a cudgel. They call it righteousness. They are Margaret White refracted through cable news and state legislatures.

That hypocrisy is not abstract. It is the condition that makes acts like Tommy’s both necessary and endangered. When faith is a performance and cruelty a policy, tenderness becomes rebellion.

The Cruel Joke of Humanity

We know how the film ends. The prank, the bucket, the blood — the gym burns. Carrie’s vengeance is apocalyptic, horrifying, and in a strange, ugly way, cathartic. Part of us watches-not because we want horror-but because sometimes the righteous rage of someone pushed past the edge feels like the only honest reaction to systematic cruelty.

And here’s the bitter lesson: Tommy’s kiss, Rita’s slap, Sue’s shame and attempted repair — they are not enough to undo a lifetime of humiliation. One act of kindness cannot erase a thousand injuries. That’s the cruel joke of humanity: goodness gets drowned out by volume. The good gets stamped by inertia. The moral acts, as luminous as they are, are finite against a machine of cruelty that grinds on.

But the punchline is also a choice point: if goodness is finite, what do you do with it? Hide it? Hoard it? Use it?

The Ache That Never Leaves

I still cry when they kiss because it is rare and because it is honest. I cry because it reminds me of that child I chose in eighth grade, because it reminds me of Matt and of the boy who swung his belt and of the principal who did nothing. I cry because those tears are a map of what I have not yet done, and what I must still try to do.

I have a long, private ledger of things I want to right: the racist taunts in a bathroom stall, the laws that would strip healthcare from trans kids, the book bans that erase entire lives from libraries, the migrant cages and the politicians who sell fear for votes. I want room in my life to fight these cruelties with the simplest of weapons: attention, friendship, the decision to speak and act when others look away.

People like Atticus Finch, Desmond Doss, Fred Rogers, and Martin Luther King Jr. — each in different ways — chose to make moral choices that cost them. Tommy Ross sits in that odd, quiet lineage: not the battlefield hero, not the megaphone moralist, but the person who chooses human dignity for someone who the world has told to expect otherwise.

I don’t want to be sentimental about it. There are real consequences for choosing this life. People call you naive. People say you’re wasting yourself. People make you pay. But there’s also the grain of truth that keeps me doing it: the small moments matter. The one night of light can hold someone up forever.

Tommy didn’t save Carrie. He couldn’t. But for one heartbeat under those lights, he altered the geometry of her life — made a room of mercy where there had been none. That is the courage I want to keep practicing. That is the work I want to keep doing. Even if the gym burns.

Even though I have equal respect for ALL religions, and my own personal belief system is generally defiant of organized religion, I do think the lessons taught in the New Testament of the bible are beautiful. With that being said, I will close with this quote:

“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” — Matthew 25:40

Originally published at https://infiniteself314.substack.com.