The Final Girl, misogyny and the slasher film…

It all originates from a fixed point in horror history. That fixed point is Psycho. Young trangressive sexually active woman, Marion, steals from her boss and her fate is sealed when she holes up in the Bates motel. Her sister, Lila, doggedly tries to find her with the help of  Marion’s boyfriend, Sam Loomis (a very popular surname in horror). And the end climax between them and Norman Bates.

The reason I mention Psycho is because I watched the film Halloween the other week and it made me think of Carol Clover’s Final Girl analysis (from the book, Men, Women and Chainsaws; the chapter Her Body, Himself). Clover looks at how “slasher” films have been big business at the box office and she wonders why?

The question, then, has to do with that particular audience’s stake in that particular nightmare; with what in the story is crucial enough to warrant the price of admission, and what implications are there for the current discussion of women and film.

Clover wrote her book during the late 80s and early 90s where the nadir of “slasher” films had been reached from Black Christmas, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw, Nightmare on Elm Street. And during the ’90s, Scream trilogy (though there are aspects of tongue firmly in cheek and a parody of the “slasher”) and earlier, Silence of the Lambs (1991). The horror film reinvents itself like other genres and there’s fluidity and slippage between these genres (I would also include haunted house in space, Alien). The killer in a slasher film is a man, with little of a back-story but the viewer is allowed to glimpse bare remnants of who he is. Norman Bates with his mother fixation, and Michael Myers stabs his sister after she’s had sex. Sex and death with a Freudian twist.

The Final Girl is usually the last woman standing. A woman who is resourceful, intelligent and feisty. She has witnessed her peers (male and female) being killed and she will be in the final confrontation with the killer. But rarely sexual and rarely sexually active. The Final Girl also brings into view the virgin/whore dichotomy. The sexually active women die and die, on camera, in the most violently gratuitous fashion possible (Black Christmas, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street….).

The Final Girl sometimes has an androgynous name such as Laurie (Halloween), Sydney (Scream), Ripley (Alien). Again, they are bookish (Laurie chastises herself for forgetting her chemistry text book) intelligent and resourceful. Lynda and Annie, Laurie’s friends in Halloween, are killed. Lynda and Bob are killed after sex while Annie is despatched in her car on her way to see her boyfriend. Sexually and morally transgressive who are, seemingly, punished for being sexually active.

John Carpenter, writer and director of Halloween believed that people misunderstood the premise of the film, his argument goes, “Girls having sex get killed because they aren’t paying attention”. He further argues that the types of implements Laurie uses to attack Michael Myers are phallic such as a knitting kneedle, wire coat hanger and a knife, this exposes Laurie’s sexual frustration and repression.

So we are back to the argument that a woman is damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t. A virgin or a whore. Being a whore gets you killed while as a virgin you get to live along with a showdown with the killer but there’s are still penalties to face.

Clover argues that the Final Girl is a congenial double for the adolescent. She is feminine enough to act out in a gratifying way unapproved for adult males, the terrors and masochistic pleasures of the underlying fantasy, but not so feminine as to disturb the structures of male competence and sexuality.

So it is about being about identify with the woman but at some a fantasy level, take a voyeuristic and sadistic pleasure in her pain and fear. And when you consider the function of the “male gaze” where E. Ann Kaplan argues that men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze; the spectator, in turn, is made to identify with this male gaze, and to objectify the woman on screen; and the camera’s original ‘gaze’ comes into play in the very act of filming. Regarding the slasher film, according to Clover, the identification shifts and changes throughout the film.

Audience response ratifies this design. Observers unanimously stress the readiness of the ‘live’ audience to switch sympathies in midstream, siding now with the killer and now, and finally, with the Final Girl.

While Clover sees the shortcomings of this analysis when considering the politics of slasher films where women are degraded and objectified yet on a contradictory level, it is a woman who comes through and beats the faceless “bogeyman”. She argues that in terms of gender representation it is positive for women even putting aside the problematics of the theory.

My own feelings towards Clover is that she has developed a competent theory about the women representation in slasher films, shifts in identification and understanding masculinity. Clover exclusively analyses American horror. I believe there is an over emphasis on Freudian and psychoanalytical understanding of feminine/masculine. There lacks a political and materialist understanding of why slasher films became popular during the mid 70s.

One argument is that art imitated life with the new phenomenon of the “serial killer” stalking suburbs and generating fear (from Son of Sam to Ted Bundy) and media coverage. Serial killers who are anonymous, a modern bogeyman whose victims are usually women. A new style of pared down horror film was created with a woman as the hero. But nothing really new there as you can point back to Psycho (1960).

I would also argue that even though it is fiction there is a negative emphasis on mental distress, from Norman Bates to Michael Myers (who escaped from a psychiatric hospital) the central notion that the protagonist is not just “mad, bad and very dangerous to know” but also something of the supernatural, something marginal, inadequate and other. Something that is attacking the core values of a small town.

But is this the best women can hope for? Is Clover excusing misogyny? Countless of these films prescribe to the dominant ideology and power relationships, along with conventional gender roles (which Clover kinda ignores). But contradictions come into play where it is a woman who fights the baddie and wins whether it’s a masked Michael Myers. Or, Ripley, the last woman standing who defeats the Alien. And it is not just the horror genre where women appear to have the upper hand at the end. Sarah Conner who goes from scared to muscle bound fearless woman who knows how to strip a gun to kick some Terminator’s ass. 

Agent Starling in Silence of the Lambs overcomes the problems of male dominated law enforcement to catch Buffalo Bill (though I believe the Buffalo Bill storyline was reactionary). With Buffy the Vampire Slayer it is the young woman who takes centre stage to fight the monsters. But is there a trangression between the masculine and feminine here? Does a woman have to partly act like traditional male to be accepted? Is this such a major problem and can it be progressive?

And do men automatically identify, consciously or unconsciously with the misogynists..or is it more complicated? When I watched Death Proof (part of the Grindhouse double feature Tarantino/Rodriguez) there were male cheers in the audience when misogynist Stuntman Mike got his comeuppance by three women. But again, these films are from a male standpoint and interpretation. Though are they any worse or better than the ‘chick flick’ film, which, if I am honest annoy me a lot more than, say, the Grindhouse double-feature? At least with the Final Girl, for all its contradictions, faults, tensions and problems, she shows herself to be resourceful and powerful.

There are issues of fantasy and reality. That’s why I think it is much more complicated regarding identification. We live in a world saturated by sexist imagery existing in a dominant patriarchal and capitalist society based on commodification. And partly on a cynical level, what brings in the punters and how it relates to their lives but not that challenging rather it is in the acceptable boundaries.