The Voorhees Shock Doctrine, Part II: Final Girls
Blasphemy it might be, but I’ve never been a big fan of the Alien franchise. They’re not bad movies, and I typically enjoy them, but – with the exception of Aliens, and only because Bill Paxton is a doll – I don’t feel a desire to watch any particular installment again. Alien itself is an important movie, however, for pretty much introducing the sci-fi world to a trope first used by slasher movies and thereafter incorporated into other genres until promptly forgotten about anytime people want to discuss leading female roles.
I say pretty much, because the Final Girl’s origins are hard to pin down. For practical purposes, the first Final Girl was in Black Christmas, a 1974 Canadian tax shelter movie that was truly unique and virtually unappreciated in its time. (There is a recent remake that seems rather “woke” and unwatchable. I would literally vomit watching a movie filled with SJW jargon.) Black Christmas was unsuccessful in the US, but probably inspired John Carpenter to make Halloween, which in turn inspired Sean S. Cunningham to make Friday the 13th, and so on and so forth until the Final Girl trope was so well recognized it’s now the name of a movie.
The Final Girl is a controversial concept despite its apparent simplicity. Loosely defined, a Final Girl is the last remaining woman who, through various means, survives to the end of the movie and takes down the killer. It’s surprising and suspicious that a female heroine in the relatively gory and hyper-sexualized genre of horror films would be a controversial thing, but so she is. The controversy centers not on the fact that a woman is usually the heroine of these movies, which should be good enough to satisfy even the most rabid feminist, but on how she’s portrayed. And if you’re already anticipating that this controversy is petty and whiny and that those indulging in it won’t or can’t be satisfied with anything, you’d be right.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to discuss the Final Girl controversy without bringing up the tangled and, frankly, silly controversy of representation in film. That I called it silly would automatically be dismissed with one of several race-gender based “privilege” ad hominems custom-fit to my straight white male handicap for being a better critical thinker than those whose training in logic and rhetoric stops short at the very words “logic and rhetoric”. As the argument goes, I have the privilege of seeing myself represented in movies and therefore don’t realize that representation is a problem. The logical fallacies of this argument are obvious. It first off assumes a stereotype as my personality – straight white man – and assumes therefore that I do in fact see myself represented in film. It doesn’t take into account my life experience, my beliefs, my values – in short, everything that makes me an individual instead of a carbon copy “white man” who only sees color and can’t relate to anything else. It doesn't realize that I have only seen one movie about Nietzsche and none about Schopenhauer, both of whom I "relate" to far more that Captain America or Tony Stark. It assumes that I relate to the documentaries about Damien Echols not because we were unfairly punished by the legal system, but only because we are white. It also assumes that mainstream, major-studio produced masscult media is all I watch; for all anyone knows, I could be an exclusive fan of J-horror or Tyler Perry or Bollywood. The “privilege” argument makes stereotypes of both the people who watch movies and the people populating the movies themselves, and it’s no small wonder that the small minds who use it haven’t fully developed into complex individuals and can only sympathize with a character who share their genitalia or their skin color.
As far as I can tell or care to, there are three types of people when it comes to representation in film. There are people who enjoy movies as long as they have a good story, regardless of what genders and races that story involves; there are people of varying degrees of marginality who have legitimate grievances with not being adequately represented; and there are people, both liberal and conservative, who have comical problems with gender-race representation in movies, most likely because they don’t legitimately enjoy movies as much as they do bitching, and are so obsessed with politics that they can’t even enjoy going to a movie without seeing it through the lens of whatever ideology they have adopted.
The first group I believe is the largest and represents most Americans of whatever race or gender you can imagine. The truth, I believe, is that most people aren’t so flagrantly racist or sexist that they are consciously aware of the race-gender of any given character more than is necessary for the story. More than is necessary for the story is the key phrase; if a movie is a story in which race or gender is important – a historical drama about the Civil Rights movement – then race or gender would be rather important; if a movie is a silly sci-fi space opera in which the mostly cookie-cutter characters could be replaced with any gender or race with no difference to the story, it isn't, and isn't therefore a great thing for humpbacked midget demisexuals when one of them happens to pop up in Rise of Skywalker because a Disney executive discovered that demographic on Reddit. The second group has more or less legitimate claims, depending on what that group is and what exactly they want. Gays and lesbians might want to see themselves represented in genres where they aren’t as represented as straight characters, and that’s fine. It wouldn’t be reasonable, however, to demand that a movie should only have gay and lesbian characters, and few people make that claim. The third group bring their ideology with them to the theater and check off the races and genders and sexualities laid out in an absurd taxonomy and will always leave any movie unsatisfied because they can’t be satisfied with anything. The third group make absurd claims such as that the Force Awakens is a war against the Aryan race, and on the flip side that Ghostbusters is innovative and progressive when females have been leading movies since at least 1976 when Carrie destroyed the prom.
It is this third group that has problems with the Final Girl.
Most people only have a problem with representation when one of two things occur: either a movie represents their gender-race-sexuality badly, or when the movie is so self-satisfied with its diversity that it shoves that diversity in your face so self-righteously that the actual movie becomes secondary to its gender politics. A good example of the former is the uproar over the Silence of the Lambs and its representation of transsexuals. While Silence of the Lambs is a bad example to criticize (Dr. Lecter is explicit when he says that Buffalo Bill isn’t a real transsexual, he merely thinks he is, and there’s no indication in the movie that he’s gay), transsexuals had a right to be angry at the time for generally being represented badly in psychological thrillers and horror movies. The most famous example of the latter is Ghostbusters 2016, which entered the world as a gratingly bad trailer and alienated its fans by initiating a smug publicity campaign that made too much of its all-female cast and dismissed its critics as sexist man-babies.
So whereas the frequency of representation can be a legitimate issue, the actual representation itself and how that representation affects the tone of the movie are more complex. The problem is far to contextual and must be examined on a case-by-case basis. When it comes to Final Girls, however, the controversy is that the Final Girls are bad because has think wrong. So, where gender and race were formerly all that mattered, and when that condition is met, the complaint goes further. No-- women aren't enough. It must be politically correct women as well.
And now is the time, my girls and boys, where I must mention Carol Clover’s book – Men, Women, and Chainsaws – which introduced the label of the Final Girl as well as Clover’s more complicated cross-gender identification theory. Clover’s film criticism is challenging and, while misapplied in some cases and too pretentious when applied to slasher movies, sought to challenge the prevailing myths feminism was using to defame slasher moves at the time she was writing. As such, she deserves her place in the history of film criticism. This isn’t the time or place, however, to delve into her complex criticism. If you’re interested, you can find a cheap copy on Amazon as well as a cheap edition of the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology that you’ll need for roughly every other sentence in the two-hundred page manifesto. Happy hunting.
Don't send me emails about Carol Clover.
The complaint about Final Girls is that they are virginal goodie goodies, who are rewarded for conforming to conservative values. While this might apply to some Final Girls, it is certainly absurd as a generalization of most slasher movies. The Final Girl of Black Christmas was sexually active enough to want an abortion, and surely a far-right conservative young woman would consider an abortion over her career options – right? Lori Strode, the sort-of heroine of Halloween, can barely even be called a Final Girl: she doesn’t defeat Michael in either Part 1 or 2: she merely evades him long enough to be saved by Dr. Loomis.
Friday the 13th Part 2 has a clearly sexually active heroine, who uses psychology to defeat Jason rather than virgin-strength and Reagan fists. In Hell Night, Linda Blair is not only an academic overachiever, but has mechanical knowledge surpassing that of her male colleagues. A lot of slasher movies don’t even have female Final Girls, especially the notorious “gang of eleven” that came out between 1980-1981.
But even if the Final girl is virginal, and does represent conservative Christian values – what is wrong with that? What is inherently and unforgivably wrong with waiting for marriage before having sex, or choosing a traditional stay-at-home-mom lifestyle over a career? Do women who chose this value-system deserve to be represented in a movie, or should they be banned for having the wrong politics? Must women conform to some ideal, some narrow-minded and ever changing ideological ideal of what a woman should be, just to be in a silly horror movie? Are slasher movies, which clearly have a social agenda and are only made to sway the innocent youths over to – oh my – conservative values, really the proper vehicle to accomplish that end?
It seems rather that the more women are liberated, the more an ideal is enforced on them by feminists that is in itself as constricting as any imaginary Patriarchy. Feminists have little pity for women who want to live a traditional lifestyle; whether they want to do so for logical or irrational reasons is not our business, and neither is it our obligation to “educate” them. The backlash against slasher movie Final Girls, while seemingly superficial, is actually a symptom of a greater problem with feminism once it has achieved its goals. If making a silly, stupid horror movie with a female protagonist who wants to stay a virgin is rewarded is “problematic”, the problem resides with feminism and its compulsion to control rather than a woman who, liberated and fully in control of her own life, chose to live the way she wanted.
Blasphemy it might be, but I’ve never been a big fan of the Alien franchise. They’re not bad movies, and I typically enjoy them, but – with the exception of Aliens, and only because Bill Paxton is a doll – I don’t feel a desire to watch any particular installment again. Alien itself is an important movie, however, for pretty much introducing the sci-fi world to a trope first used by slasher movies and thereafter incorporated into other genres until promptly forgotten about anytime people want to discuss leading female roles.
I say pretty much, because the Final Girl’s origins are hard to pin down. For practical purposes, the first Final Girl was in Black Christmas, a 1974 Canadian tax shelter movie that was truly unique and virtually unappreciated in its time. (There is a recent remake that seems rather “woke” and unwatchable. I would literally vomit watching a movie filled with SJW jargon.) Black Christmas was unsuccessful in the US, but probably inspired John Carpenter to make Halloween, which in turn inspired Sean S. Cunningham to make Friday the 13th, and so on and so forth until the Final Girl trope was so well recognized it’s now the name of a movie.
The Final Girl is a controversial concept despite its apparent simplicity. Loosely defined, a Final Girl is the last remaining woman who, through various means, survives to the end of the movie and takes down the killer. It’s surprising and suspicious that a female heroine in the relatively gory and hyper-sexualized genre of horror films would be a controversial thing, but so she is. The controversy centers not on the fact that a woman is usually the heroine of these movies, which should be good enough to satisfy even the most rabid feminist, but on how she’s portrayed. And if you’re already anticipating that this controversy is petty and whiny and that those indulging in it won’t or can’t be satisfied with anything, you’d be right.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to discuss the Final Girl controversy without bringing up the tangled and, frankly, silly controversy of representation in film. That I called it silly would automatically be dismissed with one of several race-gender based “privilege” ad hominems custom-fit to my straight white male handicap for being a better critical thinker than those whose training in logic and rhetoric stops short at the very words “logic and rhetoric”. As the argument goes, I have the privilege of seeing myself represented in movies and therefore don’t realize that representation is a problem. The logical fallacies of this argument are obvious. It first off assumes a stereotype as my personality – straight white man – and assumes therefore that I do in fact see myself represented in film. It doesn’t take into account my life experience, my beliefs, my values – in short, everything that makes me an individual instead of a carbon copy “white man” who only sees color and can’t relate to anything else. It doesn't realize that I have only seen one movie about Nietzsche and none about Schopenhauer, both of whom I "relate" to far more that Captain America or Tony Stark. It assumes that I relate to the documentaries about Damien Echols not because we were unfairly punished by the legal system, but only because we are white. It also assumes that mainstream, major-studio produced masscult media is all I watch; for all anyone knows, I could be an exclusive fan of J-horror or Tyler Perry or Bollywood. The “privilege” argument makes stereotypes of both the people who watch movies and the people populating the movies themselves, and it’s no small wonder that the small minds who use it haven’t fully developed into complex individuals and can only sympathize with a character who share their genitalia or their skin color.
As far as I can tell or care to, there are three types of people when it comes to representation in film. There are people who enjoy movies as long as they have a good story, regardless of what genders and races that story involves; there are people of varying degrees of marginality who have legitimate grievances with not being adequately represented; and there are people, both liberal and conservative, who have comical problems with gender-race representation in movies, most likely because they don’t legitimately enjoy movies as much as they do bitching, and are so obsessed with politics that they can’t even enjoy going to a movie without seeing it through the lens of whatever ideology they have adopted.
The first group I believe is the largest and represents most Americans of whatever race or gender you can imagine. The truth, I believe, is that most people aren’t so flagrantly racist or sexist that they are consciously aware of the race-gender of any given character more than is necessary for the story. More than is necessary for the story is the key phrase; if a movie is a story in which race or gender is important – a historical drama about the Civil Rights movement – then race or gender would be rather important; if a movie is a silly sci-fi space opera in which the mostly cookie-cutter characters could be replaced with any gender or race with no difference to the story, it isn't, and isn't therefore a great thing for humpbacked midget demisexuals when one of them happens to pop up in Rise of Skywalker because a Disney executive discovered that demographic on Reddit. The second group has more or less legitimate claims, depending on what that group is and what exactly they want. Gays and lesbians might want to see themselves represented in genres where they aren’t as represented as straight characters, and that’s fine. It wouldn’t be reasonable, however, to demand that a movie should only have gay and lesbian characters, and few people make that claim. The third group bring their ideology with them to the theater and check off the races and genders and sexualities laid out in an absurd taxonomy and will always leave any movie unsatisfied because they can’t be satisfied with anything. The third group make absurd claims such as that the Force Awakens is a war against the Aryan race, and on the flip side that Ghostbusters is innovative and progressive when females have been leading movies since at least 1976 when Carrie destroyed the prom.
It is this third group that has problems with the Final Girl.
Most people only have a problem with representation when one of two things occur: either a movie represents their gender-race-sexuality badly, or when the movie is so self-satisfied with its diversity that it shoves that diversity in your face so self-righteously that the actual movie becomes secondary to its gender politics. A good example of the former is the uproar over the Silence of the Lambs and its representation of transsexuals. While Silence of the Lambs is a bad example to criticize (Dr. Lecter is explicit when he says that Buffalo Bill isn’t a real transsexual, he merely thinks he is, and there’s no indication in the movie that he’s gay), transsexuals had a right to be angry at the time for generally being represented badly in psychological thrillers and horror movies. The most famous example of the latter is Ghostbusters 2016, which entered the world as a gratingly bad trailer and alienated its fans by initiating a smug publicity campaign that made too much of its all-female cast and dismissed its critics as sexist man-babies.
So whereas the frequency of representation can be a legitimate issue, the actual representation itself and how that representation affects the tone of the movie are more complex. The problem is far to contextual and must be examined on a case-by-case basis. When it comes to Final Girls, however, the controversy is that the Final Girls are bad because has think wrong. So, where gender and race were formerly all that mattered, and when that condition is met, the complaint goes further. No-- women aren't enough. It must be politically correct women as well.
And now is the time, my girls and boys, where I must mention Carol Clover’s book – Men, Women, and Chainsaws – which introduced the label of the Final Girl as well as Clover’s more complicated cross-gender identification theory. Clover’s film criticism is challenging and, while misapplied in some cases and too pretentious when applied to slasher movies, sought to challenge the prevailing myths feminism was using to defame slasher moves at the time she was writing. As such, she deserves her place in the history of film criticism. This isn’t the time or place, however, to delve into her complex criticism. If you’re interested, you can find a cheap copy on Amazon as well as a cheap edition of the Penguin Dictionary of Psychology that you’ll need for roughly every other sentence in the two-hundred page manifesto. Happy hunting.
Don't send me emails about Carol Clover.
The complaint about Final Girls is that they are virginal goodie goodies, who are rewarded for conforming to conservative values. While this might apply to some Final Girls, it is certainly absurd as a generalization of most slasher movies. The Final Girl of Black Christmas was sexually active enough to want an abortion, and surely a far-right conservative young woman would consider an abortion over her career options – right? Lori Strode, the sort-of heroine of Halloween, can barely even be called a Final Girl: she doesn’t defeat Michael in either Part 1 or 2: she merely evades him long enough to be saved by Dr. Loomis.
Friday the 13th Part 2 has a clearly sexually active heroine, who uses psychology to defeat Jason rather than virgin-strength and Reagan fists. In Hell Night, Linda Blair is not only an academic overachiever, but has mechanical knowledge surpassing that of her male colleagues. A lot of slasher movies don’t even have female Final Girls, especially the notorious “gang of eleven” that came out between 1980-1981.
But even if the Final girl is virginal, and does represent conservative Christian values – what is wrong with that? What is inherently and unforgivably wrong with waiting for marriage before having sex, or choosing a traditional stay-at-home-mom lifestyle over a career? Do women who chose this value-system deserve to be represented in a movie, or should they be banned for having the wrong politics? Must women conform to some ideal, some narrow-minded and ever changing ideological ideal of what a woman should be, just to be in a silly horror movie? Are slasher movies, which clearly have a social agenda and are only made to sway the innocent youths over to – oh my – conservative values, really the proper vehicle to accomplish that end?
It seems rather that the more women are liberated, the more an ideal is enforced on them by feminists that is in itself as constricting as any imaginary Patriarchy. Feminists have little pity for women who want to live a traditional lifestyle; whether they want to do so for logical or irrational reasons is not our business, and neither is it our obligation to “educate” them. The backlash against slasher movie Final Girls, while seemingly superficial, is actually a symptom of a greater problem with feminism once it has achieved its goals. If making a silly, stupid horror movie with a female protagonist who wants to stay a virgin is rewarded is “problematic”, the problem resides with feminism and its compulsion to control rather than a woman who, liberated and fully in control of her own life, chose to live the way she wanted.