VLVL2 (2) Friday the 13th's 'Final Girl'

[Paul Nightingale]

The Friday the 13th series of films, throughout the 1980s, are examples
of the so-called 'slasher movie'. Benefiting from the success of
Halloween in the late-70s, they are linked to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960).
DePalma's Dressed to Kill (1980) was an obvious parody of Hitchcock's
film; and Psycho II, a sequel to the original, appeared in 1983. These
three films all featured a male serial killer dressed as a woman. In
Friday the 13th the killer is revealed as Jason's mother; Jason himself
is thought to have died years before the action of the film, but is then
resurrected for subsequent films.

>From Andrew Britton's account of "[t]he Reaganite horror movie":

"The Gothic has always depended on the fear that the repressed cannot be
contained because it is in fact produced by the culture which seeks to
contain it. The modern horror film (from Halloween and Friday the 13th
onwards) abandons the identification of the monster with the return of
the repressed while institutionalising the monster's indestructibility,
thus inoculating the Gothic at a stroke."

The return of the repressed: for example in dreams. The horror film can
be loosely equated to what Freud termed 'anxiety dreams' (or
nightmares).

>From Carol J Clover's description of the Final Girl, she who survives:

"With the introduction of the Final Girl ... the Psycho formula is
radically altered ... Psycho's detective plot, revolving around a
revelation, yields in the modern slasher film to a hero plot, revolving
around the main character's struggle with and eventual triumph over
evil."

At the end of Friday the 13th, Alice the Final Girl has defeated Jason's
mother. She then wakes from a dream to find Jason standing over her.

See also Andrew Tudor:

"The threat articulated here ... is that of an omnipotent human
predator, seen at its most intense (though not exclusively) in
situations of male-upon-female pursuit."

Robin Wood shares Britton's view that the 1980s horror film is
reactionary:

In films like Halloween or Friday the 13th, the monster "has essentially
become a superego figure, avenging itself on liberated female sexuality
or the sexual freedom of the young ... Where the traditional horror film
invited, however ambiguously, an identification with the return of the
repressed, the contemporary horror film invites an identification
(either sadistic or masochistic or both simultaneously) with
punishment."

Ideologically, then, insofar as the films present the punishment of
teen/extra-marital sex, we might see a relation to New Right concerns
with 'traditional family values'.

However, Mark Jancovich offers an alternative reading (one supported by
both Clover and Tudor). In these films traditional authority (be it the
patriarchal family or the police) has largely disappeared:

"The main characters are now the monsters and their victims, and the
latter's chance of survival depends on their own capabilities, rather
than the intervention of an authority figure: male lover, father,
priest, scientist, police or military."

See:

Andrew Britton (1986) "Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite
Entertainment" in Movie 31/21
Carol J Clover (1996; first published, 1987) "Her Body Himself: Gender
and the Slasher Movie" in Barry Keith Grant ed, The Dread of Difference:
Gender and the Horror Film
Mark Jancovich (1992) Horror
Andrew Tudor (1989) Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of
the Horror Movie
Robin Wood (2003; first ed, 1986) Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan ...
And Beyond

The critical works cited here are all products of the cultural debates
of the 1980s. In VL Pynchon presents such debates as debates, without
offering resolution, without making this or that character a mouthpiece
for a given POV.

Which begs the obvious question ... how far do the first two chapters
corroborate or deny this view?