CLOVER AND REFLECTIONS OF THE FINAL GIRL IN BLACK CHRISTMAS
by Sam Ellefson
In “Her Body, Himself,” Carol Clover tackles representations of the sexes in slasher films and the concept of the Final Girl. Those who decry the abject violence and terror women endure in slasher films don’t take into account the prevailing image of the Final Girl, Clover argues. She asserts that the Final Girl is the quasi-masculine woman who outlives the other characters and triumphs over the habitually and overtly male psycho killer. Clover delves into audience identification, positing that male viewers cling to any masculine visualizations in film, regardless of whether they are benevolent or abhorrent. Inversely, women can identify with the friends of the Final girl, who are typically picked off by the masked killer throughout the beginning of the film.
Clover notes there are male representations in “policemen, fathers, and sheriffs (who) appear only long enough to demonstrate risible incomprehension and incompetence.” As a departure from these modes of identification, Clover argues that the Final Girl acts as the hero of the slasher; the audience’s attachment to her is not exclusive, but throughout the film it culminates to become nearly absolute.
Margot Kidder and Doug McGrath - Black Christmas (1974) - Horror DNA
Clover continues by noting how slasher films habitually employ first-person point of view shots to explicitly portray events from the killer’s perspective. While some scholars argue that this forces the audience to intensely identify with the killer, Clover pokes holes in this assumption by citing Jaws and The Birds as two instances where the audience does not identify with the malignant antagonist(s), despite the use of first-person point of view camera work. As the film proceeds, the audience becomes less close to the killer and closer to the Final Girl, until we are watching the film through her point of view. With the final girl, “we become if not the killer of the killer then the agent of his expulsion from the narrative vision.”
Referring again to the overwhelming maleness of slasher audiences, Clover asserts that audiences can both cheer for the misogynistic excess performed by the killer and later laud the Final Girl as a sexy, independent heroine intent on killing the killer. In her approach to studying slashers, Clover’s arguments surrounding the Final Girarguments often hold characteristics that define her less as female and more as male — when the Final Girl finally confronts the killer, they have a shared masculinity in the phallic symbols (knife, drill, axe, ice pick) that they wield, but they also have a shared femininity in what ensues: the castration, literal or symbolic, of the killer at her hands.
Thus, Clover posits, the Final Girl ‘mans’ herself by ‘unmanning’ the killer. These assertions are inherently flawed because they assume a predicated vision of actions and characteristics associated with men and women. Gender is not binary, so it cannot be assumed as such when analyzing the slasher. Clover continues by discussing gender representations in the slasher; “abject terror, in short, is gendered feminine … It is no accident that male victims in slasher films are killed swfitly or offscreen.”
John Saxon - Black Christmas (1974) - Horror DNA
There is a cinematic double standard when it comes to portrayal of women in horror, Clover argues. The Final Girl, she posits, acts as a male surrogate, a double for male adolescence. The Final Girl is not necessarily a feminist figure, but rather she’s a figurative symbol that male viewers use as a vehicle for sadomasochistic fantasies, a symbol which they later identify with themselves. Additionally, the Final Girl is defined by the agonizing trials she endures and her enactment of the virtual or literal destruction of the antagonist in order to save herself, Clover argues. When we subsume the point of view of the Final Girl, when she enacts violence on the psycho killer, the gaze of the lens of the audience becomes female, even if only for an instant.
This idea of the passing female gaze is a flawed aspect of Clover’s argument, as she does not concretely define the characteristics of the female gaze, nor does she delineate how men and women operate or are viewed within it in the context of the slasher. In all, however, the Final Girl is an androgyne, a figure of dual masculinity and femininity who deconstructs the rigid confines of gender assumed within the context of the film; “the fact that we have in the killer a feminine male and in the main character a masculine female – parent and Everyteen, respectively – would seem, especially in the latter case, to suggest a loosening of the categories, or at least of the equation sex = gender.”
In Bob Clark’s 1974 slasher Black Christmas, a veiled killer enters a sorority house before Christmas and terrorizes its residents with unhinged phone calls. Black Christmas both adheres to and challenges the arguments Clover makes in “Her Body, Himself;” the film has a clearly defined Final Girl in Jess, but the obfuscated identity of the killer complicates whether she is triumphant in destroying the antagonist.
Olivia Hussey - Black Christmas (1974) - Horror DNA
Clover delineates the character archetypes in the slasher (Final Girl, female victims and unsuccesfull male rescuers), each of which is reflected in Black Christmas. Male incompetence and tacit misogyny allows the killer to murder with virtual impunity, and he is only confronted by the Final Girl herself, albeit only for a moment. In the beginning of Black Christmas, cinematographer Reginal Morris chooses to use prolonged first-person point of view shots to merge the viewer with the killer as the latter enters the attic of the sorority house.
Even though the killer is completely hidden from view for the duration of the film, his explicit maleness allows viewers to identify with him, along with the other handful of useless male rescuers that he evades. The gender politics in Black Christmas is further complicated by the topic of abortion; Jess is pregnant and is being chastised and stalked by her boyfriend, Peter, for choosing to not carry the fetus to term. Her role as a potential — and unwilling — mother causes Peter to blow up in rage, and as the film continues viewers are led to believe that he is the killer, motivated to violence by his anger over Jess’ proposed abortion.
After Jess sees the mutilated bodies of Barb and Phyl, she escapes the killer’s grasp and boards herself up in the basement. After hiding for some time, Peter appears and breaks open a basement window to get to Jess. She screams and ostensibly kills him in an act of self-defense, which should solidify her as the heroine of the story — the Final Girl.
Lynne Griffin - Black Christmas (1974) - Horror DNA
However, Black Christmas does not reflect Clover’s idea that the Final Girl is an androgyne figure of triumph because Peter is revealed to not be the true killer. Instead, additonal male incompetence and idiocy leads Jess to be abandoned in the house with the killer still inside. The resolution of her status as the Final Girl is left unclear.
Additionally, Jess does not display any of the overtly masculine characteristics at the climax of the film that Clover utilizes to argue that the Final Girl is an image of combined masculinity and femininity. Throughout the duration of the film, Jess is explicitly female, eventually left fragile and weak after her faux victory over the veiled psycho killer.
Citations:
Clover, Carol. “Her Body, Himself,” pgs 234-247.