THE FINAL GIRL: SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND LIBERATION IN IT FOLLOWS
by Sam Ellefson
In the canon of filmmaking, women have often been relegated to serve as side characters, villainous femme fatales or victims with a lack of agency, desire or will. In the horror genre, women have by-and-large been portrayed through a male gaze—a term originating from Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema—rendering female characters helpless in their suffering and beholden to the will of men.
The exception to this trope is the final girl, a term first coined by Carol J. Clover in her Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. The final girl, as Clover saw it, is the last woman standing in slasher film to face the antagonist of the film, often after a sequence of escape and externalized fear from the female character. Some of the most famous examples of the final girl can be seen in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream. These final girls all must endure suffering at the hands of the male antagonists until they prevail, typically with the aid from a benevolent male character.
In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a truck driver happens upon the scene of the gruesome crime just in time for Sally to escape in the bed of his vehicle. In Halloween, Laurie is subjected to Michael Meyers’ sadistic desires until Loomis, Michael’s psychiatrist, shoots him, saving a helpless Laurie.
In David Robert Mitchell’s idiosyncratic horror dreamscape It Follows, the final girl complex lies within the protagonist, Jaime, albeit with obvious dissimilarities. Jaime is not the sole survivor at the end of the film, and while these aforementioned slasher films do not explicitly engage with sexuality—beyond the recurrent idea that the final girl must be a virgin—viewers can see parallels between Clover’s concept of prevailing femininity at the conclusion of a horror film and Jaime’s character arc in It Follows; it differs from some mutations of Clover’s final girl complex, however, in that Jaime is not portrayed as a lucky and helpless victim, but rather a woman with agency reconciling what has been done to her.
Mitchell’s film delves into and deconstructs an array of notions pertaining to female sexuality, including the aftermath of sexual violence and the inevitability of sexual liberation. Jaime begins the film by experiencing sexually sexual violence at the hands of a man she trusts, despite consenting to sex, moving on to having to grapple with both her own trauma from said sexual violence and the sheer disbelief she is met with from her loved ones, and eventually overcomes the enigmatic “It” with the help of those close to her, liberating herself and unkowingly passing the entity onto Paul, the man that she has sex with at the tailend of the film.
It Follows begins with an unnamed woman, clad in a flowy white smock and donning red stilettos, running away from something only she can see; she’s driven to the beach, desperate and sitting facing the bright headlights of her sedan. A somber phone call with her father ends with an abrupt shot of the girl sprawled on the beach the next morning, dead by the hand of her sex entity, with her leg snapped in half and bent the wrong way–Mitchell chooses to set the tone for his film with this foreboding, tacitly sexualized sequence.
The viewer is then introduced to the protagonist, Jaime, who spends her time relaxing in her above-ground pool and thinking about her new lover, Hugh. The two go on a date, but it’s cut short when Hugh is spooked by a figure only he can see, presumably the same sexual entity that killed the initial woman. Hugh realizes what he must do: have sex with Jaime and give her the burden of the sex entity. The lovers have sex in Hugh’s car, and Hugh muzzles Jaime with a chloroform gag to ensure the transfer of “it.”
This was the first time Jaime and Hugh had sex, and the latter committed an act of sexual violence against the former, refusing to inform her of the implications of their encounter until after the fact. This act of sexual violence against a new lover ties into what Estelle B. Freedman highlights as a broader shift in contemporary sexual politics in her Feminism, Sexuality and Politics: “Female purity (has) lost its symbolic power to regulate sexual behavior … If the Victorian ideal divided women into the pure and the impure, modern ideas about sexuality blurred boundaries in ways that made all women more vulnerable to the risks once experienced primarily by prostitutes.”
The lens shifts to portray Jaime, tied to a chair in an abandoned building, as Hugh meanders along the sidelines. This idea of a sex demon in mutating form is a parallel of the vast assortment of individuals who commit sexual acts of violence against women; strangers, family members and spouses alike can be perpetrators, and in Jaime’s case, it’s her new lover. Hugh asks her if she understands, and Jaime shakes her head no with a pained grimace. As the protagonist, Jaime begins to show similarities to female leads in rape-revenge films and other subgenres of horror in which a woman scorned is the center character.
Carol J. Clover argues that “the women’s movement has given many things to popular culture, some more savory than others. One of its main donations to horror, I think, is the image of an angry woman—a woman so angry that she can imagined as a credible perpetrator (I stress ‘credible’) of the kind of violence on which, in the low-mythic universe, the status of full protagonist rests.” This initial act of sexual violence perpetuated against Jaime gives her a tool for character development that is aligned with feminist liberation ideology in that she must overcome her sexual trauma and liberate herself.
After Hugh commits an act of sexual violence against Jaime, he disappears and leaves her to fend for herself. Police are called to Jaime’s house, and an offscreen police officer questions Jaime, asking her in a demeaning tone whether or not the sex was consensual. Jaime doesn’t see “it” initially, leading her to believe that Hugh wasn’t entirely telling the truth during their encounter. Jaime is outwardly scarred, and Mitchell utilizes realistic mise-en-scene, muted lighting and ambient, diegetic sounds to immerse the viewer in Jaime’s sexual strife.
Clover asserts that “commentators tend to distinguish between primary identification (with the camera, wherever it may be and whatever it may be up to) and secondary identification (with the character of emphatic choice). Both are fluid, character-identification on the psychoanalytic grounds that competing figures resonate with competing parts of the viewer’s psyche.” Viewers are habitually brought into Jaime’s world of sexual upheaval and constant worry, where reality is blurred and sex is at the forefront of the mind.
However, the lens in relation to Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze can obscure this identification, as Marilyn Wesley argues that the overbearing presence of a cinematic male gaze—which can both be seen and not be seen in It Follows—warps the viewer’s identification with Jaime: “In the process of being filmed, the girl finally loses all control of her own perspective. By acceding to the process of the film, she literally relinquishes her image and her sense of self to the ‘eye’ of the ‘camera.’ At first she is united with the image it portrays … but then she is forced to abandon the illusion of identification and power.” Nevertheless, Mitchell’s cinematographic decisions help to portray Jaime’s sexual trauma in its raw form, regardless of whether or not there’s a presence of faultless identification.
This scenario where victims of sexual assault are told that they imagined something, are exaggerating, or are just flat out not believed is all too common. While Jaime does receive support from her loved ones—which eventually becomes active acknowledgment of the sex entity only once they all witness/experience it’s violence themselves—she initially must perform an internal battle, questioning her own sanity and the reality of her encounter with Hugh.
Laura Mulvey posits that within the context of cinema there has evolved a particular illusion of reality where contradiction between libido and ego produces a fantasy world; sexual instincts and identification processes have a meaning with this symbolic order where desire is articulated. Looking is tied to the castration complex in Mulvey’s terms, as there is both pleasure and threat in looking; Mulvey argues women in film become representations of this paradox. In this fear/fantasy relation of the male erotic gaze, sadism contribution to Mulvey’s definition of the narcissistic scopophilic gaze. Scopophilia arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. Developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, both pursue indifference to perceptual reality and motivate eroticized phantasmagoria in looking.
After Jaime and Greg have sex, the latter succumbs to the entity—it takes the shape of Greg’s mother, kills him and has sex with his corpse—and Jaime is left to fend for herself against the entity yet again. Jaime escapes her neighborhood in tears, and Mitchell employs low-key lighting, eye-level closeups and a still lens to establish the isolation Jaime feels at this moment. After the protagonist returns home, Paul approaches her and offers to have sex with Jaime and take on the stalker as his own burden. Paul reaches out to grab Jaime’s broken hand, leaning forward to kiss her before Jaime pulls away, clearly traumatized from the past two sexual experiences she’s had. This draws comparisons between the film’s plot and the compounded dread and abject fear many women who are victims of sexual violence experience when being with another man shortly after their experience.
The characters hatch a plan to kill the entity: lure “it” into an indoor pool and electrocute it. However, the plan backfires; the entity arrives at the pool in the form of Jaime and Kelly’s dead father, and “it” begins flinging electrical items at Jaime, who is submerged in the pool. This sequence showcases how difficult it is for survivors of sexual violence to overcome their experience, even with the help of supportive loved ones.
Eventually, Kelly covers the entity with a blanket, allowing Paul to shoot it in the head. Jaime swims to the edge of the pool, where Paul and Kelly have their arms stretched out to help her out, but the entity pulls her back underwater; this brief series of events exemplifies the virulence of trauma associated with sexual violence. After the entity is seemingly dead, Jaime and Paul have consensual sex, with both of them believing the entity has been eradicated. Jaime has finally liberated herself from the personified trauma that has been stalking her since the previous two sexual encounters she’s had. However, this is not a happy ending: “It” is now following Paul, symbolizing the perseverance of sexual trauma, even when it has been eradicated from the victim’s mind on the surface.
David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is a great cinematic depiction sexual violence perpetuated against women and the internal, liberatory struggle against the clutches of sexual trauma. However, It Follows does not highlight a woman overcoming sexual trauma outside of the confines of patriarchy, as Jaime can only relieve herself of “It” once she has sex again, not by killing it.
Mitchell’s decision to force the protagonist to find a means to an end within the existing world is exemplified in one of Robert Wood’s initial arguments in Images and Women: “Hollywood’s intermittent concern with social problems has, in fact, almost never produced radically subversive movies (and if so, then incidentally and inadvertently). A social problem, explicitly stated, must always be one that can be resolved within the existing system, i.e., patriarchal capitalism; the real problems, which can’t, can only be dramatized obliquely, and very likely unconsciously, within the entertainment movie.” Mitchell made this choice deliberately, highlighting how women experiencing sexual violence have only a limited litany of options; Jaime overcomes her sexual trauma, but only within the existing infrastructure of It Follows’ sexuality. Like other final girls before her, she wins the internal and external battles by weaponizing her surroundings, namedly Paul, freeing herself from “It” through sexual liberation, rather than through something outside the bounds of sexuality.
image source: Still from David Robert Mithcell’s It Follows via FilmGrab
quotes and research on Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” included by Emily Blake