Final girl

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For the film, see Final Girl (film).

The final girl is a trope in horror films (particularly slasher films). It refers to the last woman alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story. The final girl has been observed in many films including Alien and Halloween.[1] The term was coined[2] by Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.[3] Clover suggested that in these films, the viewer began by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experienced a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film.

Trope concept

A common plot line in many horror films is one in which a series of victims is killed one-by-one by a killer amid increasing terror, culminating in a climax in which the last surviving member of the group, usually female, either vanquishes the killer or escapes. According to Clover, the final girl in many of these works shares common characteristics: she is typically sexually unavailable or virginal, and avoids the vices of the victims like illegal drug use. She sometimes has a unisex name (e.g., Laurie, Sidney). Occasionally the final girl will have a shared history with the killer. The final girl is the "investigating consciousness" of the film, moving the narrative forward and, as such, she exhibits intelligence, curiosity, and vigilance.

One of the basic premises of Clover's theory is that audience identification is unstable and fluid across gender lines, particularly in the case of the slasher film. The final girl is no longer the damsel in distress. During the final girl's confrontation with the killer, Clover argues, she becomes masculinized through "phallic appropriation" by taking up a weapon, such as a knife or chainsaw, against the killer. The phenomenon of the male audience having to identify with a young female character in an ostensibly male-oriented genre, usually associated with sadistic voyeurism, raises interesting questions about the nature of slasher films and their relationship with feminism. Clover argues that for a film to be successful, it is necessary for this surviving character to be female because she must experience abject terror, and many viewers would reject a film that showed abject terror on the part of a male. The terror has a purpose, in that the female, if she survives, is 'purged' of undesirable characteristics, such as relentless pursuit of personal pleasure. An interesting feature of the genre is the 'punishment' of beauty and sexual availability (sometimes expressed as "Sex = Death")[citation needed]. Since the final girl is a virgin and therefore unpunishable, she can be the one who penetrates the attacker, making it her outlet for her sexual frustration, such as Laurie Strode from Halloween.[4]

Examples of final girls

Before the release of Alien 3, Clover identified Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise as a final girl. Elizabeth Ezra continues this analysis for Alien Resurrection, arguing that by definition both Ripley and Annalee Call must be final girls, and that Call is the "next generation of Clover's Final Girl". Call, in Ezra's view, exhibits traits that fit Clover's definition of a final girl, namely that she is boyish, having a short masculine-style haircut, and that she is characterized by (in Clover's words) "smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance" being a ship's mechanic who rejects the sexual advances made by male characters on the ship. Ezra notes, however, that Call fits the description imperfectly as she is a gynoid, not a human being.[5]

Christine Cornea disputes the idea that Ripley is a final girl, contrasting Clover's analysis of the character with that of Barbara Creed, who presents Ripley as "the reassuring face of womanhood". Cornea does not accept either Clover's or Creed's views on Ripley. While she accepts Clover's general thesis of the final girl convention, she argues that Ripley does not follow the conventions of the slasher film, as Alien follows the different conventions of the science fiction film genre. In particular, there is not the foregrounding in Alien, as there is in the slasher film genre, of the character's sexual purity and abstinence relative to the other characters (who would be, in accordance with the final girl convention, killed by the film's monster "because" of this). The science fiction genre that Alien inhabits, according to Cornea, simply lacks this kind of sexual theme in the first place, as it has no place in such "traditional" science fiction formats.[6]

According to Clover, Laurie Strode (from Halloween I, II, and H20) is another example of a final girl. Tony Williams notes that Clover's image of supposedly progressive final girls are never entirely victorious at the culmination of a film nor do they manage to eschew the male order of things as Clover argues. He holds up Strode as an example of this. She is rescued by a male character, Dr. Samuel Loomis, at the end of Halloween. He claims Lila Crane, from Psycho, is another example of a final girl who is saved by a male (also named Sam Loomis) at the end of the film. On this basis he argues that, whilst 1980s horror film heroines were more progressive than those of earlier decades, the gender change is done conservatively, and the final-girl convention cannot be regarded as a progressive one "without more thorough investigation".[7]

Williams also gives several examples of final girls in the Friday the 13th franchise: Alice in Friday the 13th, and the heroines of Part II, Ginny Fields, and Part III, Chris Higgins. (He observes that Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter does not have a final girl.) He notes that they do not conclude the films wholly victorious, however. Both Ginny and Chris are catatonic at the ends of the respective films, and Alice survives the monster in the first film only to fall victim to "him" in the second. The final girl in Part 2 is carried away on a stretcher, calling out for her boyfriend (which Williams argues again undermines the notion of final girls always being victorious). Moreover, Ginny's adoption of the monster's own strategy, in Part II, brings into question whether the final girl image is in fact a wholly positive one.[7]

Buffy Summers, the protagonist of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series (1997–2003), was deliberately designed by creator Joss Whedon as an alternative to the "final girl" cliché.[citation needed] Buffy is, in the words of Jes Battis, "subverting" the final girl trope of B-grade horror films.[8] Jason Middleton observes that although Buffy fulfills the monster-killing role of the final girl, she is the opposite of Clover's description of a final girl in many ways. Buffy is a cheerleader, a "beautiful blond" with a feminine first name, and "gets to have sex with boys and still kill the monster".[9]

An early example of a final girl can be found in the 1974 film Black Christmas, where Jess, played by Olivia Hussey, is a well-developed character who refuses to back down against a series of more or less lethal male antagonists.[10] Other characters identified as final girls include Sally Hardesty of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974),[11] Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) from Halloween (1978),[10] Ginny Field (Amy Steel) of the 1981 Friday the 13th Part 2,[10] and Wendy Christensen from Final Destination 3.[12]

In the middle 1990s, the trope of the final girl in horror films was "resurrected, reshaped, and mainstreamed"[citation needed]. Kearney points to the character of Sidney Prescott in the Scream franchise. One of the final girl stereotypes was that the final girl is supposed to be a virgin, but the Scream films challenged that by allowing Prescott to survive until the end - even after having sex. Other examples are Jennifer Love Hewitt as Julie James (in I Know What You Did Last Summer and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer) and Natalie Simon in Urban Legend. Kearney explicitly links these changes to Buffy.[clarification needed][13] In the movie The Final Girls, Taissa Farmiga is known as a final girl.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Rogers 2002, pp. 118,120.
  2. ↑ Totaro 2002.
  3. ↑ Clover 1992, pp. 260.
  4. ↑ http://www.nightmaresinredwhiteandblue.com/
  5. ↑ Ezra 2008, pp. 73–74.
  6. ↑ Cornea 2007, pp. 150–151.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Williams 1996, pp. 169–170.
  8. ↑ Battis 2005, pp. 69.
  9. ↑ Middleton 2007, pp. 160–161.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Tropiano 2005, pp. 151.
  12. ↑ Harper 2004, pp. 31–38.
  13. ↑ Kearney 2002, pp. 132.

Bibliography

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  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. — Professor Nicholas Rogers discusses how the "final girl" aspect of the Halloween films undermines "the misogynist thrust of slasher movies".
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Further reading

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External links

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