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Carol Clover - "Her Body, Himself" (The Final Girl ("the…
Carol Clover - "Her Body, Himself"
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The Final Girl
"the Final girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine" (40)
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"she is the bookworm, the girl scout, the mechanic. Unlike her girlfriends she is not sexually active" (39). Set up virgin who survives trope
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responding to John Carpenter: "a sense of affinity, even recognition, that attends the final encounter" (49): they are both sharing masculinity and femininity?
"To apprehend in specific terms the nature of that mutation, let us, with Psycho as the benchmark, survey the genre" (26). It's Clover's way of defining terms and teaching the tropes that make this "lowbrow" genre
Weapons
knives have more intimacy: "closeness and tactility are also at issue" (31). Hey penetration; use of I Spit on Your Grave to mirror the violence and violation (32). "Hands on"
Killer
built on trauma and violence: "even killers whose childhood is not immediatyely at issue and who displau no over gender confusion are pften sexually disturbed" (28). A sort of overdetermining the violence as rooted in gender variance or sexual violence. It sort of demonizes/stigmatizes based on mental illness/sexual variance
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delayed childhoods, mommy issues (pg 28)
female killers" "Female killers are few and their reasons for killing significantly from men": no gender confusion, rooted in being cheated on from men (29)
The Terrible Place
Jason's hut, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre house/basement: "the same walls that promise to keep the killer out quickly become, once the killer has penetrated them, the walls that hold the victim in" (31)
Victims:
"whole series" of women being murdered (32): issues of age and erotic appeal. Women's death are more exaggerated: "the death of a male is often always swift" (35). The murders of women are filmed at closer range, in more graphic detail, and at greater length" (35). Also clear binary. "Tits and a scream"
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What's the way out?
The Final Girl gets us out of binary ideas of sex and gender: "masculinity and femininity are more states of mind than body" (22); "what filmmakers seem to know better than film critics is that gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane" (46)
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How do we reconcile this shift in gender identifications but also within a distinctly phallocentric/masculinist genre (47)