Final Girl- I want more

I enjoy spooky season just like most white girls.  My novelty-seeking dopamine brain loves cute ghost cookies, costumes, and thrills.

 I’ve also been a fan of horror films and books for decades.  I was up late nights reading Fear Street and Christopher Pike.  I devoured media like Buffy, Dark Shadows, and American Horror Story.

Like most things I love, this turned into a small rabbit hole, complete with academic writing (I have written about the gender fluidity of vampires and how werewolves are symbols of masculinity for instance).

Two books that are the cornerstone of mine and others'  scholarship are Men, Women and Chainsaw  (MWC) (Clover) and The Monstrous-Feminine (Creed). Both works are germinal in examining horror in the modern day.

This is just to say that I overanalyze media, but I have fun doing it.  

 The  Final Girls (the trope) was coined by Clover in MWC. This trope is one of the enduring ones for a reason.  Audiences love a survivor, especially a female one.  It is partially wish fulfillment since sometimes we think we would survive whatever horrors, or we have survived them and feel represented.

 In the Monstrous Feminine, Creed relies on the germinal work of Julia Kristeva, which posits that almost all women in horror are victims,( patriarchal values create the monstrous if a woman holds any power, even at the end) This can be seen by considering tropes such as "Woman as the Witch" (Carrie, Tsar and the Witch, Slewfoot), among others.  Creed also incorporates the Mulvey-Lacanian  (and here) concepts of gaze, but remains true to the core concept of gendered psychoanalysis.  A trope that Creed discusses at length is the Femme Castratice.  This is based on the concept of castration anxiety, which Freud posited in 1922.   The femme castratrice is the umbrella trope of the Final Girl because they “become men” by wielding knives (i.e., pseudo phallus) against the attacker and survives.  They castrate male power because their phallus is bigger.

  So how does all this academic stuff fold into silly little books? Authors are not immune to using tropes, motifs and figures in their work.  Almost all the basic things about horror movie theory are the same basic things for books. Humans are only afraid of a few basic things, so we don’t  veer far off the path too often.

Final Girls (FG)  is set up to be about how one can live beyond a tragedy, but also about how to live knowing that you can wield the power of surviving. However, the expectations of the book are quickly dashed as Sager delves into a murder mystery plot and attempts to understand the female survivors.

 As a quick summation -

The book introduces three final girls, Lisa, Quincy and Samantha. All survivors of masscares. All Finals Girls.

Quincy, a survivor of a tragic cabin in the woods type massacre, is trying to live her life “normally”.  

Lisa, whose entire character arc is “she died”  but  survived a killing spree

Samatha, who survived a brutal attack and killed the murderer.

After Lisa’s death, Quincy is  contacted by Samantha. Samatha doesn’t live her life normally and is impulsive, sly, and manipulative.  She moves in with Quincy and her boyfriend and begins to push Quincy to take dopamine-charged chances, like shoplifting, vigilante justice fights, and heavy drinking.

  This cracks Quincy’s seemingly perfect life, and she begins to remember what happened during her massacre. The unreliability of memory is not handled particularly well here, but it serves the plot effectively. Quincy’s memories of that night piece together because she is being challenged by Sam.

One of the struggles Quincy has is seeing herself as a whole person. She not only struggles to  navigate the divide between public and private identities (she is one person to her boyfriend and one person to Sam, and one person to her blog fans), she also struggles to integrate herself as her identity as a Final Girl.

In MWC- Clover states  [about the Final Girl trope]

“She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone looks death in the face; but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued.”  

And

“The Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine,she is not fully feminine, not, in any case, feminine in the ways of her friends.

Her smartness, gravity, competence in mechanical and other practical matters, and sexual reluctance set her apart from the other girls and ally her, ironically, with the very boys she fears or rejects, not to speak of the killer himself.”

Quincy allows herself to be manipulated by Sam, falling into a relationship that is familiar to many a woman, in which your friend is a bully, but you struggles to see it.  Quincy forgets that she is a survivor; she forgets she is capable.  

   Sager lightly plays with these tropes during the flashback. Quincy was saved/ rescued during the massacre, but is in control at the end, actively killing to survive, her virginity at the cabin, and almost beating a man to death.

 Metaphorically, I like the idea of an identity not becoming fully cemented when it’s created, but percolating over decades.  But the books were a bit clumsy, and I suspect that one of the discarded lines was about how  a Final Girl became a Final Woman.

 The book is supposed to explore what it means to survive, but Quincy is not surviving because she isn’t real.

 She is a cardboard caricature of what a bad writer thinks someone like her would be. She is never fleshed out; there are no descriptions of her likes or dislikes.

There is at length talk about her “moral ambiguities,” aka her shoplifting and Xanax use. This is supposed to make her interesting, but name a more iconic thruple of an Upper East  Side Blonde, Xanax, and shoplifting.

 Sager’s idea of what women do and what conversations they have is lacking.There is one throwaway line about how  Quincy is lonely and can’t make friends. The audience is left to assume that she needs friends so badly that she allows Sam to steamroll her.

Quincy, having a baking blog is supposed to be part of her normalcy.  But instead it read to me as a “little hobby”, which was off-putting.  Sager seemed to think baking was feminine and quaint, and blogs are just things that run on their own.

The book attempts to convey that victims/ survivors are human and flawed.

However, SVU taught me that lesson over twenty years ago.  

Final Girls do not exist in our reality, but survivors of tragedy do.  In my own life, I’ve met women who have fled domestic violence, experienced school shootings, been the only survivors of an armed robbery,  lived in refugee camps, and much more.

 Sager (and Grady Hendrix) overlook the fact that women exist in this reality.

Those women who are dealing with the weight of tragedy every single day are the same women you see having a latte and reading a book.

 In film media, the Final Girl is often depicted standing alone, covered in blood; in book media, she typically has torn clothes and either locks a door or walks away.

In both, she undergoes physical changes.

However, in reality, there isn't any transitional shot to indicate a change.  

 This is what survival is.  While it can be messy and morally ambiguous, it is mostly just a faster heartbeat when you feel someone behind you. It is hearing the cock of a gun and freezing. It is trying to find comfort that no longer exists.

It is unfortunate that Sager could not see the humanity in his own characters, as there are some sparks of greatness that make the book an engaging read.

Rating

3/5

I