The fantasies of Black Final Girls

ABSTRACT

This article endeavors to critically examine the popular and enduring trope of the Final Girl and its intersections with race. Coined almost 35 years ago by Carol Clover in the article ‘Her Body, Himself’, and later explicated in her book Men, Women and Chainsaws, the Final Girl is a figure that Clover theorizes as holding the possibilities of cross-gender identification – possibilities which are conditioned by a combination of narrative and visual cues and desire. This article interrogates the assumptive logics of Clover’s Final Girl and of gender permeability, arguing for an excavation of the racial dynamics that are disavowed in the theory. Analyzing Earnest Dickerson’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight and the character of Jeryline as a/the first Black Final Girl, I examine the impact of race, and more specifically Blackness, on gendered figures, narrative tropes, spectatorship, and the limitations of identificatory possibilities within the film itself and horror in general.

KEYWORDS:

• Carol Clover
• Final Girl
• psychoanalysis
• horror
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Hereafter referred to as MWC (Clover 1992).

2. Clover 1992, 225.

3. Clover 1992, 227.

4. Clover 1992, 227.

5. Clover 1992, 225–228.

6. Clover 1992, 39.

7. Clover 1992, 40.

8. Clover 1992, 41.

9. Clover 1992, 44.

10. ‘If, during the film’s course, we shifted our sympathies back and forth and dealt them out to other characters along the way, we belong in the end to the Final Girl; there is no alternative’ (Clover 1992, 45).

11. Clover 1992, 44.

12. Clover 1992, 46.

13. Clover 1992, 57.

14. Clover 1992, 59.

15. Clover 1992, 227.

16. Clover 1992, 227n. 142.

17. I state this knowing that the first chapter was released as an article in 1987, but the book itself was published in 1992, three years after the term intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw.

18. She’s not exactly alone in this blind spot. See for example the fifth chapter of Robin Wood’s Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan…and Beyond titled ‘The American Nightmare’.

19. See H.M. Benshoff 2014; Jancovich 2002; Hutchings 2004; Carroll 1990. This is not necessarily true for other genres like science fiction film, in which the subject of race plays a more prominent role in analysis.

20. A few notable exceptions are the second chapter of Framing Blackness (Guerrero 1993), Harry Benshoff’s ‘Blaxploitation Horror Films’ (Benshoff 2000) and Robin Means Coleman’s Horror Noire (Means Coleman 2011).

21. Brooks 2014, 462.

22. Brooks 2014, 462.

23. hooks 1993, 295 qtd. in Brooks 2014.

24. Brooks 2014, 464.

25. Brooks 2014, 464.

26. While this same strength makes Black men, who are monsters, more noble and easy to identify with.

27. Brooks 2014, 467.

28. Means Coleman 2011, 132.

29. Means Coleman 2011, 132.

30. I argue that this film counts as a slasher because, even though it was not made and released until 1995, the original script had been written in 1987. This places the film out of the heyday of the slasher, but within its twilight years, and certainly places the screenwriters within the realm of influence of the slasher era. Though it may be sound to assume that there were some changes to the script in the interim as it changed hands between directors and production companies, eventually the original writers were brought in to ‘polish it up’ so one could also assume that the end product retained the essence of the original draft (Ferrante 1995).

31. I’m making the choice here to ignore the story framing of the first and last few minutes of the film for a couple of reasons. First, it’s pretty obvious that the film was not originally written with the Tales from The Crypt framing and that the film did not come under the ‘banner’ of the trademark/brand until much later – to this end, there’s even a record of a dispute regarding writer’s credits for the framing portions of the film (Ferrante 1995, 69). Second, while the framing of this film offers unique insights into the ‘staging’ of horror, such a discussion is beyond the purview of this paper.

32. This establishes the biblical motif and mythos of the film, making direct references to the book of Revelation wherein wormwood is mentioned as the name of a star that falls to Earth.

33. Clover 1992, 33.

34. Dickerson 1995.

35. Clover 1992, 42.

36. Clover 1992, 33.

37. Clover 1992, 32.

38. Clover 1992, 32.

39. Clover 1992, 41.

40. Dickerson 1995.

41. Clover 1992, 26. When all that is left is Jeryline, there’s a moment when The Collector attempts to express to her his love but cannot manage to say the words. Then in a fit of rage, a moment of ‘psychosexual fury’, as Clover has described it, he bathes her with fire from, and of, his crotch.

42. And truly, this had always been the case in the various iterations of the script. The only men who had been considered for the roles of Brayker and The Collector were white, even when Ernest Dickerson himself came aboard (Ferrante 1995).

43. ‘In an antiblack world, the phallus is white skin’ (Gordon 1997, 81).

44. Here I am following the work of Hortense Spillers when she states: ‘Even though the captive flesh/body has been “liberated”, and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as the human subject is “murdered” over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise’ (Spillers 1987, 68).

45. I elaborate on this particular point in an article forthcoming in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies entitled ‘Failing to Get Out’ (63.3).

46. Here, I follow the logic and vocabulary that Anthony Paul Farley proffers: ‘The “zipless” encounter, however, requires subalterns who take pleasure in submitting themselves to the master narrative, thus becoming fantasies of the master race’ (Farley 1997, 504). While it is debatable, this term may be a reference to Erica Jong’s phrase ‘zipless fuck’. She writes: ‘The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not “taking” and the woman is not “giving” … No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is’ (Jong 1973, 15). While Farley’s appropriation of this term can seem to be a misuse of the original intent of the phrase, it seems apropos given that Farley, here, is referring to an incident that necessitates a submission in the form of an embracing of its abject treatment that affords the master – whose pleasure is paramount, and all encompassing – and his narrative, a guilt-free, zipless encounter. It is pure and free of power games because everyone at least appears to take pleasure in the encounter.

47. Marriott 2007.

48. Fanon 2008, 133.

49. Fanon 2008.

50. Fanon 2008, 164.

51. Fanon 2008, 180.

52. ‘So it is not surprising to find the black man in the guise of a satyr or murderer’ (Fanon 2008, 139).

53. That is ‘the investment of libido or psychic energy in objects outside the self, such as a person, goal, idea, or activity’.

54. ‘ … we have to call on the notion of collective catharsis. In every society, in every community, there exists, must exist, a channel, an outlet whereby the energy accumulated in the form of aggressiveness can be released’ (Fanon 2008, 124).

55. An abstraction that occurs because of the taboo that sex represents in civilized society. ‘Strictly speaking, this is what we would come up with if we analyzed our findings: if a very frightening object, such as a more or less imaginary attacker, arouses terror, it is also and above all a fear mixed with sexual revulsion, especially as most of the cases are women’ (Fanon 2008, 134).

56. Fanon 2008, 146.

57. Apropos to the topic of ritual, following the discussion above made by Spillers’, there is resonance with the work of Julia Kristeva, vis-à-vis Barbara Creed’s work on the ‘monstrous feminine’, particularly as it relates to abjection. In The Monstrous Feminine Creed notes: ‘In general terms, Kristeva is attempting to explore the different ways in which abjection works within human societies, as a means of separating out the human from the non-human and the fully constituted subject from the partially formed subject. Ritual becomes a means by which societies both renew their initial contact with the abject element and then exclude that element. Through ritual, the demarcation lines between the human and non-human are drawn up anew and presumably made all the stronger for that process’ (Creed 1993, 8).

58. Fanon 2008, 156.

59. ‘They are written by white men for white children. And this is the crux of the matter’ (Fanon 2008, 124).

60. Gordon 1995, 98–103.

61. Gordon 1997, 74.

62. Gordon 1997, 84.

63. ‘They don’t have boundaries; they constitute them. They are who all must contend with, and eventually surpass, in order to live and to make a living in their society; this is what it means to have social and political power. Similarly, a white woman may have fewer boundaries than a black man in an antiblack world. She stands before him as a presence when it comes to matters of recognition before the law. She knows that in the eyes of her society her life is more valuable than his’ (Gordon 2000, 127).

64. Fanon 2008, 156, 167.

65. Gordon 1997, 81.

66. Gordon 1995.

67. In Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison elaborates on how the figure of the Black body (what she calls the Africanist presence) provides the absented presence in the white imaginary. She says that ‘the slave population, it could be and was assumed, offered itself up as surrogate selves for the meditations on problems of human freedom’. In this way the slave became integral to the fashioning of the very idea of what it meant to be human so much so that ‘we should not be surprised that the Enlightenment could accommodate slavery; we should be surprised if it had not’. This figure, performed the duties of ‘exorcism and reification and mirroring’ and ‘enrich[ing] the country’s creative possibilities’. She continues, ‘It was Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity’. The slave provided the metaphor for the very becoming of the human. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1^st ed., (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 38.

68. Clover 1992, 45.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jerome P. Dent

Jerome P. Dent, Jr. is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor in the Humanities, jointly appointed in the Department of Communication and the Africana Studies Program at Tulane University. He has published articles in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and InVisible Culture, and he co-edited the “New Black Surrealisms” series for the African American Intellectual History Society. His research interests include film, genre, sexuality, race, psychoanalysis and gender.