Revisiting "Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film"

Book by Carol J. Clover
Published by Princeton University Press

Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film is an academic defense of so-called “crude” exploitation films that was first published in 1993. I’ll be focusing on the first chapter, an oft-referenced examination of gender in the slasher film, where Clover employs Freudian and feminist theory to push back against the commonly held opinion (especially at the time) that these films encouraged violence against women.

Attempting to pinpoint how slasher films affect an audience, Clover focuses on adolescent males who watch slasher films or, as she puts it, “my interest in the male viewer’s stake in horror spectatorship is such that I have consigned to virtual invisibility all other members of the audience” (p.7). If I didn’t know any better, I would assume that she’s trying to pad the word count, a college freshman desperately fluffing her English final the night before it is due. I think all of us have done some desperate fluffing at one point or another (stop it, you pervert), but this is supposed to be an academically authoritative work. Here is a simple, concrete point that has been obfuscated to subtly comedic levels; a building block smothered in verbosity. Don’t editors LIKE finding things to hack away at? Here is a prime victim lying helpless, flailing limbs akimbo, and yet it survives intact.

Clover argues that adolescent males are the primary audience for slashers without much in the way of convincing evidence, but I’ll go ahead and concede that point. Even if a male slasher fan isn’t technically an “adolescent”, I figure it takes at least a partially adolescent mindset to enjoy watching a cheerleader being chased through the woods with a pair of garden shears, to which I speak from personal experience (I mean the experience of watching these movies, not the experience of stabbing cheerleaders).

So, if you want to research how an adolescent male watches slasher movies, you could…

A. Hook electrodes up the adolescent male’s brain as he watches a Slumber Party Massacre marathon.

B. Interview adolescent males about their reaction to watching a Slumber Party Massacre marathon.

C. Be an adolescent male yourself who enjoys slasher movies, and take note of why you watch them and how they affect you. For example, if your eyes bulge out when you witness a slumber party pillow fight, write that down. It might be important.

The fourth possibility is that you’re an adolescent female slasher fan that attempts to apply theoretical male thinking to your own viewing experiences, which is really just a subset of approach C. Unfortunately, Clover fits none of these categories. It should be clear to the reader within the first few pages of the book that she is approaching the slasher genre as an academic and not as a detached fan. When clover declares that horror is a “marginal genre that appeals to marginal people” (p.231), she is clearly not including herself amongst the “marginal”, the great unwashed “other”. However, I suppose it’s feasible that someone, through research that mostly involves watching these films on terms that a “regular” viewer might, could lay a foundation for a reasoned analysis. However, as she explains, she had “assiduously avoided” exploitation films until a viewing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (p.19). I honestly don’t know what “assiduously” means, but then again, I’m not the kind of guy that avoids exploitation films.

This viewing inspired her to “(question) the notion of the ‘male gaze’, (as well as) the notion of ‘exploitation’ and the relation of that notion to film theory” (p.19). She was inspired to write what ended up being the first chapter on slasher films, watching “several dozen” movies as research (p.19). It would be easy to say that the sample size here is insufficient, but the more important point is that she already had theories in place (or even just notions of theories) after having seen just one single film that falls within the scope of her topic. The entire chapter makes it abundantly clear that she watched these films (i.e., her research) and forced various components to fit the models she had already started developing. No “regular” viewer would watch a slasher film under the guise of “questioning the notion of the ‘male gaze’”, so these models, while potentially useful for other purposes, do not approximate how “real” people watch these films.

I don’t want to regurgitate the scientific method and put everyone to sleep, but I’ll just say that it is intellectually dishonest and damaging to begin a research project based around theories that lack common sense, and then force the data to fit these conclusions. Especially when the process consists of an oversimplification of something so wide reaching and complex; hundreds of films viewed by millions of people in thousands of different ways, processed through an incredibly complex system like the human brain (well…most of them are complex). The first problem with Men, Women, and Chain Saws (the first chapter specifically) is that it is a book that purports to be “factual” and “academic” (at least indirectly), but is built on research that is flimsy and mutilated.

“The functions of monster and hero are far more frequently represented by males and the function of victim far more garishly by females. The fact that female monsters and female heroes, when they do appear, are masculine in dress and behavior (and often even name), and that male victims are shown in feminine postures at the moment of their extremity, would seem to suggest that gender inheres in the function itself – that there is something about the victim function that wants manifestation in a female, and something about the monster and hero functions that wants expression in a male. Sex, in this universe, proceeds from gender, not the other way around. A figure does not cry and cower because she is a woman; she is a woman because she cries and cowers.” (pp.12-13)

First of all, “the fact that female monsters and female heroes, when they do appear, are masculine in dress and behavior (and often even name)” is a very dubious claim. I’ve seen practically every slasher movie made up through the early 90’s (I assume that these are the films she’s ultimately referring to), and it can hardly be said that every female “monster” and “hero” in these films is masculine in appearance, behavior, and/or name (or even the majority). This is easily discounted by Clover’s claim that she watched “several dozen” of these movies, yet makes a claim about all of them, but I’ll dig a little deeper regardless. Even if some of these final girls contain certain male physical characteristics, does Clover actually think that the screenwriter of Cheerleader Cabin Massacre named the final girl “Stevie” in order to fit within a “gender bending” theory? That the director wanted the final girl to have short hair because he’s a strict Freudian who is using the film as a medium to undermine adolescent male sexuality? If the final girl wears a flannel shirt, it may be because the filmmakers wanted to convey that she is tough and outdoorsy (or a lesbian grunge fan, but let’s not complicate things), and being tough and outdoorsy happen to be attributes that were previously associated with males.

So, why a final girl instead of a final boy? Well, why not ask the filmmakers themselves? As luck would have it, Clover actually quotes Brian De Palma about that very topic, of which he said: “women in peril work better in the suspense genre…if you have a haunted house and you have a woman walking around with a candelabrum, you fear more for her than you would for a husky man” (p.42). Pretty straightforward, right? Apparently not, as Clover “clarifies” this statement by saying that what De Palma is actually proposing is that “the lack of the phallus, for Lacan the privileged signifier of the symbolic order, is itself horrifying, at least in the mind of the male observer”. I don’t know who this Lacan guy is, but it sounds like he takes his cock a little too seriously. Either way, I thought I had this argument pegged, that a female character traditionally elicits more sympathy than a male character when placed in a dangerous situation for the following reasons: Men tend to be physically stronger than women, a male character in a story is more traditionally heroic than a female character (especially thirty years ago), and, simply, people are more used to sympathizing with a female in peril than a man in peril when watching a movie.

Turns out I was wrong folks. Apparently, I become afraid when watching a movie where a woman was put in peril, not because she held my sympathies and I worried for her survival, but rather…because she doesn’t have a penis. The threat is not a factor, and the narrative is basically irrelevant. If I watch a movie where a woman is just sitting there doing nothing, my subconscious will scream out “OH MY GOD OH MY GOD THAT GUY DOESN’T HAVE A DICK SO HE MUST NOT BE A GUY I DON’T KNOW WHAT HE IS I AM SCARED!!!” Really?!? Really?!? Are you kidding me?!? Based on that logic, watching 90 minutes of footage of the Sex and the City ladies having dinner should be the scariest movie ever made. Actually, that’s a pretty good idea. That should be the next Saw movie. Just advertise it as Saw 8 or 9 (whatever number they’re up to by now) and throw that shit up on the screen instead. You know, that does sound pretty fucking horrifing now that I think about it. Anyway, let’s put this simply: if you cast John Rambo as the final girl in a Friday the 13th movie, it’s not going to work. Watching the movie, you know that, in the end, Rambo is gonna lay waste to Voorhees, so there is no suspense created. It’s really not the most obtuse thing in the world.

The above paragraph also sets up the idea that, in the slasher film, the gender of the hero and the victim is determined not by gender (that was my first guess), but rather, by whether or not they carry certain masculine or feminine traits. So, how did these traits become “masculinised” or “feminized”? By being aligned with males or females, of course. It is tradition that the character that springs into action and defeats the monster is male, so this is a masculine action. When a female performs this action, she is supposedly no longer female, because she is performing a masculine action. So, the “final girl” is a victim early on in a slasher film, and therefore, female. As she turns the tables and defeats the killer, she becomes male (in effect). Got that?

Well, why bother joining these two distinctions at the hip? We understand the difference between male and female, and the difference between hero, victim, and villain. We can simply point out that slasher films break the trend of having a male hero destroy a monster and pat the genre on the back for being “progressive” in a small way. Perhaps inadvertently, Clover wants to deny even this to the female hero, forcing her to be read as male because previous heroes were mostly male. Why bother? Well, to force this dynamic into her major thesis, of course. She states that the final girl is a “double for the adolescent male…a homoerotic stand-in”. In other words, some masked nutbar is trying to stab the final girl with a phallic symbol (of course, in a Freudian piece, you knew this was going to come up at some point), and the “marginal” male horror fan with the marginal mind empathizes with this female hero, not realizing THAT SHE IS ACTUALLY A MAN! Holy shit.

The viewer is hoodwinked (bamboozled even) into thinking that they were empathizing with a female while a killer comes after her with a knife. However, this is all a ruse so that the female hero can gain the sympathies of the male viewer, only to do a switcheroo and become male. This is done to stir up homosexual fears within the male viewer without him realizing it, as he still naively believes that the chick with the long hair and boobs is a girl (sucker!). Therefore, what ACTUALLY happens is that the male viewer engages in a homosexual fantasy by empathizing with a final girl (a man) who is then almost being penetrated with a knife (a penis). I guess this is supposed to alleviate homosexual fears and repression within the adolescent male viewer without him realizing it, because if he really understood what was going on, he would stand up and yell “YO THIS SHIT IS GAY TURN IT OFF!” It stands to reason that if you’re an adolescent (mostly) straight male and you watch a bunch of slasher movies, you’ll show less latent homosexual tendencies than if you just watched costume dramas. So, it’s GOOD for you (if you’re a dude, that is).

Pretty fucking ridiculous, huh? Unfortunately, it may seem plausible when couched in champion Scrabble words and academic credentials and Freudian constructs and citations and footnotes (LOTS of footnotes). When extrapolated and presented as a logical argument (padded with smartass asides to keep the gluehuffers awake), it falls apart like a house of cards. Here is a question you should repeatedly ask yourself when writing a book of “facts” – “is any of this shit actually true?” The great ones (like Stephen Hawking) are happiest when qualified peers attempt to blow holes through their argument (or a math equation that fills up three chalkboards), whether or not they succeed. You don’t really know if an argument is bulletproof until someone whips out the heavy artillery.

Clover does correctly deflate the claim of Siskel and Ebert that slasher films train men to be women-hating sadists (she equates it more to “masochism”, which is at least in the ballpark of the truth methinks), and her arguments to this effect, even if a bit misguided, seem to have had a positive effect (perhaps accidentally). Later on in the book, she acutely points out that Hollywood adopts earlier exploitation elements and waters them down, making them safer and less transgressive (she negatively compares The Accused to I Spit on Your Grave, for example). However, the most enduring and oft-quoted ideas from the book’s first chapter, her Freudian take on gender in the slasher film, are academic hogwash of the lowest order. I’m not attacking feminism or even Freudianism (although I’m not completely and totally on board with the latter), but rather, I’m trying to examine logical arguments from the most academically respected expert in the field (and I do think Clover thinks that she is arguing with logic and facts, and not general notions and possibilities). The results have me scratching my ass, then scratching my head, then forcing me to point and laugh at how stupid they are. The basic building blocks of a logical argument are ideas, and Clover, like many academics before or since, argues not with ideas, but with words, freely linked together in a convoluted game of mismatched gobbledygook.