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This year, Jamie Lee Curtis was recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for her performance as Deirdre Beaubeirdre in Everything Everywhere All at Once. But in pop culture, she will always be Lori Strode, the iconic "Final Girl" who battles Michael Myers in the Halloween movies. And as a Final Girl, she will be always connected to the asylum.
The term “Final Girl” was coined by Carol J. Clover, in her 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Clover explains that this cinematic archetype is a horror-flick staple—the innocent, virginal waif who survives the carnage to dispatch the masked psychopath at the end of the movie. In the primarily misogynist universe of early slashers like Halloween and Friday the Thirteenth, Final Girls survived by dint of not having sex or partying. Their “purity” was rewarded with life.
Curtis began playing Lori Strode at age 19. Halloween was a huge hit, and in the innumerable sequels and remakes it spawned (along with many rip-offs and homages), she and similar Final Girls defeated masked or disfigured (or both) psychopaths.
Most commentators rightly note that Final Girls strongly imply that independent or sexually-liberated women are suitable fodder for male killers. It is the “safe” women, those who don’t “misbehave,” who are worthy of survival. I’d like to track another angle, an historical one: The Final Girl’s foremothers were asylum escapees.
Go back to the nineteenth century. One of the biggest-selling novels was a melodramatic potboiler titled The Woman in White. Written by Wilkie Collins, this book sold some 126,000 copies in America following its serialization in Harper’s Weekly. The plot is complicated, revolving around an art teacher named Walter Hartright, who falls in love with his student, Laura Farlie, but is forced away because she is betrothed to another. Her fiancé, Sir Percival Glyde, is a greedy, dissolute aristocrat who aims for Laura’s money with the help of evil Count Fosco. (It’s an intricate plot; this is how folks liked their novels back then.)
The titular character is Anne Catherick. She is Laura’s illegitimate half-sister, sent off to an asylum to keep her quiet about a “secret” she knows. Asylums are enduring places where the inconvenient are stashed in such tales. Anne escapes, and is seen on a lonely road, the event that kicks off the book. We later learn that her secret (which she does not even fully grasp herself) is that Glyde is not who he says he is: He is illegitimate, and thus not a real aristocrat deserving of land and title.
The plot, thankfully, is not what is important here. Rather, it is the indelible image of the Woman in White, breaking away from the mental hospital and innocent of sin. She will help take down the villain, with her very innocence being her strongest weapon. This is a powerful cultural archetype that has remained with us ever since.
A few years later, Louisa May Alcott (whose Little Women would later bring her literary celebrity) published “A Whisper in the Dark.” In this short story, an orphan named Sybil learns that her uncle intends to marry her off to her cousin in an effort to inherit her fortune. She finds out and resists, and is tossed into an asylum. Here she jousts with the evil Dr. Karnac. Ultimately, she prevails, her innocence and honesty getting her out of the asylum and propelling her to victory over the villains.
The archetype continued on in the years ahead. We see virtuous, virginal heroines in everything from Dracula to Star Wars (Princess Leia has her own “secret”; she is dressed in white; she is trapped by a scheming mind-controlling relative, Darth Vader, in the asylum-like Death Star). For Women in White, innocence and virtue bestow power.
When Curtis made her debut as a Final Girl, she tapped into this archetype. Like the Women in White before her, she is innocent, Anglo, and even dons a light-colored blouse at the end. Unlike the other women who meet their demise in the film, she abstains from sex and partying.
There are obvious antifeminist problems with this model. But pop culture is not static; Women in White can also be configured as independent, heroic, and imaginative. Strode outsmarts Myers, and in the most recent films in the series, she is a grizzled, battle-hardened grandmother who takes no guff. Other Final Girls, such as Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the Alien franchise, have evolved from innocent waifs into true warriors. Even Princess Leia became a general in the resistance.
This is not to say that problems do not persist. We have yet to overcome sexism, misogyny, racism, and double standards in cinema. Even the name—Final Girl—carries the baggage of an uncomfortable past; these “girls” are women, after all. As ever, knowing the origin of such concepts is the first step toward transforming the future.
References
Abad-Santos, A. "The "Final Girl," a key part of every great slasher movie, explained." (2015). Vox.
Clover, C. J. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in Modern Horror Film. (1992). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Collins, W. The Woman in White. (1860). New York: Harper and Brothers.
