
Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween
(NOTE: NOT ACTUALLY A GOOD DRAWING OF JAMIE LEE CURTIS)
Bunche had a post on his feelings about the new
Friday the 13th reboot, which sent me scurrying around the nets reading all about the series. (Weird fact about me: I'm often more interested in reading about movies than in taking the time to sit down and watch them.) Thanks to good ol' Wikipedia, I learned about
the theory of the "Final Girl", the last survivor of a typical slasher film, usually a female who conforms to a certain set of characteristics. Partly due to derivative scripting, no doubt, but even higher-caliber stuff like
Alien and
Silence of the Lambs fits the model very closely.
What I found really interesting in the theory is that the audience identification
shifts over the course of the movie. The typical (male) audience for a slasher film more or less starts out identifying with the killer in a vicarious way. But by the last reel the audience is usually persuaded to shift focus to the "final girl", and root for her to defeat the killer. It's a feminist theory, and there's supposedly all these gender politics associated with the shift in identification from male killer to female victim (The killer is a male whose masculinity is in crisis, the final girl is a viginal type who becomes "masculinized" through taking up a phallic weapon, yadda yadda yadda). But I think it really demonstrates something fundamental about the three-act dramatic structure. It shows how the third act of a film is a very different animal from the first act.
The first act of the film belongs to the killer, because the killer is the 'gimmick', the hook that gets you into the theater. The gimmick is what usually dominates the first act, no matter what kind of movie it is--serial killer, spaceships, Indian TV game show, what have you. But it's our nature that the gimmick isn't enough to sustain our interest for the run time of a film--even a film with expectations as low as that of a "Friday the 13th" film. Unless you're a hard-core fan of the genre, your interest is going to start to wane by the end of act one. We start to fatigue of the cheap thrills, therefore dramatic complications have to set in that can persuade us to stick around for act two. By the time we're in act three, we've become invested in the character drama, as thin a gruel as that might be.
What this means is that even in a cheap slasher film, we
demand some kind of character arc. We demand identification with a character with recognizable vulnerabilities, who experiences fear and uncertainty that we can relate to, and who grows and evolves in order to overcome an apparently insurmountable challenge. As awesome as the crazed killer might be, he's too one-dimensional to carry the audience identification past act one. At least 'til the next sequel.