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Pseudopod 287: Final Girl Theory

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Bdoomed:
Pseudopod 287: Final Girl Theory

By A.C. Wise .

The story was first published at ChiZine but the link to the actual story has expired.

A.C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal, and currently lives in the Philadelphia area. Her work has appeared in publications such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and ChiZine, among others. In addition to her writing, she co-edits the inimitable Journal of Unlikely Entomology. Links to the author’s website and the Journal can be found by clicking their names.


Your reader this week is John Meagher. He is the writer and narrator of Tales of the Left Hand, a continuing fantasy series offering “swashbuckling, intrigue and a dash of magic,” (just click the link - you know you want to). In addition to producing Left Hand, John has narrated several audiobooks, most recently Crown Imperiled by Raymond Feist. In his secret identity, he’s a graphic designer living in Northern Virginia with his wife and two cats.



“The woman screams. The screen dissolves in a mass of spinning color, and the opening credits roll.

You know what the worst part is? The opening sequence has nothing to do with the rest of the film. It is what it is; it exists purely for its own sake.”


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THE HORROR IN CLAY



Listen to this week's Pseudopod.

Red Dog 344:
Our hero (?) has a chance to get past his obsessive but superficial crush on Ms. Linden but lapses into mere fandom, clutching the string of beads (which he will take out of the dresser drawer frequently, we are told).  From fetish to fetish, and at least the beads can't make eye contact, talk back, and make him uncomfortable.  Added pathos if she's being hunted down by dark Satanic forces and all he can think of is which of her trinkets he can steal as souvenirs.

Or... our hero is forced to confront what the cult film has meant personally to the actress* and has to re-imagine her as a person and not just an object of desire.  He says "Sorry."  Moment of personal growth?

Or... I missed the point of the story and someone can explain it to me.

* Check out the entry on IMDB, Lou Cipher and Beel Z. Bub did some really interesting work later on.  Pixar has optioned Kaleidoscope 3D for the IMAX screen.

Kaa:

--- Quote from: Red Dog 344 on June 23, 2012, 03:13:37 PM ---Or... I missed the point of the story and someone can explain it to me.
--- End quote ---

And me. It was ... interesting. In that I kept expecting there to be an end, and I was left wanting. Or maybe, like Red Dog suggests, I just missed whatever point there was.

This reminds me of a piece that ran on Escape Pod or Pseudopod a while back. I believe it was a review of a TV show that didn't exist? Maybe someone else remembers the exact title and/or episode number.

Scattercat:
Does this help?

The woman in this story, having experienced true horror (Her line, "All of it," presumably answering the unspoken question "How much of it was real?" Recall the conversation with Kevin and the protagonist's sense of superiority to those who are titillated by the idea of the sadistic sexual content "actually happening.") is not empowered by it, but is left permanently victimized and permanently fetishized by her role as the survivor.  Instead of taking up a weapon and facing the monster, her own power (the beads) is first used BY the monster to abuse other women, then later taken up by herself (or possibly a doppelganger, the monster in another guise) to further abuse women, and finally appropriated by the voyeuristic male gaze (personified in our protagonist) as a fetish object.  She doesn't get to keep them; one way or another, they're used against her.  (Compare, respectively, reactionary anti-feminist politics, women who distance themselves from the "bad girls" or who say, "but I'm not really a feminist," and male "white knights" who like to talk about how much they enjoy dating "empowered" women.  In each case, the point is missing or misused.)  

The story is in some ways a counterargument against the idea that the "final girl" in horror film idiom is secretly feminist; in this story, the whole horror fandom is indicted in exploiting her, leaving her broken and in pain, and it is implied that there is something fundamental about this exploitation that makes it inevitable (the language about infection, about how even those who say they don't obsess about Kaleidoscope can't help but focus on it, even if only subconsciously.)  Our protagonist, for example, in confronting her, comes to realize that even though he "loves" her, his need for her is just as damaging, just as dehumanizing as the crude sexual objectification he derides in his fellow fans.

Consider the opening scene.  A kaleidoscope is a lens for fragmenting and reorganizing one's perceptions.  The opening of "Kaleidoscope" suggests making an abused woman herself into our "lens" for viewing what follows.  However, in the end, all this does is dehumanize her in another way.  No one ever sees her as a person who has been damaged, who is struggling to survive; she is always a symbol of something else, even to those who want to take her side, who want to "reclaim" her.

Red Dog 344:
Thanks for clarifying.  I knew I didn't "get" the title, but I'm glad to see that I was right to focus on the beads as the key element.  I think this story needed more dialogue and (for example) a Scattercat character to help put some things on the table for the non-initiated (less initiated?).

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