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Loading... Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Filmby Carol J. Clover
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. billmcn | Feb 20, 2009 |   One of the most exciting pieces of recent literary criticism if only because of her notion that the target audience of young males is vicariously identifying with the target girls. This reversal of expectations, and a subtle dig at some of the less dialectical frminist writing in her intro, makes it a seminal work. (  )arod | Jul 8, 2007 | A bit tedious and academic and I'm not sure the conclusions are as far-reaching as I'd like them to be, but some good food for thought nonetheless. (  )nervenet | May 29, 2007 | 0.044 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0691006202, Paperback)Before Men, Women, and Chain Saws, most film critics assumed that horror (especially slasher) films entail a male viewer sadistically watching the plight of a female victim. Carol Clover argues convincingly that both male and female viewers not only identify with the victim, but experience, through the actions of the "final girl," a climactic moment of female power. As the Boston Globe writes, Men, Women, and Chain Saws "challenges simplistic assumptions about the relationship between gender and culture... [Clover] suggests that the 'low tradition' in horror movies possesses positive subversive potential, a space to explore gender ambiguity and transgress traditional boundaries of masculinity and femininity." Be forewarned, though: Clover addresses an academic audience, so her language can be heavy going.Related title: The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film by Barry Keith Grant (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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- The first chapter about slasher films was the most compelling. The analysis of gender roles was cockeyed enough to be novel without being so baroquely Freudian that I rolled my eyes.
- Clover's running concern with who the audience is identifying with could be expanded beyond the gender focus that she takes. Stories manipulate our sympathies, that's one of the things they do. (Iago is more interesting than Othello. We admire the Corleones even though we in the audience are not killers. Etc, etc.) It would be interesting to consider what sorts of manipulation are specific to horror beyond the gender identification stuff that Clover describes.
- The main scheme in the chapter on occult films—occult = mysterious = feminine = weird gooey things you go inside of—was more obvious than the Final Girl stuff, but no less true. Clover's innovation here seems to be in identifying an "occult film" subgenre, which is less clearly defined than the "slasher" subgenre.
- I'm sympathetic with Clover because she's clearly responding to a horror-movies-are-misogynist meme, but isn't simply trying to redeem the genre by moving it over into the "feminist" column. She's definitely not just a slumming academic.
- That said, I still skipped the end of the "Eye of Horror" chapter because it stuck me as largely being an intramural spat between Clover and Laura Mulvey for which I had insufficient context.
- I found the claim in the afterword that Thelma and Louise is a cleaned-up version of I Spit On Your Grave convincing. (Not that I've actually seen I Spit On Your Grave, but still.)
- An excellent book about the horror genre as a whole is Stephen King's Danse Macabre.
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