Blog post 4: Gender and Perceptions

The nature of gender in films has long been evaluated and discussed on many different levels. The perception of the audience and how we identify with characters has an intrinsic relationship to that of the gender of characters. In The Cabin In The Woods, we can see how gender plays a large role in shaping how we react to horror films and what outcomes the audience generally aims for. Carol J. Clover states how we as audience, come to understand specific characters “The one character of stature who does live to tell the tale is of course female. The Final Girl is introduced at the beginning and is the only character to be developed in any psychological detail. We understand immediately from the attention paid it that hers is the main story line. She is intelligent, watchful, level-headed; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the patterns extent of the threat; the only one, in other words, whose perspective approaches our own
privileged understanding of the situation. We register her horror as she stumbles on the corpses of her friends; her paralysis in the face of death duplicates those moments of the universal nightmare experience on which horror frankly trades. When she downs the killer, we are triumphant. She is by any measure the slasher film’s hero.” (Clover 79) Here we can come to understand how the role of gender plays a large part in our identifying the with the characters in the movie and decided which characters we can emotionally connect with the most.

 For in most films, the male identification usually consists of finding a character in which we ourselves can see and understand what actions the individual takes. Essentially, we find our sympathies with the male character who may be the perceived killer and switch it over the the final girl, who we can then identify with just as well. This switching of sympathies illustrates how gender issues can be tackled and how the audience can find ways to identify with mutiple genders who represent our own oppressed feelings. Clover states, “ Alien and Aliens, with whose space-age female Rambo, herself a Final Girl, male viewers seem to engage with ease, can doubt the phenomenon of cross-gender identification.” (Clover 80) Here we can see how males can change their perceived identification to that of the female, when original thoughts would dictate that this was not possible. This psychoanalysis illustrates how certain aspects of a specific gender can in fact represent the opposite gender and find a person identifying on either side of the issue, ultimately opening up the realm of how we create characters and their attributes. 

Carol J. Clover. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, No. 20, (1987)