Dustin Dunaway
The slasher film is one of the few subgenres in which the female character gets most of the attention. “Final Girls” are a trope all their own, and rightly so, given the importance of gender to the slasher formula. But the surfeit of expendable male characters also leaves some areas unexamined. A genre that gives us the woman as fighter certainly has some things to say about men and, more importantly, the types of masculinity that were acceptable in the 1980s. While the mainstream was feeding us Rambo, Rocky, and ‘Ahnold,’ slasher movies were doing something far more subversive with their male characters.
Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980) situates manhood in several ways. Despite Helen Reddy’s ringing in the decade by belting out the feminist anthem “I Am Woman,” it was still a man’s world in 1980. In the brief time before they are dispatched by an unseen killer in the opening scene of Friday the 13th, camp counsellors Barry and Claudette have a flirtatious lover’s spat over whether Claudette is a better kisser than one of the other girls (Mary Anne) at camp. Barry responds, “How would I know?” but he says it in a way that tells us that he knows all too well what kind of kisser Mary Anne is. Cunningham’s stated goal in this first film of the successful franchise was to bring in the horny, teenage audience–and introducing them immediately to the sexual dramas of teenagers was certainly one way to do it.
The most striking differences in masculinity in Friday the 13th are marked by generation. The older men in the film come across as creepy, even predatory. While Enos, the truck driver, shoos away Crazy Ralph (Walt Gorney) when Ralph accosts Annie, he’s not above getting way more handsy than is necessary when helping Annie (Robbi Morgan) into the cab of the truck. This predatory behavior is continued in Steve Christy (Peter Brouwer), the camp’s patriarch. When the audience meets Steve and Alice (Adrienne King), there is an implied relationship between them, and while we never get official ages of the characters, it’s apparent that there is a sizable gap between the two. Alice uncomfortably freezes as Steve brushes her hair and calls her pretty.
All of this could easily be explained away as a necessary element of the slasher film – the creation of red herrings – but for the fact that the portrayal of older, less sexually viable men is so consistently rapacious. It’s a facet of gendered interaction that women sitting in the theater in 1980 would have been well acquainted with. “I’d say she’s doing a woman’s hardest job: juggling wolves,” Grace Kelly tells James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). In some form or fashion, each of the female camp counselors in Friday the 13th struggles to keep a wolf at bay.
The younger male characters are equally oversexed, but there are marked differences in the way that Cunningham portrays their desirability. Bill (Harry Crosby) isn’t given much characterization throughout the first two-thirds of the film – no doubt to bolster his bona fides as a red herring. His infamous snake-chopping scene is portrayed as cold and calculating, evincing the type of masculinity that is unfeeling, devoid of emotion. This is in stark contrast to the scenes that precede the snake killing. Bill seems jovial and joking with Alice just a few minutes earlier in the film, and he comes across as coolly extroverted during the ‘Strip Monopoly’ sequence.
But perhaps no dynamic so clearly illustrates the argument of R.W. Connell’s Masculinities as the divide between Ned Rubenstein (Mark Nelson) and Jack Burrell (Kevin Bacon). Connell argues that masculinity is not static; it is predicated on social position and environment. Therefore, what makes a man masculine in one context may be irrelevant in another. This also applies to time and place.
Jack, as portrayed by a young, buff Kevin Bacon, is the epitome of late-1970s masculinity. Sheepishly provincial while also being a sexual dynamo, Jack evinces an “aw shucks” appeal straight out of an Andy Gibb music video. While he displays a certain ruggedness in his beat-up pick-up truck, it’s not hard to imagine he plans on blowing all that summer camp money on a bitchin’ new Trans-Am that he’ll spend every weekend waxing in the driveway to Ted Nugent’s “Stranglehold.” If we view masculinity as John Bowlby viewed relationship attachment styles, we can see that Jack Burrell falls firmly into a “securely masculine” style. As an audience, we don’t spend a tremendous amount of time with him, but the glimpses we do get reveal no insecurity for Jack about who he is. While “Neddy” awkwardly flirts with Marcie (Jeannine Taylor) on the way to the camp, asking if there will be other pretty girls like her, Jack displays the casual confidence of someone sure that he’ll be in Marcie’s bed at the end of the night.
Jack Burrell (Kevin Bacon) was the epitome of teen masculinity in the 1970s
Conversely, Ned’s squirrely look-at-me antics reveal a young man struggling as a non-Jack in a world that expects nothing but Jacks. If we stick with Bowlby’s categorizations, Ned demonstrates the “preoccupied masculinity” style. As a character, Ned exists for twenty-two minutes over eight scenes in the film. In each of those eight scenes, Ned does something to either center the focus on himself or undermine the secure masculinity of others, especially when his own masculinity is challenged. Although few side characters are developed in the Friday the 13th films, even the filler reveals the dynamic between Ned and the other men to be one of contrast. This is more apparent when viewing the scenes as they are structured.
While Ned’s toying with Marcie goes nowhere, his subsequent flirting with other women doesn’t go much better. Upon arriving at the camp, he immediately ingratiates himself with Brenda (Laurie Bartram) by nearly killing her with an arrow and a bad Bogart impression. When that approach is unsuccessful, he deceives her into thinking he’s drowning and then sexually assaults her on the pier, alienating almost everyone at the camp. During the snake scene in the cabin, it is Ned who fearfully hides behind the women and then panic-jumps onto the bed, creating chaos, while Bill stoically hacks the snake to pieces. In the next scene, Ned is dancing around in an indigenous headdress and quipping with Officer Dorf while the rest of the crew takes the latter’s warning about Crazy Ralph seriously. Immediately after that, Alice finds Ralph skulking in the pantry, and it is Ned who unconvincingly tries to intimidate Ralph into leaving. Ned’s cracking voice as he reprimands Ralph to “Get the hell out of here, man!” is a far cry from the secure masculinity of Bill or Jack.
Things just get worse for Ned. The camp loses power and Jack interjects helpfully, “Steve taught me to use the emergency generator.” Already pushing his insecure, showy conduct to the hilt, Ned frames this as a criticism. “God, don’t ya just love that macho talk: ‘emergency generator,’” he mocks. It is at this point that everyone else in the room openly tries to get away from Ned. The next time we see Ned, he is sulking and watching Jack and Marcie make out from afar. This is also the last time we see him alive.
Ned (Mark Nelson) irritates Brenda (Laurie Bartram) and the others with his juvenile antics
Although this duality of secure and preoccupied masculinities is brief and is embodied by two “cannon fodder” characters, the ideology of the film is clear: Jack Burrell is how real men should act – rugged, self-assured, and mature; Ned Rubenstein is just a boy cosplaying as a man. As symbols go, they are fleeting but palpable, and when it came time for the sequel, those symbols evolved into outright stereotypes.
Gawky redhead scamp Ted Bowen (Stuart Charno) ostensibly takes over the role of Prankster from Ned in Part 2 (1981), but while his pranks are more over-the-top and infuriating – he has Jeff (Bill Randolph) and Sandra’s (Marta Kober) truck towed and later leaps out at the campers during the scariest part of Jason’s origin story – his jokes seem to be more about amusement than pleadingly trying to get people to notice him. Ted has no designs on any of the women at camp, nor is he in competition with any of the men. He neither flouts authority, nor embraces it. In fact, he seems dismissive of the kind of macho gender roles his peers are clinging to throughout the film. In this, Ted can be categorized as “dismissive-masculine.” Dismissive-Attachment is described as an aloof, or apathetic, view of relationships.[i] Ted dismisses the need to form a relationship with his perfectly masculine self. He simply doesn’t adopt the existing roles and seems comfortable with that. So, in that respect, Ted cannot be Ned’s successor.
Instead, that role falls to Scott Cheney. Passed over as a slasher “Prankster” because he is played by former model Russell Todd, Scott recreates Ned’s preoccupied masculinity to a tee. When we first meet Scott, we’re actually looking through his eyes at the disembodied buttocks of Terry McCarthy (Kirsten Baker) in one of the series’ Male Gaze-iest shots. He playfully slingshots a pebble that gets her attention and follows it up with a come-hither stare. Instead, Terry brushes him off as annoying. She rejects him again when he asks her to dance and then makes him promise to discontinue the juvenile antics before she will cut him out of a snare trap. That Terry is not the object of affection for anyone else at camp allows Scott’s preoccupied masculinity to remain impish to the end.
If Scott is the Prankster, then Jeff Dunsberry (Bill Randolph) is certainly the Jock. Although the two never interact, they are positioned in the same clashing archetypal roles as Ned and Jack were in the first film. Jeff bumbles through most of the film, coming off as, frankly, a dumber version of Jack Burrell. He’s still presented as the (mostly) innocent beefcake of the cast, and though he suffers the same fate as Scott in the end, he is presented as the more competent, sexually desirable of the two.
This pattern of conflicting secure and preoccupied masculinities would continue in 1982’s Part III (or Part 3-D, if you prefer), with Andy Beltrami (Jeffrey Rogers) and Shelly Finkelstein (Larry Zerner). In this case, Andy and Shelly are presented as much closer friends than the men in previous films. In fact, one of the more interesting parts of the paradigm is that Andy has taken Shelly under his wing, almost as a masculinity mentor. Shelly’s self-destructive behavior is old hat by the third installment, and instead of disowning him, Andy tries to convince Shelly to behave in a more securely masculine fashion. “Be yourself,” Andy scolds, to which Shelly retorts, “Would you be yourself if you looked like this?” It’s the first glimpse of the truly conservative nature of high school sexual politics. “Sorry,” Shelly apologizes to his blind date, Vera (Catherine Parks), immediately recognizing that he’s been pigeonholed into the not-Jack category. Unlike its predecessors, Friday the 13th, Part III paints the behaviors of men? as a reaction to, rather than a reason for, not fitting in. In many ways, Shelly is a precursor to the involuntarily celibate Nice Guys™ that would come to permeate the pop culture landscape over the next few decades.
The secure/preoccupied model would be turned on its ear in the fourth installment. The Final Chapter (1984) is widely praised among fans, and even some critics, for having the most well-rounded characters of the first four films. Much of this is likely due to the way the film disrupts the already tired tropes of masculine characters. While we do have four male characters, two of the characters embody the masculine tropes more distinctly than the others. Ted(dy Bear) Cooper (Lawrence Monoson) and Jimmy Mortimer (Crispin Glover) are engaged in a conversation about Jimmy’s sexual prowess, or lack thereof, which leads to Ted branding Jimmy “Dead F***.” Unlike Andy and Shelly’s friendship, which genuinely seems to be based on Andy wanting to help his friend, Ted and Jimmy’s friendship is based in Ted berating Jimmy’s wanting masculinity. Of course, the joke is ultimately on Ted, as Jimmy winds up with beautiful twin, Tina (Camilla More), while Ted’s increasing desperation and lack of self-awareness turns Tina’s sister, Terri (Carey More), off.
Interestingly, this dynamic between secure and preoccupied masculinities presaged many of the teen sex comedies of the 1980s. Indeed, it was the preoccupied and dismissive masculine characters who would win the day by the late 80s and early 90s—a feat tied to overcoming the confident jock bully and getting the girl by winning the All-Valley Karate Tournament, skiing the K12, or defeating the Alpha Betas in the Greek Games.
Jason (Steve Dash), in Friday the 13th, Part 2, exists in an abject space outside of conventional gender roles
As with all categorization, though, these models leave out “the Other.” Nowhere is the Other more personified than in Jason Voorhees, a character who stands in direct opposition to various models of manhood. Jason is what gender scholar and literary critic Julia Kristeva might call “abject.”[ii] For one thing, it is implied that Jason was disabled before he met his untimely death. “Jason should have been watched! Every minute! He was… he wasn’t a very good swimmer,” his mother explains, stopping herself from revealing anything more about him. For many scholars, especially in the 1980s, disability, which implies a dependence and helplessness, stands diametrically opposed to masculinity, which necessitates power and autonomy.
Unlike Part 2’s Mark Jarvis (Tom McBride), who lost the use of his legs in a motorcycle accident after a presumably “normal” childhood, Jason isn’t sexually available. He has no social or economic expertise. He stands utterly outside of masculine categorization. And yet, he dominates relevant forms of masculinity, literally crushing the life out of men who were portrayed as rugged, even hyperviolent, individuals. Kristeva argues that the abject is horrific because of the feelings of revulsion we feel when the familiar is altered in a way that challenges our hegemonic views. For Kristeva, the greatest example of the abject was the corpse, which we experience as a challenge to our feeling of vitality.
Jason fits the “abject” moniker in three ways. First, as a killer, he is the embodiment of Death for teenagers who should be able to live another 60 years in a fair world. Neither dead nor alive himself, Jason resides in a liminal space that should not exist. This is true even before he is resurrected in Jason Lives (1986). The lore itself places Jason in the spaces of both the dead and the living. Jason also fulfills the abject in a second way. His appearance is grotesque, the antithesis of “the lovely, nubile young girls” that permeate the series.[iii] If the teenage dream is to be with the beautiful and naked campers in an idyllic setting, then Jason Voorhees is the teenage nightmare. His disfigured face twisted in a rictus of a horrific grin, Jason is repulsive to our dominant idea of beauty. This is so apparent that Jason himself recognizes that he must cover his face, lest the screams of terror be directed at him and not the violence that he’s about to inflict. Finally, Jason fulfills the abject by being a “Mama’s Boy.” In the second film, Ginny (Amy Steel) speculates that Jason might be “a child trapped in a man’s body.” Because one facet of masculinity is independence, Jason’s emotional attachment to his mother stirs a pathetic disgust in the audience. With his agency experienced primarily through his maternal fantasies, he exists neither as subject nor object, neither fully masculine, nor fully feminine.
Despite their reputation as brainless popcorn movies, the Friday the 13th films provide us with a snapshot of reactionary sexual politics in a post-second-wave environment, launching a conversation about the rules of gender and sexual development—especially masculinity—that came to define the teen-oriented films of the 1980s.
Notes:
[i] Connors, 475-93.
[ii] Kristeva, 1-31.
[iii] Flory, 11.
Works Cited:
Bowlby, John. Separation, Anxiety and Anger. Vol 2 of Attachment and Loss. Hogarth, 1973.
Connell, R. W. Masculinities. 1995. University of California Press, second edition, 2005.
Connors, M. E. “The Renunciation of Love: Dismissive Attachment and its Treatment.” Psychoanalytic Psychology, vol. 14, no. 4, 1997, pp. 475-93.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, 1982
Flory, Susy. “Friday 13th: New Blood, Old Story.” The Signal, 20 May 1988, p. 11.
