Something is wrong at Crystal Lake: Monstrous Nature in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

Jason J. Wallin

In the expository montage of Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), camp counsellor Paul Holt rehearses an omen well established in prior installments of the franchise: something is wrong at Crystal Lake. In a flashback to the original film, town local “Crazy” Ralph proselytizes that Camp Crystal Lake is plagued by a “death curse.” Ralph’s warning is redoubled in another scene drawn from the franchise’s first film, in which a truck driver warns that Camp Crystal lake is “jinxed.” Akin to its franchise predecessors (Friday the 13th Part III excepted), much of The Final Chapter centers on the largely abandoned setting of Crystal Lake and its surrounding forest. The ill-fated teenagers who narrowly arrive at the remote destination bemoan the effort involved in finding it. Coming across Trish and Tommy Jarvis’ broken down car, The Final Chapter’s ‘tritagonist’ Rob Dier concernedly comments, “I didn’t think anyone lived out here.”

Proving local lore correct, the forest surrounding Camp Crystal Lake is anything but abandoned. As the teenage party-goers prominently featured throughout the film approach Crystal Lake, they are pursued by something vague and terrible. While it is revealed that the film’s obscured stalker is none other than Jason Voorhees returning to the scene of his childhood trauma, it is significant that the rising sense of dread evoked throughout the body of the film is composed largely through the ‘inhuman gaze’ of the camera withdrawn under the cover of the woods. Throughout the body of the film, Jason becomes largely indistinguishable from the remote wilderness of Camp Crystal Lake with which he seems filmically allied. That is, the wilderness mise-en-scene of The Final Chapter suggests Jason’s existence, but significantly, the film’s antagonist is often visually absent but for his fragmentary and sudden emergence from the cover of forest. Disappeared into the ecological backdrop, Jason’s presence is made to suffuse the surroundings, imbuing the cinematic frame with a sense of imminent danger and dread of which the film’s characters are suitably unaware. For alike the dense vegetation that both floods and yet disappears into the cinematic background of The Final Chapter, Jason seems both ubiquitous and yet, remote to the life-world of the characters that populate the film.

Jason’s alliance with the obfuscating veil of wilderness is vaguely redoubled in his mask, where clusters of holes mimicking the natural patterns made by insects, worms, and wounds appear in lieu of a standard human face. Jason’s mask evokes fear not for its cultural reference, but for its evocation of such horrors as diseased tissue (Morgellons disease, necrobiosis, xanthomas, etc.) and the markings of venomous animals (poison dart frog, blue ringed octopus, marbled cone snail, etc.) commensurate with trypophobia – the so-called evolutionary fear of dangerous and revulsive patterns in nature.[1] In distinction to the human face adopted by Michael Myers or the horribly scarred yet recognizably human face of Freddy Kruger, Jason’s mask harkens to another point of reference. Eschewing his resemblance to the human, Jason adopts an inhuman guise allied with the deadly patterns and markings of an endarkened natural world. Jason’s filiation with nature is elsewhere dramatized through his non-violent relation to animals. While Jason pursues his human prey with singular vengeance, his fidelity to animals is illustrated in the film through his ‘letting-be’ of Tommy and Trish’s canine companion, Gordon. Herein, The Final Chapter composes an image of Jason that both allies with nature and enters into indistinction with its most inhuman, unfamiliar aspects.

The confused resemblance of Jason and Crystal Lake links the film’s brutal acts of antagonism to the ‘monstrous nature’ of the forest and lake from which Jason’s drowned body is “rebirthed.” Such cinematic confusion intimates a nuptials between Jason and a natural world perverted by human degeneracy and intolerance. Yet, the alliance between Jason and Crystal Lake also points to the monstrous nature of the lake itself. As the opening scenes of The Final Chapter suggest, Jason’s return occurs from “under” the darkened waters of Crystal Lake as a monstrous surrogate from which he is birthed into ghoulish ‘unlife.’ The endarkened womb of Crystal Lake finds little reflection in the vitalist or “beneficial” character often attributed to nature, and where the lake is often represented as but a passive backdrop to human leisure and enjoyment, The Final Chapter transpires its occulted, lethal character. For ultimately, the image of nature developed in The Final Chapter is unlinked from its passivity as a filmic ‘backdrop’ and rejoined with Jason’s vengeance. Jason and Crystal Lake not only blur into filmic indistinction, but into symbiotic relation wherein the lake and wilderness come to function as an obfuscating veil for Jason’s brutal assault. Herein, The Final Chapter modulates the stalker trope in its nascent speculation on what might be dubbed an ‘eco-stalker’ film. As director Joseph Zito dramatizes through the intermixing of Jason’s final assault with the elemental fury of a thunderstorm, Jason appears less as a human than a force of nature. Herein, and throughout the film, Zito’s direction portrays nature as less ‘for us’ or rather, as a neutral screen for the expression of our desires, than an endarkened staging-point for ambush and suffering. The wilds of Crystal Lake are made to resonate with the ancient Greek concept of loxos, which in opposition to the clarity of logos, or truth, designates a ‘place of ambush’ or ‘holey space’ withdrawn from the presumption that reality is as we think it.[2]

Camp Crystal Lake and its surrounding wilderness resemble neither the image of a beneficent, life-giving natural world, or the image of a “cultured nature” emblemized in the oversexed desires of the film’s teenagers. The confused intersection of Jason and Camp Crystal Lake suggests another darker, natural order. In overt fashion, The Final Chapter dramatizes the tension of two natural drives – that of life (vitalism) and death (thanatosis). The teens who descend upon Crystal Lake are made to resemble nature’s vitalist character, with a majority of scenes depicting their life-world awash with the pursuit of reproductive pleasure and sexual adventurism. In an ongoing depiction of the link between the vitality of youth and sexual desire, Jimmy obsesses over Teddy’s persistent ribbing that he’s a sexually impotent “dead fuck”. The significance of Jimmy’s preoccupation with Teddy’s joke is drawn throughout the film and underscores one of its founding anxieties. Astride the desire for pleasure emblematized in the film’s depiction of youth, there persists another force that advances toward pleasure’s extinction. In adversarial contrast to the desires of the film’s youth, Jason functions as a force of indomitable and inhuman destruction. As elsewhere in the franchise, The Final Chapter imagines Jason as thantosis incarnate. This posed, it is important that Jason’s thanatotic death-drive is connected to the negation of a particular form of desire. The dark history of Camp Crystal Lake might be rejoined here, for the “curse” that bedevils the lake and wilderness is precipitated by the seeming corruption of nature perpetrated through the immoral acts and negligence of the camp counsellors resulting in the drowning of 8-year-old Jason Voorhees in the summer of 1933.

The significance of desire in The Final Chapter resonates within the socio-cultural anxieties of mid 1980s America, particularly in regard to the emerging pretensions of consumer freedom and corollary fashioning of consumer freedom as a measure of social health and well-being. The end of the 1970s stagflationary period and the stock market boom of the 1980s saw both a reinvigoration of consumerism and an increasing socio-economic pressure toward ‘conspicuous consumption’, or rather, of overt consumption linked to social status and mobility.[3]The film’s focus on oversexed desire and bourgeois hedonism are coextensive with the new axiomatics of mid-1980s capitalist ‘enjoyment’ (“Coca-Cola, enjoy”), ‘overconsumption’ (“I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”), and the pursuit of pleasure without consequence (‘What Happens Here, Stays Here”). The injunction to ‘enjoy’ characteristic of mid-1980s consumerism is obliquely referenced through the youthful freedom, carelessness, and privilege of most youth that populate the film. In distinction, the film’s quintessential “final girl,” Trish, appears most responsible and obligated to familial duties, which she consistently prioritizes above invitations to join her peer partygoers. Anxiety over pleasure’s legislation as a compulsory attitude occurs in relation to the overt conformism demanded within the film where, for instance, a reluctant Jimmy is pressured into skinny-dipping with his friends. Elsewhere, the ‘obligation to enjoy’ persists via Jimmy’s ongoing anxiety that he’s a “dead fuck.” Such anxiety explicitly links the libido to the expectation of sexual confidence and prowess.

Despite the obligation of enjoyment and the worry of its inaccessibility drawn throughout the film, The Final Chapter is entirely unique for the fact that nearly all of its teenage characters realize some degree of sexual gratification. The interruption of sexual pleasure is a trademark of both earlier and latter installments of the franchise, where Jason figures more prominently as a force of prohibition and an index of conservative idealism ushered forward by the ‘iron hand’ of Reaganomics and Thatcherism.[4] Where prior installments of the franchise prominently featured the violent interference of sexual nuptials and the deferral of orgasmic pleasure, The Final Chapter presents the new socio-economic mood of the mid-1980s. For ultimately, The Final Chapter imagines the immediateness and accessibility of all desires. This aspect marks a significant shift in the Friday the 13th franchise, wherein Jason figures less as a force prohibiting pleasure and enacting Oedipal, moral conservatism. No longer the arbiter of “phallic” prohibition often attributed to the figure, Jason’s function is made to relate to pleasure differently, occurring less as an analogue to moral panic than the articulation of new anxieties coextensive with the rise of bourgeois hedonism throughout the mid-1980s.

The Final Chapter might be said to imagine two “natures.” The first is founded on the image of a rising bourgeois consumer class given expression by the vacationing teens and their pursuit of pleasure. The libidinal drive of the teens is shaped around the contours of culturally defined sexuality where such acts as Jimmy’s spastic dance to Lion’s ‘Love is a Lie’ stand-in as a courtship ritual and performance of vitalism. The cultural shaping of sexuality is further dramatized across a number of scenes in which a sexually-rejected Teddy watches a pornographic film dating to the inception of Camp Crystal Lake in the 1930s. While the teens of The Final Chapter are undoubtedly made to represent “culture” and its immediate, surface pursuits, they concomitantly function to articulate the ways in which ‘natural’ drives are routed through the cultural imaginary. Such cultural reformatting of nature is juxtaposed in The Final Chapter through the transpiration of an antithetical natural order. Where the teens come to figure in an image of nature driven by the vitalist axioms of neoliberal capitalism under which pleasure and enjoyment become mandated, the endarkened nature of Crystal Lake conspires to remit such vitalism to its horrific underside. Crystal Lake’s ‘small town’ values are made to directly contrast with the hedonism of the city, and so too, the city’s glossy image of ‘vitalism’ becomes in the course of the film measured against the forest’s endarkened natural order. The Final Chapter herein creates an augury on the disappearance of small-town America and its attendant values under the motors of consumer culture, and further, the reformatting of such disappeared places as Crystal Lake as a leisure ‘playground’ for a re-emerging consumer class.

The contrast between the vitalism of consumer culture and of a natural world in which we are yet enchained in mutual fate is reflected in The Final Chapter’s portrayal of nature. Where the film’s party-going teens figure as emblems of culture and its revaluation of the world as but a passive backdrop for their pleasure, the film composes an image of the natural world born in antagonism to the presupposition that the world is for-us.[5] In distinction to the refashioning of ‘life’ corollary to the glossy aesthetics of MTV, the hyperactive ‘overproduction’ of the mid-1980s marketing industry, and compulsory happiness ‘mandated’ by popular consumer markets, Crystal Lake is conceived in fidelity to another reality. Against the meteoric rise of the 1980s media simulacrum and abstract expansion of consumer markets advanced under the accelerating impulses of globalization, Crystal Lake exists as a reminder of ‘real’ places forged from the indelible trauma of their ‘forgotten’ past. Antagonistic to the image of nature as a passive background and fated to its exploitation by a culture it is made to serve, The Final Chapter forcefully habilitates the immanence of death rendered unthinkable from the vitalist perspective of the film’s youth. Such tensionality might be understood as an anxious rejoinder that the capitalist mantra of ‘fun and satisfaction’ is haunted by the immanence of doom, redoubling the Christian caveat memento mori (remember that you must die) against the Dionysian dictum nunc est bibendum (now is the time to drink). At a time of accelerating consumer excess, The Final Chapter articulates the inescapability of death, rendering together the axiom to enjoy the inevitable decline, herein mirroring both the anxiety of economic downturn experienced throughout the late-1970s stagflationary period as well as the anxieties of having to ‘grow up’ and face the sobering consequences of individual and collective choices.

Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter diagrams a moment of socio-political tension intimate to mid-1980s America. The pleasure-principle of the mid-1980s consumerist boom dramatized throughout the film is harried by its dark twin, thanatosis. So, too, is its attitude of enjoyment beset by the threat of immanent reversal. The film advances an implicate juxtaposition of culture and nature and forges a stealth commentary on the sublimation of rural life and wilderness under cosmopolitanism. The “return of the repressed” features through the film and primarily through the repetition of Crystal Lake’s place-based trauma and Jason’s impossible resurrection from the abyssal depth of the lake. It is here that The Final Chapter articulates the emergence of a remote world that resists against the libidinal conjunction of enjoyment and pleasure commensurate with the socio-economic boom of the mid-1980s. From the vantage of the vacationing youth, Crystal Lake is but a libidinal ‘playground.’ Yet, as The Final Chapter dramatizes, the image of the world for-us intersects with an endarkened nature antithetical to the hedonistic desires of man in its demonstration of human ignorance and fragility.

Where the name “Crystal Lake” is suggestive of nature’s transparent and benign character, there manifests in the film an obscured and remote world in which human fate is yet entwined. Crystal Lake comes to function as a strange attractor toward which the film’s action and characters are drawn and importantly, the revelation of Crystal Lake’s tragic history in the form of found newspaper clippings becomes the fulcrum by which Tommy and Trish survive Jason’s assault. The Final Chapter features the return of a monstrous nature born from the machinations of man, and returns the viewer to the primal tableaux of upon which life is rejoined to its decay and extinction. While the Friday the 13th franchise has been canonically interpreted as a morality play in which Jason dramatizes the conservative values and prohibitive social order of the 1980s, The Final Chapter posits a more nuanced relation to its cultural background. For The Final Chapter is not simply a narrative about prohibition, but of the symbolic link of consumption and pleasure to its reversibility. Here, The Final Chapter gives expression to another nature astride the conflation of vitalism and enjoyment emblematic of 1980s America. If this endarkened nature represents anything, it is the doom of the present order of things and the ruination of a culture to whom the world is presumably ‘given.’ It is in this way that The Final Chapter might be thought as an ‘eco-stalker’ for its dramatization of nature’s symbolic enchainment to death, and so too, for the monstrous nature that rises in antagonism to life’s fashionable reformatting within the engines of interminable and obligatory consumerism.

Notes:

[1] Adam

[2] Lambert, 222

[3] Page, 83

[4] “Ronald Regan, American Slasher”

[5] Thacker, 102.

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Works Cited:

Adam, David. “Trypophobia: Why a fear of holes is real – and may be on the rise.” New Scientist, 15 Jan. 2020, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24532650-800-trypophobia-why-a-fear-of-holes-is-real-and-may-be-on-the-rise/.

Lambert, Gregg. “What the Earth Thinks.” Deleuze and Space, edited by Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert, Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp. 220-39.

Page, Christine. “A History of Conspicuous Consumption.” SV – Meaning, Measure, and Morality of Materialism, edited by Floyd W. Rudmin and Marsha Richins, Association for Consumer Research, 1992, pp. 82-87.

“Ronald Reagan: American Slasher.” H8urs, n.d., https://www.8hours.com/essay/ronald-reagan-american-slasher-renegade-cut.

Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of this Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Vol. 1. Zero Books, 2011.