I’ve started reading Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, and the first chapter focuses on slasher films, movies in which “a psychokiller slashes to death a string of mostly female victims” (21). Clover analyzes several slasher films (including Psycho, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and identifies the source of the killer’s psychotic behavior as some form of sexual frustration or dysfunction, normally developed in childhood.
Although I have been a fan of horror films since I was a child, I’ve always avoided these slasher films – to this day, I haven’t seen many of those which are discussed in the texts I’ve been reading. However, there is a more recent slasher film that I have seen, May, which stands out in my mind because it seems to contradict a lot of Clover says about gender in slasher films.
May (the debut film by director Lucky McKee) is about a young woman who is a bit of a social misfit. She lives on her own, and it’s never really made clear where her parents are or what happened to them, and her only companion is a doll she keeps locked in a glass box. May works as a veterinarian’s assistant, which has allowed her to perfect her sewing skills, but other than her job, her life is uneventful…
Until she meets Adam, an aspiring filmmaker who appreciates May’s eccentricities. May falls for him (and for his hands, which she finds especially appealing), but when the two share a kiss, their budding relationship dies. May bites a bit too hard for Adam’s liking, and he gets freaked out by her behavior.
This rejection seems to set a trigger off inside of May. For the rest of the film, we witness May luring victims to her house where she butchers them, saving her favorite parts to use later in assembling a life-size doll that she can later cuddle and adore. The best things about this doll are that it will embody every beautiful thing May has seen in her victims, and it will never reject her. Rejection, which May has received from her parents and her peers, will never be an option for the doll – it’s not alive.
I think May is an interesting film to view in contrast to Clover’s ideas of slasher films. While Clover says something interesting about the male fury in the slasher film’s psychotic characters, I think it’s ultimately one-sided. To Clover, psychotic tendencies are the result of male sexual dysfunction and anger toward the opposite sex (the mother figure, specifically), but if she (and the rest of us) has unfortunately forgotten that women can be crazy, too?
Sexual dysfunction occurs (or is discovered) less frequently in women, and I think that’s one of the reasons why we see women portrayed less often as serial killers or psychotics. However, I think it’s interesting when we do see women portrayed as killers… especially when their rage is as passionate as May’s.
I think May tries to say something about psychological development. The absence of parental figures haunts the viewer’s mind; throughout the film, one questions where May’s parents are and how they could let their daughter grow into this troubled person. Not having parents has caused May’s to act differently than her peers. Although she is forced to grow up and care for herself by getting a job and supporting herself financially, she is also emotionally needy and immature. She clings to her doll for love, and on the rare occasions when people talk to her, she frightens them away with her all-too-sudden, obsessive devotion.
Because May has not integrated herself fully into society, she isn’t aware of how to interact with others. May just doesn’t play well with others (a form of rule-breaking and abjection?), and when she frightens people, she does the only thing she can do to keep them in her life: she kills them. The doll that May makes will represent the companion she’s never had, and will never have due to her failure to adjust to social order.
Posted by Kate Cielinski at October 22, 2004 9:13 PM