Adaptation and Survival: The Selection of Heroic Traits

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Laurie Strode, of the Halloween franchise, survived several times against her supernatural adversary Michael Myers (aka “The Shape”). As a final girl, she represents a character who possesses the fitness to adapt to her environment and, therefore, survive to pass her genes to her offspring (unlike those of her peers whose genetic inheritance wasn't sufficient to ensure their own survival). The question arises, What traits helped Laurie to survive against Myers? What was, in the Darwinian sense, special about her?

Her older sister Judith, the first of Myers's victims, was stabbed to death when Laurie was but a young girl. (At the time, Judith was in her teens, and Myers, her older brother, was six years old.) In January 1965, her parents were killed in a car accident, and four-year-old Laurie was adopted by Morgan and Pamela Strode, who changed her last name to theirs. The governor of Illinois ordered that the adoption records be sealed so that Myers would not be able to connect Laurie Strode to his surviving sister. Eventually, Laurie no longer recalled her original family.

By 1978, Laurie had developed into a shy, introverted, 17-year-old girl who preferred books to boys. The Strodes owned the Myers house, in which Laurie grew up, and Morgan asked her to return the keys to the house. On her way to do so, she spotted a male stranger who seemed to be shadowing her. She learned that one of her friends, Lynda, has also been followed by a mysterious man.

While babysitting Tommy Doyle, the son of neighbors, Laurie was visited by her fellow babysitter, Annie Brackett, who asked Laurie to babysit her charge, Linsdey Wallace, so Annie could be with her boyfriend, Paul Freedman. Reluctantly, Laurie agreed, after Annie promised to break the date she'd arranged, without Laurie's knowledge or consent, between Laurie and Bennett Tramer, a boy in whom Laurie was interested. 

 

When Laurie visited the Wallaces' house to check on Annie, Laurie discovered the bodies of Annie, Lynda Van Der Klok, and Lynda's boyfriend, Bob Simms, positioned throughout the house. Myers, who'd returned to Laurie's (and his own) hometown, Haddonfield, Illinois—he'd been the mysterious figure Laurie had spied following her—attacked Laurie, slicing her arm with his knife. Laurie fell off the second-story landing and down the stairs, fracturing her ankle. She managed to limp to the Doyles' house, calling for the children to admit her. When Tommy did so, she entered the house and locked the door. Myers slipped through a window, attacking Laurie again. 

 

She fended him off, stabbing him in the neck with a knitting needle, before running upstairs. Myers pursued her, cornering her in a bedroom closet. Although he attempted to stab her with his knife, Laurie straightened a clothes hanger, using it to jab Myers in the eye, and he dropped his knife. Laurie picked up the weapon, stabbing Myers in the stomach. He fell to the floor, and Laurie assumed she'd killed him. Leaving the closet, she ordered the children to flee the house. Soon thereafter, Myers began to strangle her, but Laurie pulled his mask away, exposing his face. Myers's former psychiatrist, Doctor Samuel Loomis, arrived and shot Myers six times, each bullet driving him backward, through the bedroom window, and he fell from the balcony. Loomis looked, but Myers was nowhere in sight.

Biographies of the victims in the original Halloween movie (Annie Brackett, Lynda Van Der Klok, and Lynda's boyfriend, Bob Simms) suggest that they have mostly negative traits which advance their needs and desires at the expense of the welfare of others, while the survivor, Laurie Strode's personality traits, which are mostly positive, tend to favor both her own welfare and that of others. As such, Laurie's characteristics allow her to unite with others against a common enemy (as she does in later films of the franchise or to act in support of both her own welfare and that of others, as she does throughout the franchise).

Laurie Strode (Final Girl)	Traits (Green + socially sanctioned; red = socially condemned; uncolored = socially neutral)
	Kindness Shyness Introversion Studiousness Defiance Responsibility Persistence Courage Inventiveness
Annie Brackett (Victim)	Deceptive Sarcastic Hasty Exhibitionistic Impertinent Aggressive Presumptuous Defiant Manipulative Irresponsible Promiscuous
Lynda Van Der Klok (Victim)	Disorganized and unfocused Gregarious Extroverted Social Unscholarly Loud Annoying Promiscuous Brash Defiant Teasing Titillating
Bob Simms (Victim)	Athletic Intelligent Deceptive Irresponsible Defiant Rash

Laurie's positive values are those endorsed by her society and culture, the values of secular humanism, or what the philosopher Friedrich Nietsche calls (and condemns as) “herd morality.” According to Nietsche,

Herd morality is a development of the original slave morality which inherits most of its content, including a reinterpretation of various traits: impotence becomes goodness of heart, craven fear becomes humility, submission becomes ‘obedience’, [sic] cowardice and being forced to wait become patience, the inability to take revenge becomes forgiveness, the desire for revenge becomes a desire for justice, a hatred of one’s enemy becomes a hatred of injustice (Genealogy of Morals).

He condemns herd morality, because, he says,

‘Well-being’ in herd morality limits human beings, promoting people who are modest, submissive and conforming . And so it opposes the development of higher people, it slanders their will to power and labels them evil. Belief in its values limits people who could become higher people, leading them to self-doubt and self-loathing ( Genealogy of Morals).

If Laurie, the final girl, the survivor not only of the original Halloween movie, but also of the entire franchise to date, adheres to herd morality, the victims, those who fail to survive, must represent the opposing morality that Nietsche characterizes as a position “beyond good and evil,” the amoral stance of the superman, which reverses the tenets of the herd morality and could, thus be characterized as its opposite, an amoral position opposed to herd morality and to the original slave morality from which herd morality developed, based on the ideas that—

Heroic Amorality	Herd Morality
Goodness of heart	Impotence
Craven fear	Humility
Submission	Obedience
Cowardice and being forced to wait	Patience
The inability to take revenge	Forgiveness
The desire for revenge	Justice
Hatred of one's enemy	Hatred of injustice

If we list Myers's personality traits, as they are presented or suggested by his behavior, we see a predator motivated by impulses that are considered, as Dr. Loomis later describes them, “pure evil.” In other words, Myers is everything civilized society condemns:

Michael Myers (Predator)	Traits (Green + socially sanctioned; red = socially condemned; uncolored = socially neutral)
	Irrational Sociopathic Amoral Emotionless Evil Murderous Schizophrenic Vengeful Predatory Voyeuristic Violent Persistent Thieving Duplicitous Superhuman stealth, strength, endurance, durability, survivability

For Nietzsche, the opposite of the herd is the “Superman,” a “superior man [who] would not be a product of long evolution; rather, he would emerge when any man with superior potential completely masters himself and strikes off conventional Christian 'herd morality' to create his own values, which are completely rooted in life on this earth. Nietzsche was not forecasting the brutal superman of the German Nazis, for his goal was a “Caesar with Christ’s soul.”

Thus, we see that, although Myers may have some of the traits of the Nietzschean superman, Myers, lacking “Christ's soul,” is not such a figure, nor is he a type of Caesar, for Caesar conquered nations; he did not waste his life murdering individuals for no apparent motive, nor were his foes, for the most part, teenagers, women, children, and helpless men, as were Myers's victims.

If anything, he is a rogue figure, without any redeeming qualities, something neither human nor superhuman, but subhuman. Unless one is a Caesar, the herd is needed to resist such a creature, a herd energized by the traits that make up the final girl, Laurie Strode's character, although she might be better off with the defiance exhibited in her smoking marijuana, a substance which, at the time she used it, was illegal, set apart by society as forbidden and dangerous. (It does no good to argue that, today, the recreational use of marijuana is tolerated, if not accepted, by most of the population, as, ordinarily, a character must be judged by the moral standards—and, indeed, by the laws—of the society of the time; although an act or an institution—whether the smoking of marijuana or slavery—may be reckoned as having been right or wrong by later generations, it is a rare person who transcends a contemporary understanding of right and wrong during his or her own lifetime.)

Faces Not Even a Mother Could Love

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

The mask that you wore, my finger would explore
The costume of desire, excitement soon unfolds. . . .

-- “Easy Ride,” The Doors

Leatherface

Dress has long been used as a means of controlling women. However, the use of “costumes of control” is not what this post is about. It’s about masks. More specifically, it’s about the masks worn by horror movie villains, the “masks” that, in fantasies of pain, suffering, and death, we “would explore,” not so much with our fingers as with our minds. 

• Leatherface, of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, wears a mask.
• Hannibal Lecter, of The Silence of the Lambs, wears a mask.
• The Shape, of Halloween, wears a mask.
• Ghostface, of Scream, wears a mask.
• Jason Voorhees, of Friday the 13th, wears a mask.

Hannibal ("The Cannibal") Lecter

For viewers of these films, these masks are the true faces of the villains who wear them. Their true identities are the hideous personas, or public faces, they display to the world--and, more importantly, to their victims. Designed, as is Spider-man’s mask, to instill terror in the hearts of their adversaries (and their victims), these masks suggest the inhumanity of the human monsters who wear them. Therefore, they are often either ugly and repulsive or featureless and blank.

Michael Myers ("The Shape")

Since the beginning of the horror genre, physical ugliness has symbolized spiritual deformity. Monsters are often--maybe usually--repulsive, with bulging eyes, split skin, flesh full of writhing maggots, rotten teeth or fangs, liver-colored lips, mottled skin, scars, and a host of other unsightly and unseemly facial features.

There are a few beauties among the bevy of beastly killers, usually femme fatales. However, it is more likely that, if a psychopath or a sociopath is not ugly, he or she is nondescript. His or her face is more or less featureless, or blank, as if there is no one home behind the mask of flesh and blood, as if the human who occupies the mask is him- or herself inhuman, a soulless soul, as it were, upon whose plain and vacant, expressionless countenance we may project our own worst fears and suspicions.

Ghostface

They’re faces, in short, that not even a mother could love.