interview by Kari Lydersen
12.15.03

Daphne Gottlieb’s third book, Final Girl, tells the story of the chick in the slasher flick, the one who is left alive at the end, to tell of the horror that has been done to others and what still might be done to her.

A former slam poet as well as a scholar and professor of feminist film critique, Gottlieb takes on the ever-intriguing issues of gender, sex and death through the lens of the pop cultural phenomenon of horror movies. With structure, diction and timing that reference both her slam days and film editing techniques, she explores the metaphor of the Final Girl, gender norms and the way horror movies (and presumably life itself) play with these gender norms in subtle ways. Some of the works in the book seem glossy and clipped, like a highly-stylized movie, others are full of imagery and wordplay that stimulate the senses and manipulate that mind.

Gottlieb grew up in upstate New York, writing “since she could breathe.” She studied creative writing at Bard College and came back to the form after a stint in corporate America, getting her Masters and teaching at Mills College. She is now based in the Bay Area, working a day job as a word processor at a law firm while taking her writing in new directions and looking for another teaching gig.

Final Girl is published by Soft Skull Press (www.softskull.com). Her previous book of poems, also with Soft Skull, called Why Things Burn, won a Firecracker Alternative Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist.

Gottlieb spoke with LiP during the October Chicago stop of her whirlwind 26-city book tour.

LiP: How has the reception to your book been?

DG: Amazing! I’ve been really surprised and pleased that people get it so much. I’ve had people of all shapes, colors and sizes. I read at a bookstore in Baltimore to four people and to 300 people at Fray Daym [a massive storytelling event] in the Bay Area. I’ve been featured at slams, at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York and during slams in San Antonio and Austin [among others].

LiP: Many people know you more as a slam poet than a writer. Do you still participate in slams, and how do you think the slam scene has changed over the years?

DG: I retired from slams in 1998 after the first nationals. The chief reason was that it was not really compatible with what I do any more. In slams, the scoring system rewards work that makes the audience feel good about themselves, that reinscribes their values. You get rewarded for pleasing people, making palatable work. I don’t think that’s what I want to do as an artist. I want to describe the unfamiliar, the disturbing, to raise uncomfortable questions. You won’t get points in slam for that. Slam made me very aware that I was writing for an audience—before doing slam I worked with Sister Spit—so I come from a very oral background as well as a creative writing background. With a book, the book will go places that you’re not able to go. So you have to make the page speak for itself. Then there are things you can do orally that you can’t do in writing. I’m trying very hard to do both.

So even though I don’t slam anymore, there is still a lot of great energy there, and I still encourage it.

LiP: How does this compare to your other books?

DG: This is the most thematically linked, I was really clear on the trajectory I was taking whereas the others are more loosely associated. I’m interested in gender, the problems we have with the binary gender system, looking at fictional narratives of the femme fatale and the final girl, the ways masculinity is misrepresented in our culture.

LiP: Are you a fan of slasher films?

DG: I admire them, I like them. Like pornos, they’re about bodily fluids, in this case blood and guts—things we normally don’t get to talk about. At their center, slasher films represent all the things we have to suppress to function as a society—incest, mental illness, deformity, death, vomit, blood, feces. They socially mimic what our collective unconscious is doing. In that way they’re very cathartic. And they’re ritualistic—there’s a formula to them to the point where we can satirize them. It’s the same thing in porn—because we understand the formula, we feel like we have control over what’s happening.
But these are essentially conservative forms – the world is always put back in order at the end.

LiP: Do you see them as misogynist or having elements of misogyny?

DG: To see them as misogynist you have to think fairly literally. Carol Clover’s book Men Women and Chainsaws reminds us not to think too literally about gender in horror films, since a lot of times the killer is really coded female and the victim is coded male.

Then you switch from identifying with the killer to the victim in the course of the film—I can’t think of any other forms where that happens.

At the beginning you’re forced to identify with the killer, you have the zombie cam coming up behind the girl, you’re forced to identify with the bad guy. People yell, “Watch out!” or “Don’t go in there!” but it’s in sort of a mocking way. Then toward the end you switch and start identifying with the victim, like at the end of Halloween when Jamie Lee Curtis is in the closet.

The slasher film is only as misogynistic as our culture, it’s leveraging things that are already in our culture. For instance the highly sexualized woman is always killed off, because you can’t have a sexually willing, young nubile survive. It shows us where the boundaries of normative, acceptable behavior are.

LiP: Are you a fan of pop culture and camp?

DG: I guess, as much as anyone else. I taught feminist film theory, with everything from film noire to horror. I’m not as much interested in pop culture without camp, though. I don’t have much use for it. I like the distance camp gives us, the wink and nudge, the commentary that’s inherent in the form.

LiP: I thought one of the most powerful poems in there was about you dressing your mother’s body…

DG: It’s sort of a feminist tenet that we need to break the silence, though that phrase is usually applied to talking about rape and abuse. I think that’s changed a lot over the past generation, but we still don’t talk about death. I was writing this book about death and the Final Girl and suddenly I was in that position. It became very unnerving, and rewarding in a sense. A lot of times I write because I need something. After my mother died I was looking for books about death and loss, and I couldn’t find what I needed. There were the Holy Roller things about giving it up to God, or the weepy books about loss, or highly medicalized books about death. I needed something I didn’t see, so I figured I had to create it.

LiP: Have you gotten much feedback yet about which aspects of the book people are really connecting with?

DG: Not yet, it’s still too soon, though I’ve gotten a few really amazing emails from people—one woman proposed marriage to my poems. I’m interested in hearing about where people are connecting with the book, what they’re finding true, meaningful and exciting. I want to see it through other folks’ len—it’s a real gift when that happens.

I’ve been surprised that I’m selling books two to one to men. I’m thrilled about that. I don’t know what they’re connecting with, are they just seeing it as one of those riot grrl things they can stick under their arm at the coffee shop to impress women? Luckily that doesn’t seem to be the case at all.

LiP: How long have you been writing?

DG: I published my first poem when I was eight. I majored in creative writing at Bard and then my father died and I decided I had to be responsible, so I took a job as managing editor of a stockbroker magazine for six years and did some marketing and communications work.

But at the same time it was making me absolutely miserable. And I’d gotten my first book into print, so I decided that no matter what the personal or financial cost, I needed to take myself seriously as a writer, needed to give myself two years to really concentrate on writing. So I went back to grad school at Mills.

LiP: Do you feel part of a strong literary scene in the Bay Area?

DG: It’s absolutely amazing. I’m lucky enough to be part of a real community, people like Sister Spit, Joel Schalit, Charlie Anders, Lauren Wheeler, Lynn Breedlove, Kirk Reid. It’s a luxury to have these people in my backyard, I feel like we’re in a dialogue that we’re all contributing to. I feel like there’s a bargain, where for every minute I spend on stage I try to spend four minutes in the audience. When people come to listen to you they’re giving you their time, and there’s nothing more valuable than that. You can get more sex, more money, more food but you can’t get more time.

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