The Final Girl at the U.S.-Mexico Border: The Politics of Saving and Surviving in Undocumented (2010)

Lucia Mulherin Palmer (bio)
University of Texas at Austin

Abstract

In the torture porn film Undocumented (Chris Peckover, 2010), protagonist Liz is a character descended from Carol J. Clover’s Final Girl—she is forced to watch the torture and murder of her peers, while her wit and resilience help her survive. However, the body count surrounding Liz is not composed of sexually active white teenagers, but rather primarily of Mexican migrants. Using Undocumented as a case study, this piece argues for the continuing importance of Clover’s analytical framework and of the Final Girl as a trope, but insists on taking her race, class, and nationality into account.

Three decades ago, Carol J. Clover made a crucial intervention in feminist horror scholarship when she defined the trope of the Final Girl. In the decades since the Final Girl’s first appearances in early slasher films, she has persisted in various iterations that reimagine the slasher subgenre, often self-reflexively or creatively. She continues to materialize in updates and remakes and bleeds into other horror genres and cycles such as the zombie film. In her numerous reappearances, the Final Girl has challenged and reaffirmed Clover’s foundational insights, and remains an entry point into examining sociocultural anxieties, as well as a gauge of feminism’s impact in Western society.

A number of scholars have built on Clover’s work, noting the importance of her intervention as well as providing some important critiques and corrections, especially around Clover’s characterization of the Final Girl in terms of masculine aggression and phallic agency. Nowell argues that characterizing the Final Girl as boyish is a misinterpretation, providing evidence that the characters frequently fit more “conventionally feminine” norms (134). Other scholars are concerned about the utility of the Final Girl’s description as a masculinized proxy for a young male spectator, a structure that Sue Short worries excludes female audiences. Short argues that the character can provide a point of identification not because of her masculinization but because Final Girls are survivors capable of overcoming adversity, who thus “provide an image of self-sufficiency and resilience that sets them apart from female characters generally seen in cinema” (48). Rather than phallic, the Final Girl’s transformation is a rite of passage that makes her a responsible, self-reliant, and capable adult. Pinedo similarly intervenes with a concern for the female viewer, arguing that the Final Girl’s interpretation as a “male in drag” seriously restricts the potential for female agency (Recreational Terror 81). Her actions may be normatively coded as masculine, but they are nonetheless enacted by a young woman, a turn that troubles gender binaries in potentially progressive ways (84). However, the trope of the Final Girl remains relatively unexamined in terms of intersectional identity formations and socio-political struggles. In particular, the ways in which she is constructed in relation to race, class, and nationality are often overlooked, despite her reiteration again and again as a white middle-class US woman.

Although little has been written critiquing Clover for overlooking intersections between gender, sexuality, and race, Kinitra Brooks problematizes the normativity of whiteness embedded in the trope of the Final Girl. The Final Girl, Brooks argues, is compelling because of her ability to subvert Western patriarchy, becoming an agential character who survives due to her capability and intelligence (464). Brooks points out that this relies on her normalized whiteness, through which she is figured as “plucky” (464). This is made clear when contrasted with the stereotype of the “strong black woman” whose survival strategies are pathologized as innately too masculine and aggressive (464). Brooks questions Clover’s reliance on a model of gender as exclusively binary, ignoring its differential manifestations as well as gender’s intersection with race (465). Following Brooks’s insights into the overly binary treatment of gender relations in horror scholarship, this paper calls for deeper engagements with intersectional identities and social constructs in horror film studies. Even self-critical horror films that actively highlight and/or subvert the genre’s sexist and racist tropes¹ reiterate the Final Girl in whitewashed terms. And while the Final Girl might challenge oppressive demands for “proper” Western womanhood and femininity,² she does little to challenge the normativity of whiteness and white femininity and to show how these constructions intersect with normative ideas of US-based “Americanness.”

These tensions, anxieties, and intersections are made visible in writer/director Chris Peckover’s 2010 film Undocumented, a graphically violent horror film that follows a group of mostly white male documentary filmmakers as they travel with a group of undocumented immigrants clandestinely crossing from Mexico into the United States. After the group crosses over to the US side of the border, they are kidnapped by psychotic vigilantes resembling the real-life militia groups that formed part of the Minutemen Project on the Arizona border. The vigilantes take the kidnapped immigrants to an abandoned slaughterhouse where they are undressed, chained, and selected one by one to be tortured and killed. Meanwhile, the vigilantes hold the film crew captive and force the crew members to document the torture and brutalization of the Mexican immigrants with their cameras and audio equipment. Thus, the crew members are coerced into becoming passive witnesses to the vigilantes’ racist violence and are threatened with death at any sign of intervention. Soon the filmmakers themselves become the targets of this psychotic aggression, and are picked off slowly through psychological torment and excruciating physical trials.

Importantly, the film crew includes one female member, Liz (Alona Tal), who emerges as the protagonist most capable of keeping her cool, speaking back intelligently to the captors, assessing their ever-changing captivity, and finally enabling the escape of the remaining captives. Liz is recognizable early in the film as a Final Girl, distinguished from her goofball male crew members by her level-headedness, caution, and responsibility. Like other Final Girls before her, Liz is white, middle-class, and from the United States. This is a significant aspect of her character’s identity and of the film’s narrative, as Liz is not only differentiated from her male peers in the film crew, but also from the Mexican immigrants who are silent victims. Liz’s racialized, classed, and national difference, and the ways in which these intersecting identities enable her empowerment, are further reinforced when juxtaposed with the other female characters in the film, all of whom are of Mexican descent or women of color. Liz’s whiteness must be deconstructed in order to understand how it is rendered the norm for empowered femininity and how this is enabled through her juxtaposition with abject women of color.

A close reading of Undocumented‘s most resonant and longest torture scene, in which a Mexican woman’s body is slowly dismembered as a punishment for her husband’s inability to prove his Americanness while the witnessing crew is unable to intervene, makes visible the intersecting social hierarchies embedded in character development and the mechanics of spectatorship. What emerges is a concealing of “normal” whiteness in contrast to an abhorrent white supremacy, while white, US-centric feminism is written through Liz, the Final Girl, in ways that exclude women of color. The dismemberment of the Mexican woman demonstrates the ways in which national identity and citizenship are formed in relation to the gendered bodies of women of color, as she silently functions as a plot device to reemphasize her assimilating husband’s struggles, Liz’s empowerment, and the psychokiller’s monstrous deviancy. This essay examines the systems of meaning and sociocultural hierarchies embedded in Undocumented in relation to its expressions of certain societal fears and anxieties at this moment of increasingly potent nativism in the United States. Undocumented‘s Final Girl, her relationship to her fellow captives and victims, and her relationship to her psychokiller captors are the primary sites for this investigation. How does the figure of the Final Girl function as an empowered white female protagonist when placed on the US-Mexico border in the context of ever more visible nativist anxieties? How do the layers of identification structured around Liz, her crew, and the abject Mexican immigrant victims rely on normalized racial hierarchies? How do white masculinity and white supremacy manifest on the border, motivated less by a psycho-sexual rage than by a psycho-nativist fury? These central questions look at generic horror tactics in Undocumented to reveal crucial social dynamics that manifest in sometimes progressive and often problematic ways.

Torture Porn and National Anxieties

Undocumented belongs to the recent cycle of horror films commonly known as “torture porn,” a subgenre descended from the slasher that plays with tropes of explicit gore, psychokiller antagonist(s), and sexually charged violence. The slasher’s gusto for bodily pain and horrific violence paves the way for torture porn, a body of work that features abduction, captivity, and torture as its central narrative and aesthetic tactics of fright. Torture porn is identified by film franchises such as Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005), as well as low-budget films like Wolf Creek (2005) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005), all of which demonstrate the potential popularity and profitability of films vividly displaying torture and torment (Edelstein 1; Lockwood 41). In Undocumented, Peckover uses torture porn conventions to grapple with issues of border militarization, chauvinistic nationalism, and xenophobic racism.

Undocumented has a clear lineage in the slasher subgenre, which can be seen through Liz, a character that draws on the Final Girl trope. For Clover, slasher films express the shifting sexual attitudes of their time, and the anxieties unleashed by second wave feminism’s undermining of traditional gender roles (Men, Women, and Chain Saws 62). As she maps out the slasher film’s key elements—the Final Girl, the psychokiller, the Terrible Place, the phallic weapon, and the sexually active victims—Clover also unpacks the ideological components and anxieties that are embedded in these characters, narratives, and cinematic mechanics. Undocumented inherits the slasher’s sexualized violence, especially its tendency to linger on and spectacularly display the deaths of women; its longest and most resonant scene involves the slow dismemberment of a woman’s body. However, torture porn films contain important generic deviations related to post-9/11 anxieties around the penetration of national borders (Edelstein; McMann; Pinedo). In Undocumented, these fears are played out through the cruelty and madness of the film’s psychokillers, the powerlessness of the documentary crew, and the torture of captive undocumented immigrants.

Evidenced by the cycle’s emergence in the new millennium and its preoccupation with claustrophobic captivity and intimately rendered bodily violence, torture porn is closely connected to national fears and debates in the United States after 9/11 and in relation to revelations about the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib (Edelstein; Gartside; Lockwood; Pinedo). Ben McCann understands torture porn as “politically charged allegory” working “to tap into national trauma” by addressing concerns about national invasion written onto the vulnerable human body (33). The spectacularly gory imagery in torture porn films excites audiences, but it is also important that the “attacks on the physical nature of the body allegorize fractures in the national body politic” (31). Thus, in the process of privileging bodily ruination and bloody violence, “the fear of the Other, the fear of invasion, and the fear of corporeal pollution all come into sharp focus” (43). Pinedo argues that torture porn is a “symptomatic and supple genre” that “tap[s] into social anxieties,” therefore helping us deal with disturbing fears and emotions in the context of war, terrorism and concerns over national borders (“Torture Porn” 359).

Torture porn emerged in the United States during a period marked by increasing apprehensiveness about the nation’s southern border with Mexico and a preoccupation with perceived threats from Central American immigration (Chavez). The new millennium witnessed increased visibility of nativist sentiments in the United States, nowhere more evident than in the spectacular performance of border insecurity by the nativist militia groups labelling themselves the Minutemen (Oliviero). Beginning in 2005, these volunteer-based groups patrolled the US-Mexico border in search of unsanctioned border crossers. The armed volunteers claimed to be nonviolent, but nonetheless their militarized demonstrations made visible nativist anxieties about border penetration as well as patriarchal impulses toward aggressive protectionism (Oliviero). These militia groups commanded media attention and inspired or terrified popular discourse surrounding them, desires and fears that are picked up and fleshed out in Peckover’s Undocumented.

Undocumented: Torture Porn on the US-Mexico Border

Released in 2010, Undocumented comes in at the tail end of the peak of the torture porn cycle, but it undeniably belongs to this subgenre due to its excessive aesthetic depictions of the pain and violence of captivity and torture. The reception and reviews of Undocumented tend to focus on its political subject matter, described by the president of IFC Films/Sundance Selects, Jonathan Sehring, as “part of the great tradition of political horror flicks that find the scariest things don’t have to be made up, because they exist within our society” (qtd. in B. Brooks). This description of Undocumented as “political horror” recirculated in numerous press releases and festival promotions for the film, accompanied by descriptions that privilege its themes of immigration and border crossing. Even as recently as 2017, director Chris Peckover continued to situate the film in the context of these national debates and aligned the film with progressive politics.³

Undocumented links its fictionalized cruel violence with the invisible quotidian violence of migration and exploitative labor relations, featuring small characters that speak briefly about dangerous working conditions or unfair wages and tying elements of the story’s torture and captivity to real-world issues (the torture of a drug mule, the administration of a citizenship test, the execution of a smuggler, the removal and commodification of organs, etc.). By bringing the hidden violence embedded in banal practices and processes to light, rendering them in spectacular displays of pain and terror, Undocumented dramatizes material issues in ways that might unroot them from the commonplace. Following Pinedo, we can understand the film in relation to the way cinematic horror “disrupts the world of everyday life” and “explodes our assumptions about normality” (Recreational Terror 18). This upheaval can function on ideological levels, questioning the status quo by recognizing its monstrosity.

Undocumented may help to make explicit the repressed monstrosities that underlie the policing of national borders, presenting psychokiller vigilantes that repulsively mirror a national self and overtly express the nativist racism and colonialist violence that threaten to erupt into the quiet of the everyday. The rhetoric used by the vigilantes continuously mimics real-life nativist discourse circulating in the public sphere, as well as more institutionalized terminology mobilized to justify aggressive border enforcement by the state. This mirroring begins when the immigrants and film crew are kidnapped while being smuggled in the back of a truck and brought to the vigilantes’ lair. Upon arriving at the lair, the truck containing the captives is unlocked and blinding floodlights are aimed at them (a tactic used by the Border Patrol) as a voice in Spanish declares authoritatively, “You will be detained, processed, and judged” (see Fig. 1). This scene mimes the language and the actions of the Border Patrol, but instead of being detained, the immigrants are chained and held hostage in a slaughterhouse.

Fig. 1. The arrival of the kidnapped group at the vigilantes’ lair, where they are told that they have crossed into the United States illegally and will be “detained, processed, and judged.” Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

While the undocumented crossers await violence, the vigilantes separate them from the documentary crew and command the crew members to continue filming, documenting their self-proclaimed “patriotic” practices and philosophy. This request directly contradicts the aims of the film crew’s in-progress documentary, which critiques the labor oppression and quotidian violence enacted on undocumented immigrants. The vigilantes commandeer the media narrative, forcing the progressive aims of the documentary to mutate into a film that passively observes violent nativism lashing out at the bodies of captive immigrants. The first torture scene that the crew is forced to document is that of a male drug mule, who is stripped down, chained to a chair, and forced to swallow a condom full of cocaine while a vigilante yells “take it all!” (making explicit the sexualized implications of this violent oral penetration). After the man vomits the drugs, a vigilante beats the condom into his face with a metal tool, killing the man while yelling that immigrants are destroying the United States and tearing apart American families. The film crew watches in horror and disgust and Liz tries to intervene, shouting “enough, enough of this!” in a futile effort to save the mule’s life (see Fig. 2). Although Liz is spunky, smart, and brave, in this early scene she is unable to contend with the phallic aggression of the vigilantes.

Fig. 2. Liz attempts to intervene in the oral penetration and beating of a drug mule in the first torture scene. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

The film sympathizes with the politics of the film crew, and particularly with Liz, and associates nativist ideologies with unjustifiable violence. The vigilantes adopt commonplace nativist rhetoric while enacting torture, rhetoric that is routinely used in the United States to advocate for more aggressive border patrolling and militarization. The mirrored language and affect between the vigilantes and more quotidian forms of nativism link anxieties over national borders with extreme manifestations of these sentiments. But even as the film may work to question the normalization of violent ideologies, it also maintains many of their assumptions. In particular, the film reproduces racialized and classed hierarchies by leaving the privileging of white, middle-class molds of “American” identity unquestioned, embodied in the white crew members with whom the audience is encouraged to identify. These dynamics are nowhere more evident than with Liz, Undocumented‘s Final Girl. She is the most capable, most resourceful, and most aware. And she is also the most willing to stand up and protest, to fight against the violence she watches enacted on others. In the following discussion, it becomes clear that her empowerment is constructed in relation to the women of color in the film, rendered as voiceless victims. Liz embodies white, Western feminism, assumed as an ideal progressive version of womanhood that is capable of fighting against and surviving a regressive patriarchal order. The normalcy with which she emerges as the leader and survivor speaks to the ways in which her white, Western feminist manifestation is the invisible norm of female empowerment in horror cinema.

The Victims, The Psychokiller, The Final Girl

The viewer is first introduced to the documentary crew members as they ride in a van through southern Texas, affably joking with each other as they head to their next filming location. The dynamics in the van immediately establish the lead characters. Liz is distinguished instantly from her male colleagues, sitting apart from the rest of the crew in the front seat and abstaining from their antics. She displays a no-nonsense attitude, using a kind but authoritative tone of voice to cut short their distractions and keep them on schedule. She bickers with Travis (Schott Mechlowicz), the other lead character and her love interest,⁴ who commands much of the camera and dialogue in the film alongside Liz. As the documentary’s narrator, his viewpoint is also privileged and his monologues help drive the exposition forward. Third in line, in terms of character development and command of perspective, is the film crew’s only person of color, Mexican-American Davie (Greg Serano). Davie is the crew’s lead camera operator and Travis’s best friend, as well as the cousin of some of the immigrants who will become captives. Finally, the two remaining crew members, Jim (Kevin Weisman) and William (Tim Draxl), are both sympathetic characters; they are given emotive reaction shots but are rarely in command and have little narrative agency. This first scene’s jovial dialogue sets up the crew as a tightknit group of friends, each member immediately likeable, thus making them easy and comfortable characters for viewer investment. The early narrative follows the crew members as they drive through south Texas and make their film, eventually journeying into Mexico in order to travel clandestinely back across the border into the United States with the undocumented immigrants.

The horror commences in full after the crew and the immigrants are kidnapped during their crossing. The cameras and crew members are led through the setting of their captivity, revealing the immigrants in their undergarments bound by chains, their skin soft against the cold, industrial tile, the mise-en-scène filled with metal and concrete. The women are in one room bound to the floor, and the men are in another, strung up like animal carcasses with their hands over their heads. It is soon revealed that the setting is an abandoned industrial farm, a location that emphasizes the dehumanizing treatment of the immigrants.

As they walk among the confined bodies, the crew are horrified and exchange nervous glances with one another. A dominating masculine voice is heard just outside of the frame commanding that they “Come here, come closer.” The camera turns the corner, and the viewer is invited to behold the spectacle of the masked vigilantes. The leader and head psychokiller, Z (Peter Stormare), sits in a chair in the middle, surrounded by his compatriots like an entourage for a king (see Fig. 3). The vigilante group is composed of masked men who stand menacingly, directly facing the approaching camera. The camera comes to a halt when confronted by their threatening presence. The vigilantes’ fair skin shows through their masks and clothing, and each is coded in class-based visual markers as embodying a white working-class model of masculinity.⁵ Z is the epitome of this, wearing a black mesh hunting mask, a tan cap, a camo-patterned T-shirt covered by a red flannel shirt and a jean vest. These markers fit with stereotypes of nativist nationalist sects in the US population, in particular by playing with slippages between men who hunt (Z is outfitted head to toe in hunting gear), rural political conservatism, and working-class white men.

Fig. 3. The crew confronts the vigilantes for the first time. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

In constructing the villains as stereotypes, the film separates the liberal, well-educated film crew distinctly from the vigilante killers. This visual division associates white supremacist violence exclusively with forms of Othered whiteness, contrasted with the crew’s rationality and empathy. The vigilantes embody exaggerated forms of white nativism through their dress as well as their speech: they continuously comment that the immigrants are diseased, criminal, and contaminating. Much of what they say codes them as ignorant, as when a vigilante feeds some apples to a captive woman like a pet while calling her “Maria” because he cannot understand her actual name. The distinct contrast drawn between the group of violent white vigilantes and the sympathetic and progressive (mostly) white documentary crew encourages spectatorial identification with the protagonists. The documentary crew members are the only captive characters with enough agency to end the violence. While the immigrant captives are chained and remain largely silent, the crew moves through the facilities documenting the violence, able to see the threats that await. The narrative is rooted in their thoughts and actions, as they not only observe but also react, think, protest, and try to find a way out. And the primary instigator among the crew is Liz, the member who most frequently speaks out against the violence and the natural leader of the group. Like other Final Girls’, Liz’s power comes from her intelligence, level-headedness, and ability to act while her peers succumb to fear, anger, and defeat. She challenges Z in particular, especially in reaction to his diatribes about the ills of immigration during violent scenes of abuse and dismemberment. After witnessing the removal of a man’s kidney, for example, she accuses Z and his group of targeting vulnerable people, saying that, “This is just racism posing as patriotism.”

Point of view shots and subjective camerawork in Undocumented align the viewer with the documentary crew, and especially with Liz. Critical outcry against the slasher genre of the 1970s and 1980s often centered on the alliance created between the spectator and the psychokiller through subjective point of view camerawork, suggesting that the viewer might be experiencing misogynistic and sadistic pleasures as the killer stalks and murders his victims. But, as Clover demonstrates, identification can be slippery, and pleasure can also come from identifying with the character who resists, fights, and survives—the Final Girl. For Clover, the Final Girl’s climactic battle with the psychokiller depends on her adoption of an active investigative gaze.

Like earlier slasher films, Undocumented uses subjective camerawork that directs the audience to watch the murders from the point of view of the characters. But unlike the films from the 1970s and 1980s, Undocumented never aligns spectatorial identification with the psychokiller. Over the course of the film, the story unfolds through a mix of omniscient objective camerawork and handheld subjective shots from the crew members’ cameras. Using a documentary-style aesthetic popularized in horror films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cloverfield (2008), the film shows much of the action through the perspective of an “I-camera,” handheld by one of the crew members. The viewer, like the crew, must watch the group’s atrocities, see the pain of the immigrants, and find comradery in the horrified reactions of the other crew members. This is also an uncomfortable position for the viewer because as the crew is forced to watch the unfolding torture and murder passively, their inaction renders them complicit in the violence.

The reactions of the crew members demonstrate their discomfort, disapproval, and disgust, but they remain largely silent and safe behind their camera lenses. Importantly, the “I-camera” in this film does not function to give the spectator a degree of narrative agency, but rather to create a sense of incapacitation, the feeling that the viewer is trapped in a passive position as the psychotic vigilantes torture and murder. While in the traditional slasher the victim is unaware of the psychokiller’s (and thus the spectator’s) gaze, in Undocumented all parties (killers, victims, and observers) are aware, and the privilege of observation is one that is coerced and thus robbed of much of its agency. The only crew member who is frequently depicted without video or audio equipment is Liz, who, as the producer, must stand and watch but is not forced to document the violence. Instead, Liz often becomes a point of identification in scenes of violence where she gets the most prominent reaction shot and is the site of emotional investment, her face shown unhindered by equipment. Her reaction shots become spaces for spectatorial identification, and her protests provide opportunities to experience brief moments of agency in a film structured around claustrophobic camerawork (see Fig. 4).

Fig. 4. Liz reacts to the cruelty of the vigilantes, situated amidst disrobed Mexican immigrant women chained to the floor. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

The viewer’s alignment with the crew—seeing what they see through their camera lenses, and watching them as they watch the violence—is significantly different from the viewer’s positioning in relation to the Mexican immigrant victims. The victims are dehumanized following their abduction, shackled, disrobed, and treated as animals awaiting slaughter (see Fig. 5). This device highlights the cruelty of the vigilantes and could encourage a critical awareness of the apathy and degrading treatment meeting Mexican immigrants in the United States. But it also works to occlude spectatorial identification, structuring a relationship between the spectator and the voiceless immigrants as one of pity. The violence enacted on their bodies is despicable and painful to watch, but it does not elevate the immigrants from their subhuman representations. The documentary crew members are also held against their will, but they are only locked in a room, remain fully clothed, and are periodically released and allowed to move unhindered by chains. Unlike the immigrants, the crew members are captives but can interact, discuss their situation and work toward escape.

Fig. 5. Shackled Mexican women immigrants, huddled on the floor. S Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

Liz and Travis are the only crew members left alive at the climax of the film; fully realized and fully human, they are able to act as white saviors, unchaining the immigrants as they escape. The deaths of their fellow crew members are graphic, depicted aesthetically much like the deaths of the immigrants, with lingering close-ups of blood and gore. William is shot in the head after attempting to help supporting character Alberto (Yancey Arias), Davie is bludgeoned to death when he tries to intervene in the vigilantes’ violence, and Jim is encased in a giant piñata and beaten with a spiked bat. However, unlike the immigrant captives, they are not anonymous or interchangeable. Further, Liz enables the climactic release and escape of all the captives. Near the film’s climax, Travis breaks down, sobbing uncontrollably from the weight of the preceding violence. Liz, remaining level-headed, comforts and grounds Travis, cradling him and then finally kissing him.⁶ They are interrupted by one of the vigilantes who demands that Liz come with him. Travis attacks the vigilante, losing control as he repeatedly slams his head into the ground, blood and viscera flying. Liz again brings him back to reality, instructing him to grab his keys. When they leave the room, Liz initiates the final kick to the vigilante’s head, ensuring that he cannot follow them. The two free the rest of the immigrants and eventually escape.

An important dynamic of identification is also constructed through Liz’s relationship to the female Mexican characters in Undocumented. The vigilantes keep some of the women as slaves, dressing them in maid costumes and forcing them to clean the facilities. They are represented scrubbing and mopping the bloodied floors, figures hovering in the background in numerous scenes and locations. These domestic slaves symbolically critique the everyday exploitation of feminized domestic labor, positions that are often filled by undocumented immigrants. Liz watches disapprovingly when she encounters the enslaved maids for the first time. The camera shows a maid’s back as she cleans quietly in the background, while in the foreground we see shock and disgust in Liz’s facial expressions. Liz and Z confront each other when she voices her disapproval, after which she refuses to eat and instead continues to glare at her captors, while the silent immigrant woman cannot speak or protest. The racialized gender dynamics are crucial here. Like the maid, Liz is also subject to patriarchal aggression from Z, but unlike her, Liz is able to voice her disapproval and take resistive action. The female Mexican immigrant, unable to save herself, must rely on the white woman to speak for her, to defend her, and to look after her and her wellbeing.

The two best-elaborated captive female Mexican characters, Maria (Carmen Corral) and Selina (Lorél Medina), are only allowed limited development. Their characters are attended only in relation to Alberto, who, as Davie’s cousin, is the most well-developed Mexican immigrant character in the film. Maria is introduced as his wife and Selina as his daughter, but they remain simple figures circumscribed by their relations to Alberto as their husband/father. Their framing is contained within the supporting roles of wife, mother, and daughter, and the violence enacted on their bodies is registered most resonantly through Alberto’s anguished reactions rather than their own. Selina disappears from the film after the vigilantes pretend to let her go in an act of mercy, but during a later escape attempt she is found dead, face down in barbed wire surrounding the compound. Maria’s character development is confined to demonstrations of nurturing care or abject emotional distress, first when she must watch her daughter leave the compound, and later when she is slowly tortured to death in front of her husband. Maria is therefore limited by conventions of domesticity, matrimony, and motherhood. Liz’s empowerment and her capacity to fight back in Undocumented are enabled by her rejection of the submission and self-sacrifice that these roles demand in traditional patriarchal structures, roles that Undocumented writes onto the bodies of the captive Mexican women.

The Scene of Torture: Race, Gender, and the US National Imagination

The complex relational positioning of the various characters according to intersecting racial, class, and gender hierarchies is concentrated in the longest torture scene of the film, which features the opening of Maria’s body, the psychological torment of Alberto, and the crew members’ excruciating angst and fear. The eight-minute-long scene opens with a shot of one of the vigilantes standing in front of an oversized American flag, seen through a handheld camera that signals the witnessing presence of the crew. The camera pans left and down to reveal Alberto, stripped down to his underwear and bound to a chair, captive in front of the prominently displayed flag. The scene cuts to a tight close-up of Maria, whose face is lit in heavy shadow and partially obscured by her dark hair. She seems exhausted and distraught, while behind her bits of metal and chain hint that she is bound. It cuts back to a more tightly framed shot of Alberto, the American flag still conspicuous in the background, as he cries and emotes, looking directly into the camera with pleading eyes. The full threat of the violence that awaits is finally revealed to the viewer with a shot that starts at the ceiling and tilts down, revealing a torture device that spans the full height of the room, stretching all the way to the floor. The menacing device is black, metallic, and hard, composed of chains, gears, and angular bars. Maria is chained to the device, her arms extended and feet restrained, mimicking a crucifixion (see Fig. 6). The device is in shadow while a light hits Maria from beneath, showing her almost-nude body, her pinkish underwear and skin emphasizing her fleshiness next to the stern metal contraption. She seems to glow angelically, in contrast with the industrial cruelty surrounding her, heightening the suspense. She is flanked on both sides of the device by two anonymous vigilantes dressed in black, ready and waiting.

Fig. 6. Maria is chained to a torture device. Z enters the room in command of the coming violence. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

Fig. 7. Alberto, disrobed and strapped to a chair, begins to realize what awaits when Z explains the rules of their citizenship test. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

Z enters and sets up his sadistic game, explaining that Alberto will need to answer questions from a US citizenship test. The vigilante standing next to Alberto, poised behind a podium, explains the rules: for every question he gets right, they will undo one of Maria’s wrists, but each wrong answer will result in cranking the device (see Fig. 7). The first question asks how many representatives there are in congress, and when Alberto fails to answer correctly, the test administrator bangs his gavel and begins the torture. The shot cuts to the torture device as tense music heightens the suspense, the noisescape swelling with sounds of the machine grinding, flesh and muscle stretching, and Maria’s screams and moans in pain. Her face remains largely hidden, her eyes barely visible, but her mouth is open and wrenched. Her facial close-ups are cut together with tight close-ups of her hands, her arms, and the machine. Alberto shouts out and resists his restraints, unable to act. There is a pause and then a cut to a long shot of Maria’s body, now fully extended and taut.

The scene unfolds through intercut subjective camera work following the action and tightly framed close-ups of faces, hands, and the twisting and turning of the metal device. We do not explicitly see the ripping of muscles and limbs; Maria’s physical pain is conveyed through her mouth, hands, the grinding of chains, and the turning of gears. The viewer watches Alberto’s psychological torture, as his inability to answer the questions results in his wife’s slow and painful murder. Maria’s screams are audible and her body is spectacularly exposed, but her face remains largely hidden by the angle of her head and her loose-hanging hair. Instead, the film supplies Alberto’s face, twisted in desperation, as a focal point for registering the impact of the pain enacted on Maria’s body. Additionally, the scene provides reaction shots of the crew, demonstrating fear, disgust, and the anguish of coerced observation.

The levels of identification set up in the film privilege above all the perspective of the crew, who are more fully sympathetic and human, and to a lesser extent identifies with Alberto as a kindhearted husband and father trying to live out the “American dream.” At the bottom level of identification is Maria, the least developed character in the scene and the one rendered as an object, slowly mutilated into a body in pieces. The structures of identification in this scene rely on social hierarchies that are taken for granted, privileging the US citizen, middle-class, mostly white film crew, followed by the assimilating Mexican male immigrant, with the abject and victimized Mexican wife and mother last. And on the outside, separated from the sympathetic white characters, are the agents of violence, the vigilante group that polices the border and embodies aggressive forms of white working-class masculinity.

Liz steps in assertively when the inevitability of Alberto’s failure becomes clear and asks the vigilantes to stop (see Fig. 8). Z confronts her, blusteringly questioning her for defending a man who “doesn’t respect” the country he entered. Undeterred, Liz replies, “He doesn’t understand what you’re saying.” In response, Z menacingly points his finger at her, raising his voice to announce, “When it comes to fucking food stamps these people understand English perfectly well.” This confrontation, played out in front of the bound and incapacitated Alberto and Maria, reaffirms Liz and Z as leaders and nemeses. Meanwhile Maria is bound and helpless, a figure who becomes progressively more abject as the scene progresses.

Fig. 8. Liz stands up to Z, protesting Maria’s torture. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

Liz emerges as a heroic figure over the course of the film not just because of her ability to survive her own captivity, but also because of her willingness to stand up against the aggressors and defend the helpless victims of the vigilantes’ violence. As a Final Girl, Liz is positioned against Z, a retrograde version of an outdated white masculinity that only tenuously conceals its violence and aggression. In this micro-battle between Liz and Z, viewers are encouraged to deepen their identification with her as the protagonist and the one who might be able to stop the violence. And importantly, this identification depends on the violence enacted on Maria; without a victim to defend, Liz could not materialize as a heroic defender. Maria remains bound also by traditional gender conventions through her character’s circumscription in the roles of wife and mother. Again, prior to this scene, Maria’s character is given screen time only in relation to her husband and daughter; during her death scene, she becomes a focal point exclusively as an object of violence (see Fig. 9). Liz, on the other hand, refuses to relinquish control to Z or to the other vigilantes, defying their models of white masculinity. Her racialized privilege is never interrogated in Undocumented. Liz embodies assumptions of female empowerment that are naturalized in Final Girls throughout the horror genre: Final Girls act out their gender-norm-defying agency while the films overlook and render invisible their US-centric whiteness.

Fig. 9. Maria in abject pain, close to death and unable to fight back. Screenshot from Undocumented, directed by Chris Peckover, © IFC Films, 2010.

When Alberto has answered his final question incorrectly, the punishment is meted onto Maria’s tortured body. The crew members exchange fearful glances with one another. The gears begin again, louder than ever, and her screams are more desperate and blood-curdling than before. A series of extreme close-ups show her face in absolute pain, the chains behind her head, and the gears resisting against the pull of her body. The camera cuts to Liz, who averts her eyes, trying desperately not to panic. Again the shot cuts to Alberto before returning to Maria and the device, now suddenly accompanied by the sound of soft wetness, as her resistance gives way, the gears run smooth, and her screams cease. Immediately it cuts to Liz, looking at the ground, in absolute sorrow and terror, registering the horror as a mediator for the viewer. Thus, the scene sets up both her heroism and the full danger that she faces, and does so by enacting violence on Maria’s body. Liz’s power and strength are emphasized through Maria’s abjection and marginalization.

Conclusion

Undocumented ends on a haunting note with a brief video sent to a news station of the extremist vigilantes, with Z as their leader, demonstrating that their numbers have grown. The extremists hover at the margins of society, ready to violently burst into and disrupt the everyday, revealing the monstrous nativist underbelly of the US national project. The horrific evils in Undocumented, embodied by the vigilante psychokillers and especially by their patriarchal leader Z, are portrayed as barbaric, regressive figures, out of sync with more progressive and modern sensibilities that condemn their actions. The pleasure of spectatorship in Undocumented depends on the spectator’s identification with the white crew members and the act of witnessing from a position that condemns the violence and that is not fully culpable in the suffering of Mexican immigrant bodies. The spectator is twice removed from the torture of the Mexican immigrants, privileging the point of view of the mostly white film crew, and Liz in particular.

The gender, class, national, and racial aspects of the violence in the film go unquestioned. It appears natural that bigoted rednecks are mutilating the bodies of undocumented Mexican immigrants and that young white progressives are the ones who watch with fear and disgust. Further, the logic of Undocumented suggests that it is common sense for the white Final Girl to be the one who embodies feminist empowerment while the bodies of brown women are victimized. These hierarchies of cinematic identification are taken for granted and expected because they fit with the hierarchies upon which the US national project and global capitalism are built.

Clover interprets slasher films to indicate shifting attitudes in society and the anxieties that surround the instability of “normality.” For her, slashers express changes that accompany the women’s liberation movement and loosening sexual mores, anxieties that continue to be manifest in the recurring prominence of tropes like the Final Girl. A question this essay has tried to engage is how anxieties about gender and sexuality are manifest in torture porn, a descendent of the slasher film that draws on post-9/11 national anxieties in the United States. Undocumented plays out excessive dramatizations of nativist fears of border penetration and anxieties over national identity, making them explicit while pointing to our nation’s unsightly and potentially violent undercurrents. The vigilante killers, particularly Z, are compelling and terrifying in part because they are recognizable. They describe immigration as a plague, label immigrants as criminal, and justify hatred as patriotic—these are discourses that have circulated before and have gained currency in an increasingly xenophobic contemporary political climate. Perhaps, then, torture porn is a ripe horror cycle for exploring these frightening issues, making invisible violence explicit and working towards a reckoning of social contradictions.

However, it is important to keep in sight the construction of the victims in Undocumented and the racialized hierarchies through which they become fodder for the vigilantes. The commonsense hierarchies by which the Mexican immigrants are constructed as victims rather than as heroes, or even as Final Girls, maintain racialized logics that undergird nativist sentiments, here uncritically privileging the white, US crew members, particularly Liz, as the primary points of identification. As Clover points out, it is significant that most female characters of slasher films are objects of aggression, revealing sexist undertones that surface in horror cinema. For Clover, the juxtaposition of the Final Girl, who is gender-ambiguous and sexually abstinent, with the sexually transgressive female victims, reveals tensions between female empowerment and lingering anxieties about expanding sexual freedom. The difference in the deaths between male and female victims in terms of length, intimacy, and graphic violence is an important component that should not be overlooked and speaks to persistent misogynistic impulses toward violence against women. Similarly, it is crucial not to lose sight of the gendered and racialized dynamics at play in the victimization of the Mexican immigrant women in Undocumented. When Maria is slowly tortured to death, her nearly nude body is displayed spectacularly, stretched out in abject suffering. While earlier Final Girls are set apart from victims through their abstinence, Liz is set apart from these women through her whiteness. Behind these character contrasts are assumptions that the Mexican woman of color is trapped in domesticity, framed entirely by motherhood and matrimonial servitude, a woman confined to tradition by virtue of her skin color and nationality. These stereotypes allow Maria to be so easily victimized and pitied, while Liz is effortlessly empowered to speak, act, and save others as a consequence of her character development through white Western feminist typology. The Final Girl presents white, empowered womanhood as the ideal, an agential and powerful female character capable of resisting patriarchal violence, but at the cost of excluding women of color who remain silent and in need of rescue.

Footnotes

1. Kathleen Rowe Karlyn discusses the ways that the Scream franchise, for example, cleverly recognizes slasher tropes that punish transgressive sexuality, prey on the bodies of women, and situate nonwhite characters as disposable. Nonetheless, the films depend on Sidney, Scream‘s white middle-class heroine.

2. Kyle Christensen suggests that Nancy from A Nightmare on Elm Street exemplifies a feminist Final Girl because she subverts traditional requirements for femininity, such as domesticity, submissiveness, purity, and piety.

3. For example, Peckover’s twitter feed includes a March 6, 2017 tweet with a poster concept for Undocumented featuring a bloodied street sign warning of undocumented immigrants crossing the road. This is surrounded by a number of tweets criticizing President Trump’s policies, suggesting that Peckover wants his film to have continued relevance in current immigration debates.

4. Liz remains distinct from her male peers through her sobriety and capability from the start. It should be noted that the prototypical Final Girl outlined by Clover differs from her friends not only by her intelligence and clear-headedness, but also through her sexual abstinence. Liz, in contrast, is not only romantically interested in Travis, but has another boyfriend at the start of the film (who is quickly forgotten). Liz diverges from Clover’s typical Final Girl by having two romantic partners. However, this characteristic has been thrown into question by subsequent media scholars such as Nowell and Christensen, who point to other Final Girls who are sexually active and have romantic storylines.

5. One of the vigilantes is later revealed to be Mexican-American, but he demonstrates the attitudes and beliefs of white nativism and speaks hatefully to the Mexican immigrants.

6. Once again, Liz differs from Clover’s formulation of an abstinent Final Girl. In this scene, Liz not only engages in romantic activity but initiates it. While this may seem to challenge Liz’s position as a Final Girl, it can be read as reaffirming the endurance of the Final Girl as a horror trope that adapts to contemporary sociopolitical contexts. Liz’s character manifests sexual norms of the new millennium, in which hegemonic femininity is tied to individual sexual liberation and pleasure in ways that can actually work to undermine feminist politics. In this way, Liz is represented as the embodiment of a model of feminist empowerment that is naturalized as white, middle-class, and Euro-American. For more on sexual post-feminism in popular culture, see Angela McRobbie.

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