Woke Gal Gone Bad: Populism and Gender Trouble in Wrong Turn (2021)

The politics of conflict informing contemporary populism have set a particular theoretical frame of reference in recent years, one that, arguably, structures the fundamental dialectics of contemporary culture wars. Divisive conflicts between irreducible identities based on emotional, post-enlightened affections have taken over mainstream debates on actual, effectual, and effective politics, so much so that populism(s) arguably need to deploy extra resources to deactivate specific ideological discourses to establish a unitary narrative of the masses. The chapter scrutinizes how the dialectic operation of countering these discourses usually ends up substituting a limited identity, based on the agglutinative “narrative of the masses,” for a counter-narrative that works akin to the same populist model, thus eschewing cultural nuances and intersections pertaining to a more complex identity-work. Horror conventions are particularly effective to unfold the issues embedded in this analysis. The essay focuses on the horror film Wrong Turn (Mike P. Nelson 2021) and argues that the liberal position the film thematizes offers in turn a counter-liberal stance on matters of gender. Indeed, by relocating the slasher trope of the final girl in a context of populist discourses, Wrong Turn set to indict unpolitical conventions in terms of class; yet in the process, the film, too, resorts to the gendered-biased conventions the trope traditionally enforces. Overall, the essay ponders on the discursive dynamics that foreground these liberal counter-narratives as they set out to deconstruct right-wing populism but end up asserting some of the latter’s specific traits by resorting to the same dialectically reductive processes it enforces.