If the essays in this collection lean towards the positive side of feminist television studies, focusing primarily on the new gender scripts HBO makes possible in mainstream media, the following poems by Daphne Gottlieb sound a different note. I am drawn to them as well. Gottlieb's most recent book of poems explores the concept of the "final girl" in horror films, creatively interacting with Carol Clover's work in Men, Women, and Chainsaws, an analysis of the heroine in splatter films, whom Clover presents as a transgendered figure, a masculinized girl with whom male and female spectators can identify. Gottlieb expands this figure into a wide context of American culture, imagining a range of situations in which girls face horrific social conditions in the media and in real life, and she pushes this point beyond horror films into interpersonal dynamics (see "Her Submissive Streak," from Why Things Burn, in which the female persona goes down on her boyfriend in a leather barcalounger, her back to the television screen, a figure of subservience and self-denial). I want to end the collection with these reprinted poems by Gottlieb basically to keep us all honest, to remember the horror of the media (sluts die first) and the blowjobs in the glow of late-night television—all the ways our pleasure in popular culture is undeniably intertwined with our learned submission to existing power structures and limited female imagery.

For me, a third wave feminist media theory must be able to accommodate both the joyful, playful exuberance women feel when we see Claire Fisher stare open-mouthed at her loser therapist as he labels her behavior and desire inaccurately, as well as the angry, incendiary refusals and revisions women mouth off with in the face of the media as captivity narrative (see Gottlieb's "Final Girl II: The Frame"). The discontinuity readers might feel in moving from the essays in this collection to the poems is precisely the point of third wave feminist media theory; the pleasure and danger of women's relationships to television have yet to be reconciled. And yet even in the angry voice, the feminist spectator can imagine her way into a more powerful position, not the one on her knees sucking off some guy holding a remote control in one hand and a beer in the other, but the one facing the television and calling up the images she desires:

the whisky is open
the vcr is on.
I'm running
the film backwards
and one by one

you come back to me

(from "Gone to Static")

Rather than watching the women walk one by one into the slaughterhouse of film history, in this issue we are calling them back to us, pausing at the line break between "I'm running"—the flight response, the fear, the urge to turn off the television—and "I'm running the film backwards"—an image of control and desire and the rewriting of history, a "writing beyond the ending" that transforms the arc of these captivity narratives so that all the girls come back to us. Post-horror, post-static, post-frame—where "everything / is electric projection"—we might consider the feminist spectator as a sort of "final girl" and feminist television studies as a space of camaraderie and survival: "it's just you and me / and the bourbon and movie / flickering together." Gottlieb's poems evoke a much-needed intellectual environment where the sensations of entrapment and escape can coexist.

From WHY THINGS BURN Copyright © 2002 Daphne Gottlieb. Used by permission of Soft Skull Press, Inc.

She's
kinky,

and she's
given up dating.

She's fallen in love and
given up

dating and
her whips

as youthful
foolishness.

Her chaps are gathering dust in the closet
and her corset sits like an empty saddle

after the horse has left or run
away, or been flogged to death.

He's not like
the others.

He's a very special
man, she says.

I'm glad he makes you
so happy, I tell her.

He treats me so well,
she says.

The weekend I visited,
he was hunting deer

with his father.
It's okay, she tells me.

He eats what he kills.
Okay.

It's like that sometimes,
I guess.

Maybe something is only yours
when you can do as you please with it

since now, she has
no need

for the ridiculous literal
liturgy of S&M—

no more dress-up.
No make-believe.

All the black leather
she needs

is the E-Z boy recliner
where her love is parked

with one of his hands wrapped around a remote,
the other, a bottle of beer.

She's right. It's kinky,
the way he doesn't look away

from the TV,
as her head bobs

in his lap
like a fisherman's float

on a nature program,
hectic

with the pace
his breath sets.

His crotch swells
under her mouth's

prowess. He's such
a sweetheart

he waits
until the

commercials
to come.

From FINAL GIRL Copyright © 2003 Daphne Gottlieb. Used by permission of Soft Skull Press, Inc.

i die first
in every horror movie,
before the innocent boyfriend, the too-
curious best friend
and the foolhardy pal.
death comes blind fast
and easy, familiar as the top button of
my blouse popping open
and suddenly i'm an angel
on the cutting room
floor, wearing gore,
a blank stare, not much
more.

i do it over and over.
i can play
like this for hours.

sometimes i enter a dark
room and unbutton
my shirt, rock my hips
side to side
until the killer's music comes on.
then I button up
quick, laughing or
shaking, sometimes
both.

from the way i look
after i'm split open
you'd never know:
i was born a baby.
i still sleep
with my stuffed poodle.
her name is "tammy."
after my parents divorced, i wet
the bed for a year.
i want to be a nurse.
my favorite color is blue.

first kiss at 12,
first shame at 13,
first blood at 14.
skipped four years
of gym, skimmed just the tips
of my stepfather's
fingers, nothing more.
i never took my clothes off
for a doctor but my body
became a secret
handshake
all the boys knew
and i didn't.
the ghost story
made me a ghost.

now, at 16,
i only remember my own
skin when i am touched.
it makes me real
when i strip down,
take it off, find the edges of my body
through your eyes or under
your hands, against your skin.
it feels like death
every time you
stop.

there is nothing i can do
except open my throat
and say the word for girls
who are the ghosts of want:

"slut."
i'll take my shirt off
while you watch—
call it love
when the knife rips
through my ribs,
when the ice pick cracks
my chest, or however
it happens this time
but first

here's my prayer:
that what happens to girls like me
who die dirty, give it up
with a shudder like pleasure—
pray that when we're killed as martyrs
we get loved like saints.

From FINAL GIRL Copyright © 2003 Daphne Gottlieb. Used by permission of Soft Skull Press, Inc.

it sounds better than it is,
this business of surviving,
making it through
the wrong place
at the wrong time
and living

to tell.
when the talk shows and movie credits
wear off, it's just me and my dumb
luck. this morning
I had that dream again:
the one where I'm dead.

I wake up and nothing's
much different. everything's gone
sepia, dirty bourbon glass
by the bed, you're
still dead.
I could stumble

to the shower,
scrub the luck of breath off my skin
but it's futile.
the killer always wins.
it's just a matter
of time.

and I have
time. I have grief and liquor to
fill it. tonight, the liquor and I are
talking to you. the liquor says, "remember"
and I fill the rest. your hands. your smile.
all those times. remember.

tonight the liquor and I
are telling you about our day.
we make it out of bed. we miss you.
we were surprised by the blood between
our legs. we miss you. we made it to the video
store, missing you. we stopped
at the liquor store

hoping the bourbon would stop
the missing. there's always more
bourbon, more missing.
tonight, when we got home,
there was a stray cat
at the door.

she came in.
she screams to be touched.
she screams
when I touch her.
she's right
at home.

not me.
the whisky is open
the vcr is on.
I'm running
the film backwards
and one by one

you come back to me,
all of you.
your pulses stutter to a begin
your eyes go from fixed to blink
the knives come out of your chests, the chainsaws

roar out
from your legs
your wounds seal over
your t-cells multiply, your tumors shrink
the maniac killer
disappears

it's just you and me
and the bourbon and the movie
flickering together
and the air breathes us and I
am home, I am lucky

I am right
before everything
goes black

From FINAL GIRL Copyright © 2003 Daphne Gottlieb. Used by permission of Soft Skull Press, Inc.

Don't answer the phone.
Don't answer the door.
Don't do it.
No—really. Don't.

Too late.

Don't worry.
You will make it through this.
Stay calm. If you are reading this,
you are here.

You are here because you are in danger
and you are in danger because you are here.
You've got a bad case
of the captivity narrative.

This means you are a white female under 30,
and you haven't had sex or
you only do it with your husband or
you only do it by force.

None of this is your fault.
Someone did something that put you here:
Your forefathers raped the land.
Your husband stole America.
Your father oppressed the poor.
Your sister had sex in the house.

You will be taken from your home
or you will be forced to leave it.

If you hear music,
you are in a horror movie.
That means you get a knife to fight back with.

If you hear music
and the people holding you captive
are wearing jackets that say "ATF",
you are in Waco.
That means you are Joan of Arc.

If you are eating dinner with your husband
in early America
and there's a knock at the door
and it's Native Americans with weapons,
you're Mary Rowlandson.

If you are eating dinner with your boyfriend
in late California
and there's a knock at the door
and it's white people with masks and weapons,
you're Patricia Hearst.

If you are eating dinner with your boyfriend
in the living room
and he is killed by people with masks and weapons
when you bring the dishes to the kitchen,
you're in a horror movie.

Here's how to survive:
Watch as everyone around you dies.
Scream until your eyes work.
They will work when you pick up a weapon.
They will work when something changes:
Maybe the Native Americans are just like you.
Maybe money, your father, is the great tyrant.
Pick up a weapon and gain sight.
You will fight back or die.
You will fight back.
You will become a girl who is a boy.

The story runs all the way
to daybreak, when you can be a girl
again and everything
will be returned home.
Even us.
Until then, everything
is electric projection
and we are
your captive audience.