Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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seeing Jason’s corpse will not destroy the hallucinations, to which Tommy responds,
“Seeing it won’t, but destroying it will.” Hawes then looks in the back of the truck
and sees a canister of gasoline.
This exchange becomes more rich and informed from knowledge of at least
the two previous films. The establishing shots begin the film suitably, defining the
location of the action, but a combination of action, music and the speed of the
dialogue inside the truck all has the momentum of a sequence that could fit in the
middle of a film. The words spoken between Tommy and Hawes reveal three things.
First, Jason is dead, or at least buried, second, Hawes and Tommy have been living
at an institution, likely subjected to psychiatric treatment, and third, Jason plays a
significant part in Tommy’s background and mental condition. This information
follows accurately from the background of the previous two films, and the franchise
viewer is then comfortably positioned within the overarching narrative of the series.
The new viewer, on the other hand, would have a nebulous grasp on at least
two of these three elements. First, the indication that Jason is probably dead or at
least presumed dead from the outset is suggested in the title, Jason Lives!, which
indicates that he was either not dead when last seen, or he will be brought back to
life from the dead. Between the two it is uncertain, as opposed to the franchise
viewer who will most likely have seen the machete enter halfway through Jason’s
head at the end of The Final Chapter or even know from A New Beginning that
somebody had to pretend to be Jason, further verifying the fact that he is dead at the
outset. The second element, Hawes and Tommy coming from a psychiatric
institution, has the potential to misinform the new viewer. Hawes, a new character
to the franchise appears paranoid and scared to both the new and franchise viewer,
but with good cause, which makes his exact mental condition ambiguous. Tommy is