In Friday the 13th: Part 2, it's Jason himself who does all the slashing, not his mother. This sets this film apart from its giallo roots. The killer is not insane or even exactly human. He is more of a golem, a simple being that knows and understands only destruction. The entire tone of the series changes at this point. Compared with the original, Friday the 13th: Part 2 is a lot leaner and meaner. It has a sort of sense of humor about itself. The original did also, but its humor was more a humor of content than a humor of style. Director Stephen Miner includes lots of little visual jokes involving POV shots. In the beginning, it's almost all POV shots. We seem to be spying on the victim. The camera hides behind a doorway, watching her. She takes a shower, and we follow into the bathroom. She abruptly opens the curtain and looks directly at us. All these shots are red herrings. Suddenly a cat jumps through the door, startling her and us. She then opens her refrigerator and finds a severed head. That's when the killer sinks an ice pick into her neck. The moment where there was no POV shot was the one where she gets it. Another good gag goes almost unnoticed. The camera is positioned in the bushes watching a mostly nude girl return from skinny-dipping. After drying off, she inadvertedly throws her towel over the camera.

Miner is consciously working around with the conventions of the slasher movie, and he's doing it in a subtle enough way that it works as intended (I imagine that the audience giggles in delight at these moments), while not distracting from the mood or suspense of the film. Miner's abundance of POV shots results in us relating to the killer over the victims more than ever. One of my favorite moments in Friday the 13th: Part 2 is when a counselor is telling two others that joke about the bear and the rabbit taking a dump in the woods. We hear the joke being told as they drive away, and then it fades away. We then hear the punchline in the next shot. I love the way that the joke is being decentralized as the subject of the shot. While I assume that the shot of them driving away is in Jason's very POV, it's rather inarguable that it is in his perspective. Because we aren't in on the joke, because we are standing outside of the joke, we become rather incapable of sympathizing with the victim. We're very much on the side of Jason.

The Jason-as-lonely-child motif is established in the very first shot. A little girl is skipping down the street singing a nursery rhyme. We only see her feet. Her mother calls her home, and as she leaves the frame, Jason enters. (How did Jason get away from Crystal Lake and to the suburbs for the kill? Nobody can say for sure.) The heroine is a major in child psychology, and at the end of the film, she traps Jason by dressing in his mother's sweater and telling him that she is pleased, but he needs to put the machete down now. You know, he is so cognitively underdeveloped that he associates any woman wearing her sweater with his mother the same way that my fiancé's nephew calls me daddy because I'm an adult male. The entire premise of the series is perhaps reliant on this particular hang-up. Otherwise he would be able to differentiate the camp counselors that neglected him from the ones that he is killing. Jason's obedience to his mother is quite a thorny issue. I don't think that Jason kills camp counselors because his mother has told him to.

The whole reason that she killed them in the first place was because she believed that that is what he wanted of HER. (In the original Friday the 13th, a voice in her head tells her "Kill her mommy!") Instead, I think that it's fairer to say that both Mommy and Jason are driven by their own emotions and outrage. The idea of disassociation as the primary motivation of the killers is one greatly stressed by the filmmakers in both Friday the 13th films. In the original, Mommy directly tells a potential victim that she killed her son. But the very idea that this is all that got Jason through roughly nine films is sort of exasperating, if not out and out offensive. It's better, I think, to redirect their motivations less towards a specific teenager that they keep on seeing, and more to the entire culture that let Jason drown. This is not that big of a stretch. Mommy says in the original that she could not have the camp re-opened. While this would make more sense if she bore some sort of semblance to sanity, we can see how easily another drowning could happen.

The teenagers that they kill are hedonistic, plastic and entirely free of both worry and intelligence. The series reminds me of times of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine" with the monstrous Morlocks occasionally plucking off one of the beautiful child-like Elois that they have been raising. At no point do any of these teens even begin to suggest that they're different. We first meet the one character who survives when she arrives late for orientation, a trespass she can almost freely flaunt as she is sleeping with the head counselor. Jiminy Cricket!!

In my review of the original Friday the 13th, I mentioned how one of the victims had a dream where it was raining blood. It was close to one of the signs of the Apocalypse, and she was basically too dense to realize that this meant the end. Not to mention, of course, the symbolism of the day Friday the 13th, as the betrayal and crucifixion of Christ. In Friday the 13th: Part 2, the heroine makes the curious word choice of describing Jason's return from the dead as a "resurrection." Is Jason a Christ figure? Or rather, keeping with the apocalyptic thread, an Anti-Christ figure? It's not that far of a stretch, really. Although I admit to never finishing the book, Dostoyevsky's Idiot was of course a Christ figure that liked to hang around children. The John Coffey character in The Green Mile seemed obviously retarded and was an obvious Christ figure as well. It is worth noting, I think, that we have no knowledge about Jason's father. It seems almost irrelevant.

There is, of course, a great absurdity to the idea of Jason as an Anti-Christ figure that I am not quite blind to. I would think that the Anti-Christ would want to eliminate good and promote evil. Jason simply eliminates the otherwise insignificant. Nobody in Friday the 13th: Part 2 really represents anything that can be interpreted as virtue. The whole Apocalyptic Christian subtext is in itself a sort of sarcastic joke. As Jason's evil stems as much from his innocence as good stems from the innocence of any of the other idiots, there proves to be even less to the motivation of his murders than meets the eye. The interpretation of Jason as an Anti-Christ figure is however worth mentioning, because I believe that it is symptomatic of our desire to sympathize and take sides with him over his boring victims. Those who are disturbed by how these modern movie monsters -- your Jasons, Freddies, Chuckies and Mike Myers -- become famous by virtue of their mayhem, haven't seen the movies. A good deal of the time, they are the most interesting and sympathetic characters in the whole film. The original Friday the 13th played like sort of a lowbrow Waiting for Godot. Their death was mainly there to show how meaningless their lives were. The common reading that they die because they have sex, that Jason deals out a puritanical justice, the encroachment of adulthood (meaning after sex the "child dies"), or even maybe AIDS (although I think that these films precede the disease by a little, especially among the heterosexual community) is more convincing in this film.

Miner seems to reserve a very extreme hatred for women in this film. This is the first film in the series that shows any nudity, but there is something sort of distasteful about it. One girl in particular is introduced to us in very short, very tight shorts and a shirt that tightly hugs her breasts. She later goes skinny-dipping and we view her from a distance. Where previously her sexuality was accentuated, here it is near non-existent. While I believe that in the former scene we are directly seeing her from the perspective of a horny teenager and in the latter we are directly seeing her from the perspective of the asexual Jason, in both she is severely objectified. There isn't that much in Part 2 that is the equivalent to that girl in the original looking in the bathroom mirror while in her panties and doing a Katharine Hepburn impersonation.

In From Dusk Till Dawn, honorary supporting actor Tom Savini talks about how it's easy to put a stake through the heart of the vampire prostitutes because their "flesh is soft and mushy." Indeed, as a make-up artist, Tom Savini's special effects stress the softness of the flesh. Who can forget how easily the zombies in Dawn of the Dead chewed through the bodies of their victims? It was indeed nauseatingly tactile. I find the violence in Friday the 13th: Part 2 to be especially sexual, due in no small part to Savini's make-up effects. His accent on the flesh makes us think of sex or, in the case of Dawn of the Dead, food. The body is reduced to an object for gratification of the appetites. (Compare to something like Peter Jackson's gross-out classic Dead Alive, where the accent is more in ligaments and pus. The last things that you think about there are sex and food.) I'm not sure who came up with idea of using piercing weapons (a spear and an ice pick come to mind) for the killings, but this decision also sexualizes the violence. Miner seems to stress the pushing of the weapon into the flesh. The flesh, in being PENETRATED.

The conception of Jason in some visual elements, and I guess one thematic element, mirror Ed Gein, the credited granddaddy of sexual violence. Jason lives in a shack where he keeps the mummified head of his mother, whose insanity created his own. He dresses in flannel. We reflect that if it wasn't a supernatural entity such as Jason who was the killer, it would have been some sort of crazed loner. To be fair, the original film had an understandable debt to the Gein-inspired Psycho. For some reason Jason's costume in this film is said to be an homage to 1976's The Town That Dreaded Sundown from (take note Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans) Legend of Boggy Creek auteur Charles B. Pierce. I have not seen The Town that Dreaded Sundown, but from the stills that I've seen on the Internet Movie Database, it seems clear that some sort of homage was intended. What I have seen from Charles B. Pierce's oeuvre, and from what I've learned of The Town That Dreaded Sundown, some sort of hickish drive-in vibe is being channeled. The hint of Gein is then compounded.

Compared to the original, these aspects seem to give Friday the 13th an even hollower and more nihilistic flavor. The violence is less eerie or inevitable, as much as out and out fetishistic and passionate. I can't say for sure whether or not I feel it's an improvement or not over the original film. It is simply something different in the same vein. The film ends with a shot of the mummified head of Jason's mother. It looks like an album cover for a death metal band. That is appropriate, I think.