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(DEEP CUTS) CRYSTAL LAKE: The Psychology of Pamela's Love for Jason

By. Bee Delores

SPOILERS! GO WATCH THE SHOW AND COME BACK!

 

In episode one of Peacock’s CRYSTAL LAKE show, Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini) reels from her son Jason’s disappearance and reflects on how they’re both “joined at the heart.” His absence rips through her life like a tornado twirling down tornado alley, consuming everything and everyone in its path. It doesn’t care that the counselors weren’t paying any attention or that a well-meaning friend stood up to Jason’s bullies–the incident doesn’t care about any of that. Rachel McAdams’ character Linda Liddle delivers an insightful line in Sam Raimi’s SEND HELP from earlier this year: “Monsters aren’t born; they’re created.” And that’s most certainly true of both Pamela and Jason Voorhees. They never began their stories as cold-blooded killers. Society drove them to the edge and shoved them off the cliff. They could only seek revenge.

“I don’t want to heal,” Pamela tells Sheriff Levon Brooks (Will Catlett) in another early scene. “I want to find my son,” she quickly barks. Her hyper-fixation on searching for Jason becomes a violent obsession on making those responsible and those who stood by pay a heavy, deadly price. 

In 2010, the Department of Psychology of Georgia State University issued a peer reviewed study around the long-term effects of a child's death on the parents. It found that “violent deaths have been found to more negatively affect bereaved parents' health outcomes than other causes of death,” the paper read. It also examined how those in bereavement are under considerably “more emotional distress” and display “more hostility” than those who are not. In a previous paper, published in 2008, findings concluded that “bereaved parents whose children died as a result of violent deaths (i.e., accident, suicide, and homicide) experienced more grief than parents whose children died as a result of illnesses, medical causes, or during infancy.”

While Jason didn’t die in the lake, the impenetrable loss and despair affected Pamela the same. In FRIDAY THE 13TH: PART 2, Ginny (Amy Steel) theorizes about the psychology of Pamela’s love for Jason. “The only person who ever knew him was his mother. He never went to school, so he never had any friends. She was everything to him,” he tells her boyfriend and another counselor while at a nearby bar.

“I doubt Jason would have even known the meaning of death, or at least until that horrible night. He must have seen the whole thing happen,” she continues. “He must have seen his mother get killed, and all just ‘cause she loved him. Isn’t that what her revenge was all about–her sense of loss? Her rage at what she thought happened? Her love for him? He must be out there right now, crying for her return, her resurrection!”

In CRYSTAL LAKE, Pamela believes Jason is still out there, lurking in the woods somewhere. “I can feel him,” she tells Levon. The TV show frequently plays with first-person POV as a storytelling trick. We as the audience know Jason is alive, but Pamela knows nothing outside of what her mother’s instinct tells her. The disappearance of Jason caused irreparable damage to Pamela. Throughout the show’s first season, paranoia and detachment grow inside of her. Her burgeoning romantic relationship with Levon takes a sucker punch, as she pulls away and isolates herself. When she attends a picnic event, crackling fireworks and kids playing in the lake set her off into a chaotic episode. “Why did you bring me here with these people?!” she cries. She looks like a lunatic, but in actuality, she’s simply a grieving mother trying to hold her life together.

Learning the names of the two counselors, who should have been watching Jason instead of having sex, sends Pamela careening to the point of no return. A series of other unfortunate events collide and create further complications, particularly those involving an extremely impressionable young girl named Grace (Gwendolyn Sundstrom). Pamela took Grace under her wing after witnessing her mother abuse her. The unlikely pair bond over their love of Jason, or in Grace’s case, her friendship with him.

Pamela Voorhees and Margaret White would probably have some strong disagreements about parenting. In Bee Delores' review of Mike Flanagan's CARRIE, another mother insists she knows what's best for her child, with devastating consequences. Both stories understand how much power a mother can wield, though Pamela's fierce protection of Jason is a far cry from Margaret's religious cruelty.

What transpires over the back half of the season, particularly in episodes six through eight, sees Pamela succumbing to her rage. Perhaps, she lets herself feel whatever she feels. Or maybe, the rage overpowers her, and she becomes a victim to an unseen force. But truth be told, it’s her undying, relentless affection for and protection of Jason that fuels her. She becomes primal (think: momma bear) in Episode 6, whereas audiences get a detailed glimpse into the trauma that led to her seclusion at Camp CRYSTAL LAKE and the impending, inevitable, and fateful doom.

In 2010, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health published a paper which details the importance of “warmth and affection” on laying the groundwork for children to become “more resilient to frustration, distress, and other difficulties.” In Episode 1 and various flashbacks, we see Pamela be warm and affectionate toward Jason, giving him the world that he deserves. He loves the woods, so she gives him a survivalist’s guide and a two-person tent. Through his illness (i.e., continual seizures), she doesn’t coddle him, but rather, she showers him with adoration and a willingness to let him live as free as he can. Of course, she keeps an eagle eye always on his whereabouts.

In an alternate timeline, Jason Voorhees would have grown into a confident and compassionate young man. He could have defied all odds and prove his bullies wrong. But his drowning/disappearance proves pivotal to his eventuality of becoming one of the most notorious mass murderers in history. For her part, Pamela is the catalyst–her pain over losing her son and who he could have been ignites a rampage so deadly that there’s just no stopping it from continuing forever. Whether that’s by the literal hands of Jason or by the lingering affects his bloodbath has on the community, Jason Voorhees is a true force of nature.

Pamela Voorhees has spent decades blaming teenage counselors for what happened to Jason, but were they really the ones responsible? In FRIDAY THE 13TH and the Fear of Nobody Watching the Kids, Davalyn Baker revisits the original film and asks a question Pamela never seems interested in answering: Where the hell were the adults?