SCREAM: When is Deconstruction Not Constructive?

Director: Wes Craven
Writer: Kevin Williamson
Cast: Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, Drew Barrymore
Runtime: 111 mins.
1996

For being someone who claims to be a fan of horror, I feel poorly-versed in the history of the medium.  Horror fans, even more than other subcultures, tend to display an encyclopedic knowledge of genre history and conventions.  Maybe this impulse towards comprehensive understanding was in some ways birthed by Wes Craven's Scream.

The film simultaneously parodies horror tropes and enacts them, following characters who are constantly spouting horror film trivia and debating ways their lives are or aren't like movies.  The first scene shows young, blonde, vivacious Casey (Drew Barrymore) having fun with a mysterious caller who asks about her favorite horror movies.  It turns out the caller is a killer, and Casey is slaughtered, just the sort of thing that happens in the films they were discussing!  Later on, a character is watching Halloween and imploring Jamie Lee Curtis Just look behind you! while Scream's masked murderer creeps up behind him--moreover, because of hidden camera shenanigans, a pair of other characters are watching him and shouting at their screen, Look behind you!

The function of parody is to break down old and worn-out genre tropes, like the insects and bacteria that feed on dead animal carcasses.  By putting the nail in the proverbial coffin, good parody aspires to sweep aside what has become useless, and fashion the still-useful remains into a new form or new direction for the genre.  Bad parody flips the bird at its source material simply for the sake of scoring some topical chuckles, or worse, to present a nihilistic view on the futility of the form.

The problem with postmodernism is that it is so easy to get stuck in a cycle of nothingness, deconstruction without construction, breaking down with subsequent paralysis.  Scream was the postmodern horror film that ushered in a slough of postmodern horror films.  As Devin puts it, "In a lot of ways this film killed the slasher genre for a decade, first by making everybody hyper-aware of its silly conventions and then by spawning a whole shit-load of post-modern slasher movies."  But should a film's legacy have any bearing upon its quality?

Of course it should, especially in this case, because I think implicit (and often explicit) in Scream's message is a big, throbbing middle finger to the horror genre.  Sure, it is also a slasher movie, but at its core it's just so smug, so clever, so self-assured that its observations about horror will somehow elevate it above other horror.

I've been thinking about metafiction a lot (it's my senior thesis), and I've come to a few related conclusions that apply here.  First, when you are making a commentary about the sort of artistic practice you are engaged in, it distances the audience from the emotional impact of that artistic practice--so you better damn well be doing something special in addition to drawing attention to genre tropes.  Second, the truly good metafiction has a heart, whereas the ineffective metafiction ends up being clever for the sake of being clever.  Scream for the most part fits into the latter category.

Ironically, the film was saved for me because it's actually a pretty effective slasher movie.  The characterization was decent, and I was curious who would end up behind the mask (which, in another postmodern move, ends up being more of a slipping signifier than a single franchise-driving baddie like Mike Myers or Jason Vorhees).  What postmodernism needs to realize, and what Scream almost realizes, is that good postmodernist art can't just turn on itself in a destructive intellectualized thought experiment, it must at least attempt to construct something.  Or else, why do we care?

The trend in the late '90s was to laud Scream for being groundbreaking, but now, halfway through the 2010's, the trend seems to be wising up to the film's limitations.  This seems to me like a good sign.  I do believe, speaking broadly, we are moving away from our postmodern fixation into something more academically and intellectually constructive.  In that light, Scream seems a bit immature in its striving for maturity.  I don't mean to lambaste the film, though--it was well-made and certainly an important wake up call.  But having seen our generation's Scream, The Cabin in the Woods, an exponentially more profound and productive deconstruction of the horror genre, it's hard to go back to Scream's smug referentiality and clever quips.

Was it scary?  Sort of.  I don't scare easily, and as I said, metafiction tends to distance the audience's emotional response.  The performances were adequate, including a manic Matthew Lillard who it took me forever to recognize as Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, and a puppy-dog-eyed Skeet Ulrich, who reminded me perpetually of a young Johnny Depp.

Working backwards through horror history is weird.  If unfulfilling, it's at least eye-opening.  Scream certainly had more going on than its kin, but layers of self-consciousness do not equate layers of quality.

2.5 / 5  BLOBS