Tonight is Halloween, and so this month’s essay is about Dead Teenager movies in general and
Scream in particular.
Though it came out in 1996,
Scream seems to belong to the later 1990s or early 2000s. Surely this is because of its many sequels, imitators, and parodies.
I’m not an authority on Dead Teenager movies. I haven’t seen very many of them, and my understanding of the genre must be old-fashioned. Nevertheless, I’m going to present my view of its artistic merits and limitations.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The theme of a Dead Teenager movie is
punishment. Gruesome death is meted out for misdeeds.
Misdeeds in a Dead Teenager movie may be terrible or innocuous. If they’re innocuous, then the punishment is for sin
as such.
Thus, a Dead Teenager movie is a like a morality play.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
This interpretive framework is more flexible than may initially appear. Consider that it accommodates:
(1) The terrifying
It Follows – the best Dead Teenager movie of recent years – although, in
that movie, there’s no singular punisher. (
It Follows is more like Robert Louis Stevenson’s
“The Bottle Imp” than like a paradigmatic “slasher” tale, e.g., Agatha Christie’s
And Then There Were None.)
(2)
The Virgin Suicides, in which teenagers punish their parents by punishing themselves.
Scream follows the traditional “slasher” pattern.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
The theme of punishing teenagers is especially urgent to those obsessed with the niceties of teen conduct – I mean, the teenagers themselves. It’s less important to those who’ve outgrown that stage of life. We forgive a person’s youthful acts once we notice that he or she has learned to behave like an adult.
Whenever I view the scything down of a movie teenager, I lament the prematurity of it. I regret that this person never will have the chance to outgrow the teen stage. To my adult eyes, it matters little whether,
in that moment, the teenager deserves to be butchered with a knife (or crushed by a garage door, or impaled upon a fence).
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
So, I think that the Dead Teenager genre is, at best, compelling to a teenaged (or teen-
minded) audience – whose members probably shouldn’t be watching the sex and violence anyway. And if a certain movie is no better than a fine specimen of that genre – which is the usual assessment of
Scream – then it’s subject to the same criticism.
All right: I’ve lowered
Scream down into a hole. Now, I’ll try to lift it out.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Scream is thought to have occassioned a paradigm shift for the Dead Teenager genre. It’s often noted that the teenagers in
Scream are well-versed in horror-movie conventions. They’ve all seen
Halloween,
Friday the 13th, and
A Nightmare on Elm Street countless times. Thus they know which characters in their own social circle “deserve” to be killed and which “deserve” to be spared.
That is, unlike their cinematic forerunners, they’re able to apply the earlier movies’ lessons to their own lives.
(The guru in
Scream who articulates much of the horror-movie “wisdom” is a geeky video store clerk. But the other characters share his worldview. All judge their lives by the same horror-movie laws.)
Ever since
Scream was released, movies have depicted teenagers as living, breathing encyclopedias of popular culture. And this depiction is accurate. I don’t know to what extent
Scream helped to make teenagers this way; maybe it just documented something already in full bloom. Indisputably, though, other movies followed
Scream in depicting teenagers as culturally hyperaware.
Scream is hardly the first relentlessly allusive screenwork. Other examples from the same decade include
The Simpsons and the movies of Quentin Tarantino. In those works, however, the allusiveness is ornamental (or else it’s the whole point, which makes the work not much different from a quiz show).
Scream’s allusiveness has a more interesting purpose. Its teenagers cite previous horror movies in the manner of Puritans citing the Bible, as if those movies were sources of practical wisdom. Pop culture and, especially, recent horror movies are what make up these teenagers’ canon.
And this is the crucial fact that makes
Scream more than an exercise in a largely irrelevant genre.
Scream is a commentary on the flaw that
defines teenaged immaturity, which is this:
Teenagers, despite their lack of experience, are supremely confident in the “wisdom” they glean from the culture in their immediate vicinity.
This flaw is imperceptible to teenagers. Only adults can see it.
Why do the teenagers in
Scream kill and die?
Because horror movies tell them to.
Why do they obey the horror movies?
Because they haven’t lived long enough to acquire wisdom anywhere else (and, at this stage, their parents seem useless to them as sources of wisdom).
Nor, in their youthful zeal, are the teenagers able to question whether horror movies contain
all the wisdom there is.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
One character in
Scream is not like the others. This is Dewey (David Arquette), the twenty-four-year-old deputy sheriff. Dewey is shy and self-effacing. He’s no genius. He makes mistakes. He’s barely an adult, as he repeatedly points out.
But compared to the teenagers, he’s a model of clear-headedness.
Another character – Casey Becker, played by Drew Barrymore – is a cutie-pie brimming with teenaged zest.
A lesser Dead Teenager movie would have made Casey its heroine. But, as we all know,
Scream disposes of her after just one scene.
