The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film by Pansy Duncan

Author:Pansy Duncan [Duncan, Pansy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Performing Arts, Film, General, Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781317355649
Google: Usj4CgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-11-19T05:05:10+00:00

III

The memorable set-piece in which Tatum is trapped in the garage with Ghostface offers a particularly precise illustration of the first dynamic. So given to making light of the events in Woodsboro that she decides to descend alone into the basement while a killer is on the loose, the heroine’s wise-cracking, gum-chewing best friend epitomizes the figure of the numb, jaded teen that circulates through Scream ’s critical and cultural reception. Even when Ghostface makes his long-awaited appearance on the scene, Tatum is impassive and imperturbable, and the dialogue that follows is a patchwork of movie references: “Is that you, Randy?” she asks. “What movie is this from?” she inquires drolly as she walks toward him: “I Spit On Your Garage ?” When Ghostface blocks her exit, Tatum is still skeptical: “O, you want to play psycho killer?” Indeed, it is only when her attacker reaches for his knife and cuts her forearm that Tatum shows real fear. Yet whereas the film’s critics have been united in assuming that Scream ’s characters’ relentless reflexivity and allusion forecloses a fearful spectatorial response, in fact, Tatum’s amused knowingness only compounds the tension of the scene and the fear of spectator. Far from inviting a spectatorial amusement that matches hers, Tatum’s unshakeable impassivity has us shouting at the screen, in a way that anticipates horror-buff Randy’s (Jamie Kennedy) insistent exclamations to Jamie Lee Curtis’s oblivious, entirely un-affected Laurie, at the very point that she is just about to be attacked: “look behind you!” This twinning of desensitized character and animated audience, of course, marks an exact reversal of the traditional logic of character identification, a logic spelled out in Carroll’s insistence that in the horror context the responses of the characters in the text tend to bolster and even “cue the emotional responses of the audience.”54 Drawing on the work of David Hume, however, Philip Fisher has offered a useful explanation of this reversal. For Fisher, where a text’s characters fail to model the expected audience response directly, they may invite what he calls a volunteered passion, “where we feel something exactly because the other does not.”55 And in many respects, this rings doubly true of Scream , where our desire to “supply the missing fear” is amplified by the film’s tendency to single out its most jaded, affectless characters very particularly for punishment.56 Indeed, in staging its key scenes of slaughter as ripostes to the characters’ verbal and behavioural displays of cultural erudition, Scream can be said to give a self-conscious twist to the classic slasher’s identification of sexual experience and violent death, by substituting cultural knowledge in place of sexual knowledge. Whereas in Halloween , for example, it’s the sexually voracious Lynda (P. J. Soles) who is first in line for the slaughter, in Scream , it’s the wise-cracking Tatum, her pop-culture references running a promiscuous gamut from All the Right Moves (Michael Chapman, 1983) to Friday the 13th , who’s earmarked for the film’s bloodiest death. It is in keeping

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