'Scream 2' Goes One Step More Meta, But We're Reaching Saturation

If pornography is all about every bodily thing working absolutely perfectly all the time, then horror entails the breaking down of everything you rely on (e.g. a phone call to safety, authority figures, having sex in a tent). To keep everything falling apart and yet not interfere with the narrative pushes some horror movies into nonsense: so many lights go out or break down that one could make a very good light bulb joke about the whole thing, I am sure.

What if you added a constant self-consciousness to the formula?

Now you have a clever, knowing, "genre-bending" movie that has to dig deeper in the pockets of Rich Man Horror for a payoff to your fright center. Don't look now, but there's a guy with a knife behind you--and you know that because you've had pubescent sex you will die. Audience laughs at movie, at movie's genre, at selves. Everyone thinks they're so damn smart.

But our stew is incomplete: Let's pull that pot right over the stove again and add another ingredient. Actually, just a bigger helping of the same--piping hot self-consciousness, now of consummate sequelhood. Result? Scream 2 is a boring, wrecky bundle of nerves so obsessed with one-upping itself and zipping loop-de-loops round the audience's brain that no one cares after a while.

Yet Scream 2 seems destined to have no small success among the masses of moviegoers looking for a quick, all-in-one fix. First, it's something that we are led to believe by yet another media hooey-machine, plugs directly into our generational needs. Curled up in jim-jams and sipping Sprites, we supposedly affixed our gradually dried out eyes to horror movie after horror movie in the '80s, the genre's heyday, as parades of Jasons and Michaels, Freddies and Pin-heads ran off those screens and ripped out our hearts. So what's better than a history book on film, something that let us flip through the cliches as through a photo album of a cinematic memories?

Of course, part of that nostalgia is the condemnation, the forbiddenness that made it all so appealing in the first place. Set bed times and the presence of parents do not jive well with the horrible, horrible baby-stay-up-late mentality of a video marathon (the rise of VCRs contributed to many a scream-filled viewing of gruesome death or porn-induced first masturbatory fantasy).

As we grew older, we learned the problem with these early experiences and understood how it conditioned to accept violence, particularly towards women, and to grow up to be callous vidiots sensitive only to lassoing ad execs. We echo, of course, the blood-thirsty media vultures whose tabloid exploits also increased during the '80s. Scream 2 addresses this in the character of Courteney Cox, whose Gale Weathers is now a slimy reporter; in addition, throughout the film, people theorize about what motivated people to such gore.

Wes Craven has confirmed as much, citing his obsession with rites of passage, with horror movies depicting what happens when authority figures disappear and we must face the "unpleasant truth."

Which is all well and good, but Craven doesn't seem satisfied with such commentary and fright-nighting; in Scream 2, he insists on going that one step more meta on our ass. Reenactments of reenactments of movies of movies. References to conversations about classes about sequels to movies existing in both our world and this alternative world that has the fictional slasher flick, Stab.

Like jaded cynicism applied to every-thing in the world 24-7, though, such meta-ness isn't really sustainable for long without wearing thin: expectations grow higher and higher, we're the rats at the cocaine drop bottle with the tap key, etc. Scream 2 can't go much beyond its first virtuoso scene, in which a woman is stabbed by a movie's fan(atic) in a movie theater raucous over the violence on the screen. We ourselves in the theater feel real fear that the same could happen to us.

After that, it'd be hard to deny that the strong points in Scream 2--a movie so meant to engage the audience's memory, expectations and self-reflexive reactions--are not the meta ones, but standard horror applied in ever more surprising ways (but not too surprising; things peter out quickly). For example, a man accompanied by two others in a wide open campus field in front of several buildings is stalked and killed by man. Trying to outwit his assailant as he speaks with him on a cell phone, the man is pied-pipered to his own doom. It could be anybody, really (well, so long as he had suffered through a mass-murder scandal in the past), though here it happens to be Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy).

But when such heights are not reached, the movie degenerates into the plain vanilla horror's episodic nature of red herrings and and-then-there-were-none character elimination. The self-aware cleverness of the movie's premise survives only in spirit, as the events pale in comparison: we feel gypped, but then the movie just set impossible standards for itself.

The actors are incidental; their characters are well-developed and are as well-known to the audience as soap opera faces, for Scream fans. Most are unimpressive, although Jada Pinkett proves again how far one can get by bubbly dramatic readings of a script.

Wes Craven should move on; he's made his point. But look for Scream 3 in theaters next year, and don't come running when the cinema is engineered with a live-video hook-up of the audience occurring in an inset box on the screen... or something.