[For each of the
last couple years, I’ve featured a Halloween-inspired
series. It’s been spoooooky fun, so I figured I’d continue the tradition
this year, focusing specifically on scary movies. Share your thoughts, on these
or other AmericanSpookings, and I promise not to say boo!]
On the benefits
and the drawbacks of metafiction, in any genre.
In this
post on E.L. Doctorow, Robert Coover, and the Rosenbergs, I highlighted postmodern
theorist Linda Hutcheon’s concept of “historiographic
metafiction,” a genre of creative art that blurs the boundaries not only between
fact and fiction (as do the found footage works I discussed in Tuesday’s post)
but also between art and reality, the work and its audience. The characters and
creators of such works step back to examine and address themselves, the works
as creative works, and their audiences, among other layers to their
metafictional engagements. In the mid-1990s, master
filmmaker Wes Craven and his collaborators introduced such metafictional
qualities into the horror genre: first in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
(1994) and then, far more successfully and influentially, in Scream (1996) and its multiple
sequels.
Scream has plenty of qualities of a
straightforward slasher film, as the justifiably famous
opening scene with Drew Barrymore amply demonstrates. But the discussion of
“scary movies” integral to that opening scene is extended and amplified in the
movie proper, which features a cast of characters who have been seemingly raised
on such films and who engage in multiple (even constant) metafictional
conversations about the
genre’s “rules,” conventions, and expectations. The metafiction
unquestionably works, elevating what would otherwise have been a largely unremarkable
horror movie into an analytical commentary on its own existence, the legacy of
which it is part, and the guilty pleasures it and its ilk offer (and make no
mistake, Scream remains scary and
gory despite, if not indeed through, these metafictional qualities).
As with any
genre and form, metafiction has its potential drawbacks and downsides, however,
and as the Scream series evolved it reflected
quite clearly one of those drawbacks: the tendency of such self-referential
commentaries to multiply to the point where they’re chasing their own tails
more than either analyzing or entertaining an audience. So, for example, Scream 2 features both a movie version of the first
film’s events and a killer hoping to get caught so he could be the star of
a televised trial; Scream 3 is set in Hollywood, on the film set
of the third movie version of the prior films’ events; and so on. When
metafiction amplifies both the effectiveness and the meanings of the text that
features it, it can be an important quality of 21st century works of
art; when it becomes an end unto itself, it can reflect our most self-aware and
snarky sides. Or, to quote a film that was terrifying in entirely distinct
ways, “it’s
such a fine line between stupid and clever.”
October Recap this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Spooky films (or other texts) you'd highlight?
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