[On June
16th, 1960, Alfred Hitchcock premiered his new
film Psycho in New York. So to
celebrate that anniversary, this week I’ll contextualize Psycho and other horror films, leading up to a crowd-sourced
weekend post on your own spooky story studying!]
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 films I’ll discuss later in
the week) 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.”
Next horror
story studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other horror films or stories you’d highlight for the weekend post?
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