[August 2nd marks the 100th anniversary of inventor Alexander Graham Bell’s death. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy some famous phones in American culture, leading up to a special weekend post on AGB’s life and legacies!]
On one
thing that’s really changed since the first Scream,
and one that hasn’t.
I wrote
about the most important conceit of the Scream
series of horror films, their metatextual commentary on the tropes and
traditions of the horror genre, in this
2020 post. I think that element relates closely to the way the films use
phones, so I’ll ask you to check out that post and then come on back here for
this related topic.
Welcome
back! One of the many, many many many, horror movie tropes on which Scream (1996) was commenting was the
external yet intimate threat posed by horror monsters and killers, a threat
exemplified by Halloween’s Michael Myers looking into windows
but also captured quite nicely by a threatening phone call (whether or not it’s
“coming from inside the
house!”). There’s a reason, after all, why Scream begins with the sound of a phone
ringing followed by a young woman’s screams, before the audience even sees the specific,
threatened young woman (Drew Barrymore) who will unfortunately answer this call
and provide her own screams. But it’s pretty telling that that call comes in on
a landline, and one without caller ID at that—if Barrymore’s Casey Becker and
her family had that technology, and/or if she had a cell phone with caller ID
as well, she’d likely not pickup a call from a strange number, eliminating the
entire premise of the killers toying with her over the phone.
Yet even
as the Scream series has evolved into
the smartphone era (with both 2011’s Scream
4 and, even more fully, 2022’s Scream
set in that brave new world), a time when virtually everyone has both a cell
phone and the ability to see and screen our calls, it has apparently maintained
this central trope of the killers calling on the phone (I haven’t seen either
of those films, so as always I welcome corrections and comments of all kinds!).
I’m sure the filmmakers have found specific ways to explain how these smartphone-era
killers are maintaining their anonymity (even in the original Scream there’s an
elaborate plotline about a cloned cell phone, for example). But to my mind,
the more important point is that the scary phone call trope endures, and perhaps
has even deepened in the smartphone era—I know for me, almost every time my
phone rings these days (unless it’s my kids calling to say goodnight when they’re
with their mom) it feels at best unnerving and at worst potentially
threatening. It doesn’t have to a psycho killer on the other end to make the
phone an external yet intimate and potentially invasive technology, it turns
out.
Next
famous phone tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Famous cultural phones you’d highlight?
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