Scream 3

SCREAM 3 (2000)

I think it's obvious by now; what sex was to the Victorians, food is to us. It is our strange and secret longing, the hidden key that secretly winds our culture when we sleep. All the gothic secrets in my workplace, for example, are about food. When my co-worker went on a medically supervised diet, she had two attorneys come up and talk to her very knowingly about anorexia. One of my co-workers is always quick with the bulimia stories and who she's heard throwing up their lunch in the next stall (she's done this enough that I secretly suspect that SHE's the bulimic, who implicates others who might have heard her before they have a chance to talk about her). Just as the Gothic grew from the cross-pollination of Victorian anxiety about class and sex, you think that we would be able to come up with a decent piece of horror about food; sadly, the only movie that I can think of that does so and doesn't end up being about cannibalism is Spielberg's Jurassic Park (a movie that's all about eating and consumerism).

Scream 3 is not a horror movie about food, but you're sure to think about it during the course of the movie. That's because the scariest thing in this movie is Courtney Cox-Arquette who looks, to put it kindly, like an emaciated corpse being moved about by wires and pulleys. When all those eating disorder rumors about her started a few years ago, I was dismissively contemptous; the women who said that Cox looked too skinny obviously hadn't watched enough porn. Cox looked like a petite woman who had obviously gotten too large a set of implants and so her waist and arms looked too thin in comparison. I think Courtney went back and got the boobs adjusted, because after a while I didn't even notice. Now, sometime after that, Cox must have really developed a problem, and I guess it is a little harder to catch on the small screen or something. All I know is that when she first appeared on the big screen in Scream 3, with Karen Carpenter hair and cheekbones you could slit wrists with, I cringed. And what's amazing about Scream 3, although I wasn't conscious of it at the time, is that nobody eats during the movie. Not once. Since this is a movie that uses Hollywood as its setting, it may be that there's a joke or two about the craft services table (in fact, I think Neve Campbell's character breaks her fall by landing on one) but other than that, zip (and in fact, kitchens are the scenes of at least two deaths in the movie, but they're completely devoid of food). You could make a case for food being the real monster of Scream 3; so terrifying is it that it can never actually be shown in any way.

The heart of the Scream movies Anyway, here's what my brother calls the nickel tour: all the people who survived Scream and Scream 2 come back, although it takes forever to introduce them. Just as in Scream and Scream 2, the movie opens with a cat and mouse killing of people that you thought would be in the movie more than they actually were. Unlike Scream and Scream 2, the movie does not then have the good sense to go to Neve Campbell's troubled girl Sidney Prescott. No, it goes to the cast and crew of Stab 2, a movie in production about the events of Scream 2 (Scream 2 opened with the premiere of Stab, the movie about the events of Scream), worrying about their safety and whining about the size of their parts. Then it goes to Courtney Cox Arquette and David Arquette, two of the remaining characters of the first two movies, and then, only then, do we get to Sidney, out in the middle of nowhere, working by phone for a women's crisis center and keeping herself ever vigilant for the next attack.

To me, this lends a lot of credence to the idea that the only person working on the Scream movies who understood them was Kevin Williamson (who gets a credit for creating the characters but is otherwise uninvolved here). Sidney is the center of the Scream movies, and the first two movies worked so well by showing her complex reactions of fear, strength and guilt to the brutality inflicted on her. This was obviously a complex problem for the screenwriter to solve--of course, Sidney wouldn't be living in the limelight of Hollywood, nor would she want to have anything to do with exploiting her own pain--but the solution just doesn't quite work; by the time Sidney shows up with the rest of the cast, it's about a third of the way through the movie and the whole thing feels lost already. They even blow a good joke by not having a lounge or muzak remake of Red Right Hand, but rather have Nick Cave write a new version of the song that sounds, frankly, horrible.

It's obvious the Scream producers have patted themselves on the back for their savvy casting of the first Scream movie, and each cast, like the latest Bond girl, gets lots of coverage in the entertainment press. But the group of second stringers and has beens that they've assembled for this setting are really pretty pathetic (my rule of thumb, that if Patrick Dempsey is in it then it stinks, was not disproved here). Parker Posey plays the actress who's playing Courtney Cox's character and it would have been a good pungent joke if the rest of the cast of the movie-within-the-movie had also been the bright stars of the indie movie constellation. But I think a subtextual laugh about the co-opting of indie movie talent to power genre movies would have been too much at Miramax's expense for the Scream franchise to ever make it. As it is, indie icons show up in the oddest places; Jay and Silent Bob have a cameo, and Heather Matarazzo from Welcome to the Dollhouse pops up as the little sister of the film geek from the first two movies. It's not so much the director's way of making you think that the indies have been co-opted as much as it is a genuine sign that the indies have been co-opted. There's also a character that looks like it was tailor-made for a pro wrestler to make his movie debut in, but that was just my bored mind coming up with things to keep itself entertained. Scream 3 eventually turns into an R rated version of Scooby Doo, complete with secret passageways and last minute unmaskings and the whole bit, and if you think that sounds at all fun, it isn't. The whole thing is a tired, tired waste of time and money (and, in some cases, talent). Sadly though, it's made enough money and Williamson may be desperate enough for work, that I bet in five years they'll do Scream 4, complete with Williamson doing interviews about his beloved characters and how he "wanted to come back and do it right." And by that point Courtney Cox-Arquette will either be dead or look like a piece of leather stretched across a skeleton, and our secret spectre will still, I'm sure of it, be stalking young women through dark and empty kitchens.

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