For those of you who don't know Scream was a 90's horror flick staring Drew Barrymore, Courtney Cox, David Arquette, and a young Neve Campbell. At the time horror movies weren't doing so well in the box offices, and the genre was basically dead. When a writer by the name of Kevin Williamson took the horror genre and made a horror move that was in conversation with everything that had come before.
The characters in Scream are extremely familiar with the tropes of the horror genre. However, their awareness of what has come before doesn't uses but doesn't destroy the horror films of the past. This film is set up as a horror film about horror films.
It is also part of the idea we were talking about when one is influenced by past works in the genre and writes a piece in the genre that reflects how it allows for the genre to grow and expand, which then leads to others doing the same with this new addition to the genre. We can see this happening with Scream in the other horror films of the mid to late 90's and early 2000's such as the Urban Legend and the Final Destination movies. The characters and the writers alike seem to have been influenced and are knowledgeable about the past of their genre.
Does that make sense?
Kimberly,
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting example to use in thinking about Killingsworth's appeals. This is just me working out the concept of irony, but wouldn't Albright's resistance of Hussein constitute the necessary moral force? Or, if irony isn't what Albright accomplished with her snake pin, I think she at least achieved wit. By wearing the image of her opponent's insult, as a public servant, she contradicts Hussein's words with a visual, much as the words of the Vietnam-era general are made redundant by the clip from "Hearts and Minds." Albright's pin strikes me as a similar "ironic reversal" (Killingsworth 135).
. Tylor,
ReplyDeleteI think your post does a great job of demonstrating what Blair said in class about genre being active. I'm not sure she said exactly this, but I think I heard that "genre," according to Miller, is something you "do," and demonstrating how the characters in "Scream" understood the tropes in the horror genre and used them without overdoing shows effective use of genre by Williamson, and how genre can be "done." Williamson's filmmaking fits in with Harrell and Linkugel in Miller's writing: "rhetorical genres stem from organizing principles found in recurring situations that generate discourse characterized by a family of common factors" (p. 153). I see the rhetoric, the organizing principles, (emotion evoked by tropes in horror films), and the recurring situations (especially since the film is about other films). I think the concept of genre being "open rather than closed and organized around situated actions" (p. 155) means that, one can use tropes over and over. Your post helps me see that genre is not necessarily time-based
This also seems to me to be another example of a double-frame (like Daniel's "Public Secrets"), because there's the frame of the horror movie- with all the tropes that that entails- and then there's another frame within the movie, because the characters are familiar with the horror genre and able to observe and analyze the deaths going on around them from almost an outsider perspective (like when Ghostface says 'Never say "who's there?" Don't you watch scary movies? It's a death wish. You might as well come out to investigate a strange noise or something.').
ReplyDeleteFraming seems, to me, to exist on kind of a continuum (like most things); i.e. it seems like partial framing could be possible, and maybe Scream is even 1 1/2 frames instead of 2... Maybe I just haven't fully grasped the concept of framing, but it seems like a lot of cases of self-aware narration could qualify as at least partial framing.