A spectre is haunting pop culture - the spectre of The Scream,
Edvard Munch's 1893 painting of a wild-eyed figure on a bridge,
hands clapped to his head, mouth contorted in a silent shriek
of angst and anomie. The tormented face of one man's despair and
alienation, set against the social fragmentation and moral vertigo
of the last fin-de-siecle, has been resurrected and pressed into
service, through pop-culture pastiche and parody, as the poster
child for self-mocking millennial anxiety. Once shorthand for
the age of anxiety, Munch's Screamer has been recast for the age
of terminal irony as a cross between Saturday Night Live's Mr.
Bill and Cesare the somnambulist from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Generic-faced and gender-neutral, he's a ready-made sign of the
times: a Smiley face with an ontological migraine.
One of the earliest appropriations of The Scream has turned out
to be one of the most enduring: the ad campaign for Home Alone
(1990), which featured Macaulay Culkin in a Munch-ian mood, his
tyke-next-door features stretched out of shape in an are-we-having-fun-yet?
send-up of the Screamer. Since then, the image has appeared on
T-shirts emblazoned with the heart-stopping phrase "President
Quayle" and on checks sold by the Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Banknote
Corp. It shrieks with delight on a birthday card ("Hope your birthday's
a SCREAM!") and serves as a wacky conversation piece in homes
and offices across America in the form of the inflatable dolls
manufactured by On the Wall Productions, which has sold over 100,000
of the adult toys. The political cartoonist Rob Rogers put a face
on the heartland horror of the Oklahoma bombing by transplanting
Scream heads onto the dour farmers in Grant Wood's American Gothic.
The marathon runner Andrea Bowman pledged allegiance to the no-pain,
no-gain ethos by having The Scream tattooed on her leg. And, in
the loftiest tribute a consumer society knows, Munch's angst-racked
Everyman has even been transformed into a TV pitchman - a Ray-Banned
swinger in a computer-animated spot for the Pontiac Sunfire, a
car that "looks like a work of art" and "drives like a real scream."
Most famously, of course, the painting inspired the Halloween
mask worn by the teen-ocidal slasher in Wes Craven's Scream: a
baleful skull whose elongated gape makes it look like a Munch
head modeled in Silly Putty.
So, I scream, you scream, we all scream for Munch's Scream: What's
all the yelling about? Obviously, the image strikes a sympathetic
chord because we, like Munch, are adrift at the end of a century,
amidst profound societal change and philosophical chaos, when
all the old unsinkable certitudes seem to be going the way of
the Titanic. But whereas Munch's existential gloom and doom were
a psychological affair, deeply rooted in his mother's death and
the hellfire Christianity of his stern father, our millennial
anxiety is more public than private, the toxic runoff of information
overload: mounting concerns over global warming, worries about
contaminated food and sexually-transmitted diseases and flesh-eating
viruses, fear of domestic terrorism, paranoia about night- stalking
pedophiles and teenage "super-predators," traumatic memories of
satanic ritual abuse and alien abduction, premonitions of black
helicopters over America, and, more prosaically, the everyday
uncertainties of the downsized, overdrawn, time-starved, sleep-deprived
masses.
The Screamer personifies the introverted, alienated psychology
of modernism. In Munch's painting, this psychology is literalized
in the roughly circular movement of the viewer's eye, which makes
the world literally revolve around the solipsistic Screamer. Moreover,
that world, as Munch gives it to us, has been swallowed up by
the Screamer's extruded ego, dyed strange colors and twisted into
alien shapes by his emotions.
By contrast, the postmodern self is mediated, not mediating. In
Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, for example, the exteriorized
subconscious of The Scream has been turned inside out. In the
modernist world-view articulated by Munch's proto-Expressionism,
the psyche oozes, blob-like, beyond its bounds, engulfing the
outside world; in NBK, resonant images from the 20th century -
"the filmed century," as Don DeLillo observed - inundate the mass-mediated
dream lives of Stone's TV generation. Childhood memories are relived
as an imaginary sitcom, complete with laughtrack, and Nature has
been replaced by Second Nature: the world outside Mickey and Mallory's
motel windows consists of flickering TV images. Celebrity is the
only real life, reflection in the camera eye the only confirmation
that the self truly exists.
Postmodern psychology is a product of the movement from McLuhan's
Gutenberg Galaxy into a postliterate world, a transition marked
by the collapse of the critical distance between the inner self
and the outside world, and by our immersion, perhaps even dissolution,
in the ever-accelerating maelstrom of the media spectacle. In
Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson characterizes this shift in "the
dynamics of cultural pathology" as one in which "the alienation
of the subject is displaced by the latter's fragmentation."
Utterly unlike the hypersensitive Munch-ian self, this new psyche
is characterized, says Jameson, by a "waning of affect" which
is not so much the android autism Andy Warhol aspired to as it
is the giddy experience of emotions as "free-floating and impersonal"
sensations "dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria." This psychological
weightlessness, at once terrifying and exhilarating, is the result
of life lived in the mass-media centrifuge, where everything,
from haemorrhoid-treatment ads to R. Budd Dwyer's televised suicide,
carries equal weight and where reality and its simulation are
beginning to look more and more alike. Call it Angst Lite.
Jameson calls it the "camp sublime" - camp in the sense that camp
delights in depthlessness, celebrates surface; sublime in the
sense that this "peculiar euphoria" is the postmodern equivalent,
for Jameson, of what Edmund Burke called "the Sublime" - the vertiginous
loss of self in the presence of nature's awful grandeur. In fact,
The Scream was inspired by an experience that has all the earmarks
of the sublime (as scripted by Bergman). "I was walking along
the road with two friends," wrote Munch, on the back of a drawing.
"The sun set. The sky became a bloody red. And I felt a touch
of melancholy. I stood still, leaned on the railing, dead tired.
Over the blue-black fjord and city hung blood and tongues of fire.
My friends walked on and I stayed behind, trembling with fright.
And I felt a great unending scream passing through nature."
Munch's nameless terror suits our millennial mood just fine, but
his 19th century melancholia and gloomy introspection are out
of tune with the media-circus atmosphere of the late 20th century.
A brooding consumptive like Munch, haunted by the death of God,
fear of hereditary madness, and the advancing shadow of his own
mortality, looks thoroughly out of place against the smirking
irony and flip nihilism of our age. It's the difference between
the solitary madness of Van Gogh cutting off his ear and the farcical
nightmare of Mike Tyson biting off Evander Holyfield's, live and
in your livingroom. Thus, while Munch's Screamer is the perfect
totem for our pop angst, we read his overwrought hysteria as campy,
which may be why he's ended up on a Scream-patterned dress worn
by the drag comedian Dame Edna, who insists that the schmatte-clad
androgyne is really yelling, "Oh no, I've lost my earrings."
Popping up seemingly everywhere, from tattoos to political cartoons
to blow-up dolls, the Scream meme suggests that we can't even
take our own apocalypse - our lurking sense, on the eve of the
future, of social disintegration and simmering discontent - seriously.
"What was once terrible seems to have become fun," as the cultural
critic Mike Davis puts it. Our world will end, if it does, not
with a bang or a whimper but with the violin shrieks from Psycho,
played for laughs.
- © Mark Dery 1998. All rights reserved; no part of this essay
may be reproduced or republished without written permission from
the author. A much shorter, significantly different version of
this essay first appeared on the website Suck, on January 20,
1998.