There is a moment in Scream 4 when myth-making ends and reality intrudes. Near the end, when the killers are revealed, we see a series of videos in which the killers murder their victims. These snuff videos, meant to be posted on the Internet, were self-consciously ‘directed’ by the killers to make themselves famous. This drive to make the ultimate image (not just the final image, but also the image that kills) brings to mind the Dnepropetrovsk murder – an incident where two Ukrainian youths murdered a random man, all the while filming themselves in the act. Better known as ‘3 Guys 1 Hammer’ (named after the other shock viral video, ‘2 Girls 1 Cup’), the video quickly became an Internet sensation. However, as with all viral sensations, the original video was soon forgotten as video responses (people filming themselves or their friends watching the video) became popular. This is the age that Scream 4 describes – the age of the meme.
The mask in the Scream franchise has always been a meme. It is easily available and reproducible en masse. This means that there is only a thin separation between the person who wears the mask as a prank, and the person who wears the mask to kill. Indeed, these lines are often blurred, and pranks can just as easily turn into real murders. In Scream 4, the film geek who begins by wearing the mask for fun (as an homage to horror movies) ends up becoming the murderer. In the film, as in our society, reality remakes itself in the form the image.
The relation between reality and image, here, is reversed, even erased. Irony just as easily becomes psychosis, and vice versa. Like a meme, violence has become self-replicating; it exists for its own sake. There is no longer a ritualistic/cathartic meaning to violence. It exists outside of context, meaning, and identity – just like the mask in the Scream series. Violence can, at any time, possess anybody. There is no longer a person (a history) behind the mask – there is, now, only the mask.
Many of Wes Craven’s films have been interested in the phenomenon that spirals out of the progenitor’s hands. In New Nightmare , Craven’s own creation – Freddy Krueger – takes on a life of its own and demands its right to exist. In a sense, Craven was always interested in the viral phenomenon. Internet memes, too, leave behind their creators and take on lives of their own. Their conditions of existence do not depend on rational thought; they are totally random and totally illogical. They do not need a reason to exist, and yet, they become part of our cultural memory.
With the advent of the Internet, history has not ceased to exist; rather, it is only the form of history as created by individuals/groups/authority that has ended. History is now created by memes – exterior to subjective thought, and alien to individual experience. It is now futile to consider the genealogy of an individual. The individual is no longer a product of history, but part of a series of lateral references existing within the current social memory. Perhaps only now can we fully consider the entire range of the human race as a single organism (which dances in a similar way to PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’).
The irony is that this is also the age of over-documentation; subjectivity has come to mean defining one’s individuality through personal tastes and shared references. In this cacophony (anarchy?) of subjectivity, the individual struggles to get heard above the voices of the masses. This drives one to extremism. And yet, extremist actions (even violence) are just as easily forgotten as they are created. The teenage killers of Scream 4 do not know that their extreme actions will quickly be forgotten; their fame will soon be replaced by YouTube response videos. Perhaps this is the law of our times – the more one tries to create an event, the more the event will leave one behind. We can see this clearly in the failure of Scream 4 at the box office – even cultural emissaries like Wes Craven have been left behind in the glut of horror films.
Does the end of singular authority give more or less power to the masses? Is it even meaningful to consider the masses here? After all, memes are information that seizes the masses, uses the masses to propagate itself. Agency has vanished when all that agency amounts to is clicking ‘Like’ on a Facebook post. Revolutions now happen like refrains in a song. In a viral phenomenon, the individual dissolves in lieu of the masses. A single person refusing to repost a YouTube video makes no difference to the overwhelming avalanche of people who do. The self matters less than the collective imagination of the people; this collective imagination, as is the case with history, takes the form of images – the mask of the killer in Scream 4.
Over the course of history, we have been all too obsessed in owning images, subjugating them to our own means. First, we invented the author; then, in the age of advanced capitalism, we invented the image copyright. With technology, we have finally reached a point where images do not belong to anyone again. The mask in Scream 4 belongs to everyone and no one. It can be bought at a dime store, and yet, it takes control of us like a demon possesses a human. Our attempt at tearing the icons down from the altar has turned on its head. Images have regained their stature as being above and beyond humanity – the photo that is reposted on Tumblr takes precedence over its posters, even its creator. These images have created their own community. Like nature, we can only co-exist with them; they affect us profoundly, but we have little control over them. No matter how many times the heroine kills the people behind the mask, the mask just keeps coming back.
But it is all too easy to point to images as being complicit in this technological invasion. Images are the vehicles for memes, their very own DNA molecule. The cinema auteurists did not consider this change. Images do not contain thought; all that they contain is their own will-to-live. We can shut our eyes and pretend that images do not exist. We can hide from the Internet and gum up our ears to all the new Internet sensations. But, perhaps, with or without the Internet, the violence of images will still threaten to bubble up, spill over to our reality, borne again and again in our drive to war, killing, and violence.
Written August 2013
