Harassed worker and lazy boss in Send Help
By Dennis Broe
This review looks at two horror films for what they reveal about the American character and how it is becoming more debased every day.
This is an era of declining box office which Paramount, now taking over Warner Brothers, claims to revive, though we know that’s a lie. Paramount will go where the money is and the money right now is in streaming. While box office receipts may be declining, there is one staple that works revenue-wise and that is the horror film – minimum budget for maximum profit and an almost guaranteed audience. Two recently released staples of that genre, Sam Raimi’s Send Help and Kevin Williamson’s Scream 7 unfortunately also betray sordid aspects of the same kind of penny-pinching, profit-driven, mentality that begat them in the first place.
The larger ideological disaster is Send Help. It begins promisingly as an abused female employee, aptly named Linda Little (Amy Adams), who no matter how hard she tries cannot get the recognition she deserves from her male supervisor or the new youthful head of the company. Surrounded by his male buddies, he is more interested in improving his golf-putting in his office than listening to her ideas for improving the company.
It’s not long before, in a plane crash off Thailand, the two are isolated and her literal survivor skills come to the fore, learned from her watching the series Survivor. The boss is wounded and weak after the crash but still wants to exert his male privilege, so she sets out to teach him some lessons. Sounds great so far? It is.
The problem occurs when we find out she may have homicidal tendencies and may have exercised them in getting rid of an abusive spouse. Those tendencies re-emerge when the boss’s black fiancé and a Thai fisherman sight her on the island. To keep her new-found power, she pushes them off a cliff and begins a duel to the death with her boss. She wins the duel and in a coda is now wealthy, having sold her book and appearing as a celebrity at a golf tournament, thus completely turning the tables on her former employer.
The problem is she is now more ruthless than even her boss but her ruthlessness, achieved by murdering a black woman and an Asian worker, is celebrated. The ending is double-voiced, appealing to two audiences: one that will read it as literally a triumph and the other, supposedly more worldly, that will read it as ironic. But the thrust of the ending is to validate ruthlessness as the only way to achieve what is called success in this society, and that may be true. A society that is this unequal requires absolute ruthlessness to get to the top. This element of the film goes unremarked by even the most astute critics, such as Le Monde’s Jean François Rauger.
A word then about the element of irony, present in both films, that contributes to making the audience immune to violence – just as American audiences are being asked to be immune to the violence that is being wreaked on the Middle East by its leaders, whose own ruthlessness knows no bounds.
Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead
Sam Raimi is famous for injecting two things at once into the horror film, both upping the level of grossness and explicitness of the violence, and also injecting humour alongside the horror. This is the formula for the Evil Dead series, but it is a formula that we see playing out in real life for deadening its audience to the effects of violence. In the West, violence itself and, as in this film, violence against the peoples of the Global South, is welcomed as titillating and can be written off as humorous or ironic. The makers of Send Help, unaccustomed to the realities of a multipolar world, should themselves “Get Help.”
Scream 7
Scream 7 begins with what is sometimes called a “structuring absence,” i.e. Marissa Barrera and Jena Ortega, two Latin actresses who had been used to reignite a faltering franchise, were not to be found. Instead, the series returns to its origins with Neve Campbell reappearing with a daughter who, if the franchise endures (which is doubtful) will be the next iteration of what is called and referred to in this film as “the final girl,” that is, she who survives and defeats the male violence.
Marissa Berrarra campaigning for justice against police violence
The reason for this change is that Marissa Barrera has made some openly pro-Palestinian statements calling Gaza a “concentration camp” and that she has been actively campaigning against police violence because her brother was, she says, murdered by the Californian police. Her partner, Jena Ortega, in solidarity, then also dropped out of the franchise. These political views may no longer be acceptable to a more-policed right-wing Larry and David Ellison Paramount/Skydance as the releasing company now proudly announces beneath the Paramount symbol that this is “A Skydance Company.”
Neve Campbell in Scream 7
Neve Campbell, the original final girl, then returned and the film itself returns to its original Scream roots, even bringing back, though possibly as an A.I. creation, Matthew Lillard as the original Ghostface killer, with an opening scene of a couple at the sight of the first killings. In this case, returning to its roots though means returning to its exclusively Anglo make up, at least in its leads, and eliminating the troubling Latin element.
Two points to make about this latest iteration, which many critics say has ‘jumped the shark’ – shorthand in Hollywood for exhausting its possibilities. First, is the lack of comradeship and intimacy between its female characters. Sydney (Campbell) agrees to an interview by long-time reporter and open opportunist in the series Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) only if Weathers will not in her questioning reproduce Sydney’s trauma.
Weathers betrays her trust in the interview and quickly “goes there.” This is bad enough but, in the end, Sydney claims that Weathers, who has constantly throughout the series betrayed her, is her only friend. If that’s true it is sad indeed, as the “final girl” stands alone with no female companions and misrecognizes her betrayer as her friend. Only in Hollywood where this type of behaviour – betrayal to get ahead – is commonplace, could this kind of non-relationship be offered as satisfying.
The second crucial point to be made about this iteration and the franchise is that what Scream brought to the horror film is a high level of reflexivity. Characters throughout the 30-year life of the series cite religiously the rules and situations of past horror films. As in Raimi’s humor, this reflexivity allows the audience to shuffle off the horror even as the actual horror in the series increases. This is simply another way of desensitizing an audience to violence, the same kind of desensitization that occurs in American mainstream news media, so that Venezuela, Cuba and Iran (2026) are merely sequels to Iraq (2003), Afghanistan (2002), etcetera in a (never-ending?) horror series.
Rather than being appalled, we are simply asked to see them as just another franchise with its generic codes or to use the military slogan, “rules of engagement.” These horror films in the light of what is going on are not innocent. They are part of the process of desensitization that allows the American audience to sit comfortably experiencing violence, and keeps the crowds of anti-war protestors out of the streets and in the safety of their plugged-in homes.
The ‘Shock and Awe’ of Baghdad, Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela and now Teheran transmuted into manageable, ironized horror, that we can all live with and that does not disturb our shopping.
This review is a preview of Episode 3 of Lies, More Lies and Damned Media Lies titled Trump’s War on Truth
