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 ge 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? end-up of the Screamer.
Since hen, 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 armers 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 ape 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 s 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 odernism. 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 rticulated 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 elf 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 haracterized, 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 dvancing 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. “