“It Takes a Man to Do Something Like That!”
How “Scream” addressed masculinity in ‘The Gay 90s’.
It may be Final Girl February, but Scream and feminism aren’t just about women. What a concept, right?
Let me explain.
We’re all involved in this thing called a hegemonic patriarchy.
Hegemonic patriarchy is a pyramid. At the top are the people this system most benefits: white, older, cisgender men. Meanwhile, the rest of us (including women, people of color, queer folks, and gender-non-conforming men, to name a few) are building the pyramid up below them. The people on top keep insisting that their view is the same as ours.
Except we’re all looking at their asses.
For us women, it’s a little easier to call foul when it comes to gender disparities. Guys, however, are taught that they’re meant to be on the top of the pyramid. They should want to be there. If they don’t, or if they can’t meet the narrow confines of masculinity, they’re failures.
Now that does not sound stable.
According to English professor and queer film theory writer David Greven, masculinity is inherently founded on this “instability and a repressive lockdown of all knowledge of [it].” Men have to walk this little tightrope all their lives. The end result, as seen in Scream, is that they go a little mad sometimes.
Just ask killers Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) and Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard). Their hang-ups on masculinity and sexuality stalk them as menacingly as they stalk their victims throughout the film.
There’s clearly something going on with them.
My fellow LGBTQ babes, you know what I’m talking about. Recall Stu’s slow tracing of Randy’s earlobe as he holds him from behind, giving Billy the slightly-lustful, definitely-crazy eyes.
As a teen, that scene screamed gay vibes.
Scream’s writer Kevin Williamson, an out gay man, certainly did a good job with this script. Stu’s overexaggerated physical affections and Billy’s hypersexuality during this ‘90s crisis of masculinity demanded a queer reading as soon as Scream hit theaters.
It didn’t happen until years after the fact. But we’re here now, and it’s still queer, so let’s break it down.
Scream’s debut in 1996 was smack in the middle of what Entertainment Weekly called “The Gay ‘90s.” Suddenly, people realized that gay-friendly content made money. Gay characters were everywhere on television, from Roseanne to RuPaul. Yes, representation from a consumerist standpoint is something we can cringe at now, but at the time it led to doors being thrown wide open for the community.
Trapped in the confines of both gender and genre, Billy and Stu are the product of this [masculinity] instability.
It also presented a new ideal man: an effeminate one. This new man had all the hygiene and emotional sensitivity of your favorite “gay best friend,” but he also wanted to have sex with you. Gone were the machismo Rambos and in their place stood our vulnerable Keanu Reeves and Johnny Depp types. Muscles were out. “Androgyny chic” was in.
Someone really should’ve clued Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) in on that.
It throws the first kill in Scream under a whole new microscope. While someone terrorizes our first helpless heroine on the phone, she warns them about her boyfriend, Steve.
“He’s big and he plays football and he’ll kick the shit out of you!” she screams.
The intended effect is to scare and subsequently emasculate her tormentor. A decade earlier, Steve would undoubtedly put up a good fight in a slasher film. He might even help save the Final Girl — but this being Scream, he is instead the first to get the knife. As he dies, so does this old-fashioned idea of hypermasculinity.
We later find out Casey dumped Stu — one of our killers — for Steve.
“It takes a man to do something like that,” Stu later says to his friends about the murders. While Billy throws him some pointed looks, Stu brags about the killer’s masculine prowess.
Stu, with his lanky limbs and goofy, overemotional personality, is a far cry from the traditional idea of masculinity. He looks for any excuse to touch his friends. He’s not afraid to express his emotions. He’s our new ‘90s heartthrob. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a little crush on him myself.
On the other hand, his fellow killer, Billy, is an omen of the faux-deep fuckboy type that would later plague my college years. If they were to make Scream today, he would 100 percent be played by Timothée Chalamet. It wouldn’t make him any less deadly. In fact, Billy’s dark, pleading eyes coupled with his sex obsession are a double-edged sword wrapped in a huge red flag.
Compared to the rest of the cast, their physical fixation seems to border on excessive. If this was the ‘80s, we could chalk it up to normal teen horror horniness. But this is Scream; it’s bound to go deeper than that.
It’s not too far a stretch to call Stu and Billy’s obsession with women an unnecessary assertion of their own heterosexuality.
After all, hypersexuality was often used to cover up queerness in Hollywood — the very industry that Scream both mocks and pays homage to — with many gay actors being forced into “lavender marriages” with women to maintain their image.
Billy and Stu, for all their talk of sex, seem to imitate those same marriages in their own relationships. Billy and Sidney are at constant odds with each other. In their few on-screen interactions, Stu and Tatum seem more like buddies than lovers.
Yet Stu still yells like a typical bro that he wants to see Jamie Lee Curtis’ breasts. It’s like flashing a big neon sign of straightness: flashy and distracting.
Even Billy sleeping with Sidney is received with little fanfare. It happens, then he “dies,” and is reborn as the killer. Having done his heterosexual horror film duty by deflowering Sidney, he should be able to reveal his true colors.
And that’s kind of what makes it a bummer when both boys turn out to be our killers.
It feels like a classic reiteration of non-normative sexuality as something to be feared at first glance. Don’t get me wrong; Scream is a great film. But as self-referential as it is, as prolific as Wes Craven is, it was still a product of its time and it was still a horror movie.
Horror movies have always reflected current social anxieties. In the decade prior to Scream, rampant conservatism gripped the US. Monsters invaded picturesque suburban neighborhoods and slaughtered innocent youths.
So what was Scream afraid of?
Why, in an era known for its blossoming progressiveness, were these effeminate, queer-coded boys suddenly our new psycho killers?
The answer, I’d argue, has to do with masculinity itself.
Just like Greven’s masculinity theory, the horror genre is similarly founded on instability. It can’t exist without it. The killer frequently shatters the normalcy of our protagonists’ lives. When they finally fail, our survivors try to move on and “repress” the killer.
Men have to walk this little tightrope all their lives. The end result, as seen in “Scream”, is that they go a little mad sometimes.
Trapped in the confines of both gender and genre, Billy and Stu are the product of this instability. Woodsboro is a small town that skews “traditional”. It doesn’t seem to be known for its progressive behavior.
Rather than speak candidly about Maureen Prescott’s promiscuity, most townsfolk “repress” the information. For Billy — whose parent’s marriage was directly affected by it- that repression manifests as “deviant behavior,” as he puts it.
Yet it’s not enough to catch either boy before it’s too late. Thanks to the older townsfolk’s conservative ways, they slip under the radar. They may be part of a “thieving, whoring generation,” but they’re not capable of murder. Murder is reserved for people with a certain chutzpah that skinny little Billy and effeminate Stu don’t have.
It’s the town’s failure to correct that damaging misconception that allows Stu and Billy to get away with everything for as long as they do. Hanging over our Scream killers is our real mastermind of murder: traditional masculinity.
Stu’s right; It is “peer pressure.” It’s the pressure to act like a normal, straight teenager in a small town.
