American Scream:

by Jeremy Campbell

 My intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms.
                                         -Ovid, The Metamorphoses

A spectre has been haunting pop culture-a wild-eyed figure, hands clapped to its head, mouth contorted in a shriek of angst. Amid the social fragmentation and moral free fall of the late 20th century, Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893) has become suddenly relevant. The tormented face of one person's despair and alienation has been resurrected and pressed into service, through pop culture pastiche and parody, as the poster-child (via prints available in the bookstore, blow-up likenesses of the figure, automobile commercials and kitschy birthday cards) for self-mocking millennial dread (hey-it might be 2000, but you know the die-hards). Once shorthand for the Age of Anxiety, Munch's screamer has been updated for the age of terminal irony as a manic-depressive version of SNL's Mr. Bill. Generic-faced and gender-neutral, the screamer is a ready-made sign of the times: a smiley-face with an ontological migraine.

In an age of cultural curation, menacing separation, and the ever-presence of camp, another cultural meme has been resurrected-the somber faces of Grant Wood's American Gothic (1930) farmers, a trope a bit closer to home that has been employed as jest, melancholy, nostalgia, longing, and warning in every medium we have yet conjured. Along with Munch's screamer, Wood's couple (or are they father and daughter?) has become one of the most recognized pieces of art in the world.

We are truly an ingenious species. At least, when it comes to capitalizing on the meaning and attraction of things-ideas, words, images, and even works of art. I recently viewed one of the most perplexing (but altogether mundane) images I have yet to encounter in my life, a picture fraught with irony and inanity, profound cultural commentary and glistening capitalist satire-a piece that speaks both of our advancement in cultural playfulness and our corresponding penchant for cultural boredom. In your run-of-the-mill, higher-priced-just-because art/print shop in your local mall, I saw the two images mentioned above transposed on each other-Munch's screamer with all his cultural precedence taking the place of Wood's female, the pitchfork-wielding farmer's eyes diverged to keep an eye on his new friend. Below the image, in the border of the poster, read, "American Scream." I did not know whether to laugh or cry, to buy it or to take a picture of it. I didn't need to wait for long to observe a purchase of the print-a thirty-something soccer mom pointed at the wall, wielded a VISA, and spent the next few minutes advising her son on where it should hang in his room. "We might need to take down the Power Rangers poster," I distinctly heard.

Elias Canetti, Bulgarian-born English novelist, offers some thought on these matters; "A tormenting thought-as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn't notice." At some point, then, the conditions that kept our screamer in the Norway of 1893 and kept our couple in the Iowa of 1930 bent sufficiently enough to allow fresh and alternate meanings to grow up apart from the past. History seems hurried under the table, condensed to a commercial spot or a letter writing campaign.

Various plausible hypotheses may be advanced to explain this vanishing of history. Canetti's expression 'all mankind suddenly left reality' irresistibly evokes the idea of that escape velocity a body requires to free itself from the gravitational field of a star or planet. Staying with this image, one might suppose that the acceleration of modernity, of technology, events and media, of all exchanges and metamorphoses-economic, political, and sexual-has propelled us to the 'escape velocity,' with the result that we have flown free of the referential sphere of the real and of history. We are 'liberated' in every sense of the term, so liberated that we have taken leave of a certain space-time, passed beyond a certain horizon in which the real is possible because gravitation is still strong enough for things to be reflected and thus in some way to endure and have some consequence.

A degree of slowness (that is, a certain speed, but not too much), a degree of distance, but not too much, and a degree of liberation (an energy for rupture and change), but not too much, are needed to bring about the kind of condensation of events we call history, the kind of coherent unfolding of causes and effects we call reality. Once beyond this gravitational effect, which keeps bodies in orbit, the atoms of meaning get lost in space, jumble with each other, and produce a culture no longer delimited or empowered by the weight of the past. This space is now able to combine the angst of 19th century Norway with the social commentary and admiration of early 20th century America in fin de siecle pop art. Art which, hanging in the poster shops of all the malls of suburbia, possesses irony and disproportion in change that mocks and encourages at the same time.