Guest Author - Lisette BC Abbott

In Louisiana, Mardi Gras festivities are underway. For those of you not in the know, Mardi Gras is French for "Fat Tuesday," and always happens the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday and is always 47 days before Easter Sunday. This is primarily a Catholic observation, but, Mardi Gras, in Louisiana, is a celebration with roots in the French/Creole/Cajun cultures. And, boy, does Louisiana celebrate Mardi Gras.

In a nutshell, Mardi Gras is the last chance to "cut loose" before solemnity and repentance take place, beginning with Ash Wednesday and lasting throughout the lengthy period of Lent. During this last chance to cut loose, anything goes. People dance, drink, and feast, especially on meat since meat has traditionally been given up for Lent. Further extending this last chance at debauchery before the active forgiveness of sins during Lent is the idea of adopting another's persona. This is accomplished by the use of facial masks, different clothing, and even different hair coloring/styling. The normally shy and reserved person becomes a brash loudmouth primarily because s/he's hidden behind the costume of carnival. This costume can simply be makeup or an intricate papier-mache mask festooned with feathers and beads. The point is, however, that top becomes bottom, left becomes right, and inside becomes outside. Everything is inverted. However, today's carnival pales in comparison to the Medieval and Renaissance carnival.

Believe it or not, but Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame does an interesting mini-exploration into the notion of carnival. While the animated cartoon veered dangerously away from Hugo's book, I find one of my favorite parts of all movies actually comes from this Disney-fied French classic. And that is the scene where the jester sings "Topsy Turvy." This scene, however, only suggests terror--after all, it is a Disney movie. Nevertheless, in the medieval and Renaissance eras, carnival was much darker than it is now. The Disney scene captures the essence of carnival because the jester acknowledges that to create is to destroy, what is wrong is right and what is right is wrong. Throughout his song and with his body movements, the jester manifests the juxtapositions of radically divergent notions which lend themselves to the grotesqueness that is carnival. And I don't mean "gross" grotesque; I mean grotesque in the true sense of the word: the incongruous partnering of the monstrous and the natural, of the bizarre and the staid.

In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin notes that carnival is the "temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men" and "the prohibitions of usual life" (15). In other words, all that is human-made, such as laws, rules, customs, definitions of beauty and normality, etc., are temporarily suspended--sacrificed for the sake of carnival. Thus, the dark nature of humanity supersedes the civilized nature. In medieval and Renaissance carnival, for example, unbridled lust and somatic mutilation were the norm. As were the bodily adornment of masks, both beautiful and monstrous. And as were the festivals, feasts, dramas and processions. However these all came with a twist. During these festivals, feasts, dramas, and processions, the societal structure was inverted. The ruler was mocked and relegated to the role of the fool while the fool, or jester, was promoted to the ruling class. Authority was mocked, and accepted, official societal beliefs were parodied and belittled. What was beautiful was regarded as hideous and what was immoral was regaled as purity defined.

With such an inversion of accepted roles and ideals, you can now see the notions of carnival and Mardi Gras are rife with possibilities of terror. One such movie that brilliantly captures this ironic juxtaposition of the monstrous and the sublime is the now-classic Scream.

Scream, while being quite tongue-in-cheek, exemplifies the celluloid interpretation of Mardi Gras and carnival. The norm is displaced, deliberately discomfortingly so, by the bizarre. The film opens with the standard young woman in danger. However, she's not just any young woman; she's a babysitter! By using that cliched trope of the babysitter-girl-next-door, Scream effectively winks to its audience that it's knowingly using the good ol' standby of maiden in distress. This nudge-nudge, wink-winking of the movie becomes more pronounced, but never cloyingly so, as the movie progresses. We listen to the characters in the movie describe what always happens in slasher flicks, effectively dismissing these movies for their ridiculousness, yet a few scenes later almost the exact thing happens. By describing the tropes of the slasher flick, the killers (who, not-incidentally, kill while wearing a mask!) in Scream are simultaneously warning their victims and inverting their reality. In real life, going to the basement alone is perfectly safe, yet in carnival/Mardi Gras-style horror movies the person going to the basement is simultaneously aware that that act is a trope while being aware of the significance of that act nonetheless. This is true for the inverted carnivalesque; promoters of the monstrous-as-beautiful are fully aware that what they're promoting is truly hideous yet they will do their damnedest to convince you that it's beautiful in order to force you to question the very notions of beauty and monstrosity.

And that is what Scream and other horror movies Mardi Gras style do. They force viewers to question the abstract notions of terror and safety. And they force viewers to question, and face, their own terrors and if they're really all that safe, after all.