Has meme culture killed the parody film? | Little White Lies

Has meme cul­ture killed the par­o­dy film?

28 Mar 2021

Words by Amber Rawlings

The decline in pop­u­lar­i­ty of films like Scary Movie and Walk Hard means a vital cre­ative space is being lost.

My per­pet­u­al fear of the dark stopped me watch­ing hor­ror films until my late teens. At age 17 or 18, I decid­ed that being able to enter into con­ver­sa­tions with friends about Para­nor­mal Activ­i­ty out­weighed not being able to sleep at night. I put togeth­er a high­light reel of the genre, start­ing with entry-lev­el slash­ers like Scream before work­ing my way through crit­ics’ lists of con­tem­po­rary hor­ror films. One film that kept reap­pear­ing was Drew Goddard’s The Cab­in in the Woods.

The film starts in a con­ven­tion­al fash­ion. A group of col­lege stu­dents go to spend a week­end in a desert­ed cab­in. You can prob­a­bly guess how that pans out. Only it doesn’t. It tran­spires (spoil­er alert) that a group of sci­en­tists are try­ing to ful­fil an annu­al rit­u­al sac­ri­fice of the six slash­er film arche­types: the ath­lete, the whore, the ath­lete, the schol­ar, the fool, and the vir­gin; so they unleash an array of text­book hor­ror ele­ments on the unsus­pect­ing archetypes.

God­dard has been hes­i­tant to describe The Cab­in in the Woods as a par­o­dy, but it’s clear from the out­set that the film is build­ing on the con­ceits of var­i­ous genre touch­stones – tropes I had come to recog­nise after watch­ing just a few hor­ror films. Admit­ted­ly, Goddard’s film is fair­ly tame by most par­o­dy movie stan­dards; while it draws atten­tion to horror’s more famil­iar trap­pings, it doesn’t explic­it­ly spoof any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, which might explain its large­ly pos­i­tive crit­i­cal reception.

If you trawl the inter­net for crit­i­cal writ­ing on the cul­tur­al val­ue of par­o­dy films, you won’t find much; even the terms fre­quent­ly used to describe par­o­dy films, such as spoof’ and lam­poon’, have broad­ly neg­a­tive and reduc­tive con­no­ta­tions. While there are a few well-regard­ed for­ays into the genre – The Cab­in in the Woods being a prime exam­ple – because of their depen­dence on oth­er texts, par­o­dy films are rarely dis­cussed on their own merits.

Four men in smart suits, one holding a microphone, posing for a photo.

In 2007, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Sto­ry took aim at the music biopic, specif­i­cal­ly the crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial hit Walk the Line. Up until the release of Straight Out­ta Comp­ton in 2015, Walk the Line was the most suc­cess­ful music biopic to come out of Hol­ly­wood. It’s a good film, but its rep­u­ta­tion took a knock when Walk Hard ruth­less­ly satirised the genre’s ten­den­cy to water down the lives of com­plex indi­vid­u­als like John­ny Cash, pre­sent­ing a con­ven­tion­al three-act view of fame and excess. When Dewey is seen hav­ing sex with an anony­mous woman, he exclaims God damn it, this is a fuck­ing dark period!”

In launch­ing a fierce (and very fun­ny) attack on the films that inspired it, Walk Hard held a mir­ror to film cul­ture, clear­ly indi­cat­ing which nar­ra­tive con­ven­tions were passé and had to go. But the recent suc­cess of a film like Bohemi­an Rhap­sody, which presents a glossy great­est hits ver­sion of the Queen sto­ry, proves that some clichés are hard to shake. The impact of par­o­dy films is often short-lived. Even Trop­ic Thun­der, for all the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing its use of black­face, was unap­pre­ci­at­ed in terms of its obser­va­tions about the crass oppor­tunism and tokenism of Hollywood.

The decline of the par­o­dy genre is also depriv­ing Black artists of a vital cre­ative space. If the likes of Walk Hard and Trop­ic Thun­der are neces­si­tat­ed by an over-sat­u­ra­tion of cer­tain tropes, then Black par­o­dy films are neces­si­tat­ed by an over-sat­u­ra­tion of films made by and for white peo­ple. In par­tic­u­lar, the Wayan broth­ers’ Scary Movie, which remains one of the high­est-gross­ing films by a Black direc­tor, felt like a rem­e­dy to the white-washed slash­er films that came before it.

Three men with open mouths, showing their teeth and expressions of excitement or surprise.

Scary Movie is diverse­ly cast, with Shawn and Mar­lon Wayans occu­py­ing two of the lead roles; the latter’s Shorty may be an exag­ger­at­ed car­i­ca­ture of a Black ston­er, but because the film assumes a par­o­d­ic form the char­ac­ter becomes a play­ful send-up of the kind of neg­a­tive stereo­types that white film­mak­ers have long perpetuated.

Tak­ing this idea even fur­ther, White Chicks could very well be the Wayans’ mag­num opus. The film’s premise sub­verts the his­tor­i­cal­ly racist prac­tice of black­face, with Shawn and Mar­lon white­ing-up” for an under­cov­er FBI mis­sion. White Chicks bold­ly resists the dom­i­nant gaze of main­stream cin­e­ma, instead offer­ing a crit­i­cal por­tray­al of white­ness through a Black lens.

In 2016 Mar­lon Wayans made up anoth­er notable entry to the Black par­o­dy genre, Fifty Shades of Black. While the film was large­ly dis­missed by crit­ics, its more cul­tur­al­ly-rel­e­vant moments went under the radar. The film ends with Han­nah Steele (Kali Hawk) whip­ping Chris­t­ian Black (Mar­lon Wayans) while shout­ing, This is for Ker­ry Wash­ing­ton in Djan­go Unchained!” This rais­es ques­tions about how exact­ly the sex-slave dynam­ic is meant to play out in front of Black audiences.

Through­out their careers, the Wayans have strived to unlock the poten­tial of the par­o­dy genre as an edu­ca­tion­al tool: it is one of the few are­nas where Black film­mak­ers can cre­ate a palat­able form of artis­tic crit­i­cism and express their griev­ances towards main­stream Amer­i­can cinema.

This arti­cle may be over­due. Com­pared with the sat­u­ra­tion of the genre in the 2000s, where four instal­ments of the Scary Movie fran­chise were released between 2000 and 2004, the past few years have seen only a hand­ful of par­o­dy films released, most notably Euro­vi­sion Song Con­test: The Sto­ry of Fire Saga and The Spy Who Dumped Me.

Par­o­dy films don’t attract audi­ences like they used to: while Epic Movie grossed $18.6 mil­lion in its open­ing week­end back in 2007, Pop­star: Nev­er Stop Nev­er Stop­ping grossed just $9.5 mil­lion in 2016, fail­ing to recoup its $20 mil­lion bud­get. This is a reflec­tion of wider trends; with the con­stant can­ni­bal­i­sa­tion of con­tem­po­rary film and tele­vi­sion hap­pen­ing online in the form of memes, it seems there’s sim­ply no longer a place for the par­o­dy genre.

Man in glasses holding necklace in retail setting with colourful backdrop

Memes are an increas­ing­ly core com­po­nent of film mar­ket­ing. Though crit­i­cal­ly panned, 2018’s Bird Box was report­ed­ly viewed 26 mil­lion times on Net­flix in the US in its first week of release. Why? Pos­si­bly because after being exposed to a con­stant stream of Bird Box memes on social media, audi­ences – myself includ­ed – were intrigued to see it. There have even been claims that Net­flix used bot accounts to cre­ate the memes.

Of course, the memefi­ca­tion of cin­e­ma is not lim­it­ed to main­stream Hol­ly­wood cin­e­ma. In Jan­u­ary of last year I went to see Uncut Gems and loved it. But due to what Mash­able calls the endur­ing pow­er of Uncut Gems memes”, I inter­act with images from the film on a near-week­ly basis. As the dev­as­tat­ing events of 2020 unfold­ed, empa­thet­ic los­er Howard Rat­ner (Adam San­dler) became an unlike­ly con­duit through which peo­ple could express their feelings.

Memes are an easy and acces­si­ble way to ascer­tain infor­ma­tion and con­vey cer­tain unas­sail­able truths about the human expe­ri­ence. But iso­lat­ing an image of Howard Rat­ner to pro­duce a quick visu­al punch­line means that audi­ences are side-step­ping the wider emo­tion­al con­text of the Safdie broth­ers’ film.

Can memes be satir­i­cal in the same way that par­o­dy films can? A 2019 arti­cle on Dig­i­tal Spy sug­gest­ed that con­tem­po­rary audi­ences don’t need the Wayans broth­ers, or Mel Brooks”; by cre­at­ing memes, they’re doing it plen­ty fine for [them­selves]”. I’m not sure I agree.

True, memes depend on irony. But as David Fos­ter Wal­lace point­ed out, irony does not try to con­struct any­thing to replace the hypocrisies it debunks”. In this sense, memes are blank par­o­dy. They take the skele­tal form of a film or TV show and appro­pri­ate it with­out build­ing upon it. Con­verse­ly, par­o­dy films are con­struc­tive. They rein­ter­pret and rein­vent their source(s) of inspi­ra­tion and in doing so high­light which tropes have become overused or outdated.

We should move away from bina­ry pre­con­cep­tions of par­o­dy films and appre­ci­ate their role in the evo­lu­tion of cin­e­ma. After all, par­o­dy is ulti­mate­ly the recog­ni­tion that we exist in a world where every­thing has already been seen and screened.

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