Tag Archives: Teen Wolf

Scooby Doo, Where are You, Now that We Need You?

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What can I say about the glory that is the original series of Scooby Doo? It is one of those shows that makes me want to sound like some BBC arts presenter, who gushes with superlatives about the rich, artistic quality, the genius that evokes Leonardo, Michelangelo. You know, that kind of stuff. I even want to suggest that our brave hero’s cry of ‘Scooby Dooby Dooooo’ reminds me of Yeats…

I know that Scooby is back with a vengeance, and it is a deep pleasure to see youngsters worshiping at his majestic feet but (and now I definitely sound like a BBC arts presenter decrying the decline of western culture) it’s just not as good as it once was. Yes, folks, I am getting old.

But what can Scooby and the Gang tell us about horror and television. Well, first, there is the association with children that we discussed a while back. The show started in the late 1960s, which was only about ten years after horror films were the first major package of films that were sold to television and developed a huge following among the kids.

Indeed, most of the humor in the series relies on a high level of familiarity with the history of the horror film. Each week, the gang would run into yet another classic monster or classic monster movie type, and the series depends upon a familiarity with these monsters, their mythologies and the narratives with which they were associated.

None the less, the show was actually strongly associated with a particular period of horror. Despite the psychedelic clothes and van design, the series is strongly rooted in the monster-hunter narratives of the 1940s, as exemplified by the Sherlock Holmes films of the 1940s.

If the Sherlock Holmes films are now remembered as detective stories, they were known as ‘mysteries’ at the time; and the term ‘mystery’ was not a separate category from ‘horror’ but meant stories of the strange, weird and uncanny. Holmes was therefore usually hunting down supposedly supernatural monsters, and even when the mystery was not a monster on the loose, the ‘mystery’ was not just a puzzle to be solved but a seemingly impossible phenomena that seemed to defy logic – even when the work of Nazis or criminal gangs.

It is therefore worth remembering that the Scooby gang drive around in ‘The Mystery Machine’, and they are teenage detectives in search of clues. They were monster hunters in much the same way as Holmes in the 1940s or Carl Kolchak in the 1970s.

This also relates to a theme that is central to the 1940s but also to horror from the Gothic novel to the present: the tension between the rational and the irrational. In the Holmes narratives, the conflict revolves around the possibility of supernatural explanation versus the power of Holmes’ rational logic. Would he be able to counter the supernatural; to give it a rational explanation? Or would the forces of the supernatural and the irrational win out?

Of course, like the Scooby gang, Holmes always finds a rational explanation; as does the detective in The Beast With Five Fingers. But in other narratives, the supernatural wins out and ridicules the powers of rational thought. Think about The X-Files for a moment!

However, Scooby Doo, Where are You? may have seemed to follow a rational logic but, let us be honest, who really cared about the key figures of rational normality, Fred or Daphne? Walking blocks of wood! Instead, it was disruptive monsters on the one hand, and the mad antics of Scooby and Shaggy on the other, that provided excitement. And Scooby and Shaggy were driven by an obsessive preoccupation with food; not the desire to solve the mystery (they ran to food and away from the mysterious and uncanny).

They are driven by the body, not the mind; they continually lapse into irrational panic; and it was usually their slapstick clumsiness that captured the menace, not Fred and Daphne’s carefully laid traps. And then, of course, the two blocks of wood are finally upstaged by Velma, who explains everything; and she was in almost all ways far closer to Shaggy and Scooby than Fred or Daphne, being another teenager outsider: the bespectacled smart girl. God, one can only imagine the humiliation that Daphne must have heaped upon her in the locker room back at school!

At the present, teen horror series a huge on television following Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in which Buffy’s group called themselves the Scooby gang); and, consequently, while Buffy may have been highly important in industrial terms, Scooby Doo hangs over the whole output (from Buffy to Pretty Little Liars, Supernatural, Teen Wolf, and The Vampire Diaries) like some grand ur-text; or some renaissance master: Leonardo, Michelangelo …

Teen Wolf (2011) – Subtexts that Hardly Qualify as Such

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Some years ago my friend Harry Benshoff published a book called Monsters in the Closet in which he explored various ways in which horror has been associated with homosexuality and homosexual desire. For example, he suggests that the monster has often been figured as a disruptive force that threatens the heterosexual couple. When I recently watched season one of Teen Wolf (I do a lot of commuting!), I was rather taken aback by the extent to which the series seemed to have taken this premise and run with it – big time. It is awash with homosexual subtexts, subtexts that hardly qualify as subtexts – its a bit like Garth Marenghi’s great line: ‘I know writers who use subtexts and they’re all cowards. Okay?’

The story starts with a nerdy young boy, Scott McCall, whose best friend, Stiles, is the best thing in the entire show – far better than Scott. Stiles seems to have been made out of all the best DNA from 1980s teen comedies (and particularly teen horror-comedies). Scott and Stiles are also the kind of best buddies who climb in and out of one another’s bedroom windows, but when Stiles hears about a savage attack by a strange beast in the nearby woods, he insists that he and Scott go there and have a look see. And, wouldn’t you know it, Scott gets bitten by the strange beast … whatever it is.

Then Derek appears, a young hunk but one who is no longer young enough to go to high school; and he warns Scott that the bite will change him into a werewolf and that Scott needs the guidance of an older male mentor so that he can make sense of what is happening. But Scott says, no way, he has fallen for the new girl in school, Allison, who is different from the others (for a start, she appears to be about ten years older than everyone else – even Derek).

But the question is: who is doing all the werewolf attacks. Is it Scott? Is it Derek? Or is it another, even older ‘alpha’ whose identity is unknown but who wants Scott and Derek to join his pack.

Oh, and there is also a high school jock, Jackson, who continually wears an expression of hatred and disgust that screams ‘homophobia born of repressed homosexuality’ – he initially hates Scott and then spends ages trying to have the gift of becoming a werewolf bestowed upon him – he thinks that it will give him an advantage in sports or something…

But the key narrative problem is that every time Scott starts to get romantic with Allison, his inner werewolf kicks in and he has to stop.

Of course, what matters is not whether the show has a homosexual subtext, but what it is trying to do with it. As Benshoff points out, the association between homosexuality and the monster is a very double-edged sword that has some very real pleasures and some very real problems. But I will leave it to you to read his work, which I strongly recommend. Instead, I want to suggest that the search for homosexual subtexts can also cut both ways. Just as much as there are serious attempts to explore the meanings of homosexuality (such as Benshoff), there are also numerous attempts to simply ridicule others as ‘sooo gay!’ In other words, the search for, and identification of, subtexts can either be used to undermine or reinforce notions of ‘normal’ masculinity – whatever that is!

So what is Teen Wolf doing? At one level, it seems to be clearly working towards the establishment of the heterosexual couple, but that is hardly a surprise and may be little more than a narrative of convenience – a pretext that allows the show to play with lots of other material. On another level, the show is also associated with Russell Mulcahy, whose films have long been an exercise in high camp. For example, he directed Highlander, Ricochet, The Shadow, and was even the director of Rambo III before being replaced by Peter MacDonald due to ‘creative differences’. In television, he has also have a variety of credits, most notably (in this context) four episodes of Queer as Folk: USA.

But what does the association with Mulcahy really prove? While the search for homosexual subtexts can be a fascinating game, it is actually very difficult to decide what these subtext actually mean; and part of the reason is that it is often unclear whether these subtexts are supposed to be conscious or not. Sometimes the implication is that they are clearly not consciously intended but rather work at a subconscious (if not unconscious) level; but, others times, the implication is that they are conscious – that filmmakers are secretly smuggling materials into programming below the radar.

Of course, the interest of generic materials is often precisely due to their undecidability. Shows that use horror materials as a metaphor for something else can often be too conscious or obvious; and finally end up being bad metaphors and/or boring horror stories. While those that remain more ambiguous often end up being more telling and more fascinating. In horror, the fascination is often in the ambivalence – Dracula is neither straightforwardly attractive nor repulsive; and much the same is true of the Frankenstein monster.

Returning to Teen Wolf, given that its homosexual subtexts seem so overt that they barely seem to be subtexts at all, another question is also posed: is the homosexual subtext actually a subtext (material that is subconscious or secretly smuggled in below the radar), or is it actually consciously and explicitly aimed at specific markets. The whole thing has the feel of a joke that we are all expected to ‘get’ (or at least a significant number of us are expected to get). In other words, the makers do not seem to be taking the subtext very seriously but rather treating it as ‘camp’.

None of which tells you whether Teen Wolf is actually any good. For my part, I certainly found it to be fun, in a junk food sort of a way; and I am vaguely looking forward to the second season … I am not holding my breath or anything; but I will certainly give it a chance – if only to see if the subtexts are going anywhere.