A Wes Craven Romance – Robo Tripping

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Sometime in 1998 I drank a four ounce bottle of Robitussin Maximum Strength and smoked a bunch of weed. This combination gives a person a high that is as powerful as mushrooms, acid or ecstasy, but with its own unique psychoactive flavor.

About an hour into my trip, my roommate, who had not joined me in my drug use this night, asked me if I wanted to go see Scream 2 with a few other friends. I jumped on the idea, as I wanted to get out of the apartment.

However, Scream was not the kind of movie I would normally see, and the idea that I would be seeing it tonight had never crossed my mind, so my thoughts had no frame of reference to hold on to.

My Robo-mind didn’t feel like seeing a horror movie. I wanted to see a romance. To my forward reasoning, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to see a horror movie, it was that I didn’t realize that horror movies even existed. The idea was absurd. Why would anyone enjoy watching people get killed? So even though I could remember enjoying horror movies when I was a kid, the idea was foreign and I went to the theater having no idea what to expect.

When the movie got moving I immediately latched on to the sub-plot of the reporter woman played by Courtney Cox and the deputy played by David Arquette who have a budding romance. There was actually only a little time devoted to this plot, but I decided that this was the center of the movie, and was what the director had intended everyone to focus on.

There was all this killing going on in the background, and people who were scared, and all worried and distracted by the killing. If I had been on mushrooms or acid I probably would have been disgusted and horrified and had to walk out, but Robo is a little different and for me isn’t as likely to accentuate negative emotions.

All the killing didn’t affect me one way or the other. I found it boring more than anything else, and just wanted to get back to the dialogue between Dewey and the reporter lady. However, I understood the importance of the killing as background. It was painting a picture of a society of murder. I didn’t realize the characters weren’t used to this kind of thing. I thought Wes Cravin was portraying a whole society gone horribly wrong where everyone’s killing each other.

So at the core of Scream 2, as I saw it, was the story of this new love, trying to grow in the midst of all this horror, and even though they have their lives and their friend’s lives to worry about, they still stop and risk death so they can steal a kiss and take time for what’s really important. The whole point was to show the power of love and that no matter how torn apart and psychotic our society becomes, love will always find a way to survive. I had to shake my head at the genius of it and at the end of the movie, I couldn’t understand why people weren’t standing and cheering.

After I sobered up I laughed and reminded myself that it was a horror movie, not a romance.

Over a decade later (September 20^th, 2009 to be exact) I saw Courtney Cox on Late Night with Conan O’brian, and she mentioned that she had played the reporter on Scream and that she had married someone from that movie. I had never known nor cared who had played those roles until that night, so I got on the internet and discovered that the reporter and the sheriff from my romance delusion had been married ever since they did Scream 2.

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Robitussin High - my blog post about this story

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