Screams

There are in my life some very distinguishing screams. Of course, there is the horror contained in Edvard Munch’s painting, “The Scream.” Fay Wray’s uncontrolled screaming in King Kong certainly set a high standard for the genre. High on my list is the terrified cry elicted from the quaking eleven-year old as I sat frozen holding my banana flavored Turkish taffy (Smack it and crack it!) watching the Japanese horror film, Rodan, at the Plainview Movie Theater. The first sight of those giant ants upon which the great monster fed provoked a involuntary yelp from my terrified soul. Something deep in my unconscious had been touched!

A scream I recall with a bit more pleasure is that of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as they leap off the cliff into the waters below trying to escape the posse which is inexorably closing in on them.

I think there are others: perhaps Janet Leigh’s tortured cries in Hitchcock’s Psycho remains high on my list, as does Marlon Brando’s animal evocations in A Streetcar Named Desire.

But the scream I am most drawn to now is the scream Ronnie Hawkins makes in his performance in The Last Waltz of the classic song, “Who Do You Love?” In four escalating screams, Hawkins displays not fear nor terror, but sheer and uncontainable joy. On that stage at that time, the world is just too much fun. “Big time, Bill, big time,” he announces to the event’s producer, Bill Graham. And what is big about the time is the irrepressible pleasure of the moment that can only be expressed in the scream.