“I know we’ve never met and I don’t mind you never returning my calls, but after two films I feel like I am in your mind,” gushes Jennifer, as if she’s a wide-eyed ingenue meeting her hero. “That would explain my constant headaches,” quips Gale, a cut that gets Jennifer to change her approach. Instead of kissing up to Gale Weathers, Jennifer decides to be Gale Weathers.
She takes a beat to change her composure and then says, “You know, I’m sorry things didn’t work out on 60 Minutes II, but Total Entertainment, that’s a pretty good fallback.” In an instant, we clock who Jennifer really is, as well as how far Gale has fallen from stabbing at serious journalism and returning to tabloid dreck.
Jennifer isn’t the only character to play someone we know from the Scream movies either. Scream 3 also features Emily Mortimer as a Sidney Prescott stand-in and Matt Keeslar as a pseudo-Dewey. But Jennifer is the only one who feels like she’s doing to the franchise what Scream did to ’80s slashers. Posey is at once breaking down and celebrating the basic tropes and formulas that came before her arrival. As she does so often working with Christopher Guest, the real actor is interrogating the type of character represented by Gale Weathers, and Posey then delivers a precise send-up.
Posey plays Jennifer as a canny careerist, someone who sees all the angles and knows how to play them to her advantage, no matter who gets hurt in the process. This is most obvious in her relationship with Dewey (David Arquette), who has been hired as a consultant by the Stab producers (which include Roger Corman, in one of the movie’s many larger genre nods).
When the sight of Dewey forces Gale to lose composure for the briefest of moments, Jennifer pounces. She allows herself a slight strut as she goes up to Dewey’s side and takes his arm. In contrast to Dewey’s expression of guilt and embarrassment, Jennifer gets increasingly melodramatic as she describes what she’s learned about Gale from him, even about “that lost, lonely little girl inside.”
Posey’s performance is, of course, fully comedic. Jennifer never seems believably scared, not even right before she’s literally stabbed to death by a killer. But in playing the comedy, Posey plays the strongest aspect of Scream 3, downplaying the film’s lackluster horror and dramatic beats.
