Are you watching Scream Queens? Me neither. But I did catch a scene of the FOX slasher-comedy and was surprised to see that my father, Justice Antonin Scalia, made a cameo appearance. Sort of.
The show, set on a college campus, is about a murder spree waged by mysterious figures dressed as devils, and features Jamie Lee Curtis evading death as she did in 1978’s Halloween. The scene in question begins with Curtis re-enacting the famous shower scene from Psycho in which her mother, Janet Leigh, plays a character murdered by—I’d better not give anything away.
But Curtis avoids her mother’s fate, emerges safely from the shower, and is fending off the devils when a surprise third assailant arrives, wearing a different disguise. Curtis asks, “Are you supposed to be Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia?” (Give her credit for pronouncing his name correctly.)
The masked man nods his head before attacking her. But, a skilled martial artist, she thwarts him and his devilish companions. She takes particular delight in knocking the Scalia-guised assailant to the ground, punching him like Ronda Rousey Holly Holm and talking to him like Linda Greenhouse. Between every punch to the face, she makes a claim that, presumably, is meant to rebut something Justice Scalia has said.
“The homosexual lifestyle is not destructive to the fabric of American society!”
Bam!
“The Voting Rights Act should be authorized in every state!”
Pow!
“And the Affordable Care Act does not require people to eat broccoli!”
Bash!
Why, it’s almost as if she’s speaking to the real judge.
I imagine that at both of the Scream Queen viewing parties around the country, people wondered who this guy was supposed to be. But the ideal Scream Queen viewer, the enlightened type the show’s writers congratulate themselves for attracting, stood up and cheered Curtis on. She’s not only a tough grrrrrrl, but she’s also striking blows for truth, justice, and progressivism! (Though they were probably disappointed that Curtis didn’t mention Citizens United. Oh well, gotta leave ’em wanting more.)
Yet the character’s righteous indignation comes off as particularly strange given that she hasn’t exactly been a beacon of morality. She has affairs with students; she decapitated her husband; and she framed her husband’s mistress for the murder. But hey, at least she’s not an originalist.
Another problem is that she’s making rejoinders to claims that Justice Scalia never made. “The homosexual lifestyle is not destructive to the fabric of American society!” is probably a reference to his dissent in this summer’s Obergefell decision, which begins: “I write separately to call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy.” His point was that the Court threatened democracy by usurping the role of the legislature. But that’s not as good a reason to punch him.
As for “The Voting Rights Act should be authorized in every state,” I have good news: it is! Presumably, she’s taking issue with the Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which invalidated an element of the Voting Rights Act that required nine entire states and certain counties in seven others to get federal approval before changing election laws. The ruling did not throw out the VRA in any state, and jurisdictions that violate voting rights are still subject to judicial oversight.
Finally, Justice Scalia did not say Obamacare “require[s] people to eat broccoli.” She’s probably referring to his question during the oral arguments of HHS v. Florida: “Could you define the market—everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.” Anyone reading above the second-grade level can recognize that he was alerting us to the slippery slope that the ACA was walking down. (What’s more, he was picking up on an idea put forth by Judge Vinson in an earlier opinion that declared the ACA unconstitutional.)
Apart from these minor details, her tirade was completely accurate.
Am I going overboard by nit-picking an obscure television show? Perhaps. Then again, Andrew Breitbart’s oft-quoted remark that politics is downstream from culture applies here. Most people watching this scene will never read any of Justice Scalia’s opinions or books, or encounter a news article that accurately represents his opinions or statements. If they hear his name, they won’t say, “he’s such an articulate textualist” or “he’s absolutely right about deep dish,” or even ask “doesn’t he have a son who watches too much bad television?” Instead, they’ll ask, “didn’t he, like, say that, President Obama wants to, like, make us all eat our vegetables?”
In other words, it matters that his ideas are so misrepresented because this could be the only representation that viewers see.
It’s worth noting there’s precedent for this bizarre scene. In one of her books, at the start of a chapter called “Revenge Fantasies,” the actress Mindy Kaling jokes that to motivate herself during workouts, she imagines that her make-believe husband is murdered “by a deranged man wearing an Antonin Scalia mask.” She tracks the killer (whom she simply calls “Scalia,” not “Man in a Scalia Disguise”) to Miami: “I choke him to death with his own mask. When his body goes lifeless in my arms, I’m tempted to pull off his mask to see who it was. But I stop just before I do it. I don’t even care anymore.” Not to mention, keeping the mask on lets her and the reader imagine that she really has murdered a conservative judge.
I understand that I’m less likely than most people to find these scenes hilarious. Nonetheless, I think it’s fair to point out that these scenes raise the usual questions about media double standards. How would the left react if, say, a rodeo clown wore the mask of a Democrat president? It turns out that liberals own their fair share of the hatred and intolerance, incivility and rage that the right is supposed to monopolize.
More to the point, these scenes of semi-ironic violence are desperate and pathetic. They are juvenile revenge fantasies with Hollywood production values, in which the writers finally get to say everything they’ve ever wanted to someone they despise, and kick his butt in the bargain (even if it turns out he never said what they think). They’re so eager to vent their ire that they do so at the expense of character consistency, plot coherence, and accuracy.
And in these moments, the violent anger of many on the left is unmasked.
Christopher J. Scalia works at a PR firm in Washington, D.C.
