Look, it’s hard for me to say this, but it probably would be best for us all to avoid a relationship like the iconic romance at the center of the Scream movies. One of the cornerstones of the franchise is the love that slowly blossomed between hard-nosed reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and charmingly dopey Woodsboro police officer Dewey Riley (David Arquette) while avoiding being slaughtered in various Ghostface rampages. Well, mostly avoiding being slaughtered. Spoiler alert. However, being a cornerstone does not preclude Gale and Dewey from having an incredibly toxic relationship.
To help illuminate my argument, I’ve broken their relationship into three distinct eras.
The Will-They-Won’t-They Era
This era is where the foundation of their relationship was built, from their tentative flirting in Scream to their acrimonious reunion in Scream 2 to their also acrimonious reunion in Scream 3. It makes narrative sense why they would keep breaking up in between movies. Even though it’s a trope that I hate, screenwriters know it’s easier to get audiences invested in a new couple getting together (even if it’s their third go-round) rather than an established couple staying together.
Needs of the narrative arc aside, this on-again-off-again approach is a bad omen for their relationship. It makes sense why they wouldn’t have stayed together after the first movie. They were barely even together in the first place. They had a spark, but they lived in different towns and decided not to go for it. Also Gale wrote mean things about him in her book. People drift apart. People call you “dim-witted” in a New York Times best-seller. It happens to the best of us.
But the fact that they have had another split as of Scream 3, after that huge moment at the end of 2 where she chooses Dewey over her work, belies the problem at the core of their relationship. Because of the ministrations of a cadre of Ghostfaces, they keep trauma-bonding and trying to make their romance happen. But you can’t build a relationship off of sexy red streaks and surviving a serial killer. That’s proven by the fact that they keep failing to actually make it last.
The They-Finally-Did-And-They-Hate-It Era
As if we needed more proof that their romance is far from perfect, the one time they did make it last, it was a total disaster. Scream 4 picks up a decade and change after Scream 3 and sees that Gale and Dewey have gotten married in the interim, but things have quickly grown stale. Gale feels penned in by her Woodsboro life and finds that she can’t channel herself via writing in the way that she used to. Meanwhile, she has to compete for her husband’s attention with that lemon-square-baking siren Judy Hicks (Marley Shelton).
Frankly, their marriage was always doomed to fail. Gale is an on-the-go city gal, always on the hunt for the next big story. Her approach was brusque, and those stories were exploitative, for sure. But no matter how much she cleans up her act, she is still hardwired to stay moving, like a shark. In Woodsboro, she’s a very big fish in a teeny tiny pond, and her husband doesn’t seem to have any aspirations to rising any higher than sheriff and maintaining the quiet lifestyle he grew up with, give or take a few dozen stabbings every couple of years.
Instead of meeting her where she is and – I don’t know – getting a job as a police grunt in Los Angeles, he drags her into his sphere and tries to stuff her into the tiny box known as Woodsboro. You can’t hide your light under a bushel, Dewey, and Gale is your light. You’d think the highlighter-yellow pantsuit would have reminded you of that, but whatever.
The Post-Breakup Era
Their fundamental incompatibility is highlighted by how things shake out once they actually do break up. As revealed in the 2022 legacy sequel Scream, Dewey’s vision for his life stays small-scale. He can’t imagine a life without Gale and lets himself go to seed, watching her television show and never quite getting the guts to send that reconciliation text. Tragically, this is the last version of Dewey we ever get to see.
The snippets of Gale’s life in New York City, which we get to see in Scream VI, tell a completely different story. She has a high-rise apartment, a handsome new boyfriend, and she stays booked and busy. And that’s not to say this is the case because she never cared about Dewey. Of course she cared about Dewey. He’s adorable. A real nice guy. And she’s not unaffected by his death, naturally. She even has that moment where the Broken Arrow theme plays on the soundtrack that makes me cry every time. But she has always fundamentally been able to stand on her own and build a life around herself in a way that Dewey never was. But that life needs to be her own. She doesn’t need a man, it’s just nice to have one. She needs space to thrive, and that’s something that Dewey never recognized about her while trying to force her into the mold of his own small world.
Frankly, I don’t know that they could have made it work even if they’d tried a half dozen more times, which surely would have happened if the franchise hadn’t taken so many long breaks between 2000 and 2022. Opposites attract at first, sure, but if you keep them together long enough, sometimes they begin to repel each other like reverse polarity magnets. Unfortunately, that is exactly the case with Gale and Dewey’s relationship, as sharp as their banter is and as cute as they are together.