Camp

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Camp

THE HISTORY OF CAMP
THE END OF CAMP?
FURTHER READING

Camp is often a confused and confusing term; it is sometimes said that one either "gets it" or one does not. Camp has been called a sensibility, a taste, and an aesthetic, and it is frequently associated with homosexual or queer people who use it as a means of humor, self-definition, and critique. Camp shares similarities with literary tropes such as parody, irony, satire, and black comedy, as well as aesthetically pejorative terms such as schlock or kitsch. John Waters (b. 1946), one of the most well-known camp filmmakers, defined camp (when he was a guest star on TV's The Simpsons [Fox, beginning 1989]) as the "tragically ludicrous" or the "ludicrously tragic"—something so seriously sad, bad, or inept, that the only response one can make is to laugh at it. Such a double or conflicted response is key to understanding the phenomenon of camp. Camp (as a reception paradigm) might thus be described as a negotiated reading strategy that ironically calls into question certain aspects of mainstream taste, and especially how those aspects of taste relate to issues of gender and sexuality. As a style of production, camp texts are those that encode a self-aware irony into their very fabric, assuring that audiences will find them (deliberately) "over-the-top" or "bad."

There are at least four overlapping (and possibly many more) types of camp that theorists have identified. The first is naïve camp, in which audiences decode mainstream "serious" texts as campy; thus cliché-ridden, badly acted Hollywood films like Showgirls (1995)—or any number of older melodramas from Cobra Woman (1944) to Valley of the Dolls (1967)—have been called camp.

Deliberate camp is created by the producers of the text (and not the spectators, as is the case with naïve camp). The Batman TV show (ABC, 1966–1968), Pink Flamingos (1972), and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), are all self-conscious, deliberate camp: they invite audiences to laugh at their deliberately wooden acting, bad dialogue, and cheap sets. Queer camp is camp that forthrightly calls into question dominant notions of gender and sexuality, and queer camp can be both naïve or deliberate. For example, Ed Wood Jr. (1924–1978) made the sex-change exploitation film Glen or Glenda (1953) in all seriousness, yet it is extremely queer and thus might best be classified as naive queer camp.

Pop camp is the mainstream appropriation of camp into styles or texts less challenging to dominant notions of gender and sexuality. Pop camp often verges on simple parody, in that it wants audiences to laugh at its stylistic or textual excess, without necessarily thinking about issues related to normative gender and sexuality. For example, the movie Barbarella (1968) might be best understood as deliberate pop camp: it is trying to be "cheesy" and "over-the-top"—but not to the point of deconstructing traditional concepts of gender and sexuality (as does the deliberate queer camp of Rocky Horror). Nonetheless, some theorists have suggested that all camp should be considered queer-at-heart, as it always skews or distorts mainstream film practice (if not always gender and sexuality) in provocative ways.

THE HISTORY OF CAMP

The word "camp" may come from the French term se camper (to flaunt)—in this case the flaunting of one's homosexuality. Camp style can be traced back to at least the early eighteenth century and the rise of homosexual subcultures within western European cities. Camp was thus a way of performing a hitherto unseen identity; early camp style celebrated a certain degree of gender-bending, wit, and aestheticism. These attributes became somewhat synonymous with homosexuality and/or homosexual style through the public persona and writings of the playwright Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). Wilde's camp sensibility infiltrated film directly via several silent film versions of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1913, 1916). Other silent films—perhaps most famously Alla Nazimova's film of Wilde's play Salome (1923)—also employed camp style via overly mannered acting, highly stylized settings, and bizarre narrative events. (As such, camp styles have often blurred into various art or experimental cinemas—the attention to surface style, often at

MAE WEST
b. Mary Jane West, Brooklyn, New York, 17 August 1893, d. 22 November 1980

The classical Hollywood star Mae West was a camp icon for much of the twentieth century. It is often said that she acted as if she were a man impersonating a woman—that she was in fact a female drag queen. Her bigger-than-life persona (over which she maintained strict control), sexually provocative dialogue (which she wrote herself), and ultimately her refusal to go quietly into retirement with dignity made her a favorite among gay men and other camp aficionados. Even today she remains a much-discussed figure among feminist and queer theorists.

West began her career as a child star in vaudeville and burlesque, playing both boys and girls. As she started to mature, she was sometimes billed as "The Baby Vamp." During the 1920s she appeared on the legitimate stage and began to write her own sexually frank (for their era) comedies. In 1926 her play Sex caused such a furor she was sent to jail for ten days, and her play The Drag was one of the first to deal with homosexual characters. West made a huge impression in her first Hollywood film, Night After Night (1932), and she was signed to a contract at Paramount. She Done Him Wrong (1933, based on her stage play Diamond Lil), and I'm No Angel (1933) were huge box office hits and catapulted West into instant stardom. Many straight men in the audience lusted after her, while women and gay men responded to her ability to use her sexuality as a playful yet powerful weapon.

But West hit Hollywood at exactly the wrong time. The Motion Picture Production Code was in the process of being revivified and actually enforced, and West was attacked repeatedly in the press by religious and secular reformists who saw her as the embodiment of decaying morality. The title of her next film, It Ain't No Sin, had to be changed to the less suggestive Belle of the Nineties (1934), which was also a big hit. However, throughout the rest of the 1930s, West's characters and dialogue faced increasing censorship and continued harangues from a prudish press. After The Heat's On (1943), she retired from films and returned to the stage, touring for decades with her sexually provocative plays and nightclub acts.

In 1970 West returned to the screen in Myra Breckinridge, a deliberately campy sex comedy about a male-to-female transsexual. In her final film, Sextette (1978), the eighty-five-year-old West was still playing a sex goddess, a campy turn that bordered (according to many critics) on the grotesque because of her advanced years. Although she made only twelve films throughout her long career, West's importance to the shifting terrain of gender and sexuality in twentieth-century America was immeasurable.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Night After Night (1932), She Done Him Wrong (1933), I'm No Angel (1933), Belle of the Nineties (1934), Klondike Annie (1936), My Little Chickadee (1940), Myra Breckinridge (1970), Sextette (1978)

the expense of content, was and is a hallmark of camp taste.) Deliberate and queer camp can also be found in the work of the gay Hollywood director James Whale (1889–1957), most famous for directing the classic horror films Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). These films all feature a highly stylized mise-en-scène, contain much ironic humor, and make pointed jibes against bourgeois heterosexuality.

Such deliberate queer camp was a rarity in Hollywood after the enforcement of the Production Code (1934), but queer spectators nonetheless continued to decode Hollywood films from non-straight perspectives. A sort of "cult of camp" coalesced among urban gay men (and some women) of the era. This cult laughed at the excesses of Hollywood's naïve heterosexual melodramas, while simultaneously celebrating the indefatigable drive and bigger-than-life personas of actresses such as Joan Crawford (1904–1977), Bette Davis (1908–1989), Mae West (1893–1980), Barbara Stanwyck (1907–1990), Lana Turner (1921–1995), and Judy Garland (1922–1969). Many gay men emulated the style and bitchiness of these leading actresses, identifying with their performativity, their subordinate (but often resistant) position within patriarchal culture, and their frequent romantic troubles with men. Indeed, so strong was the impact of the cult of camp on gay identity during this highly closeted era that some homosexuals covertly identified themselves to one another as "Friends of Dorothy," an allusion to Judy Garland's role in The Wizard of Oz (1939). "Bad" actresses such as Maria Montez (1917–1951), "bad" or cheap movie-making (B movies), and the outlandish stylistic excesses of certain genres (the musical, the horror film, the melodrama) were also celebrated within the cult of camp. As such, it was not unusual to see drag acts and stage shows in urban gay bars that simultaneously celebrated and mocked favorite camp movie stars and the creaky vehicles in which they appeared.

That type of parody/pastiche/appropriation found its way into the work of 1960s experimental filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger (b. 1927), Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol (1928–1987), all of whom made deliberately queer camp films that critiqued or interrogated Hollywood style. For example, Anger was obsessed with Hollywood history, especially its seamier side. In addition to making films that explored gay desire in relation to Hollywood icons (such as Scorpio Rising [1964]), he wrote the trashy tell-all book Hollywood Babylon. Smith's most famous work, Flaming Creatures (1963), poked fun at the idea of the Hollywood bacchanalia as envisioned in countless Orientalist, biblical, and/or Roman epics. Warhol's minimalist long-take films (such as Haircut [1963], Blow Job [1963], and Harlot [1965]) countered Hollywood's continuity editing style, while the films' actors—drag queens, hustlers, lesbians, trade boys, etc., who proclaimed themselves "Superstars"—critiqued notions of Hollywood celebrity. Warhol even made a film entitled Camp (1965), a sort of queer variety show made up of various camp performances. The work of these and other underground filmmakers was an important influence on John Waters, whose independent features starring the cross-dressing actor Divine (1945–1988) (including Pink Flamingos [1972], Female Trouble [1974], Polyester [1981], and Hairspray [1988]) brought deliberate queer camp style to ever-widening audiences.

Camp stresses the performative nature of gender and sexuality—the idea (more recently expanded upon and explored within Queer Theory) that allegedly stable categories of gender and sexuality are in fact shifting and complex subject positions that must be repeatedly performed in order to maintain the illusion of their constancy. Drag or cross-dressing (the performance of a socially constructed femininity by men, or the performance of a socially constructed masculinity by women) is camp by its very nature and is the hallmark of much queer camp in film. Drag acts reveal—through parody and appropriation—that what was thought to be essential and true (in this case, traditional concepts of gender) are in fact merely roles that anyone can assay.

During the 1960s, as countercultural filmgoers began to reject Hollywood's usual formula filmmaking, the camp sensibility became increasingly mainstreamed. Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" (first published in 1964) is a good indicator of how the homosexual cult of camp—as a way of finding humor in and satirizing texts—was being absorbed into more mainstream spectatorship and filmmaking. While her essay downplayed camp's queerer political meanings, it did differentiate between naïve and deliberate camp, as well as note camp's ties to previous and current aesthetic movements such as Art Nouveau and Pop Art. Within years, Hollywood was itself producing deliberately campy films (and TV shows such as Batman and Lost in Space [CBS, 1965–1968]). For example, after audiences mocked the bad acting, stilted dialogue, and cliché-ridden narrative of the "serious" Twentieth Century Fox melodrama Valley of the Dolls (1967), its sequel Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) was produced as deliberate camp. Its script (by film critic Roger Ebert) is full of outlandish situations and clunky dialogue, and its overall style (courtesy of sexploitation film director Russ Meyer) is a riot of color, cliché, and condescension.

THE END OF CAMP?

Hollywood's use of camp was basically a fad, one that connected briefly with late 1960s countercultural audiences and then quickly died away. Many of these deliberately campy films, such as Candy (1968), did little to challenge dominant assumptions about gender and sexuality. The few that did, like Myra Breckinridge (1970) or Something for Everyone (1970), were often met with critical hostility. Fueled by that era's more pronounced homophobia, critics and commentators charged that Hollywood elites were corrupting America with homosexual propaganda, and Hollywood filmmakers shied away from queer themes altogether. Hollywood eventually reconnected with its mainstream audience via the blockbuster genre films of the 1970s—films like Jaws (1975), Rocky (1976), and Star Wars (1977)—that hid their generic clichés and B-movie acting behind spectacular special effects and/or a hazy veil of nostalgia. Pop camp turned into simple parody: films such as Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974) went for easy laughs that mostly avoided any critique of gender or sexuality. When Twentieth Century Fox released its deliberately queer camp genre hybrid The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975, it flopped terribly among mainstream audiences (although it eventually became the most famous of all cult films). Camp was no longer a style appreciated by mainstream audiences, and since that time it has continued to cause consternation for many movie-goers. Deliberately campy films like Moulin Rouge (2001) and Down with Love (2003) often reach a plateau at the box office because mainstream audiences are unsure what to make of their uneven tones and formal excesses.

Camp is, and was, perhaps a discourse of the closet, a sensibility for survival produced in an era when one's homosexuality had to be kept secret. British film critic Jack Babuscio explored those ties (even as they were fading away) in his essay "Camp and the Gay Sensibility" (1977). For Babuscio, the camp sensibility was dependent on queers' alienation from the mainstream. Such alienation produced irony (between the straight and gay worlds), performative role-playing (the need to pass as straight), aestheticization (desire to find beauty and truth wherever one could), and bittersweet humor (needed in order to survive in a hostile world). While those four traits still describe the camp sensibility, they no longer necessarily describe a specifically gay sensibility. Many gay and lesbian people now see themselves as part of mainstream America, and one does not have to be gay or lesbian in order to understand and appreciate camp.

To a certain extent, historical camp style and taste have been subsumed by a more generalized sense of postmodern irony and pastiche, a stance that approaches life (and media texts) as always and already "within quotes." Within film culture, the originally queer cult of camp has evolved into a larger, straighter, cult of fans who enjoy watching "bad movies"—B movies, low-budget genre films, exploitation cinema, and so forth. While this is consistent with camp's historical function (the revaluation of artifacts that dominant culture has already sloughed off) much of the "bad movie" cultism in the early twenty-first century perhaps lacks the critical context or political grounding that queer camp cultists embodied. Bad movies may be funny, and fun to laugh at (as the cult popularity of a show like Mystery Science Theater 3000 [1988–1999] attests to), but if and when more political critiques those films give rise to are heard, they are only one voice in an otherwise cacophonous semiotic excess. True to the polemics of the postmodern economy, the camp sensibility, born out of genuine political struggle and discrimination, has perhaps become just another hip stance or lifestyle practice available for purchase.