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130 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
contagious, yet subterranean, power of metonymic conjunction (Beaver 109,
after Todorov; Douglas; Crocker 59). James C. Scott calls this form of resistance
“the hidden transcript” (136), e.g. the mode by which marginalized groups
insinuate their own voices, albeit in masked form, into official public discourse.
Thus, I would like to suggest that there is not only a “straight” reception of
Music Hall productions that reinscribes capitalist desire, but also a gay reception
that resists compulsory heterosexuality and by extension patriarchy. Furthermore,
this gay perspective is largely unavailable to a heterosexual audience
participating in a conspiracy of blindness.
IN THE INTEREST OF CORPORATE CAPITALIST
PATRIARCHY: READING IT “STRAIGHT”
The productions at the Music Hall have become legendary
throughout the world as an expression of the joy and vitality of the
American spirit.
Richard Nixon (1971)
Establishing Music Hall productions as expressions of America’s spirit not only
locates that spirit in the heartland of corporate capitalism, but fetishizes the
performances that embody it. 3 Ideologically, then, the Music Hall, and by
extension Rockefeller Center, becomes America’s spiritual center. Calvinist
values were transposed into the tourist environment of the Music Hall, a case
that I have argued elsewhere (Drewal passim). This transposition put
entertainment in the service of the work ethic. The whole was then imbued with
a spiritual quality in several ways: among them, through invoking the value of
hard work in themes about man’s achievements that run like a leitmotif
throughout the artworks in the building and the stage productions; through
transposing features traditionally associated with cathedrals into the
environment, thus symbolically sacralizing the site (they even went so far as to
employ ushers from church-sponsored high schools and then fired them if they
were found drinking in local bars [Krinsky 168]); and, equally important,
through displaying advanced technology in the form of stage spectacles that
stood as incontrovertible evidence of the fruits of man’s labor for all to see. 4
Man’s achievements were in this way objectified and fetishized. If man’s
salvation depends on his hard work in this life, then evidence of that salvation
inheres in material success that can be measured concretely, expressed in
positivistic statements, 5 and then labeled “progress.” Dean MacCannell identifies
this process as the main legacy of industrial society as discovered by Karl Marx
(19–20).