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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA 145 Room, which literally perch atop the New York City skyline. In the auditorium, lights concealed behind the concentric panels can create a rainbow effect, a sunset, or the aurora borealis that pull together and focus the viewing masses. Or, left natural, muted beige and gold tones give a sense of sunrise. Indeed Carol Hershelle Krinsky notes that a sunrise service was often held there on Easter Sunday (176). Thus the power of the Music Hall’s design is in its ability to induce a sense of anticipation through symbolic associations with better things to come, new dawns, or new beginnings, as well as in its potential to unite the viewers with that which they view, drawing them into the event through a series of ever-decreasing ovals that flow continuously from the auditorium to the proscenium. Additionally, “the light console, far in advance of its time, can turn the great auditorium into an extension of the stage and the audience into part of the spectacle, another Roxy principle” (Karp 88). In this way, the design and the lighting minimize the bicameral roles of performers and spectators. Add to this celestial setting the world’s largest organ playing as patrons enter, during intermissions, and at the conclusion, and the metaphor of tomorrow’s heaven on earth is more or less complete. Krinsky feels that the Music Hall is “unforgettable because its form is simple to understand and to describe, and because its size, its lack of intelligible scale, and its ‘celestial’ shape can both exalt and overwhelm” (180). Likewise, Alan Balfour suggests that the setting creates an awesome sense of anticipation, the auditorium appearing as a boundless space. He comments, “perhaps in this soaring quality that conveys a sense of almost spiritual pleasure, of entrancement, the setting and play are one” (97). But the gigantic space is only one element of the total experience. In 1982, Walter Karp wrote that the Music Hall stage was—and still is—the largest and best-equipped stage in the world. Its three lengthwise sections can each be raised 13 feet above stage level and lowered 27 feet below it by huge lifts of such advanced design that the Department of War was to make use of the system during World War II and treat it as a military secret. The stage contained, in addition, a revolving circular section that is 43 feet in diameter. The seventy-fivepiece orchestra, carried in a special band car, can go above the stage, below the stage, across the stage and under the stage. It can disappear from out front and re-emerge at stage rear. The stage has equipment that can send up towering fountains of water or bring down cascades of rain. …The great stage curtain, driven by thirteen motors, can produce so many patterned shapes that Roxy decided to make it the first act of his opening show. (88) 11
146 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP The front curtain can lift in a hundred different shapes; a second curtain can produce a wide range of openings from door size to the size of the proscenium arch, which is 100 feet wide. This focus on technology in the stage productions in a curious way paralleled the major strategy of Rockefeller philanthropies to fund technological medicine in order to make it more effective (Brown 239). The degree to which spectacle functions to reinscribe the capitalist authority of the state was implied by Terry: the Rockettes were concluding their routine with the required across-thefront-of-the-stage massed unison kick. The brightest of lights were poured on them as they executed the kick, and the whole house applauded. A man sitting next to me did not. I leaned over to him and said, “you must be a foreigner. In the United States we stand up for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and applaud when the Rockettes kick together.” Terror swept his face. He stood up and applauded simultaneously! The Rockettes, as they have for fifty years, deserve both tributes. (17, emphasis mine) Reportedly standing up and applauding simultaneously, the man next to Terry metaphorically brought the allegiance to nation-state authority (patriotism) into contiguity with the phallocentric high kicks of fetishized womanhood cast as a military machine. “The Rockettes,” Terry affirmed, “deserved both tributes” (17) in the form of a standing ovation. The Rockettes sacrificed individual aggrandizement to the aggrandizing ethos of the whole as a more valued means to a particular end—democratic capitalism. Consistent with the entire Rockefeller Center environment, the basis of the production was the work ethic and capitalist values. It was expressed in a display of the products of man’s labors. It was evident in the display of the advancedstage technology that had formed a central part of Music Hall shows from its opening night in 1932, so powerful and sophisticated that the War Department labeled it top secret during World War II. It was evident further in the precision teamwork of the Rockettes, the only surviving act from opening night. They supposedly taught Rockefeller the value of working together as a group instead of striving for self-aggrandizement. And the work ethic continued to be featured in one of the last versions of the Easter show through the display of Liberace’s personal material wealth—all tax deductible, as he pointed out, since he used it in his work. He even enshrined the evidences of his success in his museum so that visitors may examine their workmanship up close. As he advised the boy in the front row, “See what you can have someday if you practice”—this just before he blessed all with his aspergillum. If the Rockettes embodied, as Rockefeller himself suggested, the value of working together for the good of the group in their emphasis on uniformity and conformity, then Liberace embodied their dialectical American opposite—individualism.
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First published 1994 by Routledge 1
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CONTENTS List of plates vi List of
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11 Richard Halverson as Lady Enid a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to tha
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Plate 1 Joan Jett Blakk, “The May
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Plate 3 Prince Rupert, from a broad
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Plate 5 Actor Robert Wilks, from Co
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Plate 7 Antinous and Dancing Master
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Page 200: homosocialism 35-6, 43-4 Hutcheon,
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