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THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP 159 400 Blows (1959). Of course the boy runs to find his mother and, of course, opens the door on his mother in his grandfather’s arms. Could we ask for a more primal scene? Could we imagine that the film would be that obvious? But it is. Besides, the whole sequence takes place during a rainstorm—the pathetic fallacy in action. Clichés are not merely recycled in this genre, they are made more literal. For example, in The Other Side of Midnight (1977), faced with an unwanted pregnancy, the heroine performs a self-abortion using a wire coat hanger. Watching the film we are forced to ask ourselves, will they dare be that obvious? And of course they are, for the exaggeration, the heightening, the acceleration of clichés, underlines the situation, and the situation—the dramatic arrangement of characters and conflicts—forms the central fantasy attraction of melodrama. For people with high-culture tastes or backgrounds, films such as The Betsy and The Other Side of Midnight can be received as total parodies. It is especially easy for media people (who can spot the formal clichés that underline the content conventions) to do so. But these films function in a different way with the general mass audience: spectators are engrossed by the situation and the exaggeration simultaneously. Fans have usually read the book and, if not, have heard the plot in advance from everyday conversations or the print and television journalism that surrounds contemporary film production, such as the Entertainment Tonight type of show. The experience of such self-aware kitsch demands a certain kind of willing suspension of disbelief. Identification and enjoyment of the film’s visual and narrative pleasures are present, to be sure, but taken in a somewhat distanced direction. Rather than “talking down” to the audience, the makers of selfaware kitsch are “talking across” to that audience. The implicit assumption is: We all know this is fun, just a good piece of entertainment. In a study of Dynasty with attention to audience responses, particularly group spectatorship in bars and clubs that made viewing a distinct event highlighted by active parodic reading, Jane Feuer linked this dual sensibility to gay consciousness: the camp decoding is also a preferred reading of the text. According to one critic, “Dynasty represents something extraordinary: the incursion of socalled gay taste into the mainstream of American culture.” Camp is not a property of a text, but exists in the nature of the activations; however, not just any text can be camped, and Dynasty certainly facilitates the process. … Very early on its producers were aware of camp decodings and intended to encode them in the text by devising “outrageous plots” and “walk(ing) a fine line, just this side of camp. …It is important to stress that the camp attitude toward Dynasty in both gay and mainstream culture does not preclude emotional identification; rather, it embraces both identification and parody—attitudes normally viewed as mutually exclusive—at the same time and as part of the same sensibility. As Richard Dyer has written, the gay sensibility “holds together qualities that are elsewhere felt as
160 TAKING OUT THE TRASH antithetical: theatricality and authenticity… intensity and irony, a fierce assertion of extreme feeling with a deprecating sense of its absurdity.” (447–448) The characteristic parody of self-aware kitsch promotes what John Fiske has called “skeptical hedonism” in audience response to much mass-culture documentary, that is, we all know this is a fantasy, but we want in on the fun of such phenomena, for example, as television wrestling or supermarket tabloid headlines. In this duality of response, self-aware kitsch is related to, or overlaps with, Camp. CAMP READINGS Following Susan Sontag’s provocative and original essay, “Notes on Camp,” we can recognize Camp as a strategy of reading that sees the world in terms of aestheticization and style: “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” (105). Camp is an ironic and parodic appreciation of an extravagant form that is out of proportion to its content, especially when that content is banal or trivial. Sontag identifies pure camp as naive and unintentional, exhibiting a failed seriousness and/or passionate ambition. A good example of failed seriousness would be the mid-1950s independently produced film about transvestism, Glen or Glenda, which found some success when rereleased on the midnight show and college film circuit where it is appreciated for its amazingly defensive fetishism. The defense of fantasy is so strong (a voice-over narration interprets everything we are seeing), and so mundane (the rhetoric of democratic choice and privacy of the home is constantly invoked in the style of instructional films), and so particular (we are continually reminded that male cross-dressing has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality), that it invites the same kind of hilarity as Reefer Madness, the earnest anti-marijuana film of the 1930s that was recirculated to stoned audiences in the 1960s. Such work, if not actually Camp, certainly facilitates a Camp reading because it invites scornful laughter due to its ineptness. Hollywood film often exhibits a psycho-aesthetic pluralism. Films are deliberately constructed to be open to a great deal of very different fantasizing. That is one secret of their mass appeal. What facilitates a Camp reading in this context is that possibilities for fantasizing have been so simplified that they seem isolated and ridiculous. We need our defenses. Sontag underlined the problem with this as a deliberate strategy in discussing the delicate relation between parody and self-parody in Camp. The films of Hitchcock are a showcase for this problem. When self-parody lacks ebullience but instead reveals (even sporadically) a contempt for one’s themes and one’s materials—as in To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, North
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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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1 PERFORMING “AKIMBO” Queer pri
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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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112 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION pieces th
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114 FE/MALE IMPERSONATION practitio
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Page 200: homosocialism 35-6, 43-4 Hutcheon,
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