Susan Sontag's revenge

Over on my Moviepalace blog, I've been reviewing a handful of films which were released on DVD as part of a series of "Camp Classics" sets, which set me to pondering the idea of "camp" or a camp sensibility. My dissertation, which never got beyond an opening chapter, would have dealt briefly with the idea of camp as it applies to "gay culture" (another wildly broad category), but the Warner Home Video Camp sets don't include any movies that strike me as especially gay in concept or appeal, except inasmuch as any films with muscle heroes (see Reg Park, a frequent Hercules in the 60's, above) and sweaty gladiators always have some gay potential, from the 30's Tarzan films to the recent 300.

So what is meant today to call something campy? Susan Sontag, who wrote the seminal work on the subject, "Notes on Camp," says in a nutshell that "the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration." It presents itself seriously but its audience can't take it seriously--which explains why, for me, DeMille's The Ten Commandments is a perfect piece of camp: it is outrageously over-the-top in almost every way it can be (script, sets, narrative reach, and especially acting), but I suspect DeMille meant every frame of it to be serious.

Sontag also notes that "camp is esoteric--something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques," and again the DeMille film fits: I, my partner, and several friends have, for almost 20 years running, watched the movie at Easter/Passover and always take great delight in camping it up along with the actors. We play a drinking game that involves the line "So let it be written--so let it be done"; we moan, "Moses! Moses! Moses!" along with Anne Baxter; we yell out "The obelisk of my jubilee" in Fat Albert voices and anticipate Nina Foch's warning to Judith Anderson, "Your tongue will dig your grave, Memnet!"; we freeze-frame the fabulous moment when Yul Brynner enters a room flicking his cape over his shoulder like a runway diva; and we enjoy the bare, oiled chests of Brynner and Charlton Heston which are constantly on display. Others take the movie much more seriously: some love the movie as the ultimate Biblical epic, and others call it a ridiculous, overlong costume drudge. We, approaching it as perhaps the ultimate camp experience, could be said to hold both beliefs. (See the photo above of the Burning Bush Jello treat one of our friends whipped up one year for our viewing party.)

The recent Camp Classics DVDs are being marketed that way because there is an audience out there for such films, but few of them strike me as "real camp." The Colossus of Rhodes is a fairly well-made cross between an overdone Biblical epic and an Italian Hercules movie (two genres which contain more than their share of camp artifacts), but in my eyes, it never goes over-the-top enough to be campily enjoyable. The lead actor, Rory Calhoun, is bad but not juicily so; there are many sweaty men fighting or getting tortured, and there are women done up in flashy 60's makeup, but even these elements aren't, in Spinal Tap lingo, turned up to eleven. The same applies to Land of the Pharaohs, though the very presence of Joan Collins is, I suppose, enough to edge the film closer to camp territory.

The Big Cube, part of a "Women in Peril" camp set, is much closer to being a true campy film: an aging Lana Turner, near the end of her career, is enjoyable as she overdoes her damsel in
distress role (and, most crucially, never seems to know that she's overdoing it), and the addition of LSD to the mix of Hollywood melodrama and romance guarantees some (theoretically) unintended chuckles. But it's become too easy to apply the word "camp" to anything that seems bad or overdone, and that does a disservice to movies and to camp followers. I warn you, I may have more to say on this soon!