Another attempt to explain Camp using Judy Garland because Homos can’t come up with anything new.
I think that when a lot of people think of camp. They link camp and irony together right. They think that its an attitude of superiority. And they’re not entirely wrong. Because gays will feel superior about anything related to taste. But they do think of it as to look at something where the emotions are larger than life and snide at it, or turn your nose down on it. Shut it down. Which is why so many projects about women (where the emotions on screen are always bound to be more explosive than anything with men because of social conditioning of what’s acceptable for men and women to show etc) get wrongly labled as camp (great article on that here).
I think another thing is Judy Garland is still well linked to camp. And today in the 21st century, outside of The Wizard Of Oz, people’s main perception of Judy Garland is probably from SNL sketches where she’s portrayed as a fast talking neurotic emotional woman erratically popping pills to laugh at. So the impression one gets is Judy Garland = camp, camp = laughing at the ridiculousness of women and their emotions or big emotions in general.
I think what camp is for me, it’s not really “failed seriousness” like Sontag said. Camp for me is….. in an absurdist, heightened world to find real emotion, whether that is laughter or tears or both. Because “the gay sensibility is about holding qualities together that are elsewhere felt as antithetical: theatricality and authenticity. The sensibility holds together intensity and irony, a fierce assertion of extreme feeling with a deprecating sense of its absurdity” (Dryer). The insanity of being a homosexual or a queer is so random, nobody is raised to be one. You just have the day where you go “well shit” and now you’re stuck here. And it’s really such a banal thing right at the end of the day, who you’re attracted to or how you identify. And yet the far reaching outcomes of it are so extreme and come so quickly that suddenly you don’t recognize the world you were born into. And you build these tools so you don’t get “tagged” as different for your safety, you start monitoring your own behavior and you contrast that with your “straight” peers’ behaviors so that you don’t stand out. But now you really are “different” in a way where you FEEL all these extremities. Because you notice things that straight people don’t, you feel constricted in ways that straight people don’t and you feel that no one but you is noticing the insanity that is occuring every day because of all these “rules” and “rituals”. So you keep people at an emotional distance and start to walk the line between embracing your straight loved ones and ridiculing them and their structured lives. Which is where camp thrives. You know nothing is natural about heterosexuality so you prefer artifice, visceral vs emotional truth. Which is why camp is claimed by gays even if not all camp fans are gay or all gay people get camp.
Judy Garland was not “a star turned into camp” like a drag queen imitating a female star but someone who embodied camp attitudes. Garland was positioned as “the girl next door” during her MGM days, she was supposed to be ordinary. But problems “were surfacing, exactly expressing the way in which a ‘below-surface’ became part of the surface of the image itself. Once this ‘below-surface’ was available, it became possible to look at the films and discern, or think you could discern, not straightforward ordinariness but a special relationship to ordinariness”. Garland’s public image is now inseperable from her drug addictions, her suicide attempts, and her death. So you watch these early films and something seems…… off.
Queerness is always there. Even repressed it is always there. When you weave in the sense of difference that was always there but is now finally recognized, it becomes possible to recognize all the effort that went into maintaining that artifice of “ordinariness” (i,e, heterosexuality) in the first place.
Garland’s irreverent attitude towards these two times in her art where she expressed intense theatrical emotion is to puncture it, to show the reality of the pretense of ilusion. To emotionally distance yourself from it so you are not overcome by this sadness. Garland often expressed ridicule at the idea that she was some “tragic” figure. And you can see in these moments why. The joy that comes in poking holes and trivializing these narratives, that heterosexuality is valid or that there is only one way that woman can exist as or any other culturally dominant oppressive idea and ultimately taking away some of their original power is what defines a lot of camp. It’s to create or see this illusion, and its not that the emotions in it are not real or that the emotions don’t matter. But you take your needle point and you POP! And now you can see the strains. And now your emotions and the artificiality of the illusion sit next to each other. But they don’t cancel each other out. They create a more interesting picture than there was before.
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