Is Total Drama All Stars "camp?"
"Isn't Total Drama All Stars kind of 'camp?'" It's a question I asked myself after rewatching the season recently. I said it was, but that was based on vibes. You hear all the time about how "campy" something is, but you never know what they fully mean. Cheesy? Corny? Goofy? Outlandish? I did a bit more research, and still think the answer is "yes."
In this post, I propose an interpretation of Total Drama: All Stars as embodying the artistic style of "camp," rather than, through the lens of a mainstream and serious viewing of the season, awful. These points are based on cultural critic Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Notes on Camp," which investigates what "campiness" is and what makes one form of art "campy" and another not. Broadly, Sontag defines camp as a work of art, be it a film or a TV show or a painting or a play, that is "so bad it's good." Think the movie Night of the Living Dead (1968) with its awkward acting, cheesy plot, and eventual status as a cult classic for originating the modern American trope of the flesh-eating, undead zombie.
Similarly, I apply Sontag's 14 main notes of what defines campiness to All Stars as a whole. I thought it'd be interesting to view the most hated season in the Total Drama fandom through a different scope:
18. "One must distinguish between naive and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying.
The writers of TD All Stars didn't intend for the season to be a campy masterpiece, but rather a standard season of Total Drama. The differences lie in their incredibly earnest portrayal of dramatic storylines, namely Mike's evil alter Mal and Mike and Zoey's relationship, and their exaggeration of characters and challenges for the sake of comedy. This naïvetÊ of the audience's reaction is shown through the Mal plot line being played incredibly straight. Not only is its portrayal of an "evil" alter incredibly inaccurate through the DSM-5's description of DID, but it is seen as a genuine, villainous threat. Imagine: an evil-for-evil's-sake split personality whose dream is building an evil lair is the villain of a reality TV show, and the heroine is a hapless girl-next-door type who doesn't have a single confessional that doesn't revolve around her boyfriend. Mike and Zoey's storylines are intertwined, in a heightened, cartoonish romance, star-crossed lovers a la Romeo and Juliet, only they receive a happy ending, complete with the entire island blowing up. The writers' earnest portrayal of these events earns it the lack of intentionality that is required of "pure campiness."
19. "The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious..." / 22. Considered a little less strictly, Camp is...completely naive"
Consider the Final 7 storyline of Ezekiel kidnapping Chris for the 100th episode and Cameron being betrayed by Mal continually, culminating in him being rendered to a full-body cast back inside his bubble, pre-character development, and Mal sadistically revealing his identity to a screaming Cameron as he is popped down a toilet. The episode's stakes of a Gollum-esque former contestant terrorizing the others, the two-hour relationship between Courtney and Scott, and Mal's villainy consisting of orchestrating a forced kiss and letting his friend fall down a hole in a cave are all played straight. The absurdity of the situations are heightened by such events constituting the main dramatic and suspenseful moments of the episode
For one of the most controversial episodes as an example, consider the Final 5 storyline of Courtney's reputation being ruined in a single episode by Mal exposing her manipulation and chart of an elimination order with crude drawings of the other contestants. The episode culminates in her having a bird-vomit-covered sundae that she is forced to eat and ending up flushed down a giant toilet. It's such an excessive downfall for the season's tertiary antagonist (even less severe than secondary antagonist Alejandro) that it's laughable the amount of comeuppance she receives and the villainy in which she is portrayed. I'd like to mention that I don't intend to analyze the validity of any character portrayals, only the state of such character portrayals in their relation to the exaggerated, so-serious-it's-unserious style of camp.
23. "In naive, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that, which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naive." / 38. "Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of 'style' over 'content,' 'aesthetics' over 'morality,' of irony over tragedy." / 41. "The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to 'the serious.' One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious." / 42. "One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that 'sincerity' is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness."
Consider the opening episode, "Heroes vs. Villains." The writers' division of the 14 competitors as "heroes" or "villains" and this designation dictating the players' behavior for the rest of the season was an earnest choice, one that failed in its execution for dramatic storylines. Mike and Zoey being heroes elevates their relationship drama from that of typical teenage angst which Total Drama usually relied on for drama to a storyline of more epic proportions. Now, the villain to this couple, Mal, borders on supervillain, with his superhuman strength, deep voice, edgy appearance, and cheesy maniacal laughs and "evil" acts (e.g. denting Duncan's knife or smashing Sam's video game console). In turn, Mike and Zoey are, again, positioned narratively as the Romeo and Juliet of the season, a couple that ultimately triumphs. Sierra, despite her stalker tendencies returning upon a new victim, Cameron, she is portrayed as a crazed, but ultimately kind fangirl who receives a relatively dignified ending (albeit with tears) compared to other contestants. Speaking of Cameron, his role as the sweet brainiac sidekick means his kindness is intensified when in contrast with his placement on the villains team, who he fears will "eat him alive." This serious portrayal of his difficulty fitting in on the team and villain Gwen befriending him showcases the failed seriousness of this storyline, as fan reactions were tepid at best, and negative at worst, to Cameron and Gwen's portrayal as rootable heroes this season. Sam's continual injuries and Boney Island exiles making him desperate enough to chat for his team is seen as a shocking development, but his elimination also missed the mark of sadness and was seen as unfortunate by fans for his "wasted potential." The writers failed to deliver on a serious storyline that was received well by viewers.
So, despite the serious portrayal of the heroes failing, where is the campiness driven home? An attempt to be serious isn't the only parameter of camp, after all. Well, consider the villain's team. The Villainous Vultures are largely agreed to be the preferred team by the fandom, as well as a well-liked team in general, on paper, that is. The naĂŻvetĂŠ of the writers' portrayal of the villains as evil-laughing megalomaniacs is seen in the contrast between Gwen's desire for morality and their unscrupulous, power-grabbing ways, complete with a scene in the first episode of them laughing crazily against a background of flames around a naive, team-playing Gwen.
This exaggeration blends with the fantastic. It is seen in "Moon Madness," when Heather's opposite personality as a kind person all episode is revealed not to be a moon curse, but a trick the whole time to throw Alejandro off his game. Alejandro's leg paralysis stunt, also revealed to be fake, is also fantastic in his ability to keep up the charade.
This passion is seen in Heather's downfall at her ex-lover's hands after he steals her invincibility statue, in Duncan and Gwen's angsty deterioration of their relationship as they clash over heroism vs. villainy (i.e. playing fair vs. playing dirty), in Courtney and Scott's alliance-turned-relationship-turned-breakup-turned-relationship again-turned-breakup thanks to Mal, and in Courtney and Gwen's season-long rekindling of their friendship (culminating in a hammy scene of them gushing over the other's hair) and eventual breakup.
The high emotional stakes viewers are expected to spend the episode investing in these relational, romantic, and platonic storylines miss the mark, but end up retaining campy merit in the unashamed earnestness with which the show portrayed these relationship developments.
Irony continually interrupts moments of earnest tragedy. For example, the prospect of Mike being lost forever to Zoey thanks to Mal in the finale is interrupted by fantastical, outlandish scenes of Mike, in his giant inner brain prison, and his alters fighting to defeat Mal. Duncan's arrest isn't seen as a dramatic, sad elimination, but as a downfall tacked onto the end of an explosive boat race, the tragicomic end to Duncan's attempts to assert his bad boy status, which would have succeeded (albeit with a new criminal record charge) ...had Duncan not proceeded to say "Aw, snugglemuffin!" as he was arrested, instead of an actual "hardcore" swear word.
It is through the superficial labelling of heroes versus villains and the ultimately frivolous designations between characters, coupled by the continual team swaps that muddied the lines by the time the teams merged (the "villains" being goody-goody Gwen the weeping goth, submissive butt-monkey Scott, meek and friendly Cameron, uptight rule-stickler Courtney, and Alejandro, arguably the "purest" villain as designated at the season's start), that informs a core tenet of camp--it must value the "style" over "content" of heroism and villainy, the "aesthetics" of heroism and villainy over substantial heroic or villainous actions. These are teens/young adults on a reality show, after all. Serious themes of heroism and villainy were unattainable from the start.
The frivolous reality TV labels played completely straight and seriously by the writers, and the serious danger the contestants inject themselves in to win a seriously large amount of money ($1,000,000) that is portrayed lightheartedly and frivolously by the writers and the contestants themselves (ultimately indifferent to the traumatizing, injury-inducing, mutant-filled challenges they undergo and the prospect of losing a chance for a vast sum of money) demonstrate camp's reversal of tone depending on how serious a certain subject matter is. The sincerity and congruence of serious portrayals of serious subjects and frivolous portrayals of frivolous/trivial subjects wasn't enough; the camp sensibility requires a subversion of how lightly or seriously something, especially in the naturally lighthearted cartoon medium, is portrayed. As famed author and playwright Oscar Wilde once said, "Life is too important to be taken seriously." All Stars' writing embodies this trope in the opposite of a reverent, dramatically satisfying, emotionally and tonally deep portrayal of legacy characters throughout its past four seasons.
24. "When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. ('It's too much,' 'It's too fantastic,' 'It's not to be believed,' are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm.)" / 33. "What Camp taste responds to is 'instant character'...and, conversely, what it is not stirred by is the sense of the development of character. Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence - a person being one, very intense thing. This attitude toward character is a key element of the theatricalization of experience embodied in the Camp sensibility..." / 26. "Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is 'too much'..."
Common complaints of All Stars are that it is "too unrealistic" in its storylines and especially of Mike's Mal plot, that it "flanderizes" and "derails the characters," and contains humor that was too "cartoonish" or "slapsticky" or "loud." This bombast in the season's tone and comedy, this preference for shock and flair over content (preferring physical, gag, and gross-out humor over reality TV parody, pop culture references, and tongue-in-cheek humor of teenage life and the entertainment industry, unlike most other Total Drama seasons), embodies Camp's prioritization of style over substance.
To exemplify, consider the characters considered most flanderized. Zoey's lack of confessionals revolving around something other than her boyfriend are unintentionally leaned on by the humor she dispenses being Mike-based. The confessional gag of her trying and fully misinterpreting tarot cards to find out what is wrong with Mike and what she should do, or the dramatic irony from her theorizing that Courtney is the "greater evil" that Alejandro warned her about as he swirled down the Flush of Shame.
Lindsay's dumb-blondness reaches a fever pitch as she forgets how to push (i.e. execute a basic motor function learned as a toddler, like jumping or gripping an object) in "Heroes vs. Villains." Her drawing an X on herself has created a double-meaning, either of her being so stupid that she doesn't know she is supposed to not vote herself and instead voting using the photograph of another contestant OR of her intentionally voting herself off, showing herself to be smarter than she lets on. Either interpretation gives her All Stars portrayal a lasting impression on the fandom.
Scott's rural ignorance, his hillbilly trope, is heightened most noticeably. He is the butt monkey of the season, always injuring himself or showing off his stupidity, greater than the slapstick or his occasionally rough-around-the-edges, slovenly disposition. And yet in the writers' earnest portrayal of him as the new comic relief, something that would've been impossible to believe from just a Revenge of the Island (ROTI) point of view, All Stars Scott succeeded in charming viewers, with many preferring All Stars Scott and his canon relationship with Courtney over ROTI Scott and his fanon ships with Dawn or Zoey.
Gwen, seen as flanderized with her niceness, is earnestly leaned on as a sisterly moral compass during the season, always trying to right her wrongs with Courtney, discourage Duncan being a bad boy, and befriend Zoey. The blend of confusion at best and anger at worst from fans interpreting the plothole/retcon of Duncney being broken up when Gwen kissed him as Gwen being a hypocritical/false apologizer, the unrealistic haste with which Gwuncan's relationship crumbles, and the earnest heartwarming response from the fandom at one of the seemingly bright points of the season, Gwen and Zoey's friendship, all culminate in campy enthusiasm that the writers' tone takes on towards Gwen's characterization.
Duncan, with his hidden soft heart being seen as flanderized, has arguably the most obvious example of an "exaggerated" claim from the fandom. His downfall, as he increasingly became insecure under the eye of reality TV perception and tries to shed his nice guy image (crying at taking a mutant baby bird's eggs, accidentally fixing the Jeep of Chef, his old nemesis's, and spray-painting what Zoey interpreted as a cute bunny) by blowing up Chris's mansion (sorry, "cottage") with dynamite and his eventual arrest to prison, is arguably the most tragicomic that Total Drama gets, a campy culmination to a bad-boy-turned-good-turned-too-bad plot-line played with full seriousness aside from the nature of the jokes about an ex-delinquent acting like a sweetheart, written seriously by the writers but interpreted as hamfisted in, unrealistic, and redundant by fans.
Courtney and Heather, two Total Drama villainesses from seasons past, received some of the most blowback for their derailment. Heather's cockiness landing her at a 10th place position, the lowest placement of her entire competitive history, was decried by fans. The outlandish nature of the invincibility statue being found by her, then hidden because it would be seen for sure, instead of in the typical cartoon hammerspace of a player's bottomless pockets, makes a mountain out of what is normally a molehill in cartoon world, and the statue ends up being poached by Alejandro anyways. Courtney's backslide to cruelty and manipulation in Sundae Muddy Sundae was also seen as an outrageous degradation of her character. The writers depicted her as thinking Gwen should be "grateful for her genius," as an ex-employee of an ice cream shop fired for flinging a scoop at a customer, as a ruthless competitor who left Zoey to die to an alligator, and as someone who tried to feed a bird-vomit-covered sundae to starving interns and said they should "thank" her since they were on the verge of death anyways. Ed Macdonald pulled no punches in her unlikable, villainous characterization.
Rather than be a middling, uninteresting poor portrayal of characters, All Stars writers opted (unintentionally, of course) for the coup de grâce of writing: complete character overhaul and exaggeration based on a singular trait. The flanderization of characters is the complete distillation of a core personality characteristic of theirs (i.e. Zoey's love for Mike, Courtney's competitive streak).
Overall, the ridiculousness is too much to be taken with a serious serving of medicine. Instead, a less bitter, more unserious perspective to view the shallow, ostentatious spirit of the characters, their simplicity (but not necessarily unrespectable) of essence, the style of their character and not their development or substance, is what constitutes their characterization as Camp. In no other season would Courtney, even in Action, her most antagonistic portrayal in the show, utter such a saucy, self-important, comically painful pun of a quotation as the following: "I've got three scoops and a cherry. Funny. All I can taste is victory!"
27. "A work can come close to Camp, but not make it, because it succeeds.
Consider Total Drama Island. Lightning in a bottle, its 26 episodes are seen as the pinnacle of the series by laypeople, not necessarily the fandom, to the point of Total Drama being synonymous with Total Drama Island, many being unaware that it contained more than one season after the first. Even within the more dedicated, concentrated fandom, Total Drama Island's parody of teenage stereotypes with Survivor-esque reality TV buoys it to a serious consideration as one of the best, most humorous and dramatic animated series of Fresh TV and that aired on Cartoon Network. The exaggeration of the characters and their angsty teen drama, like Heather the Queen Bee or Gwen the Goth and their clash, and the outrageous challenges, courtesy of the medium of animation allowing for heightened physical comedy, ended up going over tremendously for audiences in 2007 and beyond. The first season's success as a parody cartoon, seriously written to be parody and to entertain audiences, and its high ratings made it a mainstream success--it fell outside of the Camp threshold subsequently.
44. "Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyper involvement, comedy is an experience of under involvement, of detachment."
Building off the aforementioned happy ending of Zoke, this ship's happy ending by the end of the season takes all the teeth out of the traditional Romeo-and-Juliet tragic ending. In this season, the couple gets everything they want, which elevates the cheesiness of the entire ordeal. All Stars' writers aren't intending to incite genuine romantic angst, tragedy, melancholy, or stiff-collared literary seriousness through this couple's storyline, and this ending, evocative of a mushy rom-com, demonstrates that. The explosion of Wawanakwa in the finale, the complete blowup of a legacy setting in the show, demonstrates the detached tone the writers applied to All Stars. Rather than pat themselves on the back for their time-honored franchise, they burned (or rather detonated) it all to the ground and started anew, going out with a bang, in the tastelessly tasteful manner that only Total Drama All Stars could uniquely create.
55. "Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn't propose that its is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn't sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures." / 56. "Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of 'character.'...Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying...Camp is a tender feeling."
This quote speaks for itself, so I'll try to keep my conclusion brief:
Many fans find that All Stars is a train wreck of a season, but I enjoy viewing this season from the angle of a lighthearted, campy series of episodes to watch. An easy, thirteen-episode investment that sends off legacy characters in an unserious, offensively flippant manner. Rather than turn my brain off and melt into the lack of emotional investment via the failure of the attempted serious writing, I turn my brain on, and feel amused by the reckless, unscrupulous, inflated stakes of every episode of the season, by the small bits of resonance I have with characters in their dialogue and lines. Haven't we all, those of us who've worked customer service or any part-time job, wanted to fling a scoop of ice cream or a cash register at an annoying customer? Haven't we all gotten too big for our britches sometimes and felt the consequences of our arrogance, maybe even letting someone snatch up an opportunity we coveted? Haven't we all obsessed over someone or something we liked, to the point of sounding like a broken record at every utterance of that person or thing's name?
In these little questions I've asked myself when surprisingly resonating with the human nature seen in the exaggerated, flanderized portrayals of All Stars contestants, I find myself saying yes at each of them. I also find myself saying "yes," then, to the question of if Total Drama All Stars is a camp masterpiece. It's the writers' theatricalized trainwreck of a world, and we're just living in it.
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