viz. - camp

Texans Getting Campy

Laura Thain — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 19:33:56 +0000

Hey y'all, in case you haven't heard, we're electing a new Lt. Governor this year here in the great state of Texas. With four Texas Republicans competing for the position, a campaign is taking shape to see who can be the cowboy-iest candidate of 2014. With a fight like that, you might expect to see some campaign ads that border on self-parody. And what, my friends, do you get when sincerity fails? Well, of course, a whole lot of camp!

Incumbent David Dewhurst, who is (for real) a member of the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame, released an unusual campaign ad this week. Before we view it, let’s take a look at a more serious cowboy call from contender and current Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples:

Ok, so we’ve got some typical campaign rhetoric going on here with a little bit of cowboy flair, but nothing too unusual. Staples' team shows that our Texan values are threatened by the specter of the Democrats and big government (specifically, the evil Obama and his friend the state of California). And it’s no surprise that the ad finds a way to say “Todd Staples” as many times as possible while showing him practically BURST across a true Texan field on a horse. He’s a cowboy in shining armor. Let’s take this as an example of non-campy cowboy. There’s nothing particularly failed about the sincerity of this campaign video—its effectiveness rests firmly in the success or failure of its polemics. This is a candidate who’s clearly courting Tea Party conservatives and ready to toe the Republican party line, taking no prisoners. (Perhaps it’s no coincidence that he’s considerably behind the other three candidates in a recent poll.)

But here’s what happens when the cowboy antics get a bit more theatrical: check out a favorite of mine (courtesy of Cate Coleman here in the DWRL), from current US Senator John Cornyn’s 2008 campaign:

The particular kind of camp we see here is determined by the audience:

Image Credit: Screenshots form Cornyn's campaign video

It is the campaign’s attempt to be serious and the utter failure of that seriousness that makes this over-the-top cowboy spectacle campy—and it’s the risk that many conservative appeals to “traditional” Texan-white-rancher-values take.

How, then, might a conservative campaign make the same kind of appeals to individualism and masculinity without resorting to the cowboy cliché? Take a look at Dewhurst’s recent campaign video as a response to that kind of rhetoric:

That’s right, folks. No cowboys. No news coverage. No dark and foreboding shots of Washington or California. Just a simple, sustained (nearly twenty full seconds) demonstration of bodily masculinity. Contrast our TX t-shirt wearing SuperBeard with the California hipster literally fondling a shake weight. Could it be that, unlike John Cornyn’s campaign, Dewhurst is intentionally using camp in his campaign rhetoric?

Image credit: Screenshot from Dewhurst's campaign video

It’s a strange move that I think attempts to accomplish a few goals simultaneously. First, in response to radical right complaints that Dewhurst isn’t “Republican” enough (perhaps because he has on occasion dared to try and cooperate with Texan Democrats in the State Senate), Dewhurst’s campaign produces a video so machismo that you almost can’t help but laugh. The camp seems self-conscious—which we might infer from the heavily stylized camera filter and a variety of other formal elements of the film itself—but it is serious in its implications, that is, that the Texan economy is absolutely tied to strong, hyper-masculine leadership. Bigger is better. Bearded is best.

I dare say the video also makes sincere attempts to appeal to younger voters, although this might represent the limits of the campy aesthetic. The crude, Instagram-like styling of the film (which, upon further scrutiny, is most interesting because it appeals to nostalgia for a time that young people in Texas never experienced outside of The Wonder Years and photo filters) has the most potential, despite its sincere intent, to fail.

Perhaps this lesser-watched Dewhurst video can tell us more about the campaign’s strange appeal to a hipster aesthetic. Watch it and see if you think Texas is ready to “walk down the aisle” with Lt. Governor Dewhurst all over again:

Does it remind you, too, of a Royal Tenenbaums style narration? What do you think of Dewhurst's campaign rhetoric?

Reading Django Unchained as Camp

Laura Thain — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 08:13:13 +0000

Image Credit: Vanity Fair

Although it’s been two months since its initial release, the internet is still abuzz with social critique of Tarantino’s newest film Django Unchained. Roxane Gay, a staff writer for Buzzfeed, argues that rather than encouraging a national discourse on slavery, slavery is instead “the movie’s easily exploited backdrop.” The movie functions instead as “a white man’s slavery revenge fantasy, and one in which white people figure heavily and where black people are, largely, incidental.” Finally, she concludes, “Django Unchained isn’t about a black man reclaiming his freedom. It’s about a white man working through his own racial demons and white guilt.”

Many of Django’s critics couch their arguments in similar terms—that is, that while Tarantino claims to reignite a discourse on slavery in Django Unchained, he in fact privileges genre over content in a way that dangerously decontextualizes our most central national trauma. I have argued in an early post that privileging medium over content can function as a form of censorship. Here, I want to discuss how the same aesthetice practice can simultaneously suggest and defer engagement with tragedy and trauma.

When Django Unchained was in the drafting stage, Tarantino hinted at his new project to The Telegraph’s John Hiscock:

"I want to explore something that really hasn't been done. I want to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it…But I can deal with it all right, and I'm the guy to do it."

In trying to find a way to engage with Tarantino’s claims—his claims to authority, his privileging of genre--I found DD’s argument on WhitesEducatingWhites the most provocative. In his article entitled "Whiteness Unchained: When A National Shame Becomes Camp," the author argues that although “[the] movie supposedly centered around a slave turned bounty hunter in pursuit of revenge,” it “stars white people with Black people in supporting roles.” Although DD never unpacks his claim that Django Unchained is campy, it struck me that reading Django Unchained as camp is key to deconstructing some of its problematic relationships to slavery, race, violence, and history. I refer here to Sontag’s seminal essay “Notes on Camp” for some basic definitions of the form and its mechanisms.

First, “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp depends on hyperbole and in always privileging form above content. Second, camp requires rhetorical distance: “Things are campy, not when they become old - but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt.” Third, camp is a comedic form, it “proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy.” Following this, it requires aesthetic engagement in the act of detachment: “If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.” The aesthetic experience in camp is formed with a sensual engagement with the artifice—the genre, the medium, the act of mediation—itself, rather than, as in tragic forms, the content of that artifice. And, as Sontag notes, “Detachment is the prerogative of an elite.” Finally, its “essential element is seriousness.” Camp is earnest, even when that seriousness fails. Camp cannot be ironic.

Image Credit: Chief Crew

“Campifying” violence and tragedy becomes especially problematic because earnestness is the defining element of camp. There is no room for irony, critique, or satire in camp as a discourse; rather, respect for the artifice or mediation itself is the militant narrative force. If, as Northrup Frye argues, irony is the central discourse of satire, then sincerity has the same function for camp. The moment campiness attempts irony, it becomes satiric. This is why a movie like The Producers draws on elements of camp but is not campy itself—it instead implements elements of irony to levy critique against the “producers” of Broadway performances specifically by way of aestheticizing the public’s near-universal disdain for the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. The moment The Producers ridicules Nazism through camp, it becomes satire.

For Tarantino to claim the rhetorical distance that irony provides in addressing the national shame of slavery would be problematic from the onset, but in privileging genre over content, he extinguishes even this possibility. Instead, the film functions to aesthetize a violence so terrible that, as Tarantino notes, we as a nation struggle to “deal with,” especially in filmic depictions. By doing so, he creates rhetorical distance from the content itself. He does not campify the experience of slavery so much as he avoids its portrayal, which exists little outside of highly-mediated (i.e. highly aestheticized) depictions of violence. It is the “campification” of this violence that is so dangerous, because it encourages the reader to indulge in the violent fantasy from all angles—that of the slaver, that of the slave—without interrogating it. In operating on the assumption that slavery is universally rejected by the contemporary American audience, Tarantino defers engaging with violence in an immediate sense. Rather, he hypermediates and hyperaestheticizes violence at the cost of content—and in the case of Django Unchained, that content is any substantial character development for the people of color within the film, as well as any depiction of the actual practice of slavery.

Image Credit: Wondersinthedark

What we receive instead is proto-Klansmen who are humanized through the demotic language that distracts from the intent to commit unspeakable violence. We see women slaves sauntering the plantation grounds or dining aside their masters in the garb of the aristocracy. And we see Django himself executing his first act of revenge in emasculating, Fauntleroy garb. (Sharen Davis, the film's costume designer, designed the valet "uniform" after Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy".) The lives of slaves themselves are mythologized—most explicitly, Django and Broomhilda as Siegfried and Brünnhilde in the Nibelungenlied—while the white characters are humanized, individualized, and given complex characteristics. Because of this dynamic, King Schulz leads the film, acting as its primary agent.

Image Source: Think Progress

Finally, I would like to suggest that the film’s Academy Award nominations serve as further evidence for the dangers of camp and Hollywood’s complicitness in this sort of problematic and incomplete engagement with slavery. The film was nominated for a total of five Academy Awards: Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, Best Picture, Best Sound Editing, and Best Supporting Actor. Best Screenplay and Best Picture are all accolades that belong primarily to Tarantino himself and show the Academy’s admiration for Tarantino’s vision, and Best Cinematography and Best Sound Editing rely heavily on the film’s engagement with the genre of the Spaghetti Western. All of these nominations demonstrate the Academy’s deep respect for the bare-bones aesthetic of the film itself. But Christoph Waltz’ nomination and win for Best Supporting Actor implies complicitness even with the false premise (of engagement with national trauma, of engagement with slavery) of the film itself. Although Christoph Waltz has the most lines, the most screen time, and the most character development—criteria that in virtually any other film would qualify him as the “lead”—his nomination for Supporting Actor is necessary to support the films’ other Academy-nominated accolades. We must believe that Waltz supports Jamie Foxx as lead to believe in the film. But this is one final fantasy that collapses under scrutiny.

Girls Just Want to Party in the USA (and Boys, Too!)

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:21:09 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

As everyone reading this blog knows, I love random bits and pieces of pop culture. Jezebel is one of the websites I visit to indulge this love, and they did not let me down last week. I’ve been saving this since then, and though I know it may be a bit late to write on this, I couldn’t resist bringing this to everyone’s attention as a kind of alternative archive in its own right.

Marisa Meltzer, in a blog post called “Video Vixens: Spice Boys and Barbie Men,” groups together several YouTube clips that feature young men lip-synching to songs made by women. Meltzer wrote a book called Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, which claims that bands like the Spice Girls helped popularize the empowering message of riot grrrls for both men and women. Speaking of clips that include covers of artists like Shakira, Taylor Swift, and Aqua, she writes:

There's something very joyous and celebratory about girlhood in all of these songs. They can express, in a kind of candy-colored way, excitement, heartache, and pride of being a girl. I don't think boys who film themselves lipsynching are making fun of us girls, though. I think this is a way of expressing some kind of homage to us and our music. I'm not sure there's an equivalent for boys—that is, music marketed to boys expressly about the state of being a teen boy, which is perhaps why so many guys are so happy to post themselves singing along.

Watching the clip of the young men lip-synching to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” does make me feel quite a bit of joy:

However, I’m not sure I can totally accept Meltzer’s reading here. Homage may be a part of the Taylor Swift cover, for example, but this version isn’t acknowledging Lauper’s popular song (and its own memorable video) so much as re-envisioning it. The shirtless male bodies rolling around in the bed enact a kind of queer performance of which the gay icon Lauper would probably approve. We as an audience see the singer hump a car and a friend put a whole banana in his mouth to perform a sexuality that the song insists is for “girls,” but which the male performers co-opt for themselves. The men here look manly, but not manly in the heterosexual way of the Abercrombie-attired boys who lipsync and dance their way through Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.”

The same queer aesthetic seems to be part of the semi-famous lip-synch cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA,” which Meltzer did not include in her post:

These men here lay on the beach here in their highly colored bathing trunks to purposefully camp up their performance of the Disney teen’s song. As they try to surf in their blow-up swimming pool while wearing colorful Ray-Bans, I can’t help but want to take part in their fun. The fact that they tag it as “Party in the FIP” makes the queer connection explicit (as Fire Island is a notorious gay vacation spot) as well as its intent to be a transformative performance.

The homemade aesthetic that these videos share, whether filmed on Flip cameras or in front of iMacs, incorporates a call for authenticity of a particular kind. Each of these artists attempts to construct himself for his YouTube audiences by following the common models of other viral videos, but in these works each works to condition that performance through girl’s pop music. This isn’t to say that this qualifies the kind of masculinity, but draws our attention to the process of its construction in lo-fi and high-fi ways.

I can agree with Meltzer that this is all in good fun, but this seems to be more than just tribute. There may not be “music marketed to boys expressly about the state of being a teen boy,” but it’s not like popular culture lacks an attention to teen boys (see: Harry Potter). These clips instead seem to be doing another kind of cultural work, hopefully one in which we can all join in.