SUNDAY, 22 DECEMBER 2024

After a discussion with one of my students, I began to wonder if camp is a dying mode of feeling and behaviour, or is perhaps already dead. This led to my re-reading Sontag’s essay (or what she calls her ‘jottings’), On Camp. Every time I doubt Sontag as a thinker and critic and feel she is sometimes obscure and portentous, a quick flick through these ‘jottings’ makes me realise just how perspicacious her writing often is. Consequently, I strongly recommend that anyone who is interested in this topic should read On Camp, and I fear that I do little more than paraphrase her thoughts in the first part of this essay (all of the direct quotations I use here come from On Camp.) Once I have talked about what camp actually is, shamelessly stealing many of Sontag’s insights, I will go on to question whether camp has become impossible, exploring four possible reasons for this: homosexuality has become mainstream, traditional splits between high and low culture have more or less dissolved, no one believes in the possibility of serious discourse anymore, and feminism has led to massive changes in traditional gender roles. Sontag argues at one point in her essay that camp is the antithesis of tragedy: perhaps for this reason it can no longer exist in a world where the only option is irony, even if we have not quite yet reached Marx’s eventual destination of farce.

It is often argued that camp is a sensibility rather than a style or a fashion or a way of behaving: that while it is impossible to define camp, we know it when we see it, at least if we are in tune with this sensibility. Because of this difficulty in pinning camp down, we often resort to making a list of people and things which are generally agreed to be indisputably camp: famous actresses and singers (Judy Garland, Greta Garbo, Carmen Miranda, plus Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as a catty double act); certain films (The Wizard of Oz, Johnny Guitar, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane); movements in art (Mannerism, Art pour l’art, Art Nouveau), art forms that tend towards the overblown and which take themselves very seriously indeed (ballet, grand opera); things that are very obviously covers for other things (Health and Efficiency magazine). Camp can be instantiated in certain objects and fashions (feather boas, peacock chairs, beehive and bouffant hairstyles, ostentatious make-up and jewellery). Finally, it can manifest as an androgynous way of looking and behaving: men dressing and acting like women, women dressing and acting like men. Drag queens have always played a key role in camp with their absurd, exaggerated portrayals of femininity. And sometimes the opposite becomes camp, too: the alpha-male displays of masculinity of narcissistic, muscle-bound bodybuilders, cowboys, leather queens.

But listing is not analysis and Sontag attempts to go beyond it to aim for the essence of camp (if indeed camp has any essence, something that is often denied). Firstly, camp is against the natural and in favour of artifice: as Sontag says in a marvellous aperçu, ‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks’. There is an emphasis on the difference between how something appears and the underlying reality, although at the same time the whole idea of an inner reality is sometimes ridiculed. Style is favoured over content, so camp is resolutely superficial and glories in the surfaces of life and is highly aesthetic in approach. Long before postmodernism questioned our concepts of surface and depth, camp was busy mocking and undermining them. The external look of a person or object is simultaneously a false veneer and the only thing that matters.

This love of surface wallows in extravagance and excess. The Golden Age of Hollywood musicals was the perfect example of this, with its fabulous, over-the-top Busby Berkeley extravaganzas and its ludicrous, colour-splashed images of Carmen Miranda with half an orchard on her head surrounded by dancing girls waving bananas in the air in The Gang’s All Here, a sequence that still has me laughing uncontrollably no matter how many times I see it.

This brings us to a second key feature of camp: it makes fun of all attempts at meaning or profundity. Sontag again: ‘The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious’, and ‘Camp convert[s] the serious into the frivolous’. This lack of seriousness is used to differentiate what is camp from what is not. Thus, Abstract Expressionism isn’t camp; Pop Art often is. Sometimes there is no attempt at seriousness, as we see in movies such as Barbarella and the work of John Waters, TV shows like Lost in Space and the 60s Batman series, and pop groups like the Village People. In other cases, camp ridicules art forms which take themselves extremely seriously and throws them in the trashcan along with the subcultural junk it tends to prefer with no regard at all for high art status (ballet and grand opera). And sometimes it appropriates things which originally took themselves seriously and then drags them down (with the emphasis on drag) to the level of campy trash (the Eurovision Song Contest, Miss World).

Thirdly, camp is amoral, ‘a solvent of morality’. This links it clearly to earlier historical phenomena such as the 19^th century dandy, the figure who Sontag argues acts as a bridge between the aristocratic, fin de siecle decadence of Wilde, Whistler and Beardsley and the phenomenon of camp that followed in the century of the masses: ‘Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture’. No one expresses this flippant rejection of morality better than Shelby Carpenter, a character in the film noir, Laura: ‘I can afford a blemish on my character, but not on my clothes’. Sometimes one senses that perhaps a moral message is intended – a criticism of insincerity, bullshit and hypocrisy – but more often camp comes across as a refusal to accept any kind of overarching moral standards.

Camp is almost exclusively an urban phenomenon, a big-city sophistication which mocks the suburban and the homespun, and plays with concepts of innocence and experience as adroitly as a Restoration comedy. Within these urban spaces, as Sontag points out, one of the key functions of camp has been to act as a kind of ‘private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques’. This makes it a child of industrialisation and the cities that grew up around the subsequent affluence, where these urban cliques could thrive in the anonymous demi-monde in which they clustered.

The most important of these cliques by far was the homosexual subculture that grew up in post-war American cities and other global capitals such as Amsterdam and London, which Sontag identifies as the ‘vanguard’ of camp. While I agree with her on this, I would question her statement that if homosexuals had not invented camp, someone else would have done so. I think here she is underestimating the role of gay people in the development of camp because for them it was not a mere game or divertissement but a way to survive in a world where having a gay relationship could land them in prison. In the UK, for example, a language called Polari grew up in the gay subculture, a secret slang that gay men used to identify themselves to each other and protect themselves from a hostile world, and this language was linked to an effeminate self-image and behaviour personified by Quentin Crisp. Camp emerged not only because it was fluffy and delightful and fun, but also because for some people it was essential.

So why do I feel that camp may be dying? First, I’d like to draw on Sontag’s division of camp into two strands: the first, which she calls ‘pure’ camp, seriously believes in what it is doing and is largely unconscious of its own campiness (grand opera), while the second strand is knowing, flippant, self-conscious and deliberately ironic (the films of John Waters). These strands have always co-existed, of course; I cannot believe that the people making The Gang’s All Here or the 60s Batman ever took themselves even slightly seriously. But when the social changes after World War II became a mass movement and camp slowly trickled beyond its subcultural roots into society at large, it ceased to be a secret code and began to lose some of its power, so having a collection of Judy Garland records was no longer a telltale sign to a minority in-crowd: everyone was suddenly in on the joke. So the Eurovision Song Contest, for instance, has become an opportunity for all kinds of people to relish its campy tackiness, while Rocky Horror evenings attract audiences which are a mix of gay and straight dressed up as the characters in the show. This has arguably watered camp down, and many things are now accepted as camp which perhaps would not have qualified in the past. This may just be because of my age, but I find it hard to see Kylie Minogue as a camp icon, nor Madonna, nor perhaps even Cher. They are simply too knowing. Camp shouldn’t have to wink quite so blatantly and to such a large audience.

The second reason is a cultural drift towards a world in which very few people are placed on pedestals anymore, so much of the pleasure that camp offered from deflating the glamorous, the pompous and the high and mighty has been lost. The Hollywood stars of today are not as distant and unapproachable as those of the past, but even as it travestied these glamorous, hugely popular icons and at the same time mocked high culture, camp depended on both for its existence, and there was often a genuine love of these things even as they were mocked. Ridiculous as it may sound, there was a genuine glamour and colour and beauty in Busby Berkeley and Carmen Miranda and camp recognised and adored this.

But alongside this adoration, camp (and certainly 19^th century dandyism) was often also associated with an ennui and a cynicism which has now spread more generally through society at large, to a point where there is a sense that people believe in very little in the contemporary western world. Both on the abstract, intellectual level of critical theory (no more grand narratives), and at the level of a confident populism (‘I don’t know much about Art but I know what I like’), there is a feeling that there are no standards anymore and that attempts at seriousness are risible and futile. Camp is reliant on seriousness for its existence, though, even as it mocks and undermines it: if there is no sacred, there can be no profane. There has always been a twilight zone between camp and kitsch, so that one person’s camp is another person’s kitsch, and contemporary scepticism has blurred this even further, to a point where I would personally label kitsch much of what some people now label camp.

Feminism has been another factor sometimes diluting camp. It has problematised the figure of the drag queen, questioning whether the comic, outlandish figure of a thousand drag shows is progressive or reactionary. Do camp and drag challenge accepted gender roles and undermine sexist stereotypes through ludicrous exaggeration and humour or do they mock and belittle women in a show of blatant sexism? When I was a young(ish) man, there was a theatre troupe called Bloolips which grew out of post-Stonewall radicalism and used drag as a kind of political tool (which makes it sound very dry and worthy – I can promise you it wasn’t, it was very funny). In 2024, though, we are much less confident about this kind of performance in a world in which everyone is much more sensitive about how groups of people are presented, the feminist and trans movements are often at loggerheads with each other, and the drag queens’ ruby slippers are treading on eggshells. Could such a group exist nowadays or would it become a target for activists and ideologues?  

In general, my answer to the title of this essay is that camp isn’t dying, and is certainly not dead, but is changing in response to larger social changes in the western world. This is a positive phenomenon in the sense that it reflects a world where gay people are much more integrated into society, gender roles are more fluid, and people have greater freedom about which roles to adopt. But this has come at a cost in my opinion: camp has lost a lot of its cutting edge and Sontag’s ‘pure’ camp is no more. When we watch Russo’s documentary, The Celluloid Closet or listen to Julian and Sandy, it is hard to believe that audiences were so blind to the more than obvious subtext of camp, but it seems in many cases they genuinely were. That collective naivety has gone forever. I welcome this on the whole because camp is generous and inclusive at heart and I like the idea that everyone, bar a few rancid bigots, is in on the joke and having fun. There is just a part of me – a typical old fart, I guess, bemoaning that fings ain’t what they used to be – that regrets the spread of camp into the mainstream. And that when people like me pass on, a secret strand of our culture will have disappeared forever.