That Indescribable Feeling
Bonus entry! In which I have an overdue epiphany at AMC Kip's Bay. Republished from film newsletter "MOVIE TIME," edited and illustrated by Cara Engh.
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Lately I’ve been gathering thoughts for a piece that I hope might answer a question (For The Culture, if you will). A question that’s kept me up at night.
It’s like clockwork, just after I’ve turned out the lights. A preliminary stillness. Then the walls begin to creak. The curtains rattle. The wind whistles and moans and begins to whisper: “There can be 100 people in a room…” The ghost of Divine’s lacquered nails begin rapping, tapping at my chamber door. Somewhere deep in the forest outside, Jessica Lange screams “KNOTTY PINE???!”
The call of these spirits is a peaceful presence, a lullaby. But then I hear a low, breathy voice:
“I’m looking camp right in the eye.”
My eyes shoot open to find Karlie Kloss’ Amazonian gazelle body looming over me. Behind her, in the shadows: a gaggle of beings. I cannot discern their faces but by the smell of polyester I know they’re wearing the new Mugler/H&M line. They all speak over each other in loud monotone:
“This is so camp”
“Jennifer Coolidge is mothering”
“Are you going to Le Bain—”
“Andy Cohen”
“Is it giving camp?”
“You’re giving me everything”
“Camp”
“CAMP”
Their voices grow louder, and soon they’re all shouting “CAMP” in unison. Karlie throws her head back in a gorgeous, swan-like motion, laughing maniacally. I scream. The walls start to close in. Then my melatonin kicks in and I fall asleep.
What is Camp, in the current cultural climate? The term feels inescapable these days; in media write-ups, on For-You Pages or in everyday conversation, it’s being used with a lot of… confidence. We can blame the Met Gala (it warrants a great deal of blame), but its presence in the cultural lexicon also speaks to the larger trend of queer culture reaching unprecedented levels of saturation in the mainstream (despite obvious and abhorrent blowbacks in recent state legislature around the country).
What happens, then, to what began as an underground, transgressive mode for surveying the cultural landscape? What happens when we attempt to commodify camp, when it is pursued head-on by even the straightest of minds (media executives)? Where does camp live when the world is awash in microtrends and monoculture is a waning fire of the past? When the word gets tossed around like seasoning? When everyone is in their _______ Era and TikTok is bursting at the seams with thousands of wild-eyed girls, gays and theys wrapping their hands around your throat to tell you that they wrote the Next Bimbo Anthem? Can Camp — that glitteriest, slipperiest of fish — still be found in the ever-expanding pond of culture content? Or has that fish been gutted, an empty shell now used as a clutch purse by Charli XCX?
I cannot answer all of these questions here. That is a future piece, one that incorporates theory and weeks of thought and is not written on a deadline. But I can talk about last night, when I went with a friend to see a movie in midtown.
Disney’s new adaptation of The Little Mermaid was, in essence, a 2-hour amusement park ride. The romance was drained, Alan Menken’s sweeping score stripped away, and any sense of dramatic stakes or pacing was thrown entirely out the window. Halle Bailey is a star, but the spirited twinkle in her eye couldn’t salvage what was ultimately a bland, oversized platter of IP-mining. Melissa McCarthy, most pertinently, did exactly what you expect: she did Melissa-McCarthy-doing-Ursula.
McCarthy has mentioned in interviews how the original character was based on Divine (drag queen and general cultural hero, known for various performances in the John Waters oeuvre), how she took inspiration from drag for her performance, etc. It was a semi-savvy media move, an acknowledgement that would hopefully keep queer fans from feeling snubbed by the film’s lack of any semblance of queer sensibility (or characters). It was also in tandem with one of the movie’s fundamental flaws: a complete unwillingness to offend or challenge. Any potentially “problematic” aspect of the story was reworked, rendering the film edgeless and shapeless. They even took out the “body language” line in “Poor Unfortunate Souls.” Criminal. Thus, with one of Disney’s edgiest characters entirely defanged, McCarthy fell victim in these interviews to what has recently become an epidemic in media: a promise of camp with no delivery. In fact, it is the promise itself that squanders any potential — pandering and camp are like fire and water. The only exception to this is miss Karlie Kloss herself, who inadvertently became the campest look at the 2019 Met Gala after posting cryptic, hype-building tweets about her ensemble only to arrive on the carpet in a bland gold minidress. Looking camp right in the eye, indeed.
I had a feeling Melissa was not going to deliver. And so despite my inner child’s excitement heading into the theater, I was all huffy and puffy, ready for this piece to be a woeful tracing of the evolution of Divine/Ursula, a treatise on queer culture’s inevitable sterilization upon entering the mainstream, a bitter old queen’s (I’m 24) maudlin moratorium on Camp. But something happened to me in that darkened room. I was saved from a shipwreck by an otherworldly creature — another Amazonian gazelle. Her name is Nicole Kidman.
I am far from the first to express appreciation for Kidman’s AMC segment. In fact, talking about it here runs the risk of looking like a desperate grasp at 18-month-late internet relevance (which, to be honest, is just extra seasoning in a piece about camp). There has been endless online discourse about the ad, even an SNL skit. People are known to stand up in the theater and recite it along with her like the pledge of allegiance. In my early ignorance, I’d considered the obsession slightly noxious — almost post-camp, like Jennifer Coolidge-mania (She’s a genius, that goes without saying. So doesn’t expressing appreciation for her just feel like cultural virtue signaling at this point? It’s like saying water is wet).
Sitting in that theater, though, my jaded disaffection melted, and I embraced transcendence. What I had cast off as meme-core nonsense was in fact Pure Camp on a mass scale. “These gays, they’re trying to murder me” this was not — there was no blatant pandering here, no “campy” intention. A company simply cast one of the silver screen’s biggest stars to walk around an empty theater (in a sparkly pantsuit) and illustrate the “indescribable feeling” of theater-going. And it’s perfect. Her gazing intently at the title screen for Jurassic World like she’s trying to decipher a Pollock painting? High art. But there’s truth in her speech, an earnestness in her delivery. The public’s cult-like reverence, too, balances directly on the razor’s edge between irony and sincerity.
Thus, camp lives to see another day, and I am put in my place for doubting its longevity. There will be more on the topic here in the future — it’s too elusive not to explore further, too amorphous, too relentless in its constant recontextualizing in the culture. But for now, we take solace in Kidman’s silk-spoken words, we nod and say, “Thank you.”
LOOOOVE
this mad me laugh laugh laugh so good