“One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (”camping”) is usually less satisfying.” - Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp.
Can one even distinguish - in the age in which video has collapsed cinematic and televisual history into an ever-accessible archive of style and genre - between between the naive and deliberate? Watching TV’s best Sunday night offerings, I began to feel that the distinction no longer made much sense. On one hand you had Desperate Housewives, which immediately signalled its camp disposition with its title and its Knots-Landing-writ-suburban narrative and its Stepford Wives references. I still don’t know what was supposed to be comedy, what was was supposed to be played straight, and what was supposed to be played straight with the intention of being consumed as camp.
On the other channel, you had Suburban Madness, the movie of the week based on the true story of Clara Harris, the Houston dentist who ran over her husband after finding him cheating. The drama offered the over-the-top moments that Desperate Housewives was unable to give: outrageous intercutting to a heart-shaped “Mom’s Keys” keychain during the murder, Clara’s boob job and turn as dominatrix, sassy Dixie-Chicks-like private investigators who seem to have used Charlie’s Angels episodes as training manuals. Or maybe that was the movie’s writers taking their cue from TV’s past… instead of naive camp, what we had here - as with the Martha Stewart biopic - was an attempt to offer the generic pleasures of the made for TV movie genre and to craft a topical film that could be read either straight or as camp, depending on the audience. Or as something in between for an audience segment capable of treating media products lightly but who still are unwilling to fully accept, in Sontag’s words, the “convertibility of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, ‘person’ and ‘thing’.” Even if camp still exists as a mostly gay sensibility, the popularization of some of its tendencies means the dividing line between the two modes of aesthetic reception won’t do.
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