Queer Film Blogathon 2012: Marginalia on Note 25

This entry is part of the 2012 Queer Film Blogathon, co-hosted by Garbo Laughs and Pussy Goes Grrr. While you're here, please read my contribution to the 2011 Queer Film Blogathon, Throwing Shade: Homophobia in Riva's Dietrich Bio? Pt. 1. You can also browse our entries tagged "LGBT."

Now that summer's upon us, I'd like to make a proposal that none of you should refuse. Instead of trekking across Yosemite, spelunking in Carlsbad Caverns, or zip-lining through the Redwoods, consider roughing it in my camp. There's just one caveat. I've assigned some required reading. Don't worry. You've probably already read this text in an introductory film course, an introductory queer studies course, or an introductory queer film studies course. If none of those apply to you, maybe you've read it elsewhere--Susan Sontag's seminal work, "Notes on 'Camp.'" In case I've offended any of you radical separatist feminists, you ought to leave now because this blog is like a can of Vienna sausages--not that I'm pushing my patriarchal power on you or anything--no, siree! For you less radical or non-separatist feminists, please forgive my male privilege and substitute "ovular" for "seminal." As for you trans-folk, I can never do right by you, so rip me a new one in the comments section.


In "Notes on 'Camp,'" Marlene Dietrich scores Note No. 25 with Josef von Sternberg, which I find eerie because, you know, two plus five makes seven--the number of films that the two made together. Maybe Sontag consulted Carroll Righter before arranging this list, or maybe I've been drinking too much go-go juice. Let's eschew that balderdash and delve into what Sontag in fact says regarding Dietrich and Sternberg: "Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Sternberg's six American movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The Devil Is a Woman. . . ." Just to clarify, the five other films that Sontag doesn't name are Morocco, Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, and The Scarlet Empress. Now, what could Sontag have possibly meant by "outrageous aestheticism"?

Is it high heels in the desert sand?

Is it primping for one's execution with a soldier's sword as a mirror?

Coincidentally, Sontag declares in Note 25 that "Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers."

Perhaps outrageous aestheticism is making vagrancy look fabulous. In the 21st century, the Olsen twins would wear this look to the Met Gala, and the media would call it "boho chic."

Could it be horses galloping up staircases?

How about smoking a cigarette while rolling them as a factory worker? 

Of course, the more obvious examples of "outrageous aestheticism" would include a beautiful woman emerging from a gorilla suit or wearing a top hat and tails. If outrageous aestheticism is about an excessive or extravagant emphasis on appearances, then I agree with Sontag's assessment. My view of camp, however, diverges from Sontag's because of the opposition that she describes in Note 51: "The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony." Long before I even knew of "Notes on 'Camp,'" James Naremore had already examined notes 25 and 51 together, accepting Sontag's dichotomy of sensibilities with the assertion that Sontag associates Sternberg with "homosexual aestheticism and irony."

Cut! Sternberg wasn't gay, but he was a Jew. In fact, I often neglect the coded antisemitism in comparisons of Sternberg to Svengali, that famous literary character from George du Maurier's Trilby whom Edgar Rosenberg analyzes in his often-cited text, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction. What are we to make of this situation? Is Sontag mistaken to attach sensibilities to particular minorities when we can regard Sternberg as a Jew whose work exemplifies camp? Not necessarily. One need not be a member of a group to make movies in its style, which is evident in the non-black filmmaker Jack Hill's blaxploitation films, Coffy and Foxy Brown.

Although I can reconcile the straight, Jewish Sternberg's intensely personal (a word I use here in its proprietary sense) aesthetic--which screams, "Camp!"--with the idea of camp as a predominantly gay men's style, I have to ruminate on the ground rules established by Sontag regarding who can delineate a sensibility:

For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

When I first read this prerequisite, I immediately wanted to dismiss the entire text because it appears to deprive those responsible for propagating a sensibility of the ability to discuss it. Thus, I wanted to cast "Notes on 'Camp'" as a homophobic screed, which the likes of D.A. Miller have already articulated. In "Sontag's Urbanity," Miller convincingly characterizes Sontag as a homophobe attempting to wrest camp from gay men, especially taking issue with the Sontag quote above and Sontag's claim that someone else would have invented camp had gay men not done so. After further consideration, I now see Sontag's point, regardless of whether Miller's portrayal of her is accurate.

Indeed, revulsion is the secret ingredient that allows a person to scrutinize a sensibility, and Miller in fact ignores the phenomenon of gay men who express a loathing of camp despite exemplifying it. Such is the paradox of internalized homophobia. I recall that when I was in middle school, I was horrified after hearing myself in a videotaped class presentation. This isn't by any means a uniquely gay men's experience, but it can be and has been a nuanced one for gay men who feel disgusted by the sound of their voice because they deem it camp, queeny, effeminate, or gay. Despite that first and ongoing experience of self-repugnance, I learned that I could also delight in exaggerating my speech to play gay caricatures in various academic, professional, and social situations. Therefore, my actions would fall under the category of deliberate camp, which Sontag contrasts with naive camp in Note 18. Incidentally, my internalized homophobia enables me to laugh at Sternberg's ridiculous images of queer characters, figments of his own homophobic imagination.

"Don't worry. I've got a kid of my own. Good luck." We were supposed to laugh at that, right?

Some stereotypes go back centuries. Snip! Snip!

By acknowledging my internalized homophobia, I can stake my claims as both an analyst and exhibitor of camp sensibility, thus conceding somewhat to Sontag's model. On the other hand, I find myself in a quagmire of a quandary as I try to determine whether camp would have developed without gay men, even if I narrow my focus on Sternberg. The straight Sternberg all but denies his influences in the 1967 BBC documentary, The World of Josef von Sternberg, which almost misleads me into believing that Sternberg could have conceived his camp sensibility himself. Maybe the BBC interviewer Kevin Brownlow fails to extricate a neat list of influences because Sternberg has already cited them in his 1965 memoirs, Fun in a Chinese Laundry.

One influence, Romaine Fielding, was a straight actor-director who was nonetheless very camp. According to Sternberg, the prodigal Fielding once visited the film lab where Sternberg was working "in an electric cabriolet, footman and all, wearing a black cape and sombrero." Truth be told, Sternberg describes Fielding with homoerotic adoration, recalling that Fielding used his eyes to charm Sternberg into loaning him money, but I admittedly could be reading too much between the lines. Sternberg expounds on other directors who influenced him, some of whom may have been gay (e.g., F.W. Murnau and Mack Sennett).

Rather than chart Sternberg's creative lineage to identify any gay predecessors, I should be acknowledging the gay man who helped create the lavish fashions in his Dietrich movies, Travis Banton. In her memoirs, Dietrich misnamed him Travis "Benton"--unaware of the embedded slur, I hope. Whether we call him an influence or a collaborator, Banton deserves credit for contributing to the "outrageous aestheticism" described by Sontag, and I don't know how we could possibly say that Sternberg and Dietrich could have created this camp style without Banton. Let's remember the one Dietrich-Sternberg vehicle that Sontag doesn't qualify as camp, The Blue Angel, which was made in Germany without Banton's creative eye.

Still, I'm left with Sontag's baffling characterization of moral seriousness as Jewish, but if I acquiesce to Sontag's philosophy regarding the analysis of sensibilities, I'd argue that Sontag got seriousness all wrong because she was only capable of exhibiting it. In her astute anti-eulogy, "Desperately Seeking Susan," Terry Castle explains that Sontag's "carefully cultivated moral seriousness – strenuousness might be a better word – co-existed with a fantastical, Mrs. Jellyby-like absurdity," and the reference to terms Sontag herself used in "Notes on 'Camp'"--"moral seriousness" and, in its grammatical variants, "absurdity"--doesn't escape my attention. By blurring the lines of her own sensibility binary, Sontag appears less understanding of camp than she seems and could be a prime example of naive camp, which may not have been morally serious but was at the very least--to quote "Notes on 'Camp'"--"dead serious."