Origins of Camp

Notes on a mini-series presented for Club Crisis (The Scarlet Empress, The Old Dark House, Cleopatra, This Day and Age, Sylvia Scarlett, The I Don’t Care Girl, I Don’t Want to Be a Man, The Old and the New)

If we take camp as a mode that is so sincere as to become totally insincere, or rather, so insincere as to become sincere — like a kid’s home movie, too innocent to believe in itself, too self-aware not to — then it makes some intuitive sense to locate the primetime of cinematic camp in the 1950s. The 50s were, after all, an era in which Hollywood was desperately fortifying its citadel of willed innocence against the encroaching self-awareness of a Bergman-Fellini-Kurosawa invasion of new waves, all so self-reflexive, so deconstructive of cinematic myth-making, that Hollywood found itself in a kind of strange, Adam-like position: asserting its innocence so emphatically as to raise further suspicions that it, too, had become dangerously conscious of itself. And so one way to explain the spectacular dumbness of, say, the parade of Hollywood biblical epics in the late 50s might be to say that Hollywood knew it had to cling to big-swinging mythology in the face of neorealism, that it had to hold tight its supposed innocence at the moment it was about to be irrevocably lost. (Audiences who initially propelled these movies to success might have agreed; in the decade between the Holocaust and Vietnam, they too might have recognized the expiration date on American mythology.) But in any case, this strange mix — so much innocence willed forcefully to hide its utter loss at a moment of global demystification — was, then, a prime generator of camp.

But by that logic, there would be at least one other key era for Hollywood camp, another era in which Hollywood found itself caught between sincerity and flippancy that couldn’t always be differentiated: the early-mid 30s, the beginning of the sound era, of the Great Depression, and thus (combined) of a greater realism of street and working life that were rapidly scuppered for vacuum-packed fantasies of chivalric swash-bucklers and respectful husbands by the end of the decade. If the mid-late 50s marked the gradual degradation of Hollywood innocence into self-awareness, then, the early 30s represented the opposite: the degradation of self-awareness into a fantastical innocence that not even another World War could upend. (Quite the opposite, the war would typically find itself communicated through the noirish shorthand of broken heroes and gaslit wives’ feverish nightmares, more fantastical, more mythological, more Hollywood than ever.)

To be sure, the implementation in 1934 of the Production Code to regulate characters’ mores on-screen was arguably the crucial moment of Hollywood becoming so aware of itself as to swear its complete innocence. Yet it was also, in some ways, an awkward negotiation of two very opposite Hollywoods, the spectacular epics of silent film and the vulgar stories of snappy hustlers that predominated in the pre-code era of the early 30s. To put that another way, Hollywood found itself caught between the lavish visuals of the silent era and the obscene sounds of life in the Depression. The Production Code, which would beget a stream of awful biopics about the “real lives” of legendary people, was fairly effective in negotiating a marriage between visual fantasy and sonic reality that let each neutralize the other. But before it was effectively implemented — when the lavish image of the 20s came colliding with the off-hand vernacular of the 30s — there was camp. “All hail Caesar!” a legion of gold-plated soldiers salute lion statues to the blare of trumpets in DeMille’s 1934 Cleopatra. Then a few beats of Caesar’s footsteps as he tramps on into the room, dismissing his own spectacle: “Well, well, come on, come on, let’s go to work,” he says, settling down to read through some parchments on his office desk, another yawning 9–5 for the emperor of the world.

Those unnecessary beats of characters entering a room and walking across it quickly so that they can station themselves for their line are a staple of early 30s cinema, played for particularly good effect in flattening DeMille’s scene, and they suggest a more obvious reason why the 30s might have been a key time for camp: in the search for sound productions, the early 30s was the only point when Hollywood fully, unequivocally embraced theater as a template for its own work. Whatever the traditional associations of “theatrical” with “camp,” theater in the late 20s and 30s offers a particular entry point to camp in the Weimar cabarets and the performative librettos of Brecht. What would that performative theatricality look like when Hollywood had shorn it of political context? It might look like Marlene Dietrich in the Sternberg movies, a monument to the hard-won conquest of aesthetics over all political concerns but one, a crucial one: the many different ways Dietrich and her characters emulate the male figures in order to enact social privileges reserved for men. Any other film might have Dietrich trying to get with the lothario Count Alexei when politics pulls them apart; The Scarlet Empress suggests, instead, that the way to conquer him is to sleep with everyone else but him, that getting him is little gain at all, but becoming him is the path to power. Still, Sternberg’s wonderful mythic excesses raise the question of whether gender liberation in camp must come at the cost of waggish colonialist fantasies: if camp denudes these fantasies as nothing more or less than Hollywood fashion shows, does it also denude them of all political engagement? What is camp if not the praise of false idols — for their falseness?

And yet, in its way, it was perhaps this love of falseness that allowed Hollywood, until the code or perhaps the failure of Sylvia Scarlet, to allow some kind of truly queer cinema, in which characters knowingly stage their gender and sexual desires, seemingly falsifying and revealing these in the same gestures, taking over from the filmmaker in blocking and producing a spectacle of the self (John Barrymore lighting his own death scene in Cukor’s Dinner at Eight). Of the seven major queer filmmakers working in Hollywood at the time — Dorothy Arzner, George Cukor, Edmund Goulding, Mitchell Leisen, Arthur Lubin, Irving Rapper, and James Whale — five of them came to Hollywood in the early 30s from, of course, directing theater. (Only Arzner and Leisen worked their way up the Hollywood system, possibly the only major queer filmmakers in Hollywood in the late 20s.) Yet it was also a key era for queer actors — Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Claudette Colbert, Katherine Hepburn, Charles Laughton — most of whom came to prominence in the early 30s, often defining the early sound diva roles. None of that should mean that these figures offered any kind of “Origins of Camp,” a false title; as DeMille’s mini-epics show, we can go back to the Romans for that. But they point to the way that 30s movies still allow us to see Hollywood myth in both excessive and fledgling form, not quite needing to believe in itself — and knowing the greater value, at a historical inflection point, of refusing to do so. Or rather: if camp means taking the serious unseriously and taking the unserious seriously, then the early 30s mark a time when Hollywood made the horrific discovery that it could be serious — with a sharp premonition, at some point between a mass depression and the Holocaust, of just how dangerous that could be.