Camp: Notes on Heathers
Two am had done no favors for my raging headache, clouded eyes glazed by a kaleidoscopic fever dream of roughly masked green screens and cartoonish zoom backgrounds. It’s not the first all-nighter I had pulled that week, in preparation for opening night of an ambitious virtual production of Heathers: The Musical. Accompanying me on FaceTime is a fellow video editor and a director; the hour, combined with the overall crudeness of our “movie” (a reality we so desperately tried to remain naïve to), tinged our optimism and playfulness with an unspoken melancholy. They make the same, resigned declaration:
“It’s… camp!”
This term conflicted me — “camp” is often easier spotted than defined, yet the term felt more immediate on paper (a pandemic Zoom musical? With green screens?) than it did upon viewing Heathers drafts. Less so was this due to any lack of aspiration as it was to quite the opposite — the Stanford production of Heathers was brilliantly cast and performed by world-class actors, scored and choreographed from scratch, costumed and lit creatively. In other words, Heathers struggled to be camp because of its good taste, not its bad. The issues that plagued Heathers were rooted in the limitations of technology and impossibly short deadlines, which begged to me the question: is our claim of “camp” merely a cop-out, an excuse for poor execution, rather than a genuine love of anti-culture?
American writer Susan Sontag’s essay Notes on “Camp” is often considered the leading literature on the term. But even Sontag’s characterization of camp is necessarily slippery — she spends her essay providing observations and examples of camp but cannot herself place a definition, admitting that “to talk about Camp is therefore to betray it.” (Sontag, 275). One can be forgiven for reading Sontag’s essay and having a foggier understanding of camp than before, with a fear of conflating camp with one of its close cousins — kitsch, Art Nouveau, or simple inferiority. Sensibilities are madness without method, as is the human construct of taste, and gatekeeping camp defeats its purpose as merely a lens of enjoying work.
Nevertheless, Heathers manages to fit Sontag’s bill, both tragically and delightfully; In fact, the very premise of the show almost demands and makes inevitable the camp sensibility. In this grim age, a show that makes light of topics as serious as suicide and bullying, without any meaningful closure found or serious questions asked, is unable to demand much sobriety from its audience. Camp parodies the world in a way that is “not a bitter or polemical comedy” (Sontag, 288), by which Heathers superficiality actually aligns with. The theatricality of Heathers as a show reflects camp’s brand of parody, in its bouncy soundtrack, bright colors and cheesy sounds. The artistic set design and staging of virtual Heathers take this a new step further, rejecting realism almost altogether and embracing the flavor of zoom-era artifice as a substitute for the artifice of the stage, using wildly stylized backgrounds and hilariously framed attempts at fight scenes.
“Premise” can also mean the choice to put on a virtual show in the first place — Heathers was given a miniscule timeline of eight weeks to craft a two hour show that has little breaks in content. Sontag asserts that “In Camp there is often something démesuré in the quality of the ambition” (Sontag, 283). To attempt to do a musical in full, virtually, is an extravagance of its own — not just in the amount of effort, for that alone is not quite camp — but for the fantastical, creative nature of its dreams.
Perhaps an ultimate motive to Heather’s camp sensibility is its gender-bending of main character JD and its creation of a queer relationship. To talk about camp without mentioning its queer roots is erasure, and it is hard to not see camp’s relation to queer spaces such as drag and ballroom culture. Camp often deals with the epicene, and Stanford’s Heathers in particular plays much with gender fluidity — in makeup looks on the stereotypically masculine characters Kurt and Ram, in its staging of the number “My Dead Gay Son,” and especially in the gender-bending of JD, a character written to be especially masculine. Lines take on whole new meanings, but more importantly JD’s motives become far more empathizable as a queer woman. Camp inadvertently serves the effectiveness of the queer relationship in that it insists on a reality that subverts society’s status quo.
Most important to Heathers’ camp sensibility is that its company was mostly naïve to its own campiness until the very end. Sontag finds this element crucial to camp — she writes that “The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious” (Sontag, 282). Indeed, the cast and crew treated Heathers with the same passion and dedication as a “real” production all the way through previews. Keeping the final product hidden kept our aspirations for the production high. The paradox is that the seriousness that caused the successes in Heathers that tends to nullify camp is the same seriousness that lends to the authenticity crucial to camp. Arguably, it is the authenticity that wins out — “Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles,” Sontag writes (Sontag, 292). In the end, whether it was camp or not, Heathers survived because that love remained apparent throughout.
Heathers’ biggest triumph might be that, through its campiness, it managed to find the artifice of the stage in the digital realm. The particular flavor that is camp somehow allows the audience to suspend its belief and humor its imagination for the sake of the show. I dare say that Heathers is indicative of how crucial a sensibility camp is to Generation Z. As an era who has had to cope with the pressure of a post-9/11 world, global warming, a pandemic and the corruption of politics, we have created a culture that relies on a new artifice unique to the digital age as an escape. Camp is imaginative hope, and while some argue that now is no longer the time for a show like Heathers: The Musical, others might argue that the world needs Heathers more than ever — it just needs to embrace its camp.
