Crawling into Bed with Sontag’s “Camp”
A strikingly beautiful woman and her ordinarily handsome husband are grazing feather pillows and tightly knit rugs down color-coded aisles of a Pottery Barn somewhere in Northern California.
“Honey, I love this couch. The pattern is a bit outlandish, but it almost makes sense to me. I think it could be the focal point of our living room, a conversation piece, even. Then all of the other furniture in the room around it can be simple, a few solid throw pillows. What do you think?
“Sure babe… but would you wear that couch cover?”
This may or may not have been a conversation that a few designers came across last year when the ‘Met Gala’ theme was announced as “Camp”. After an event full of extravagant and breathtaking demonstrations of the Catholic Church, it seems as though the Gala folks wanted to stir things up, a lot. When confusion and distress overwhelmed the ‘Met Gala’ elite participants and couch watchers alike, everyone turned to a single piece of journalism. The piece provided comfort in its explanation of “Camp” and what we are to do with it; rather, the immense possibilities there are with it. The most extraordinary thing that came out of this theme announcement wasn’t necessarily chandeliers on heads and dresses weighing back to the Victorian era, but a return to journalism; the written word, a stronghold, a truth, which brought us back down to one our simplest form of communication in the midst of our wildest forms of expression.
In a shockingly tight list of 58 definitions of “Camp”, Susan Sontag reaches out to us and puts her literary hand on our shoulder: It’s okay, I’m here to explain this to you with plenty of pop-culture references, one of which you are sure to recognize or understand, I can hear her saying. I myself felt slightly overwhelmed flipping through Sontag’s descriptive images of “Tiffany lamps” and “a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers” (290, 295) until I came across an example that made sense to me, possibly my understanding of “Camp”. I was considering films I had seen such as Rocky Horror Picture Show and other outlandish yet delicious art that has pleased me throughout my life, then I thought of one particular Italian director that has accomplished the out-of-the-ordinary beauty in film, and Sontag was there to confirm my suspicions: “Consider the way Fellini got Anita Ekberg to parody herself in La Dolce Vita,” (294). When I felt as though Sontag had crawled inside my head, tucked me in and read me a bedtime story she had written with me in mind, I wasn’t afraid of the unknown anymore. I went back to search for photos of the ‘Met Gala’ runway looks and understood that all of those models and actors had their own bedtime stories, and Sontag was there to guide us all through. Her piece is not only an explanation of “Camp” but also a lesson in literary compassion.
