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NOTES ON CAMP
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prints and
posters,
presented in relief on lamps and ashtrays; the
haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta
Garbo. Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth
of taste: the most rermed form of sexual attractiveness (as well as
the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against
the grain of one's sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is some–
thing feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women
is
some–
thing masculine.... Allied to the Camp taste for the androgynous
is something that seems quite different but isn't: a relish for the
exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms.
For obvious reasons, the best examples that can be cited are movie
stars. The corny flamboyant femaleness of Jayne Mansfield, Gina
Lollobrigida, Jane Russell, Virginia Mayo; the exaggerated he-man–
ness of Steve Reeves, Victor Mature. The great stylists of tempera–
ment and mannerism, like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah
Bankhead, Edwige Feuilliere.
10. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp,
but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive Camp
in objects and persons is to understand Being as Playing a Role. It
is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as
theater.
11. Camp
is
the triumph of the epicene style. (The converti–
bility of "boy" and "girl," "person" and "thing.") But all style
is,
ultimately, epicene. "Life" is not stylish. Neither is nature.
12. The question isn't, "Why travesty, impersonation, theatri–
cality?" The question is, rather, "When does travesty, impersonation,
theatricality acquire the special flavor of Camp?" Why is the atmo–
sphere of Shakespeare's comedies
(As You Like It,
etc.) not epicene,
while that of
Der Rosenkavalier
is?
13. The dividing line seems to fall
in
the eighteenth century;
that's where the origins of Camp taste are to be found (Gothic
novels, Chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth.) But
the relation to nature was quite different then. In the eighteenth
century, people of taste either patronized nature (Strawberry Hill)
or attempted to remake it into something artificial (Versailles).
They also indefatigably patronized the past. Today's Camp taste ef–
faces nature, or else contradicts it outright. And the relation of
Camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental.