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SUSAN SONTAG
lack the Visual reward-the glamor, the theatricality-that marks off
certain extravagances as Camp.
29. The reason a movie like
On the Beach,
a book like
Wines–
burg, Ohio,
are bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to
the point of being enjoyable
is
that they are too dogged and pre–
tentious. They lack fantasy. There
is
Camp in such bad movies as
The Prodigal
and
Samson and Delilah,
the series of Italian color
spectacles about the super-hero Maciste, numerous Japanese science
fiction films
(Rodan, The Mysterians, The H-Man)
because, in
their relative unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme
and irresponsible in their fantasy- and therefore touching and quite
enjoyable.
30. Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a
great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply
dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it,
because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the
fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to
enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.
3!.
This is
why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste
are old-fashioned, out-of-date,
demode.
It's not a love of the old as
such. It's simply that the process of ageing, or deterioration, pro–
vides the necessary detachment--<>r arouses a necessary sympathy.
When the theme
is
important, and contemporary, the failure of a
work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time
liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to
the Cam,p sensibility.... Another effect: time contracts the sphere
of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the
contemporary. ) What was banal can, with the passage of time,
become fantastic. Many people who listen with delight to the style
of Rudy Vallee revived by the English pop group, The Temperance
Seven, would have been driven up the wall by Rudy Vallee in
his
heyday.
Thus, things are campy, not when they become old-but when
we become lesS involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be
frustrated by, the failure of the attempt. But the effect of time
is
unpredictable. Maybe Rod Steiger's acting will seem as Camp some
day as Ruby Keeler's does now-or as Sarah Bernhardt's does,
in
the films she made at the end of her career. And maybe not.
32. Camp
is
the glorification of "character." The statement