I’d like to start out by saying the cult film presentations have been great so far, really well done. I had forgotten how bad Troll 2 was, I hadn’t considered its’ cult potential before but it now makes sense considering the only reason I had watched it before was because of a review that had lauded its badness. While I hadn’t heard of The Black Cauldron, the presentation piqued my interest, mainly the fact that Disney’s target audience for this film was teens. Having seen fantasy themed animations at the high (Wizards) and low (Lord of The Rings) end of the age spectrum, I’m curious to see the where middle ground lies in terms of dark themes and ‘age-appropriate’ content.

This week Meg and I led the reading discussion in class, my readings being Transgressions and Freakery and Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp. As far as Sontag’s piece, we hit the key points in class: camp is the celebration of human failure, leaning away from a judgmental view and instead holding an appreciation its’ effort and exuberance. In other terms; an act of love. While we talked about camp sensibility, there’s a few more elements of Sontag’s notes that I thought were helpful in understanding what qualifies as ‘camp’. In general, camp loves that which is created with serious intent but is unable to be taken seriously by others. But that does not mean that all projects that fail in seriousness ca be considered camp, they must also meet its’ specific aesthetic. Note 28 explains this best,

“28.  Again, Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous. (The curved line, the extravagant gesture.) Not extraordinary in the sense of effort. Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not items are rarely campy. These items, either natural oddities (the two-headed rooster, the eggplant in the shape of a cross) or else the products of immense labor (the man who walked from here to China on his hands, the woman who engraved the New Testament on the head of a pin), lack the visual reward – the glamour, the theatricality -that marks off certain extravagances as camp.”

Camp has an added flare to it, a sense of something being “too much”, but also must stand by that quality and not stray from it in the slightest. Sontag describes it as a sense of fantasy or theatricality, which is important to remember because camp is also the rejection of meaning. What camp ignores in concept it focuses on in style and the idea of surface detail, this relates back to camps playfulness. Reading about the style of camp can be tricky to understand, what helped me the most in recognizing camp quality were Sontag’s numerous tangible examples of camp:

Swan Lake for its theatricality 

Tiffany Lamp for its gaudiness

crystal doorknob for its frivolity

Vase in high relief for its exuberance

Novelty liquor bottle (yes, they exist)

We also watched the John Waters film Pink Flamingos, featuring poor production, poor acting, and the magnificent Divine. The film is set in Maryland as Divine plans for her upcoming birthday party and living as the ‘filthiest person alive’. Though, filth feels like an understatement. When Connie and Raymond, two perverts, threaten Divine’s title (and set her pink trailer on fire), Divine employs the help from her son, Crackers, and friend, Cotton, to set things straight. This is a mellow description for Pink Flamingos but, for the number of crazy situations, it’d be hard to adequately describe how repulsive the film actually is. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the film; it was humorous, odd by all standards, and had a great soundtrack….but, I have to admit, some scenes I wasn’t as fond of. But it was John Waters intent to create a film that was outright nasty, in this week’s reading Transgressions and Freakery we learned that it would fall under the category of a ‘sick film’. Sick films are beyond transgressive and test the audience’s ability to sit through their duration, making them strong contenders for cult status.