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THE_FALCON
January 1-18, 2005
In editing my Sontag quotes, I've
elided many of her examples of camp SUNDAY_CAMP
because to my eye, her examples
obscure her points.
She continually comes up
with cases that I want
to argue with:
o "The Maltese Falcon"
"The Maltese
Falcon! But
that's a great (The George Sanders
movie!" Falcon would be a
much better example.)
o "Trouble in Paradise"
"Trouble in Paradise" --
the Lubitsch comedy about
jewel thieves.
Rogues naughty, but
not villanous... much
like "To Catch a Thief".
It's also quite
obviously a comedy,
with a prominent
role given to
Edward Everett Horton...
o Edward Everett Horton
By what possible stretch of the
imagination could Edward Everett Horton was a
Horton be regarded as unconscious comic actor.
of his art, an innocent producing How is it
"camp" by accident? possible to
see his work
as "failed
seriousness"?
o Gaudí
Could it be that
Sontag is
Maybe Gaudí registered conflating two
as camp to someone still different concepts?
steeped in the esthetic
of modern architecture? Bogart & Horton are
favorite subjects
for campy imitation,
but they themselves
need not be camp
for that to work.
Perhaps it would
be better to
o "To Catch a Thief" reserve "camp" for
the genre of queer
Now... In what sense would stage act, and
I want to defend "To Catch think of the
a Thief"? Not on grounds central subject
of realism, certainly. here as "kitsch".
Though, while there's
certainly a forced,
clumsy quality to much
of Hitchcock's The "suspense" form in
"suspense", I don't general has an air of
see too much of it in contempt about it...
this film. it's very manipulative,
and rarely "plays fair".
CHEAP_SUSPENDERS
I can't detect the CASTLE_SKULL
sense of contempt that
Sontag refers to.
But it's not hard to
think of examples of
forced camp redolent
of contempt e.g. the
60s Batman TV show.
But even that TV show --
AVENGING_RAND which I've come to loath --
I liked it a lot when I
was six or so. It was a
guilty pleasure;
I didn't want to let on
to my older brothers how
much I wanted to see it.
And *many* people feel
some affection for it. NULL_HINGED
A veneer of nostalgia
lathered over it's
badness?
Is it just that
camp is in the
eye of the
beholder?
Sontag denies that taste is
a purely individual thing --
hence her many flat pronouncements
about what is or isn't camp -- So possibly: "The
but she at least admits that it Maltese Falcon" may
can change over time. have once been camp,
and now is not.
A film missing from her lists
is "Cassablanca". Because too "Full appreciation of a
many would argue with her hero's hard knocks requires
pronouncement, either way? a battered context of one's
own. The Maltese Falcon will
Because "Cassablanca" seemed not work on an innocent reader."
more complicated... some
camp lines here and there on -- Algis Budrys,
a more serious framework? Galaxy, Sept 1971
Cassablanca certainly didn't Perhaps then, Sontag
work on *my* unbattered was revealing a kind
context -- when I was a kid of innocence of her
I just thought it was boring. own...
(She was 35
in '68, if
The noir detective that matters.)
has hooks for
different levels
of experience.
Youth just sees a Possibly, Sontag
Hero, it takes was blinded by
experience to see a seeing it only on
failed, bitter figure its simplest level.
flailing through life.
No sane person sets
out to be a Spade or G_IN_THE_AIR
a Marlowe.
"36. But there are other creative
sensibilities besides the
seriousness (both tragic and comic)
of high culture and of the high
style of evaluating people. And one
cheats oneself, as a human being, if
one has respect only for the style So she notes that
of high culture, whatever else one a love only of the
may do or feel on the sly." serious is too
limiting...
"37. The first sensibility, that of But I would go further:
high culture, is basically
moralistic. The second sensibility, Must we only take the
that of extreme states of feeling, serious seriously?
represented in much contemporary
'avant-garde' art, gains power by a TAKEN_LIGHTLY
tension between moral and aesthetic
passion. The third, Camp, is wholly
aesthetic." Sontag here does not
undermine the high
and low distinction,
This is what's offensive about she embraces it.
shuffling "The Maltese Falcon"
off into the "camp" bin.
It amounts to a denial that any
of the moral issues involved
amount to anything.
SUNDAY_MORNING
"The Maltese Falcon" is about
living according to your own
standards in a corrupt world. LIGHT_EXPECTATIONS
The near infinite cynicism of
the Falcon... all just a joke?
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