Camp (Usually) Doesn't Win Awards & It's Homophobic

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

One of my favorite films of this year has been one most people hated or, at the very least, ignored: Lisa Frankenstein (2024), a lovechild of Oscar winner Diablo Cody of Juno (2007) fame. I saw it near midnight in a practically empty theater and enjoyed every minute. There is an inside joke from this movie, my partner and I still say, months later, and reflecting on it is almost bittersweet because most people don't know what I am talking about even when I explain the reference.

Critics hated this movie (mostly). With a 51% on Rotten Tomatoes (though a much higher audience score), it was grilled for being unserious and disjointed. "It will come as no surprise that the new movie 'Lisa Frankenstein' is a real monster," laments Mark Kennedy in the Associated Press.

"It's messy and chaotic, and while that makes the movie a fun horror-comedy, it isn't a fully satisfying experience," remarks Molly Freeman in Screen Rant.

This overly negative reaction felt strange because, from the perspective of a campy pleasure, the film set out with everything it was trying to do. It had that topsy-turvy sense of humor that you often see in beloved camp classics such as Serial Mom (1994), But I'm A Cheerleader (1999), or Rocky Horror (1975). These films are cult classics now, but they often bombed at the box office when they initially premiered. Like then, it felt like critics were judging Lisa Frankenstein to a different, straighter, less queer standard.

And I see that a lot with Hollywood — what is considered serious and professional is coded as masculine, straight, and often white, and everything else must either conform to that box as best it can or push against it, frequently in vain.

Camp is indecent

The word camp is thrown around a lot these days. In her seminal essay Notes on Camp (1964), Susan Lee Sontag summarized it as the "…love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration." Campy films are like a mirror universe where the motivations and sensibilities of "traditional" society are not prioritized. We focus on characters who experience the world in ways that "normal" people find abhorrent.

As a consequence, camp films are usually not "serious." Humor is not grounded in traditional sensibilities, and therefore, it may seem off-kilter to the uninitiated. We see this with the campy drag queen Divine, whose character would say and do all sorts of unhinged things. As she remarked in the absolutely filthy Pink Flamingos (1972): "Condone first-degree murder. Advocate cannibalism. Eat shit. Filth is my politics. Filth is my life." It's an absurdist framing meant to seem darkly humorous to the viewer, and this statement is, by far, one of the tamer things in that movie.

Furthermore, camp is frequently coded or directly about queer people, Black and Brown people, and anyone else who is otherized. It resonates with identities and viewpoints that are not only marginalized by the status quo but actively reject it. Camp figures are loud and abrasive, and they hold values that are entirely antithetical to straight, cisnormative, white society for a reason.

They are willfully choosing not to conform, even when it's dangerous, even when it's absurd.

In Serial Mom, for example, the main character is a serial-killing mom whose targets are those who violate the norms of suburban society, and she is worshipped for it. While fleeing the cops near the climax, she briefly becomes a figure of adoration at a punk show. They let her in, knowing who she is, and later, post-chase, as she is being dragged out of the venue by the cops, the crowd starts chanting "serial mom." Her eventual exoneration receives intense applause from her new morbid fans, who love her because of her murderous rage.

Going back to Lisa Frankenstein, the morality of the characters was one of the significant contentions with a lot of the criticism I saw. The two leads, Lisa (Kathryn Newton) and her "Creature" (Cole Sprouse) go on a killing spree, all so Lisa can build the "perfect" boyfriend. It's an entirely unhinged and campy motivation, and some reviewers simply did not get it. As Richard Lawson writes in Vanity Fair:

…Lisa Frankenstein does a lot to alienate even those most susceptible to its appeal. It’s a gross movie, a squelch of reeking bodily fluid and severed limbs and creepy crawly bugs. The film asks that we, too, fall in love with Lisa’s monster, the magically revived corpse of a lovelorn young man who died hundreds of years ago. As played by Cole Sprouse, the creature is a lurching ghoul, hideously awkward in his own body.

Yet that love for the disgusting was the entire point of the film. We are being asked to identify with the unhinged outcasts and their murderous obsession. This love for filth is what camp is all about. If you want a nice film where the monster turns out to be sweet and hot, then go watch Warm Bodies (2013) or some other straight fantasy.

Camp is "unserious" and "repugnant," and occasionally, despite what the title of this article suggests, it even wins awards. Everything, Everywhere All At Once, the 2022 Oscar winner about a mother named Evelyn Quan Wang (Michelle Yeoh) traveling across the multiverse to rescue her tyrannical queer daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) from her own nihilism, was campy as hell. It had an entire subplot where characters had to do unusual things to their bodies, including inserting a dildo-shaped object up their butts. This film was queer and loud, and it won widespread acclaim (though there is a massive caveat that we will discuss later).

At the time, I thought this was the beginning of a reorientation of the kinds of films we as a society decide to praise, but that's not what has happened — at least not as quickly as I would have hoped. The Oscars came and went this year, and, unsurprisingly, the moody and male Oppenheimer (2023) swept the awards. It's like when Moonlight (2016) won Best Picture, only for us to snap back to white saviorism two years later with Greenbook (2018). A film can break the mold, but it doesn't mean we stop using the old mold altogether.

While I am starting to see more camp-like contenders receive more significant acclaim (see Poor Things (2023), arguably Barbie (2023), etc.), the old mold still exists, and it's stronger than ever.

Camp and war

Oppenheimer is the antithesis of camp, falling into what I loosely refer to as "Great Man Films." Where camp actively rejects society's current hierarchies, Great Man Films are all about reaffirming the status quo through the celebration and adoration of patriarchal figures (see The King's Speech (2010), Braveheart (1995), etc.). These are films about great men of history, both real and imagined — films that focus on their concerns and worries.

For example, in Oppenheimer, based on the biography American Prometheus (2005), named after the myth about the God who gave fire to humanity, the eponymous character is depicted as uniquely special. We start the movie by glimpsing the magical quantum world that J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) sees. We are constantly shown not only how smart he is but also how he adheres to his principles at a significant personal cost.

Oppenheimer is a man who tells a racist President to give land back to the Indians and flirts with the communist party during a time of increasing anti-communism. He is a maverick, a genius, and arguably, a hero.

Great Man Films are also, as opposed to camp, entirely "serious." They have somber tones, heavy subject matter, and, most importantly, idolize trauma and loss. These men suffer, and that suffering is rarely joked about or trivialized. Oppenheimer loses his lover, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), and has to soldier on with his work. He grapples with the weight of his tremendously vital decision to build the atomic bomb, often alone. The film ends with him moodily proclaiming that he has "ended the world" with his creation. The moments of exhilaration and tenderness we might see in camp are few and far between.

Finally, these films are about perseverance. Even when Oppenheimer loses his battle against nuclear proliferation, the narrative is based on his triumph. In this case, the film is structured around several political hearings — a hearing for Oppenheimer's security clearance as well as the Senate confirmation hearing of Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) for Secretary of Commerce.

Strauss is the closest the film gets to a villain, and when Oppenheimer's allies manage to scuttle his nomination, the hearing also serves the double purpose of singing Oppenheimer's praises. He may have suffered, but he has pushed forward all the same.

As we can see, these two genres are vastly opposed to one another. There is what we may dramatically call a war between the Great Man perspective and camp, with the Great Man one currently reigning supreme. When it comes to awards, how we think of "serious" often fits these archetypes around Great Man Films— about male trauma, greatness, and perseverance — and that reflects the titles that even get made. When you think of award seasons, you think serious, and when you think serious, these traits are what films get made around, even if white men are not your subject matter.

For example, Moonlight was a great film about a Black queer man named Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert/Ashton Sanders/Trevante Rhodes) struggling to make space for himself in a world that actively hates such intersections. Its awards are well-earned, but I also cannot help thinking that it might not have received such accolades if its emphasis had not been so overwhelmingly on trauma.

Chiron endures a neglectful environment where even those who love him can't help but hurt him a little. It's heartbreaking, the type of pain often viewed as awards-worthy. Yet plenty of films deconstruct White Supremacy and Blackness in America, including brilliant campy satires such as Sorry to Bother You (2018), that don't win Oscars (or even snag a nomination).

Even with Everything, Everywhere All At Once, there is a caveat to its campy success. The entire film centers on a conservative mother's struggle to effectively come to terms with her daughter Joy's queerness — an identity that is rooted in so much pain that she wants to wipe herself from existence. Everything, Everywhere All At Once ends, not with the campy celebration of Joy or Jobu Tupaki's power, but assimilating into the traditional conservative family structure.

Evelyn accepts Joy and her girlfriend (Tallie Medel), and they become regular members of the Wang family. Jobu Tupaki consequently abandons her attempts to move beyond this singular dimension, focusing on imperfectly staying in place like her mother.

There is usually a conservative foundation amongst the most successful campy films. Hell, Diablo Cody's most famous movie, Juno, is about a white woman who ultimately decides to go forward with her pregnancy and ends up in a relationship with the man who impregnated her.

It's non-traditional in the sense of her not keeping the baby, but an acceptable type of non-traditionalism that manages not to offend conservative, forced-birth sensibilities. It would be hard to believe a fun romp about a young woman getting an abortion would win an Oscar, and I know that because it's called Grandma (2015), and few saw it.

There is a type of otherization that happens in filmography but also in society at large. Serious things are in the domain of the masculine, the rich, the straight, and often the white. Unserious things, well, they just so happen to be pushing against the norms of our society, and they are tacky for it. I am reminded of a quote from Jo Weldon's book Fierce: The History of Leopard Print (2018), writing:

Tacky, as a concept, refers to the lack of cultivation or the resistance to taste, and more often than not refers to tastes that are not suitably conservative….Tacky doesn't respect gatekeepers, and tacky tries too hard.

Furthemore, tacky is likely to be feminine, ethnic, queer, deviant; not manly, not practical, not businesslike, not serious. Tacky, like hell, is always other people.

I feel this in my bones. There is a hierarchy to taste. I cannot merely say that Lisa Frankenstein was one of my favorite films of the year and be respected as a critic because that movie is tacky. That film is queer. It is loud, unhinged, and unserious.

A Tacky Conclusion

Hierarchies of taste have been built around the world of cinema. They assert that certain styles deserve acclaim, and as someone whose identities often do not meet the more conservative values of Great Man Films, I tire of this mold. It's okay for a film to be about trauma, perseverance, or even greatness, but for these values to dominate as they currently do is intolerable.

I would like to see cinema go more in the direction of Everything Everywhere All At Once, or even Pink Flamingos, and away from Oppenheimer. I want camp to be respected for the art that it is and not merely an anomaly that wins because it manages to make the appropriate concessions to normative culture. Otherness should not have to be dressed up to seem valid. It should be allowed to break the mold, to shatter expectations, and to be praised for doing so.

I want filth to be king, and I don't care if that makes me unserious.