The premise couldn’t be campier: a remake of that sci-fi thriller “The Stepford Wives” featuring camp icon Bette Midler and a script by the gay author of the movie “In & Out.”
A TV executive (Nicole Kidman in the old Katharine Ross lead) moves to Stepford, Conn., and befriends not just Midler but a new gay character, played by Broadway’s Roger Bart, doing his Carmen Ghia bit from “The Producers.” Just as the women turn into Betty Crocker robots, he changes, too, into a strait-laced Republican. Jokes about hair, makeup and cuisine abound.
And the result, which opened Friday, is decidedly . . . blah. Word of trouble on the set and last-minute reshoots didn’t, in the end, add up to an unabashed flop. But there’s something a little bit tired about it all, Midler’s bits a pale echo of her “Ruthless People” glory days and nothing any edgier than the fare routinely on TV’s “Will & Grace.”
This is camp as comfort food.
Coincidentally, in a small North Side theater, there’s a camp imagining of the filming of “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” In it, male performers portray Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
That one, too, has its problems. Instead of dizzying hilarity, “How ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’ Happened,” now at the Theatre Building, is sometimes lugubrious, an attribute anathema to camp.
These are ingenious ideas, quintessential camp, and yet they fall short. That Time magazine cover question, once famously asked about God, now looms:
Is camp dead?
Or, at the very least, is it on life support?
Evidence is everywhere. “Some Like It Hot” and “Tootsie” delighted audiences with drag and gender-bending; this year’s movie “Connie and Carla” added another layer (women play-ing men dressed as women) and yet left critics and viewers cold with its cloying and simplistic message. Camp is a lot of things, but when it’s treacly and uplifting, it’s in trouble.
Doubts about camp’s vitality first emerged as far back as the mid-’90s, when humorist Fran Lebowitz suggested that this one-time under-ground sensibility had gone too mainstream and lost its subversive reason for being. With camp at the center of such hits then as “Priscilla: Queen of the Desert,” and more recently at the heart of Broadway’s cuddly “Hairspray,” not to mention “Will & Grace,” where is the taboo, the wicked, insider wink?
Of course, art forms and sensibilities never really die, they just go in and out of fashion. But camp, pardon the pun, is particularly perverse on that score. It’s relatively new, and its efficacy may well be tied to its time, to the subterranean aesthetics of certain pre-21st Century artists steeped in the gay demimonde, if not gay themselves: Oscar Wilde, Mae West, Andy Warhol and John Waters, to name a few.
Now, gay humor and transgender politics are open and widely understood, even when not embraced. Is camp any fun if everyone’s in on the secret?
“I wouldn’t advise investing your money in camp futures these days,” says Ron Hutchinson, the playwright whose “Moonlight and Magnolias,” now at the Goodman Theatre, is a fanciful telling of the making of “Gone With the Wind.” Though inspired by a cinematic legend loaded with camp aspects and icons, Hutchinson’s play is classic farce, not camp, and he’s not sure the camp sensibility makes sense anymore.
“It was always a coded, underground mechanism,” he argues. “Once its subjects are accepted, then the joke doesn’t play. Ten years ago, Eddie Izzard in women’s makeup and high heels still had a frisson, that touch of the forbidden. Now, he’s got an HBO special. Camp is just another brand of the entertainment smorgasbord.”
“It’s getting harder and harder to shock,” agrees David Cerda, the author of “Baby Jane” who also plays Joan Crawford. “The underground scene is getting smaller and smaller. The Farrelly brothers [`There’s Something About Mary’] took it and made it frat-boy friendly. The drag queen is a Disney character who families stand beside to have their photos snapped.”
May be evolving
“I don’t think camp’s necessarily gone,” demurs Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Chicago author of “Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna” and associate professor of film, television and theater at the University of Notre Dame. “But it is certainly changing.”
Like pornography and that famous judicial dictum — “I know it when I see it” — camp is a lot easier to cite by example than define. “Camp,” Mae West once told Playboy, “is the kind of comedy where they imitate me.” Just about everyone can rattle off camp icons (Judy Garland, Midler, Davis) and camp instances, from intentional efforts (“Hairspray”) through the it’s-so-bad-it’s-good mishaps (“Valley of the Dolls,” “The Poseidon Adventure”) to combinations of the two (“Dynasty”).
Camp is humor that tries to be funny or inadvertently winds up that way. A test of your own camp-o-meter: Do you regard the movie classic “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” as a horrific tragedy (non-camp) or a hilarious comedy (camp)?
Though more than a century old, employed as a term by West in her plays in the ’20s, camp as a cultural concept really burst on the scene in 1964, when Susan Sontag published her landmark essay “Notes on Camp.”
“The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural, of artifice and exaggeration,” she wrote. Camp sees the world “not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization,” in fact emphasizing style over content.
Sontag famously underrates camp’s political potential and downplays its gay roots. In fact, in the decades that followed, bit by bit, camp moved from the avant-garde in movies by Warhol and Waters to the mainstream in the ’70s and ’80s, with outlandish send-ups of past pop (Midler on stage) and an increasingly political evolution in drag (“Torch Song Trilogy”).
A self-love
“Yes, camp states that `This is fake; this is made up,’ but it also suggests an inherent self-love,” explains Chuck Kleinhaus, associate professor of radio, television and film at Northwestern University. “For a community facing repression, this was a response. `I want to do this even if it’s not commercial or socially acceptable. I don’t care how others react.’ Divine [Edna Turnblad in the `Hairspray’ movie] is the best example.”
In “Stepford Wives,” the defiant politics of camp (and Kleinhaus includes heterosexual movie director Ed Wood in the pantheon) come together with another, less celebrated element: women. For gays, camp is an exploration of the artifice of gender. But both genders are crucial, and huge female personalities hover about the sensibility, whether inadvertently (Davis, Crawford) or deliberately (West, Midler).
Hence, Wojcik sees in camp a feminism. And in both versions of “Stepford Wives,” the subject is ultimately women’s liberation, a vibrant issue since the late ’60s and, in this time of pay inequities and all-male presidential candidates, one not likely to go away. The 1975 original is based on Ira Levin’s novel, in which he essentially recycles his “Rosemary’s Baby” plot and replaces Satan as the villain with the scientifically enforced role of the ’50s housewife: Invasion of the Male Chauvinist Body Snatchers. Wojcik argues that the original movie is both feminist tract and classic, unintentional camp.
“Yes, there’s a feminist message, but the whole thing is so silly and poorly done,” she argues. “There have always been straight female devotees of camp, and their relationship to it is very different from that of gays. Gay men look at Mae West and sympathize with her sexual liberty. For women, it was more vicarious.” West acted out her sexual promiscuity, in other words, while the average housewife couldn’t. Paradoxically, Wojcik adds, women find something in West impossible for the gay man: a literal sameness.
Camp could be in a state of transformation, entering a new period when its devotees come from an underground no longer gay. Women may well cheer “Stepford Wives” the most, and Wojcik says that’s sorely needed. “I think we’ve been in a low period for feminist camp and feminism in general since the early ’90s,” with the camp-empowered, self-mocking Madonna giving way to what Wojcik calls the “bleak pop image of young women today, a sad version of the oversexed virgin,” a la Britney Spears.
Meanwhile, a recent performance by Dale Watson, a manly, rockabilly balladeer, at FitzGerald’s in Berwyn teemed with rowdy urban and suburban men dressed like cowboys and hooting “hee haw.” Call that good ol’ boy drag, the macho male the outsider now, camping it up as a way to fight back.
Like a cakewalk
In a 1994 essay, Kleinhaus links camp to political parody. Citing the 19th Century Southern cakewalk, he writes:
“Originally, the cakewalk was a show arranged for . . . white masters. The black slaves were given cast-off clothing, finery unsuitable for their ordinary labor, and thus dressed up to parade. For the masters, there was considerable amusement in seeing slaves in this totally `inappropriate’ clothing . . . performing as if they had the refined manners of aristocrats.
“Yet, for the slaves, it was also an opportunity to mock the masters’ manners. Whites remained amused and superior, but blacks could read the subversive ridicule involved. Everyone laughed, but one side laughed differently from the other.”
Camp precedes gay subject matter and will outlast our era of gay marriage. Sequins, boas and old movies may not be the tools. But as long as there are outsiders, they’ll find secret solace in this modern-day irony.
They’ll employ artifice, double meanings and drag as means to generate laughter through their stifled tears.
“Anytime you take a stereotype and play around with it, it’s empowering, because it reminds us it is a stereotype,” says Linda Mizejewski, who chairs women’s studies at Ohio State University. “We rely on stereotypes until camp explodes them, and that’s why camp is so so important and undying.”
