Watch Dynasty

I watched the first season of Dynasty last winter. A classmate in my critique group was writing an amazing paper on portrayals of non-normative characters in soap operas, including Dynasty. She loaned me her DVDs of the first season and I watched the whole thing. So I could give her better feedback. No other reason, of course. The common opinion about Dynasty seems to be that the first season, before Joan Collins joins the cast, is boring. Well, if the first season is boring, I can't wait to watch the rest, because I thought it was fantastic. If Joan Collins' Alexis is half as great as her daughter, Fallon, then I will be thrilled.

Last night, much to my excitement, I discovered that CBS.com has full episodes of the first two seasons that you can watch for free. Scroll over "Shows" and look under "TV Classics" on the far right. I watched the first episode of season two, and it was great. Fans of campy soap operas might want to note that they also have the first 4 seasons of Beverly Hills 90210 and the first season of Melrose Place.

If you want to read my classmate's paper, you can find it and my review of it on the Fashioning the Body website. It's "Framing the Body" by Ella Bowman. It also covers Melrose Place.

Thoughts on Jawbreaker

I'm not generally a huge fan of movies. I'd rather watch the same 5 movies over and over again than see something new. Last night, I watched two of those movies (Jawbreaker and Spice World) with a roommate. My two favorite mediums of pop culture are pop music (where I repeatedly listen to songs) and reality television (where I rarely repeat-watch an episode, but each episode repeats the same structure). Movies just don't have the level of repetition that I like in pop culture.

I've been thinking a lot about camp the past few months. I decided that, in my opinion, the two main elements of camp are excess and an overcommitment to the marginal. Watching Jawbreaker again reminded me of another element that is often, though not always, present in camp: failure. So many of the plot points and conversations in Jawbreaker simply don't make sense, and it adds to the general campy charm of the movie. Spice World is also very campy, but I don't think it's a failure on any level. I know that many people would disagree with me about that, which points out the important fact that failure is subjective. When something is campy (because it's excessive and features an overcommitment to the marginal), moments of failure (as perceived by the individual viewer) can add to the campiness (for that individual viewer).

Back to repetition: I would imagine that I have seen Jawbreaker about 20 times. I feel like I could watch it many more times, but it's difficult to sit through a movie so many times. I've listened to the song "Glamorous" over 200 times, but I listen to it while doing other things. I've watched over 100 episodes of America's Next Top Model (many twice), and while there's a lot of repetition (of episode structure, activities, themes, the word "fierce," and the judge comment "The camera loves you!") each episode is different. I want to watch Jawbreaker more, but since the same thing happens every time and movies demand that you not do other things while you watch them, it can become almost boring.

I'm considering trying to convert Jawbreaker into other forms. What I've come up with so far is to print off screen captures and put them up on the walls and to convert the audio to mp3 files, about the length of a pop song, and listen to them while doing other things.

Irony?

I started reading a chapter of Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema by Matthew Tinkcom (which is one of the best scholarly titles I've encountered). I was particularly struck by this paragraph about irony:

We discover, though, that irony is a depleted term for comprehending the variety of contemporary cultural practices encompassed in its name, and perhaps worth recalling is that the term carries with it its classical meaning, whereby irony was defined as a form of feigned ignorance. To be ironic in this sense is to maintain a pretense of not knowing in order to produce an alternative knowledge of a statement, object, text, or performance: insisting that one is not perceiving the conditions under which the ironic message is dispensed, not possessing its different registers of signification, not acknowledging that one is perhaps the perfect recipient of the statement that one claims only to be overhearing, irony captures a form of complicity between producer and recipient, one allowing for a form of textual camouflage that provides for a hidden, ambivalent interpretation to arise around the message. (156)

I think that irony as a means of reading culture, as it is practiced now by a lot of people, is not about ambivalence, it's about entirely disliking or having disdain for a cultural product and consuming it ironically in order to play up or perform that dislike. It's almost a way to disavow any ambivalences towards the cultural product. This is why I find camp, with its ambivalences, much more interesting. Of course, as Tinkcom points out, "irony is a depleted term." His revisiting of the original meaning of irony is fascinating to me. It comes near the beginning of a chapter about John Waters. I'm excited to see how ideas about irony and its relation to camp play out in the rest of the chapter.

And the Band Played On

Recently, I have been reading a lot about the AIDS crisis, starting with Douglas Crimp’s Melancholia and Moralism, which is fantastic. In one of Crimp’s essays, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” he critiques Randy Shilts’ book As the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, a journalistic book about the crisis. Crimp writes that Shilts irresponsibly places blame for the crisis on gay men and promiscuity, particularly in his creation of “Patient Zero.” I wanted to read And the Band Played On because I’ve been reading so much critical writing about politics and art in the AIDS crisis, but I don’t know much of the history. I was also interested in reading the book to see if I agreed with Crimps’ critique.

I’m almost 200 pages in now, and I think Crimp was definitely right. It’s clear from Shilts’ focus on promiscuity as what is at fault. For example, he repeatedly refers to bathhouses as “the commercialization of promiscuity,” to the point where it almost becomes a euphemism. On a few occasions, he describes gay men who were promiscuous before anyone had even heard of AIDS as “playing on the freeway.” For example: “Perhaps the new virus was like some lurking jungle predator, striking the stragglers first. That would explain the extreme life-styles of the early cases; they were out dancing in the freeway, ensuring they would be the first to get run over.” (153). On page 157, Shilts writes, “Jim Curran passed up the opportunity to meet Gaetan, the Quebecois version of Typhoid Mary. Curran had heard about the flamboyant attendant and frankly found every story about his sexual braggadocio to be offensive. Stereotypical gays irritated Curran in much the same way that he was uncomfortable watching Amos n’ Andy movies.” (157) Here, gay men acting “stereotypical” is equated with blackface. Perhaps a more appropriate metaphor would be straight men acting a gay men and portraying these stereotypes, but that is not what is happening here. Curran is a straight doctor who is the head of AIDS research at the CDC. Shilts has created a story where a straight doctor is one of the heroes of the AIDS crisis, yet expresses such offensive sentiments. He wants to save gay men’s lives, but he doesn’t want to meet them if they act “stereotypical.”

What I actually like about And the Band Played On is how (unintentionally, I presume) campy the writing is. For example, Shilts writes, “The sun melted the morning fog to reveal a vista so clear, so crystalline that you worried it might break if you stared too hard.” (11). Or, a few pages later, “His body was superbly toned. He carried himself with increasing confidence, much like the body politic whose ideals he was articulating.” (14). Personally, I find this writing laughably bad. This amusement is helping me enjoy the book through the offensive sentiments.

On "Young Gay Rites"

A few weeks ago, the New York Times Sunday Magazine published an article about young gay men getting married called Young Gay Rites. Today, they published letters in response.

The first letter is my favorite:

As a gay man of a certain age (I was 18 when Stonewall happened), I realize that much of what I have valued overall in my life — virtually all of it “out” — has been access to a much wider landscape of sexual and relationship possibilities than most of my straight confreres felt they had. In fact, being gay in this culture has required me to forge my own identity — cultivate it consciously — rather than have it handed down through societal institutions like marriage. I think there have been benefits to that.

That everybody has a right to get married surely is obvious. But how lovely to feel you don’t have to.

When you’re gay, it can be difficult to explain to people why your views on gay marriage are negative or apathetic. I think this letter is very well articulated. I like that it expresses how a lack of marriage rights can be of benefit to queers without attacking the institution, which would cause a lot of people to close their minds to the sentiment.

The third letter I am not as fond of:

I dunno . . . after reading the article, sounds to me like gays get married for good or dumb reasons, impulsively or after careful or neurotic consideration, exactly like straight couples.

But as a 42-year-old gay engaged man, still giddy to be on the receiving end of a marriage proposal from my Julian, I do shudder to think what the gay-marriage opponents would think of our hypergay lifestyle, which I’m hoping California will condone soon by granting real marriage rights.

Why, just the other night we went to Target with our straight friend Brian and then, to top off our gay evening, got some doughnuts. It’s just one fabulous day after another.

Or should I say fabulously normal.

This is a typical example of the “gays should be able to get married because they’re just like straight people.” If this particular gay life style is “normal,” then something else isn’t normal – probably some more "hypergay" lifestyle. The use of the word “fabulous” seems particularly offensive to me, attacking certain non-assimilationist ways of being gay (i.e. faggy).

The last letter is very interesting. It’s about the images that ran with the story, campy 50s-style portraits of the young gay couples in the article. For example:



The letter states:

I enjoyed Denizet-Lewis’s article. He created a lively and sympathetic read, chronicling the path to marriage and beyond, a path that is not so different for couples of any sexual orientation. But why the colorized, exaggerated photos, mimicking the most clichéd and self-conscious of coupled moments? Why pose Marc and Vassili in tuxedos when they specifically stated that they will sidestep all the trappings associated with “traditional” weddings? Besides the uncomfortable nod to the ’50s (an era that was not especially welcoming to gays and lesbians), it suggests that gay couples are somehow “play acting” at being married. As a civil celebrant, who has had the great joy to preside over many gay unions in New Jersey, I was offended by the way these couples were depicted, at least visually.

I think this letter misses the point, which is the campiness of the photos. It’s not an “uncomfortable nod” to the 50s, it’s a parodic nod. Pictures like these, send-ups of the 50s, are usually parodic these days even when they feature straight couples. The letter made me think of Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. Butler writes about gender parody as repeating gender norms with a difference – in this case, that the couples are both men. This is not “play acting,” it is a parody that reveals the “original” as being a copy all along (unfortunately, I don’t have Gender Trouble with me, and this is something of a paraphrase from memory). In this case, the photos point out the constructedness of straight marriage as an institution. In my view, the author of this later misread the photographs and was offended by what she read into them, something that she wouldn’t have seen if she had noted the photos’ camp effect.