Definitions #1: Camp

The first in a series where I collect influential definitions of concepts

What is camp?

In her essay on Camp, Susan Sontag says many things about Camp. She says for instance that Camp is the farthest extension of the sensibility of life as theatre. Camp sees everything in quotation marks: "lamps" rather than lamps, "crying" rather than someone crying, "laughing" rather than someone laughing. But one could say this about melodrama as well with its affinity for exaggeration - and I would personally characterize Indian movies, Japanese anime and Korean k- dramas as melodramatic rather than campy.

The parts of Sontag that I agree with are when she brings innocence into the picture. Something that is consciously trying to emulate camp can be enjoyable in a post-modern meta narrative self aware way but it wont be deliciously enjoyable in the same way that you would enjoy something genuinely campy.

The difference between something bad and something campy is the degree of effort perhaps - one can see that the maker of camp is completely earnest and serious. They have poured their heart and soul into making this thing - in all seriousness and its the ability to not take it seriously despite the earnestness and seriousness apparent in the work is the hallmark of camp. Good camp must always be sincere.

"Camp is art that proposes itself seriously but cannot altogether be taken seriously because it is too much"

"In naive or pure camp, the essential element is a seriousness - a seriousness that fails. Of course not all seriousness that fails can be camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the fantastic, the exaggerated, the passionate and the naive."

Camp may also often require that time passes. A lot of camp for this reason is also old. We might find Bollywood movies from the 80s or music such as hair metal from the 80s as camp because sufficient time has passed that we can evaluate it with a different perspective than the people who would have watched or listened to these things in the 80s. Thus what is merely bad in the 80s - bad as in failing to meet the criteria of its day despite all earnestness can become camp with the passage of time.

PS. If you enjoy camp, I highly recommend the FB community "I love trashy hindi movies" It is currently my favourite group that I follow on Fb and has been for a while. There are some real prized truffle pigs among the members - they root among trashy hindi movies all day and all week - with a passion and zeal I have never managed to muster for anything in my life.

In case you want to read the original Susan Sontag essay: https://monoskop.org/images/5/59/Sontag_Susan_1964_Notes_on_Camp.pdf