American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations

1966: Movies and Camp

1966 Movies and Camp HARRY M. BENSHOFF By most accounts, this was not a strong year for American cinema. Commentators observed that Hollywood seemed to be out of touch with the era’s countercultural sensibilities. Audiences were turning away from Hollywood films in favor of underground and exploitation films, as well as more idiosyncratic auteur films from Europe such as Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac, Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine-Feminine. If and when countercultural audiences attended mainstream Hollywood films, they often viewed them through an ironic lens, a distanced and distanciating reception practice known as camp. At its most basic level, camp is a form of comic negation—a refusal to take seriously the serious forms and artifacts of dominant culture. Camp is a sort of “queer discursive architecture” that in the act of reception allows one to “pervert” “all ‘originary’ intention, deviating it toward unpredicted—and often undesired—ends” (Cleto 11). Most cultural historians agree that the origins of camp can be traced back to Western male homosexual subcultures of the last few centuries. The word is believed to have evolved from the French term se camper, which means “to flaunt,” and as such, camp is something a spectator can do: one can “camp up” a film, a room, or even a persona. However, camp is also a means of textual production. A film may be called deliberately campy if its makers have purposefully encouraged outlandish plotting, baroque visual design, corny dialogue, and wooden acting. As Susan Sontag’s seminal essay “Notes on ‘Camp’” (first published in 1964 and anthologized in 1966) describes the phenomenon, by the mid1960s camp was a sensibility that was shared not just by homosexuals, but by increasingly larger numbers of straight Americans turning away from the dominant ideological structures of Western culture. Furthermore, by this year, audiences were not only decoding mainstream texts as camp (what Sontag called “naïve camp” or the camp of failed seriousness), but Hollywood itself was beginning to produce texts of deliberate camp (Sontag). 150 Camp’s ironic way of seeing things, of turning the terrible into something grotesquely amusing, was understandable in a year when there was no shortage of troubling issues plaguing the country. Racial unrest, the war in Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and the burgeoning youth movement all posed significant challenges to the nation’s sense of itself. Although the year saw the election of the first African American senator since the Reconstruction era (Edward Brooke from Massachusetts), race riots plagued Chicago and Cleveland throughout the summer. Violence against civil rights leaders continued to escalate: Martin Luther King Jr. was hit with a rock during a protest in Chicago, and James Meredith was shot and wounded by a sniper. Partially in response to such attacks, the militant Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California. More random, less ideologically motivated acts of violence were also occurring with alarming frequency. Serial killer Richard Speck killed eight women in Chicago, and Charles Whitman killed fifteen and wounded thirty-one more at the University of Texas at Austin. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, famously chronicling another senseless murder spree, was one of the year’s best sellers. Such violence at home was mirrored by the violence in Southeast Asia, as the Vietnam War continued to escalate. In October alone, over 46,000 men were called up to serve. In response to the war, demonstrators mounted a series of massive protests in the capital and around the nation, and even the Senate Foreign Relations Committee conducted televised hearings questioning U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Antiwar and civil rights groups were but two segments of the year’s growing countercultural movement. Young people in general were turning away from the nation’s proscribed course, proclaiming a new platform of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response added fuel to the sexual revolution, as did the founding of the era’s bestknown feminist group, the National Organization for Women. LSD guru Timothy Leary launched his League for Spiritual Discovery even as the previously legal drug was criminalized by the courts. The Beatles were riding the crest of their popularity, allowing John Lennon to observe that they were now more popular than Jesus. Nonetheless, their infamous “Butcher Block” album cover was censored by Capitol Records: the original image, featuring dead baby dolls and raw meat, was considered too overtly political...