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143 Adrienne L. McLean If Only They Had Meant to Make a Comedy Laughing at Black Swan Several years ago a friend and I were in a movie theater watching the generic backstage ballet film Center Stage (2000) in which young ballet hopefuls (some played by dancers, some by actors) spend a summer trying to make it into a fictional but world-renowned New York ballet company where they hope to become stars. There was the usual stereotypical cast of characters—the anorexic perfectionist with the really pushy stage mother, several small-town innocents of each gender, and assorted sarcastic but talented misfits. At one point the main female misfit (she’s working-class, non-white, she talks back to her teachers and other authority figures), played by Zoë Saldana, gets in trouble in ballet class for chewing gum and not having her hair done up tidily enough. I turned to my friend and stage-whispered, “Oh no, now she’ll never get into the company!” Then we cackled like maniacs. We would perhaps have felt stupid later if it turned out Saldana’s character never got anywhere, but instead, as our laughter was acknowledging, the film had just telegraphed, very loudly, that she was going to end up on top. It was a species of backstage musical, after all, and we knew the rules—rebellious but talented characters always become stars—even if the film seemed to think we did not. But others in the audience took things more seriously; although this was hardly the only moment at which we giggled or hooted, most of the time we did so alone. Almost everyone has probably had the experience of finding a film funny for what might be construed as the wrong reasons—what 144 Adrienne L. McLean we’re laughing at is not supposed to be funny, we’re laughing at rather than with the film, and so on. And, as above, we often laugh at things that are not precisely comic but are nevertheless hilarious to us— something is funny in ways that seem to run counter to a film’s intended effect, creating a sense of ironic humor that undermines the solemnity or narrative intensity of the project at hand. (“If only they had meant to make a comedy,” my friend e-mailed me later.) Why is it funny when something about a film simultaneously complements and undermines what seems meant as intended profundity? And why do some people laugh but not others? To date, such dissonance has been studied primarily as an effect of camp or kitsch, which are often conflated as forms of unintentional burlesque . A film like Center Stage certainly can be understood as Camp as well as camp. “Camp” refers to the “queer praxis” of a text’s production by gay labor and the concomitant reading strategy that such a text demands (which would emphasize Center Stage’s spectacularization of the male as well as female body and its use of gay male performers and production personnel). By comparison, “camp” is a coopted and mainly parodic “Pop camp” that attempts to deny the queer basis of a text’s production but which can nevertheless become, in Moe Meyer’s words, “the unwitting vehicle of a subversive operation that introduces queer signifying codes into dominant discourse” (13). To other viewers , Center Stage would be kitsch, an example of what Gillo Dorfles calls “the world of bad taste” (Kleinhans 182), of formula repeated without variation or concern, a film that uses the “high art” of ballet to make itself “serious” but in a context that has no use for art as such. Center Stage might also be “self-aware kitsch,” in Chuck Kleinhans’s words, a film whose “implicit assumption is: We all know this is fun, just a good piece of entertainment” and one that understands that spectators can be “engrossed by the situation and the exaggeration simultaneously” (Kleinhans 184). Indeed, laughing at the film’s many implausibilities didn’t keep us from tearing up a bit when Saldana’s dancing double performed gorgeously on the climactic opening night, replacing the anorexic girl who had decided to defy her mother and leave ballet for a “normal” life of heterosexual romance. There are many pleasures that a film like Center Stage can produce for spectators, in other words, depending on how many other, similar films one has seen, whether one knows anything about the ostensible [18.191.135.224] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 23...

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