Errata is a web journal written by Robert Davis who has neither spent a night in a ghost town nor pulled a turnip from the earth. He doesn't even know if turnips grow in the ground. Perhaps on trees, like candy corn. Therefore, Errata is a non-commercial project.

Observation #1: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious."

Observation #2: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious" at the top of your lungs. Bring your eyebrows together before you say it. Effective!

Observation #3: Same for books. Even at libraries.

There is a prize for people who correctly guess the thing about Metropolis, Nevada.

Except where the text specifically states otherwise, Errata's vagaries are indicated vaguely and its authors are indistinct in the traditional way of the Internet, except where the authors lay claim to their work. In some cases Robert Davis lays claim to work that is not his own but has been abandoned like so many ghost towns. Except where held presently, fistfuls of dirt are suspended via dispersal, or dispersed via suspension (in the air), and thus their dissolution is their transcendence, or their transcendence is their dissolution. And yet our eyes tear, and our vision is impaired, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that one entity's gain is another's fit of sneezes. Except where indicated, storms shall outlive the clay upon which they rain, unless storms are improperly delimited by their clouds, which dissolve, rather than by their inevitable return. Thus the clay loses, unless the clay is said to own the storm, to use it to make itself heavy, to make itself cling to white garments, refuse dispersal, cake upon the facades of abandoned buildings, and sit like Man [sic] upon the earth where it is pelted by a storm that it owns. In which case the clay still loses, if you ask us.

Some of the above is legally binding and should be considered a mental contract between Errata and those upon whom it acts. The bit about the prize should be considered an overstatement insofar as prizes differ from dirt and prize dispersal differs from dirt dispersal. Please recall that ownership is a weight and, therefore, hope that you do not win the prize.

One day Errata or its representatives will call upon you for a favor. It is expected that you will hop-to without delay.

You may contact Robert Davis by email unless it's about the rock that was thrown in anger. The rock is more properly called a clod. Why do you continue to raise the topic?

31 October 2003

Camping in the 50s

Camp again. If enough movies and TV shows celebrate camp, we're going to need another term to describe them. There's the earnest source material. There's the camp attitude toward it. There's the re-creation of the source material informed by a camp attitude. What's the next step? When does irony become so passé that we we need to comment on it in our art rather than simply embody it?

And it was just a couple of years ago, as towers fell, that someone predicted the end of irony. Maybe they were right, but in the wrong direction.

The earnest source material of the moment comes from the 50s. For Far From Heaven Todd Haynes conjured Douglas Sirk, really truly communed with the dead, as far as I can tell, and the screwball comedy, the caper, and the romantic comedy have roared back, sometimes intact and sometimes through an impossibly thick ironic filter: Catch Me If You Can, Down with Love (which I blinked and missed), Kill Bill, Intolerable Cruelty, etc.

Bubba Ho-Tep combines the J.F.K. assassination and Elvis Presley into a monster movie, with mixed results, too few ideas to sustain a feature but a few great moments. But the question: what besides distance is needed for tragedy to become camp? Does it require some kind of cultural understanding, a common ground finally drained of emotion? Did it happen to the J.F.K. assassination somewhere between Oliver Stone's movie and the Seinfeld episode in which Keith Hernandez's spit hits Kramer and ricochets "back and to the left"? Will the events of 9/11 make the transition, or are some things too awful, too sacred, like the holocaust? Tell that to Mel Brooks who, if not exactly laughing about Nazis in The Producers is at least laughing at tastelessness based on the sacredness of the subject. Layers.

Finally, this week, it's Die Mommie Die. I haven't written a capsule for this one, but I refer you to Ebert's excellent analysis. I thought the movie was kind of funny but strangely un-surprising. Ebert puts his finger on it: it makes fun of movies of the 50s because they're out of date but doesn't recognize that this type of humor — a drag queen as the lead female character — is itself out of date. (I also agree with Ebert's comments about Sirk being subversive, but then lots of people do, I think.)

Blog entries about camp. What to call them. I'm reminded of Elvis's best line in Bubba Ho-Tep: "Hey man, why ya got me in here lookin at chicken scratches on the shithouse wall?"

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