The First Wives Club and the politics of camp

Camp is both a dangerous supplement and a needful weapon in a handbag of dazzling accessories. - Allen Pero

PART 1

I recently made my partner watch the 1996 cult hit, First Wives Club, as a much-needed distraction from… well, the end of the world as we know it. It’s 2022, we’re living through unprecedented (!) times  – plagues, wars, and (in Brisbane) floods. Again. What’s a girl to do but indulge in Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton’s delightfully camp histrionics as an alternative to another hour of doom scrolling?

I’ll take your thoughts on the film’s brilliance in the comments below, please and thank you – from Bette Midler’s emphatic “don’t SHAME me at the synagogue!” to Goldie Hawn’s physical comedy post-plastic surgery to every single Maggie Smith reaction shot. Not to mention the use of this banger by Billy Porter at the film’s emotional climax.

Sign 👏 me 👏 up.

Sharp cut to me chortling with delight while Kate cringed any time an ear-piercing scream escaped Diane Keaton’s body – whether while finding out that her daughter is a lesbian or while plummeting to her inevitable death on the side of a building, the screams were in no short order. In fact, if you know the film, it’s safe to say that Diane Keaton spends the bulk of her time on screen screaming. I think it’s both ludicrous and hilarious. Kate thought it was all a bit much. She also made an off-hand comment – as Diane Keaton pummeled her therapist with a foam bat – about the First Wives Club’s representation of female rage. I’ve been humming Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” and thinking about her comment ever since.

Don’t get me wrong, Diane Keaton pummelling Marcia Gay Harden (one of many brilliant cameos in the film) with a tiny yellow bat is very, very funny. But Kate had a point. This was one of many hysterically Camp moments that suffocated the drama and undermined the women’s feelings in favour of playing for laughs. A choice I often hate but am (apparently) far more inclined to forgive if the work is funny.

It's easy to dismiss these shortcomings as belonging to a specific wave of 90s cinema (made almost exclusively by middle-aged white dudes), but that’s not what prompted me to start writing about it. It was all the best parts of First Wives Club that got me thinking about ‘Camp’- as an aesthetic, a style, and a sensibility.

PART 2

In her first published essay Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag argued that Camp, as a sensibility, was depoliticised or, at the very least, apolitical – “style over substance”, so to speak. This ‘disengagement’ from politics gave 60s Camp its power. I am, of course, using ‘Camp’ independently of ‘Queer Cinema’ here, which exists as an umbrella term that Camp sits under comfortably, rather than exclusively. Almost sixty years later, queer academics have criticised, unpacked, and appropriated Sontag’s argument with aplomb. 

In an effort to cut myself off at the pass, I’ll encourage everyone to do their own reading on the subject  - or just buy my friend Lewis Treston a coffee, it’s his area of expertise and he’s very funny. It was Lewis, in fact, who reminded me that everyone who writes seriously about Camp has at one stage emphasised that the very nature of Camp is impossible to pin down through definition or discourse. It’s safe to say that this is, in part, why I’m so drawn to it. 

I will say that, for me, the authenticity of Camp hinges on its capacity to dabble in transgression, non-conformity, and a perception of the world that is different from the mainstream. This, in itself, is political. I find Camp particularly potent when sharpened as a political tool that’s deployed within the critical framework of feminism. 

But, I digress…

The kitschy genius of late 90s Australian cinema – with films like Muriel’s Wedding, Strictly Ballroom and Priscilla Queen of the Desert – captures the irony, aestheticism, theatricality, and humour of Camp. All three films also produced soundtracks, in my opinion, that have stood the test of time (Ce Ce Peniston’s Finally is an R&B classic). More recently, the sharply observed Kath & Kim established itself as a classic of Australian comedy. In a 2005 Griffith Review article, Simon Caterson called the show “an indispensable feature of the Australian mental landscape”. He quite rightly points out that its success came at a price; as it had been thoroughly assimilated, if not bought off by the society it lampooned so mercilessly.

Kath & Kim came to a glorious end, feat. Kylie Minogue in a cameo that raised the bar for all cameos, fifteen years ago. As a mainstream comedy, it deployed snobbish cruelty to hilarious effect. The show was very funny. But, it was also relatively short lived, very white (also true of all the films listed above), and arguably conservative (don’t @ me, I’m getting to a point!) in its criticism of contemporary Australian suburbia. This is, in large part, the reason so many have absorbed its peculiar vernacular as their own - no, I will not look at “youuuu”.

There is no denying the fact that Kath & Kim captured the early 00s zeitgeist, but did its widespread acceptance by the very people it was sending up cancel out the show’s potential impact as social commentary? Did Australian suburbanites even see themselves in the characters they were laughing at? And why were the creators so decidedly resistant to even the slightest glimmer of pathos in a show that was begging for it? 

I was re-reading this Declan Greene 2018 opinion piece recently, where he touched on Camp in an Australian context: “I think across Australia – and the rest of the world, too – there’s a new kind of Camp evolving – which shares the ‘old’ Camp’s obsession with the refuse of history, but applies it to people who’ve been told by white cis-hetero Western culture for decades – sometimes centuries – that they’re garbage”. 

Declan was writing in defense of irony in contemporary theatre, but I think it warrants consideration in a screen context. As I look around, with unbridled hope, for the next wave of Camp cinema in Australia, I wonder how much sharper our tools could afford to be in response to a world that is literally on fire (or underwater, depending on where you’re currently based in so-called Australia). 

Since Sontag penned her ‘64 essay, Camp has well and truly become part of the mainstream (on ya, RuPaul) – an exaggerated mode of expression that’s visible across popular culture. But has this widespread acceptance diluted the authenticity of Camp and the politics of its aesthetic? What is its relationship to HIV-era politics today? And what is the potential of Camp to interrogate dominant ideologies through representation and the stories we choose to tell on screen?

Please indulge my gay agenda and let me know your thoughts.