CURRENT TRENDS

Communicating Otherness through Camp: Plan 9 from Outer Space and Ed Wood

The text is an excerpt from the master theses Communicating Otherness through Camp: Towards the Queer Society.

The paper is an attempt to rethink and elaborate the concept of Camp, partly examining a related, but also very different concept, that of kitsch. It looks specifically and in detail at the films Plan 9 From Outer Space (by Edward D. Wood Jr., USA, 1956/9) and Ed Wood (by Tim Burton, USA 1994). Namely, the term camp connotes a complex set of techniques, social attitudes and appropriated aesthetic standpoints that can be detected in the work of the both authors. Plan 9 was the movie for which the critical cliché it’s so bad that it’s good was first coined, and the cliché epitomizes the essence of Camp, and Burton’s film elaborates the point.

The paper investigates a characteristic that make both films exemplary Camp phenomena: film and Camp are both »marvelous hybrids« that deal with the excess of irony, iconography, humor, aestheticism, theatricality, archetypes, stereotypes, clichés, nostalgia, marginality and sexual ambiguity. They both embody parody as the general mode of discourse managing to transcend the merely ridiculous. It seems that Camp in film is suggested not only by the mere exaggeration but by a subtle play of (gender) identities.

Everybody in both films is trying and struggling to be(come) something they are not. Actually, what is communicated through Camp films is »the otherness«, something that does not belong to the mainstream, but strongly relates to it. What Camp seems to be trying to tell us is — that just beyond the edge of the perfectly normal lies the truly bizarre.

Sanja Muzaferija