The Lobster Dance

“Bette Davis, sumptuously horrific in the title role, in Baby Jane.” Bette Davis as Jane, fake smiling and carrying a tea tray.

A lot of my focus on queer horror this year has been on better representation of queer creators and characters in horror. But what about the films queer folks have reappropriated for themselves?

David Greven’s “Bringing out Baby Jane: camp, sympathy, and the 1960s horror-woman’s film” is an analysis of 1960s melodramas that were reappropriated as camp by (primarily) gay and bi men.

Greven writes,

As David Halperin discusses in How to Be Gay, the political uses of women’s melodrama by gay men “can be summed up in a single, simple formula: to turn tragedy into melodrama.”

As Halperin continues,

“The historical function of gay male culture has been—and its ongoing political task remains—to forge an ironic perspective on scenes of compulsory, socially validated and enforced performance, to decommission supposedly authentic social identities and return them to their status as willfully or witlessly iterated roles.”

The analysis spans three pages and discusses–with major spoilers for all films, which include What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Now, Voyager–another side of “queering film.” That is, not queer-coding, when queer creators hint at attractions/gender identities or when straight people frame queerness as villainous, but a kind of repurposing of narratives, celebrating the melodrama of older women and seeing connections in being marginalized and desexualized. (I would argue that claiming these films as camp is the 1960s-70s answer to of queer fans shipping characters in the 2000-10s.)

The Camp response to the films has so thoroughly framed their reception in the past four decades that discussing their significance—to say nothing of their radicalism—is necessarily to challenge these film’s seemingly inextricable associations with Camp. Such a challenge itself creates a set of difficulties that will need to be worked through in order to arrive at a new understanding of the films that is neither hostile nor indifferent to Camp but also refuses a certain thorough immersion in Camp principles that, while keeping the legacy of the films alive, has made it almost impossible to think about their significance in any other register.

Greven also points out how the films have not been included in “serious film analysis” and why:

One implicit effect of the Camp framing of these films has been their subsequent exclusion from other kinds of analyses. Though an immense body of rigorous feminist scholarship exists on the classical Hollywood woman’s film, comparatively little feminist work has been done on “campy” horror-woman’s films of the 1960s. With the powerful exception of Peggy Phelan’s experimental, poetic analysis of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in her brilliant Mourning Sex, there is no major feminist film theory treatment of which I am aware of the cycle of horror-woman’s films of the 1960s.[12] (I would be happy to be proven wrong on this finding.) And to the extent that these films have been discussed in feminist terms, they have not been well-received.

My challenge—both to myself and to Camp discourse, and also to feminist film theory—is to imagine a response to the films that treats them as continuations of, rather than a radical break with, the woman’s film of the classical period. While there are many other possible responses to the woman’s film—which has also been received as a Camp phenomenon, especially in terms of the valuation of stars such as Davis and Crawford as Camp icons—one of these responses is sympathy, which forges communities of empathy and feeling. The woman’s film in America is a continuation of the genre of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, exemplified by Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly, the phenomenal 1852 global bestseller written by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Read the full article on Jump Cut.

Also:

Phone Voice: What’s your favorite scary movie?

Randy Meeks: Showgirls. Absolutely frightening.