In Defense of Camp (and a look at Cop Land)

So, one of the reasons that I question my ability to make a literary impact–and believe me this is only one, and not nearly the top reason–is the type of media that I like to consume.  I picture the modern literary novelist as a person who takes in foreign and indie flicks, squeezes every drop of enjoyment out of concertos and symphonies, and reads 19th century English novels.  You know, cultured and stuff.  I, on the other hand, enjoy campy movies (I won’t stretch the definition of “film” this far), the kind of R&B/Hip Hop that I know for a fact is inconsequential, and…well, my book tastes probably aren’t quite as bad, but I’m certainly not reading Henry James on a day-to-day basis.  But you get the point.

While my fate as a writer is yet to be determined, I’d like to say that I think Camp gets a bad rap.  Camp, by my definition, is a type of movie that is created around a few plot and character devices that have been shaped by its predecessors in the genre.  For example, in a campy horror movie–take any Friday the 13th (besides the horrible “re-imagination”)–you expect to see fornicating, drug-using teenagers fall into a cat-and-mouse game with the killer.  You expect a few creative kills.  You expect a few pairs of boobies.  You expect a pervasive sense of humor throughout the movie.  You expect the person with the least tainted morality to survive.  A solid camp horror flick will deliver these elements to the audience time and again.  Look at the camp cop flick: you’ve got a protagonist who is either a rogue or an underdog, you’ve got a traitor, you’ve got a protagonist’s self-awakening, and, most importantly, you’ve got the bullet from nowhere–you know, where our hero is on the wrong end of a gun and then BOOM! out of nowhere a character that we’ve written off comes back to save the day, taking out the gunman.

Each genre and sub-genre of camp has its own devices, and for a camp movie successful, all it has to do is to meet the audience’s expectations when it comes to these devices.  The creativity in these movies does not come from the crafting of characters or plot or symbolism or any of that nonsense.  No, the creativity comes from how the devices are delivered.  Who was the traitor?  How is the teenaged cocksman going to meet his fate?  We all know these things will happen, and the fun is in guessing how and when.  Like any great piece of classical music (I think), the magic comes from variation on a theme.  These movies get shot down by critics time and again, and perhaps for good reason.  These movies don’t count as cultural progress.  They sure as hell don’t make us reflect upon our own lives or human nature (though they may make us think twice about going on an isolated cabin retreat).  But they’re fun, they’re simple, and they’re almost interactive in inviting us to predict how the devices will be delivered.

That being said, I checked out Cop Land today for the first time ever, if you can believe that.  I’m not sure why, probably just circumstances: I’ve been re-living the finest moments of action stars from the 1980s and 90s, and perhaps more importantly, Netflix’s Watch Instantly library is pretty small. 

Being a slow-witted person, especially when the household is out of coffee, I didn’t catch on that this was camp right away.  Maybe it was how convincingly Sly played a punch-drunk, half-deaf sheriff (who knew that Stallone’s natural slurring is spot-on half-deaf talk?).  Maybe it was that the movie took a good bit of time in the exposition phase instead of rushing to the action.  But in the end, as anyone who has seen the movie knows, this is pure camp.  And God bless it.

I enjoyed this movie, minus the last ten minutes.  I mean, the climax is short, late, and unconvincing.  Good God, the man limps up the street with a shotgun and disposes of three men (a fourth goes down thanks to Liotta’s bullet-from-nowhere) in the span of a minute, the end.  That being said, I just felt like this was the role that Stallone was born to play… I mean, he’s perfect for it, really.  Harvey Keitel managed to curb his over-acting tendencies, and Michael Rapaport’s nervous flailing was less off-putting than it usually is.

I remember reading about this movie when it first came out.  The big news was about how convincing Sly’s weight gain was.  I vaguely remember him stating that he just ate whatever he wanted, to the point of getting sick.  Stacks of pancakes everyday and on and on.  Perhaps it is hindsight that allows me to view this more objectively, now that we’re used to the bulky Stallone, but he reminded me more of a bodybuilder in the off-season than an out-of-shape, over-the-hill lawman.  Needless to say, I wasn’t convinced.  His arms were just too ropy and his shoulders too broad.  God bless the man for committing to the movie, but if I’m remembering clearly, the praise was a little too exuberant.

One final note, if you haven’t seen this movie, see it.  If only for DeNiro’s haircut.

Don’t call it a comeback…

…because I was never really here.  But here I am, and like billions of others in the blogosphere, I have resolved to be here more often.

I have been guilt-tripping myself for months about how I don’t write–since March to be precise.  How can you honestly tell yourself that you are a writer, I ask myself, if you don’t ever write?  Well, I’d like to think that I’ve been letting the pot simmer while I’ve been taking care of some other important things: law school finals, graduation, moving, studying for the bar exam, taking the bar exam, and recuperating from the bar exam.  But now I’ve done all of this–well, still working on the last part–and I am still afraid to write.  I’ve managed to sit down and bang out a thousand words of the novel that I’ve been formulating for months, and I hated every single one of those words.

I’m going to stop before this begins to read like a diary entry.  The point is that I’ve lost whatever writing voice that I had.  Imagine a comedian with a few decent jokes but who lacks any sort of stage presence.  To the audience, it feels like he is standing in front of a microphone reading from a list of jokes.  I think most comedians start this way, not counting the few that have  naturally compelling personalities.  Contrast this poor sucker with the veteran who has learned who he is on stage, how he talks, his cadence, his rhythm, and so on.  Now it feels like you are having a conversation with the comedian.  Just a conversation with a gifted storyteller who happens to be hilarious most of the time–and who happens to hijack the entire conversation.

Well, I feel like that first comedian.  I’ve got stories to tell, but without a compelling voice, they read like a catalog of actions.  I have lost my voice.

The only way to get it back is to write.  So, once again, here I am.  This space will be used mostly for small things of little to no consequence: book and movie reviews, essays, thoughts, and–boy, could this go poorly–personal philosophy.  Perhaps more important is what I will try to refrain from putting on this space: pieces that read like diary entries (notwithstanding the beginning of this post) and attempts at fiction (sort of like the embarrassing types of posts for which this space has been used before).

I plan on lightly editing posts, probably just a once over to catch typos and glaring grammatical errors, though those may slip through from time to time.  Expect the writing to be stilted, uncertain, and annoying for the immediate future.  I hope that things improve as I begin to get comfortable with my voice.  I hope that then we will be able to have a conversation (wherein, like the veteran comedian, I do all of the talking).

Never Knowing

I think I’m afraid of knowledge–more precisely, I probably feart the possibility that, after expending so much effort, commitment, and youth to obtain it, I’ll find it doesn’t really exist.  Instead I learn a smattering of talking points and counterpoints so I can keep up the charade.  Like a ping-pong match, my thought bounc back and forth: point, counterpoint, exception, caveat, qualification, and on and on until I’ve narrowed and sanitized a piece of information ot the point where it holds not value except to show that some other piece of information is less correct than presented.

So I do this.  But then I’ll get so cynical, so cognizant of hte fact that I am not closer to a truth of any kind, so far from creating constructive, affirmative knowledge that I just stop.  Instead, I’ll allow myself to get caught up in mundanities like money, work, television, “the future,” mindless games–the exact things that I tell myself to move beyond every morning.