In spite of its catchy title, Todd Graff's teenage comedy Camp is at best just not campy enough, and at worst bordering on queer self-loathing. For those who wonder where the high school art geeks, drama queens, and faghags go to during summer vacation, Camp provides the answer.
Camp Ovation functions as a summer refugee camp for queer outcasts of all colors and backgrounds, where they spend their time tap-dancing and belting out Broadway show tunes. And when legend musical composer Stephen Sondheim makes a surprise cameo appearance to watch them perform his torch songs, the happy campers flock around him as if he was Wacko Jacko himself. According to the press release, Todd Graff based Camp on his own experience at Stagedoor Manor, a teenage summer camp of the performing arts that counts Robert Downey Jr. and Mary Stuart Masterson among its famous alumni. Hopefully for Graff, his real life experience was not such a flawed rip-off of the early 1980s television series "Fame" as Camp turns out to be. To give the performers some credit, the film does contain a couple of enjoyable musical performances, including a hilarious rendition of "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" from Dreamgirls and a super sentimental Camp original composition "Here's Where I Stand."
However, these performances cannot save the film. Camp revolves around the relationship of three teenage campers: the Puerto Rican Michael (Robin de Jesus) who got gay-bashed at his high school prom after showing up in drag, white faghag Ellen (Joanna Chilcoat) who is so unpopular that her brother has to take her to the prom, and the white - I'm so cute I could have been in a boy band - straight boy Vlad (Daniel Letterle) whose secret passion is reciting the monologues of Boogie Nights' Dirk Diggler.
With this set-up, Camp has the potential of being a queer and quite funny Revenge Of The Nerds. After all, while Michael and Ellen are the geeks within the high school environment, at Camp Ovation they become stars of the in-crowd, making straight boy Vlad the odd one out. Unfortunately, though, Camp does exactly the opposite. Rather than playfully challenge outdated queer stereotypes, the film reinforces them again and again by contrasting the desirability of Vlad with the overly pathetic characters of Michael and Ellen. Vlad does befriend Michael, but shows more pity than friendship for him, even successfully coercing him into having sex with a woman. Here the film fails to capitalize on the funny notion that Michael believes that experimenting with heterosexuality means gay guys sleeping with straight guys. Michael doing Vlad would have made Camp far more interesting. Instead, Michael ends up accepting that Vlad is way out of his sexual league and subsequently expresses his queer identity by camping-it-up like Harvey Fierstein in Torch Song Trilogy. Of course, there is nothing wrong or regressive about using stereotypes in comedy, and bitter old drag queens can be fun, but seeing a teenager "celebrate" his sexuality by taking on the old-school image of the sexless drag queen is rather depressing and definitely not a celebration.
The most problematic aspect of Camp, however, is that in the end the white straight boy proves to be the smartest, the most talented, and thus the most desirable. No matter how much Vlad lies, cheats, and screws around, Michael and Ellen forgive him, want to be with him, and really want to be him. Vlad is not the odd one out, but the one who keeps reminding the others that they are in fact queer and undesirable. Thus, rather than presenting a world "where normal is no longer the norm", as promised by the film's website, Camp continuously reaffirms the desirability of the white straight boy, at the cost of the sexual desirability of the queer characters. Camp presents Vlad as the ultimate wet dream of all gay men and faghags, the cute straight boy we can lust after but will never get. This makes Camp more bitter than sweet, and strongly suggests a feeling of queer self-loathing. So, if you really want to see a queer Clueless, a campy and quirky teenage comedy that intelligently makes fun of gay and lesbian stereotypes, avoid Camp and go see But I'm A Cheerleader instead.
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