While some of both Davis and Crawford’s work could arguably be described as camp (for the former, King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest; for the latter, later-era films such as Strait-Jacket and aspects of the wondrous Nicholas Ray film Johnny Guitar), that their entire careers and places within film history are defined as such does a disservice to their artistry. But they aren’t alone in representing what has become a troubling trend when it comes to women’s work. As camp entered the mainstream lexicon, especially after Susan Sontag’s landmark 1964 essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” the term has been increasingly tied to work featuring women who disregard societal norms. Camp is often improperly and broadly applied to pop culture that features highly emotional, bold, complex, cold, and so-called “unlikable” female characters. I’ve seen films and TV shows such as the witty masterwork All About Eve; the beguiling Mulholland Drive; the stylized yet heartwarming Jane the Virgin; Todd Haynes’s Patricia Highsmith adaptation Carol; the blistering biopic Jackie; the deliciously malevolent horror film Black Swan; Joss Whedon’s exploration of girlhood and horror, Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the landmark documentary Grey Gardens (which inspired the 2009 HBO film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore); and even icons such as Beyoncé and Rihanna be described as camp. Look at any list of the best camp films and you’ll see an overwhelming number of works that feature women and don’t actually fit the label. Usually, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the film whose behind-the-scenes story provides Murphy’s launching pad for Feud, will be at the top of the list.

While camp need not be a pejorative, that hasn’t stopped it from being widely used as such. In effect, being labeled as camp can turn the boldest works about the interior lives of complex women into a curiosity, a joke, a punch line. The ease with which camp is applied to female-led films and shows of this ilk demonstrates that for all the (still-paltry) gains Hollywood has made for women in the decades since Davis and Crawford worked, our culture is still uncomfortable respecting women’s stories.

That major Hollywood icons such as Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford (and, more recently, Natalie Portman, thanks to Jackie) have been roped into this lineage isn’t surprising. Society doesn’t know what to do with women of this ilk without discrediting their very womanhood. Take artist and filmmaker Bruce LaBruce’s offensive description of Mae West in an essay on camp: “[She] played with androgyny to the degree that her final performance — her autopsy — was necessary to prove her biological femaleness.” In his 2013 essay “Why Is Camp So Obsessed with Women?”, J. Bryan Lowder expands on Sontag’s most well-known line: “It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’ To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” Lowder writes, “‘Woman,’ the concept within the quotation marks, is not the same thing, at all, as a real woman; the former is a mythology, a style, a set of conventions, taboos, and references, while the latter is a shifting, changeable, and ultimately indefinable living being. Of course, there may be some overlap.” But if all gender is a performance, where does the “real” woman begin? And why does the presence of camp hold more importance than the actual work and voices of actresses such as Crawford, who have come to be defined by it?

At times, camp can feel like a suffocating label. Its proponents often misconstrue the fact that recreating oneself as a character is not merely an aesthetic for women, but rather, for many, a matter of survival. Living in a culture that profoundly scorns ambition, autonomy, and independence in women, girls learn quickly the narrow parameters of femininity available to them. When they transcend these parameters, life can get even more difficult. Women often pick up and drop various forms of presentation in order to move through the world more easily. Performance as a woman — in terms of how one speaks, walks, talks, acts — can be a means of controlling one’s own narrative. Camp often limits this part of the discussion, focusing instead on the sheer thrill of watching larger-than-life female characters cut and snark their way across the screen. How these works speak to women, past and present, becomes a tertiary concern at best, and the work loses a bit of its importance in the process; it either comes to be regarded as niche or, if it still has mainstream prominence, as abject spectacle. In turn, the conversations around these works become less about the women at their centers and more about how those women are presented.

Much of Baby Jane’s camp legacy comes down to how more recent audiences have interpreted Davis’s performance. She’s ferocious, frightening, and grotesque. But framing Davis’s performance as camp, as Murphy does, doesn’t take into account how dramatically acting has shifted over the course of film history. In some ways, camp has become a label used when modern audiences don’t quite understand older styles of acting. Modern actors privilege the remote, the cold, the detached. The more scenery-chewing performances that make the labor of acting visible — such as the transformative work that Jake Gyllenhaal did in Nightcrawler, or most of Christian Bale’s career — is typically the domain of men. (Or, at least, it’s only men who can get away with it without being called campy.) As Shonni Enelow writes in a marvelous piece for Film Comment, “[Jennifer] Lawrence’s characters in Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games don’t arrive at emotional release or revelation; rather than fight to express themselves, her characters fight not to. We can see the same kind of emotional retrenchment and wariness in a number of performances by the most popular young actors of the last several years.” Davis’s work as an actor was the antithesis of that; she painted in bold colors. Even her quietest moments brim with an intensity that cannot be denied.

last barbie thought forever. (lying). but . well. okay. i am always forgetting that people hate women for realsies. because everyone in my life is normal aboutwomen. anyway. lots of Normal Women are watching barbie and going wow this is so meaningful and applicable to All Women . Every Single Woman has this experience and im like. well this isnt true for any woman who is weird any woman who is weird is having a very different experience i guarantee you. but i am glad that you feel seen and heard 👍 which is also twin tracking with the thought process of. wow you have never met an autistic woman or gay woman or even a woman who doesnt wear makeup in your entire life. which. kind of weird but i still support you ����we are in this tent together (they are not aware that we are in the same tent). and then. (generalizing). men are like. this movie is so deep because it says that men have problems too and not just women isnt that so moving. that men have problems. or. i hope women die forever theyre so stupid and condescending and rude. ok 👍

Sorry what’s up w the Ethan slater stuff? I know him only from your posts / SpongeBob stuff

HI HELLO please buckle in

yep -- the same guy from the spongebob musical, and my posts abut the spongebob musical.

he blew up completely and now the general public knows him as 'ariana grande's new boyfriend' - their relationship seems to have started off the back of co-starring in the upcoming wicked musical film adaptation.

it's just been like. a monkey's paw curling sort of a way for him to get catapulted to fame, as i had always really enjoyed him as a performer (as spongebob, yes, but also in the other roles i'd seen him in,) and my biggest hope back around 2017 was that he would continue in and be really successful in theatre, get a lot of broadway roles, maybe take on some existing parts i thought he'd really suit, like seymour in little shop or ogie in waitress.......... but instead he booked the role of boq from wicked in a massive hollywood film production instead, where he met ariana grande. THE ariana grande.

and then yeah. at some point, he and grande broke up with their respective partners, (slater leaving both his wife AND newborn son) jumped into a new relationship, and now the whole wider internet knows who he is but certainly not for the right reasons.

there's been speculation regarding whether or not grande and slater had cheated on their previous partners before their relationship began with various sources coming out of the woodwork saying "yes they did" and others saying "no they didn't" -- humans are all perfectly capable of making stuff up, the media especially, so i simply don't know who to trust and i admit it had completely shattered my whole good impression of him - PLUS it gave the wider internet an absolutely awful first impression of him, resulting in, yeah, the (frankly, unflattering, sometimes downright cruel) memes of him popping up on twitter and, as i discovered yesterday, in non-theatre youtubers' videos who would literally never have heard of him if not for the slater-grande romance 🥲

FULL COVERAGE of the situation as it was happening can all be found on the lovely @notasimpleslater's blog under the tag 'ozgate' if you want to delve deeper!

unnamed toba sauropodomorph - titanosaur(?) - early cretaceous

only known from a few partial leg bones and four caudal vertebrae, this mysterious fella was found in toba, japan! the only information ive been able to find about the lad (apart from its appearances in the fossil fighters franchise) is a paper written by yukimitsu tomida and yoshihiro tsumura discussing the discovery and structure of the bones, as well as postulating the fossils belonged to a titanosaur! assuming it is a titanosaur, its quite possibly the largest dinosaur ever found in japan.

higher resolution version and a link to the paper under the cut!

to anyone standing with isr*el.

look me in my eye right now and name 47 family names you know, imagine all of those people, each and every one. the mothers and fathers, young and old, some newly weds, others long time soulmates, children gathered at their feet. the aunts and uncles and cousins, all sisters and brothers and children in their own rights. the grandparents with crows feet and wise eyes watching their children and grandchildren. think about them.

name me 47 family names you know off the top of your head right now, think of what they look like, and then imagine them gone. imagine them bloodied and dead, imagine them in rubble and body bags. old and young alike.

look at me and tell me that you don't feel sick to your stomach.

cause that's what is happening in Palestine. 47 whole families, whole bloodlines are gone. isr*el did that. they killed them. all of them. and thats just the current count, god only knows how many have been killed since that count was taken.

how can you stand for that?

PORNO FOR TYROS: TREY PARKER TAKES A VACATION FROM “SOUTH PARK” AND GETS “ORGAZMO” ON THE BIG SCREEN

article by steve pond, october 1998. photo by davis factor

Ok stupid rant, but I’m sick of looking up a game and only being able to find guides and wikis made by people who obviously hate the game they’re writing information about.

I was looking for guides for the hedge maze portion of Castlevania 64 because I was stuck in it and couldn’t visualize what the layout of maze looks like (turns out, it’s not technically a traditional maze, aka one route to the exit, which helps a lot) and the only guide I can find is one on gamefaqs or something where the person cannot contain themselves from constantly interjecting to say how much they don’t like Malus cause “ugh overdramatic cutscene, his parents are dead who cares, he looks like a girl” or how they hate the game cause it’s too hard and annoying and “oh boy as if this game couldn’t get worse”.

And like dude! Sincerely! Shut up! I don’t care! I just want to know what I’m supposed to do! You are allowed to dislike the game and express your opinions, just please keep those to a little ending opinion section or a review!!! Stop breaking up actual instructions I can’t keep track of what you’re telling me to do!!!!!!!!!!!

And I saw something similar happen on a different smaller wiki-ish sort of website (it might have been the Castlevania Dungeon, I’m not sure. Definitely not Fandom tho.) on the Castlevania: The Adventure page when I was looking for some facts. Again, the person writing was constantly being all “not that this game is important anyway” and like! I literally don’t care if you don’t like the game that’s not what I’m here for!!! Heck the website even had some misinformation on the page too saying that Christopher was Simon’s grandson in that “or whatever, it doesn’t matter” kind of tone! Like!!!!! Shut up!!!!!!!!!!!! I am here for factual information! Not a review!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s just absolutely annoying and now I don’t even know what I’m supposed to do in CV64 cause I can barely process what this guy is saying ugh.

and also just adding onto that, the recent wave of like armchair diagnosing ppl as npd is sooo annoying. Like its actually a serious condition, you CANNOT diagnose someone as npd with just one story or interaction. Sometimes ppl are not "narcissistic", they're just assholes? It feels like every second story i hear, there's ppl going "thats a narcissistic trait yk :/" and its like just bc its a narcissistic trait doesnt mean they have npd??

yes defintely !! it's so so harmful and i have not seen any other disorder (except maybe aspd?) get as much demonisation and hate as npd has and it is genuinely so heartbreaking bc it is a serious dissociative disorder that does Not inherently make anyone a bad person and yet !! like the term "narcissistic abuse" and also ppl just generally equating [mostly covert] abuse w narcissism is so immensely Harmful .

anyway i think we should bring back calling people mean, assholes, rude, gaslighters, abusers, etc instead of being like "my mother was a narc abuser so all ppl w npd are abusers and will never change!" etc etc bc it does 3 horrible things:

1) implies all people with npd are abusers

2) implies people with npd are not capable of self-improvement just like any other human being

3) offloads the horrible actions of abusers onto a disorder, thereby taking away the responsibility they had/choices they made in the situation and instead blames the (completely inaccurate + harmful!!) perceived invariability/ubiquitous evil of npd symptoms/traits .

"how to spot a narcissist" babe are we birdwatching now for ppl with a dissociative disorder or...???

i often find myself questioning reality and i'm thinking that maybe people shouldn't let their 8 year olds watch The Truman Show (1998) because it might actually create lasting psychological damage

WHEN I FIND MAGAZINES WITH THEM ON THE FRONT COVER... IT'S A GOOD DAY... 🥹🐾✨️

So terrible to be forced to choose between writing my essay and looking at the full moon light up the sea

We always talk shit about Mamorus bad fashion and usually think his manga fashion style is very decent (besides the cow print anyway lol)

But listen the boy literally cant dress right he doesnt even wear a tuxedo right, theres 3 types for specific occassions with specific etiquette and our boy is wearing all 3 styles at once what a mess.

imagine newspaper articles and forums just clowning in his drip lmaoooooo

ive only ever seen like 2 or 3 james somerton videos max and i forget what the first one or two i watched even were (something to do with disney i think?? but not the evil queens one im almost certain) but i have hated him ever since i watched the attack on titan video and he said something along the lines of "yeah this isnt an ALLEGORY bc the ghettos in the show arent literally identical to actual historical ghettos" and i was like what do you think an allegory IS

i don’t know if people were like this about the female villains on game of thrones since i never watched it while it was airing but man it would be really nice if people who don’t like alicent hightower could discuss her without immediately resorting to calling her a hag or a cunt or a bitch

.

I've been trying to figure out and justify why I've been experiencing so much fatigue lately. At first I thought I may have developed anemia from my endometriosis making me bleed for 8 weeks straight but my blood tests came back fine. Maybe I'm just exhausted bc I had to work that entire time while actively sick? But I had quite a few days off to rest this month and I haven't been as sick recently, so what gives? Turns out I didn't need to look for an outside source. Apparently fatigue is one of THE most common symptoms of endo and it's just not mentioned often bc most doctors underestimate the impact fatigue can have on people's lives 🙃 The call is coming from inside the fucking house