a grammar

important retraction / note on camp

The first time I wrote about Lana Del Rey, in a column, a few months back, I said I was pleased that when she invoked the name “Lolita,” she actually seemed to be talking about something like the character in the novel, and not whatever strange mincing porny thing people use that name to refer to today.

Now, having heard her song “Lolita,” I would like to apologize and mostly retract that.

I wrote a review of her album for Vulture, findable here. I suppose the bullet points are as follows: It’s a so-so moody pop record that stumbles around a bit, and there are things about Del Rey’s attempt to pull off a persona that are campily interesting and/or poignant, and a lot of it reminds me of Showgirls. I have many more thoughts and feelings about related topic,* but I’m sure there’s more than enough to read about this artist at the moment, so I’ll save the bulk of them for another time.

Except for one thing. One novel I really adore is Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. It’s about two prisoners, in Argentina, sharing a cell: Molina’s there because he’s gay, and accused of corrupting a minor; Valentin’s there because he’s a leftist revolutionary. Through most of the novel, Molina is recounting to Valentin, from memory, the plots of films he loves. He has a keen memory for the sensual, glamorous, swooning side of them.

One of the films he recounts is, essentially, a Nazi propaganda thriller, and he describes the things in it the way the film sees them — at some point, he’s describing all the beautiful, masculine German soldiers marching through Paris. This annoys Valentin, who challenges him on it. And Molina’s answer, as I remember it, is to just let the issue pass for a moment, and appreciate the type of beauty that this film, right or wrong, is trying to offer at that moment.

And that issue, the thing that’s contested between them at that moment, has more to do with “camp” than laughing at things because you think they’re bad — to me, camp is always about seeing some overblown proposition of what beauty is, and knowing that the fundamentals behind it, the belief system it grew out of, is defunct or rotten or collapsed. It’s like a touchingly grand expression of a belief that has no worthwhile purchase on the world.

I mention this because when I suggested Del Rey could be enjoyed as camp, and that her album bore some resemblance to Showgirls, I think some people interpreted that as suggesting that she’s good to laugh at, or that the album is “so bad it’s good.”** But what I’d rather point at is something more like the issue that’s running between Molina and Valentin here. Del Rey’s aesthetic reference points are a little bit camp from the get-go — it’s all old Hollywood, Americana, Vegas, small-town bad girls, moony lovelorn types. This is movie stuff, B-movie stuff, already stylized and aesthetically frozen, glamorous images that are already on screens.

So the effort to invest in them, and find them swoonsome, is actually pretty complicated, both for her and for us. For her part, she seems sincere and not particularly knowing about this stuff — which, if I remember correctly, Sontag proposed as critical to camp. But then she’s also not always good at it, and something about it all adds up to a weird tangle of critical distance and uncritical listening that can very occasionally make the whole thing touching — this odd costume she’s trying very hard to wear, and this weird vision of an all-American “bad girl” that right-thinking people roll their eyes at.***

I just don’t know — I’ll leave it at that. Except to add that the length of this thought is not intended as some commentary on the album’s importance; really, by my estimation it’s just an okay pop record that sounds a bit like second-tier 90s trip-hop with occasional guest appearances by Betty Boop. (Sometimes, when a commenter says something like “but I love the atmosphere,” I want to time-warp them to the mid-90s so they enjoy listening to a billion forgotten trip-hop also-rans like this one.)

* One big one involves people saying she sounds like an annoying drunk girl, or some other type of woman we’re agreeing to find problematic, which keeps making me think, you know, problematic drunk girls are people too, and we accommodate problematic drunk dudes left and right, and if LDR ever did a duet with the Weeknd, it’d be the grossest, most creepily apt thing ever, possibly.

** There was a piece in the Believer years ago in which Douglas Wolk traced out the differences between camp, in the Susan Sontag sense, and “So Bad It’s Good” — if you ever come across it, I recommend it.

*** For the record, Showgirls is much more interesting than just laughing at badness, like it’s a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie or something — it’s totally touching, too, and better if you take a certain Molina approach to experiencing it from somewhere in the heart! But it has the advantage of Nomi Malone being a much better character than any of Del Rey’s, flinty and feral and ruthless instead of moony and girlish.