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.
Law & Order, Balzac, or the New York Post
January, 1961. This is an exchange between New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell and author Sylvia Townsend Warner, on the subject of Balzac:
MAXWELL: “The pace irritates me, and I see everything coming for miles and miles.”
WARNER: “I think you will come to Balzac yet. When one has disproved all one’s theories, outgrown all of one’s standards, discarded all one’s criterions, and left off minding about one’s appearance, one comes to Balzac. And there he is, waiting outside his canvas tent — with such a circus going on inside.”
Exercise: replace “Balzac” in this discussion with “Law & Order.”
“especially heinous”
I guess the best episode of Law & Order: SVU must be the one where Detective Stabler, looking at a drawing of the arch to which a suspect fled, says “He took her to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris?” and Detective Benson replies: “There’s one exactly like it in Washington Square Park.” (There’s a neat statue of some chick in the harbor, too.)
Nathan Heller once wrote a piece for Slate claiming that Jeff Goldblum was a bad addition to Law & Order: Criminal Intent—that his familiar, knowing, near-ironic style of acting was somehow at odds with the show’s self-seriousness: “It comes across as an oblique, high-irony parody of Law & Order with Jeff Goldblum playing both the premise and the punch line.” The article seems perceptive and well-argued but also weirdly tone-deaf. Surely Law & Order has always been like that, right? Sometimes it leads a double life, sewing together moments that work both ways: as gritty big-city sensationalism for those who’ll take it straight, and as near-campy, intensely formal exercises for those who “know better,” those for whom anything “ripped from the headlines” is inherently a comedy. Criminal Intent feels like a whole spin-off dedicated to exactly that, widening as far as possible the gulf between watching it as high-concept hilarity and watching it straight. Goldblum might tip those cards a tad farther than Vincent D’Onofrio did, but it’s not like he’s changing the game. One network is running promos for its constant SVU reruns, joking that the cardinal rule of a Law & Order investigation is that you never, ever crack a smile. Which reads both ways, and perfectly sums up the rhetorical line the show takes: are you not-smiling because this is serious, or is your non-smile just a deadpan?
The SVU detectives, incidentally, deftly deduced that the arch at Grand Army Plaza was a much more feasible spot to take kidnap victims than the one in Washington Square. Arye Gross was successfully apprehended; Detective Stabler was temporarily blinded. Note that Christopher Meloni, who plays him, can also be seen playing grotesques in Wet Hot American Summer and both Harold & Kumar movies, which is to say that he’s sort of a comedian.
