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Forum namePass The Popcorn Archives
Topic subjectI think you're debating two different things.
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=23&topic_id=105846&mesg_id=106218
106218, I think you're debating two different things.
Posted by SoulHonky, Wed Aug-08-12 11:43 PM
You seem to be using the Batman: The Series definition of camp - silly shit that people knew was hokey and embraced.

Frank is including the classic definition of camp - overwrought films with shoddy scripts and overacting. For instance, "The Room" wasn't intended to be a comic classic but that's what has become because it's so bad.

Susan Sontag wrote a piece about it: http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html

18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying.

19. The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! Genuine Camp -- for instance, the numbers devised for the Warner Brothers musicals of the early thirties (42nd Street; The Golddiggers of 1933; ... of 1935; ... of 1937; etc.) by Busby Berkeley -- does not mean to be funny. Camping -- say, the plays of Noel Coward -- does. It seems unlikely that much of the traditional opera repertoire could be such satisfying Camp if the melodramatic absurdities of most opera plots had not been taken seriously by their composers. One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all. (Compare a typical 19th century opera with Samuel Barber's Vanessa, a piece of manufactured, calculated Camp, and the difference is clear.)
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The line between the two is probably "Catwoman". People had to know that some of the shit was silly but I don't think anyone realized what a steaming pile of shit and how awful scenes like the basketball game would be.