“its so bad, its good”..!!

Camp is an aesthetic in which something has appeal because of its bad taste or ironic value. I am using camp here in a film-aesthetic sense.

My original intention was to write a somewhat (stilted)-male account of the apocryphal nature of the pleasure from movies, about the camp genre. The immediate reason for invoking such an impressive parade of expressions (jargons) being a hindi movie known as salam-e-isq. As I proceed in real time to pen (type) my words on to the word-processor here, the strands of thought are actually getting entangled giving me a vision of a route-map of Delhi forcing me to pause and ask the conductors (the wiki) time to time.

Voyeurism is a practice in which an individual derives pleasure from observing other people.

The moot point of my analysis is that scopophilia (i.e. a veritable addiction to movies) is voyeurism in the sense of using a peep-hole into the lives of others. Now I don’t claim to possess a scotopic vision (i.e. the ability to see in reduced illumination) here, so that my analysis would see through the dimly lit pathways of (Freudian or otherwise) domain of a priori intentions, motives, and actions involved in such a mass-consumed category of leisure time activity. I definitely claim to have seen some bad movies though.

We have witnessed the Govinda phenomenon over well nigh two decades now. My first movie of his was Hatya, where apart from his chi chi dance routine the camp element is pedestal!! The Govinda of Salam-e-Isq reminded me of the camp element ruling the roost in (popular) culture all over India. The classicism associated with our (classical) dances/songs actually denies any possibility of lampooning them. Without any space provided for caricature, forms actually tend to acquire a stilted rigidity of well-known types. High-brow vs. low-brow culture, anyone, haan?

Anyways, coming on to our “jatra” culture seen in Orissa/Bengal or Bhojpuri films or for the matter the (mainstream) regional movie/filmi-music scene, we see a phenomenon that’s no less than a revolution of sorts. People listen to these song and dance routines. Hum these songs. They are a rage. The politics behind this pleasure is a form of voyeurism that’s instant.

Titillation is direct derivation of pleasure from either tactile or visual stimulation that leaves nothing (much) to imagination.

[Vide: The so called “theiss theory of titillation, which says that "the degree to which a costume is considered sexy is directly proportional to how much it looks like it is about to fall off". This is named after a (supposedly) famous costume designer known as William Ware Theiss, who designed (costumes) for such vaunted movies and serials as Spartacus, Harold and Maude, Bound for Glory, Pete's Dragon, Dog Soldiers, Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, The Man with One Red Shoe, and Star Trek!!!..]

What constitutes good, so good or their reciprocal banal implications (i.e. bad and its other badland brethren) is a democratic (in its sotto voce and imposed senses, both) exposition of tastes blared through processes like codification, formalization etc. whereby these tastes come to the fore as a sort of guideline into the land of high-pleasure. Some days back I saw a movie by a (celebrated) Hungarian director, Bela Tarr. Werckmeister Harmonies is a movie in the so called genre of drama-movies, where the actors play out events as directed by the auteur on a stage crafted for the story as it would be in another established form- drama. The story here can be an anti-story too. Violation of the unities notwithstanding, an anti-form is basically a form (deliberately) displaced from the formal nature of (established) forms. What it retains, though, is the rigour of high-aesthetics.

Music is an art form that involves what are sometimes organised sounds and silence. It is expressed in terms of pitch (which includes melody and harmony), rhythm (which includes tempo and meter), and the quality of sound (which includes timbre, articulation, dynamics, and texture).

In the Harmonies, Bela Tarr’s erst-while mayor, is addicted to creating and commenting on music. His avocation may be dubious, but his attempts struck a chord in me (literally). He believed that the problem with harmonies created out of the common instruments is precisely its finesse, its perfection. He believed that once the chords are liberated from the imposed perfection, the true music will emerge. Whatever may be the flow of the movie from hereon, the point made makes sense in terms of the camp culture.

Shamanism refers to a range of traditional beliefs and practices concerned with communication with the spirit world, mostly animal spirits.

Juha Pentikäinen, in his introduction to Shamanism and Northern Ecology, explains how the Sámi drum embodies Sámi worldviews. He considers shamanism to be a ‘grammar of mind’, because shamans need to be experts in the folklore of their cultures. The rituals, shamanistic or pleasure-deriving have parallels as in they both involve a sense of letting go. In the former the gaze is from this word to an obscurantist spiritual one, whereas the latter is actually a gaze that is more lateral, but symbols here involve titillation that is direct. The Bhakti-movement involved oddly illogical discotheque type dancing, as did shamanistic rituals. Both used symbols that were directly comprehensible. The voyeur does not mind the wait, but he has a very small attention span. The time he exists in is that of a splice of 2 (could as well be more) different times coexisting. Work-time and leisure-time, contend with each other necessitating instant ‘gratification’. The bhakti-saints actually enacted the actions of their gods (Krishna, Kesava, Gopala etc.) themselves- cavorting, wooing, and in low-brow acts like playing holi. The laity lapped it up, and the Buddhist siddhas of a demanding and more abstract religious/cultural order gradually lost space to these, and the Sufis preaching Islam.

The camp degenerating into classical forms is a scenario I am not contemplating here. Rather I would very (safely) say that popular film/music has a very obvious camp content from a stilted-male-(localized)-high-brow perspective. The male gaze further necessitates that this content is replete with voyeuristic tropes of a nature that titillate instantly.