Notes On Camp

I watched the preview for Notes on a Scandal about two dozen times over the past month. To the annoyance of, well, pretty much everyone I know, I memorized and enacted all the lines. I finally saw the movie and it definitely lived up to the expectation-- the expectation being that it would be superbly acted, thought-provoking, and finely tuned, but also hilarious, ridiculously campy, and deliciously over-the-top. Think Cape Fear meets Mommie Dearest, for a whole new generation of queer boys and girls.

The movie tells the story of the bizarre relationship between two school teachers: the effortlessly beautiful, ex-punk, unhappily married Sheba (Cate Blanchett), and the old, haggard, and just plain creepy Barbara (Judi Dench). Sheba joins a lower-income public school in Northern London as an art teacher and has trouble keeping her rowdy pupils under control. Barbara steps in to help and guide Sheba and soon develops a crypto-lesbian crush on her. Soon after their friendship develops, Barbara discovers that Sheba is having an affair with a 15-year old student. And hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. She is hurt and furiously jealous, and she uses the knowledge of this illicit relationship to her advantage, blackmailing Sheba in order to win her affection. As is to be expected, this fundamentally unbalanced relationship ends in disaster when Barbara fails to get from Sheba what she has so deeply desired.

I tend to empathize with villains. Sure, Barbara is a pretty rotten human being. She exploits one woman's mistakes for her own personal gain. She sets up a facade of friendship but her real intentions are far more turbulent. But at the same time Barbara is a sad, pathetic human being who is so deeply bored with life that, in her own words, will make going to the laundrette the highlight of her weekend. That doesn't make me hate her. It just makes me sad for her. And I don't mean that in a condescending way. Loneliness, especially at an old age, is something that I find extremely depressing, and even more so in this case because I speculate, although the movie does not explicitly say this, that the reason behind Barbara's deep loneliness is an undealt conflict with her latent homosexuality.

Is this movie homophobic? I am tempted to say no. Does it show a pretty heinous gay character? Sure. But there is something so clumsy and pathetic about Barbara that, despite how conniving and perverse she is, makes me feel like she deserves my sympathy. I imagine her as a teenager longing so desperately to share her life with another woman. Her desires are met with fear and rejection and they soon push her to become a recluse. Throughout her life she is unable to have real, meaningful, interactions with other people, and as such has the emotional maturity of a child who doesn't understand that relationships are two-way streets.

Forgive me if this is a stretch, but I feel that while watching the movie I encountered the same conflict between empathy and reprehension that I do at my job. Every day I get new clients who have made mistakes in their lives. They range from people accused of gun possession, to illegal immigrants, to drug couriers, to makers of child pornography. Some of the crimes are heinous. Some of the crimes I don't even think should be crimes to begin with. But regardless of what the offense may be, I very rarely lack sympathy for our clients. I know that people make choices and, like I suppose Sartre would say, our worth as human beings ultimately comes from the choices we make.

At the same time, I find it impossible not to wonder what pushes people to make choices and whether in a world that is deeply unfair-- be it to people in the third-world, to African-Americans, to gays and lesbians, to women, to people with mental disabilities-- we can always fault and punish the individuals for their poor decisions. It is perhaps more productive to examine the deeply-flawed system in which we live and strive to change it, rather than locking away those whose behavior we find unacceptable. I think, both at my job, and in Notes on a Scandal, it boils down to the unresolved age-old sociological conflict of structure versus agency. That is my two cents of naive, liberal bullshit.

I enjoyed that this movie could be both campy and serious. It made me think about sociological rhetoric, but also kept me amused with its snappy dialogue and iconic images-- one of my favorites was Cate Blanchett applying severely punk eye make-up and lipstick, and subsequently going crazy, as in foaming at the mouth, holy-fucking-ape-shit crazy. I loved this movie and I am sure that it will be the new camp classic for the Y-generation.