Crash: A Modern Day Melodrama?

"Bigotry as the Outer Side of Inner Angst". By A.O. Scott The New York Times, May 6, 2005.

The look of these movies and the rough authenticity of their locations create an atmosphere of naturalism that is meant to give force to their rigorously pessimistic view of American life….

[these movies] have the dense texture and sober discipline that we associate with realism. But to classify these movies as realistic would be misleading, as the stories they tell are, in nearly every respect, preposterous, and they tend to be governed less by the spirit of observation than by superstition.

But in approaching "Crash," we should be more than usually cautious about mistaking its inhabitants - residents of Los Angeles of various hues, temperaments and occupations - for actual human beings.

Tastemaking Today

"Small Films With Potent Themes Lead Oscar Nominations". The New York Times, Feb. 1, 2006

"I think this year is the year that small movies get attention because they deal with complexities, they go to the gray area," said Ang Lee, the director of "Brokeback Mountain.

Brokeback Mountain:

Both Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn. The pain and disappointment felt by Jack, who is softer, more self-aware and self-accepting, continually registers in Mr. Gyllenhaal's sad, expectant silver-dollar eyes.

Munich:

If Mr. Bana sometimes seems overly sensitive for an undercover agent it's largely because without his anxious eyes and jittery hands Avner would not be half as sympathetic or rhetorically effective.

Imitation of Life and Mass Camp

Melodrama typically demonstrates an exaggerated logic and style that can be viewed as absurdly fantastic

Are Style, Music and Plot all over the top, excessive elements?

Mass Camp and Melodrama

"No clothes, no sex, no fun!"

Historical difference does not produce camp; camp results from an imposition of present standards over past forms turning them into the outdated

Mass camp renegotiates the meaning of films according to modern standards

Andrew Ross says:

the camp effect is created not simply by the change in the mode of cultural production...but rather when the products (stars...) of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to produce and dominate cultural meanings, become available in the present for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste.

Outdated: gender roles, special effects technology, heterosexual romance...

Mass Camp

Warhol, Andy. Campbell
Warhol, Andy. Marilyn Monroe

The Donna Reed Show:

Democratizing of culture leads to "mass camp"

The preference of "mediocre mass media products over the offerings of "high culture" leads to a shift

Pop revolution celebrates objects of mass culture (see Warhol's Campbell's Soup and Marilyn) as a direct attack on high art pretensions.

Mass camp sensibility entered mainstream culture ready to adore the mediocre, laugh at the overconventionalized and critique archaic sex roles (Donna Reed Show)

The Camp Viewer

Style Vs. Content

The camp viewer gravitates toward images that self-consciously demonstrate exaggeration, stylization and tackiness...as well as those more "naive" images that unintentionally represent excess and bad taste

Camp Taste: distinctly antinatural, eschewing beauty and realism in favor of the patently glided

Components of camp:a penchant for lowbrow tackiness, hyperbole and artifice over nature

What is Camp?

Lichtenstein, Roy, Tears.

Camp as counter-taste:

the camp sensibility has mocked and opposed high culture aesthetics...It vies brashly with truisms about good taste to establish the validity and special worth of that which appears to be vulgar

As Susan Sontag called it, "a good taste of bad taste"

Michael Bronski writes that camp "is a particular re-imagining of the material world...It changes the natural and normal into style and artifice.