Camp Integration: The Use and Misuse of Nostalgia in John Waters' Hairspray

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Caetlin Benson-Allott is a doctoral candidate in English Language and Literature at Cornell University, where she teaches courses on film and gender studies.

Notes

1. In this essay, I will use nostalgia both in the sense of a painful longing to return to an idealized past and as desire to freeze or lock down one anaesthetizing vision of the past. While it might clarify my argument to use two different terms for these respective yearnings, Hairspray operates along this slippage between them and so I find the ambiguity inured in “nostalgia” advantageous.

2. Theorists of the postmodern nostalgia film, among them Frederick Jameson, Vera Dika, and Pam Cook, cite as its exemplars Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), George Lucas's Star Wars (1977), Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981), David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), Lucas's American Graffiti (1973), Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Randal Kleiser's Grease (1978), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970), Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002), and Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

3. One other African American extra appears in the frame, yet as his title indicates, he is not an active part of the scene.

4. To be sure, Link's dialogue is meant as a joke, even one at Waters’ own expense, since he lovingly recalls his own naïve childhood idealization of African Americans in Hairspray's director's commentary, but the humor comes at a price.

5. Fat and black stereotypes share many characteristics of the Other; both are portrayed as infantile, loud, oversexed, dimwitted, and excessively aligned with nature and the corporeal (see Sander L. Gilman's Fat Boys: A Slim Book).

6. By “social eccentricities,” I mean that Waters’ had declared himself a beatnik in high school by dying his bangs platinum blonde, ran a floundering morbid puppet show out of his garage, and regularly got beat up trying to hear R&B shows in black clubs around Baltimore, as he notes in commentary for the DVD release of Hairspray. Furthermore, despite Waters’ notorious recalcitrance on the subject of his own sexuality, I find it difficult to presume queer exclusion, in the face of a total dearth of evidence, given that the subject under scrutiny here is a dance program.

7. Pastiche is Jameson's term for the “the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language” of popular and high cultural icons and “is of such insistence in our culture that it actually signals an impeded ability to represent our own time and to locate our own place in history (Postmodernism 17, Dika 10). Unlike camp, however, pastiche is “a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse” (Postmodernism 17). In cinema specifically, “nostalgia films restructure the whole issue of pastiche and project it onto a collective and social level, where the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past is now refracted through the iron law of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the generation” (Jameson, Postmodernism 19). Because of this focus on commodity-artifacts and fashion, however, “the past is only metonymically reexperienced” with the inevitable result that its usefulness either as history or as personal cathexis must be limited by that unbridgeable gap.

8. As Waters recalls, “that hairdo that Debbie Harry has, the one-sided wing—People had that hairdo! I know it looks ludicrous right now; people actually walked around like that. They did, all the time, up on Eastern Avenue, which we called the ‘Hairdo Aorta,’ “and “this car [Amber's Victory-Mobile] was really on Buddy Deane, on “Future Day” or something. Not this exact one, we had to make it … It was based on a picture the Buddy Deane people showed me that they have of Pixie in that car in real life” (director's commentary, DVD of Hairspray).