A Celebration of the Camp Performances of Dusty Springfield and Dolly Parton by Renée Drezner
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A Celebration of the Camp Performances of Dusty Springfield and Dolly Parton By Renée Drezner Dusty Springfield and Dolly Parton two-step and shimmy through Venn Diagram of femininity, Camp, and glamour. With their iconic high blond hairdos, sequined gowns, and devoted gay followings, Dusty and Dolly utilize Camp to play with their public/private identities and gender presentations. Judith Butler describes gender as “an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an 1 abiding gendered self.” Surely some stylizations are more and less convincing than others. Though her look is admittedly based on “the town tramp,” her hyper feminine style combined with traditional country values render Dolly’s “Backwoods Barbie” persona non-threatening. Dusty’s lesbianism and eccentricities were ostensibly hidden from her public, however her demure floor length gowns in an era of miniskirts rendered her hyper-femininity moot, less convincing, and more Camp. Undoubtedly, the transgressions of each artist were considerably more palatable to the public due to their white packaging, but each artist mitigated her outsider status with Camp identification that both distanced and reinforced their identities. While Dusty’s homosexuality is lesser known to the public and Dolly’s reputation as Gay Icon has been cemented for many years, the camp sensibilities of excess and artifice figure prominently into each of their diva personas. 2 Before discussing it a length, Susan Sontag wrote, “To talk about Camp… is to betray it.” Camp, though difficult to pin down exactly, is a sensibility and aesthetic that incorporates irony, exaggeration, and post-modern breakdown of high and low art. Perhaps you cannot define it, but know it only when you see it. Attempts to define Camp fragment and spiral away, like sequins reflected in a 1 Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519, doi:10.2307/3207893. 2 David Bergman, “Introduction,” in Camp grounds: style and homosexuality, ed. by David Bergman. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 4. spinning Disco-ball. Born of a pre-Stonewall necessity to hide in plain sight, it functioned as a mechanism of survival. Meet Camp’s three dads: Schlock, Kitsch and se camper. Andrew Ross writes: “The pseudo-aristocratic patrilineage of camp can hardly be overstated. Consider the etymological provenance of the three most questionable categories of American cultural taste: schlock, kitsch and camp. None of are Anglo origin, although it is clear, from their cultural derivation, where they belong on the scale of prestige: Schlock, from Yiddish (literally “damaged goods” at a cheap price), Kitsch, from German, petty bourgeois, and C amp, more obscurely from the French se camper, with a long history of upper-class English usage.”3 Or, Camp can be delineated into High and Low factions. Low Camp, defined contemptuously by Christopher Isherwood as “a swishy little boy with peroxided hair, dressed in a picture hat and a feather boa, pretending to be Marlene Dietrich;” whereas High Camp “is the whole emotional basis of the ballet, for example, and of course baroque art. You see, true High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can’t camp about something you don’t take seriously. You’re not making fun of it; you’re making fun out of it. You’re expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and 4 elegance.” Seriousness is as paramount as superficiality. Does the wink mask earnestness below or does sincerity overpower the ubiquitous wink? Dolly and Dusty both subscribe to and undermine melodrama simultaneously in performance. Dolly displays the same amount of earnestness and artifice singing a trifle of a tune about friendship with Ms. Piggy as she does singing her signature ballad “I Will Always Love You” to Porter Wagoner, her original inspiration for the song. Dusty’s melodramatic and self-abnegating songs such as “I Close my Eyes” and You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” reach an emotional fever pitch in terms of lyrics and music, but in performance, Dusty seemingly cannot commit to their indulgence and instead emotes only with her wrists and tips of her fingers. Anguish never travels all the way to her face (or her heart?). 3 Andrew Ross, "Uses of Camp," The Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 1 (Fall 1988): 9. 4 Bergman, Camp grounds: style and homosexuality, 4. The tottering scales of sincerity and superficiality echo poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum’s love of the artifice and very real sentiment of opera. Suspension of disbelief is necessary to adore an art form built on spectacle and opulent grandeur. Significantly, eroticism mingles casually with Diva worship. Koestenbaum asks, “Am I in love with Julie Andrews, or do I think I am 5 Julie Andrews?” Are Divas tangible people to be known and loved or simply exalted figures to be adored and desired? Are they sexual or sexualized? Furthermore, does the Diva’s song sound the same to all audiences? Here we have promenaded around back to Camp in the questions “How does one speak to a double audience? How does one 6 simultaneously make identity apparent and call it into question?” Dusty and Dolly both inhabit the realm of the Diva and the Gay Icon. As will be discussed later, despite Dusty’s homosexuality, Dolly is considerably more identifiable with the gay community. If we accept Bergman’s stipulation that camp “exists in tension with popular culture, commercial culture or consumerist culture.” then the Divas widespread popularity within the Camp aesthetic would seem to present a problem. Enter Mass Camp. Andrew Ross writes “camp can be seen as a cultural economy at work from the time of the early sixties. It challenged and in some cases, helped to overturn legitimate definitions of taste and sexuality. But we must also remember to what extent this cultural economy was tied to the capital logic of development 7 that governed the mass culture industries.” Ross uses Andy Warhol as an example to reveal how Camp strategizes by using items and concepts of “surplus value; the low risks involved, the overheads 8 accounted for, and the profit margins expected.” Dusty and Dolly are able to minimize risk even more by being white, and straight or straight-passing. Influenced by Andrew Ross, Moe Meyer attempts to wrench Camp back into queer hands and laments Sontag’s separation and de-politicization of queerness and Camp. Meyer writes: “Camp is political; Camp is solely queer (and/or sometimes gay and lesbian) 5 Wayne Koestenbaum, Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality And The Mystery Of Desire (Boston , MA: Da Capo Press, 1993), 18. 6 Bergman, Camp grounds: style and homosexuality, 10. 7 Ross, "Uses of Camp," 21. 8 Ibid., 22. 9 discourse; and Camp embodies a specifically queer cultural exchange. However low risk, Dusty and Dolly both politicize their camp performances by being relatively outspoken (for their respective time) advocates of LGBT rights, directly referencing their gay and lesbian fans, and recording activist songs, Dusty’s “Closet Man” and Dolly’s “Travelin’ Thru.” Lest we throw too much shade at Sontag, Pellegrini notes that Sontag’s difficulty with lesbian identity and her desire to be identified as a writer 10 both influenced her ideas at the time. Bergman’s definition contains a flexible and dynamic maxim of Camp’s gay associations: “Camp is affiliated with homosexual culture, or at least with a self-conscious 11 eroticism that throws into question the naturalization of desire.” Put another way by Meyer, “the un-queer bourgeois subject under the banner of Pop… transformed Camp into the apolitical badge of the consumer whose status-quo “sensibility” is characterized by the depoliticizing Midas touch, and whose control over the apparatus of representation casts the cloak of invisibility over the queer at the moment it 12 appropriates and utters the C-word.” However, if, as Thomas Hess put it, Camp “exists in the smirk of 13 the beholder” perhaps Dolly Parton’s heterosexuality is irrelevant. Nadine Hubbs outlines the 14 “everyday homoerotics” of “Jolene.” Dolly sings longingly of Jolene’s “flaming locks of auburn hair,” “ivory skin,” and “eyes of emerald green.” Dolly has more to say on the subject. Jolene’s beauty? “Incomparable.” Her voice? “Soft like summer rain.” Jolene’s smile is “like a breath of spring” to smitten Dolly. What does Dolly have to say about the fickle beau she purports to be determined to keep? Oh him? He talks in his sleep. Dolly’s exaggerated femininity and outlandish personality call out to queer audiences, engaging her in queer discourse. In many ways Camp serves a “double function” as a “style and strategy of 9 Moe Meyer, “Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp,” in Queer Cinema: the film reader ed. by Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 137. 10 Ann Pellegrini. “After Sontag: Future Notes on Camp,” in A companion to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies, ed. by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007.). 11 Bergman, Camp grounds: style and homosexuality, 5. 12 Meyer, “Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp,” 143. 13 Ross, "Uses of Camp," 10. 14 Nadine Hubbs, "“Jolene,” Genre, and the Everyday Homoerotics of Country Music: Dolly Parton’s Loving Address of the Other Woman," Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 19, no. 1 (2015): doi:10.1353/wam.2015.0017.