B*A*P*S* And The Political Joy of Black Camp

Black Is Not A Genre: Week One

Few categories are more hotly contested or more ambiguously understood than “camp.” When the Met Gala chose the genre as its theme last fall, the responses were scattershot, and the moment revealed a lot about dominant Western culture’s notions of taste, beauty, and artistic merit. What it also revealed was the extent to which the genre of camp has been completely whitewashed in the popular imagination of the art world. In her Refinery29 article on the omission of Blackness at the Met Gala, Channing Hargrove notes how Black art movements like funk, Carnival, and Blaxploitation were all conspicuously absent from both the Met’s annual fashion exhibit and any discourse on cultural contribution and influence surrounding the gala. Accordingly, scholarship on camp, including Sontag’s work, whose seminal “Notes On Camp” was the inspiration for The Met theme, while engaging directly with notions of gender and queerness has routinely ignored the dynamic of race. In their introduction, “Notes On The Uses of Black Camp,” for an Open Culture Studies’ special issue on Black camp aesthetics (also referenced by Hargrove), editors Anna Pochmara and Justyna Wierzchowska recall Professor Pamela Robinson’s observation “that although critics do not explore race as inherent in or significant for camp aesthetics, they frequently tend to compare camp to black culture or blackface,” which, “she argues, indicate[s] and strengthen[s] the assumption that all camp is white.”

One of the other reasons suggested in the journal that Black camp and the intersection of camp and race have been critically ignored is because previous scholarship, particularly Sontag’s essay, in all its cultural primacy, espouses a version of camp that is decidedly “depoliticized and disengaged.” This intellectual distance allows for a mainstream, white-majority analysis of camp that takes place in a political vacuum in which its main role is to defy seriousness or to be, as Sontag calls it, “a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgement.” The problem with that characterization is that it reduces camp to a function of what Pochmara and Wierzchowska call “uncritical pleasure,” which in turn has led even Black Studies scholars to dismiss it all together as a tool for resistance and social praxis. What we end up with is a split between camp employed by white artists that, because of the perceived ahistorical neutrality of the white cultural experience, can ostensibly be enjoyed broadly, apolitically, and Black camp which inherently carries with it a history of oppression whose effects persist in present day and trouble its enjoyment, especially for white audiences. The article’s authors difference this way:

“[it] illustrates the central problematic of racial camp: it can be safely enjoyed only when it is perceived as depoliticised or easily dissociated from traumatic history. Yet when the historical context cannot be glossed over, or the theatricalisation resonates with present politics, camp performances do not offer unproblematic pleasure. In the former case, it does not exhibit the critical potential that Black Studies scholars are interested in, whereas in the latter the tension between enjoyment and theatricalised stereotypical representations becomes too sensitive for academics to address.”

Cut to the 1997 release of Robert Townsend’s B*A*P*S and famed critic Roger Ebert’s infamous zero-star review in which he refers to Halle Berry and Natalie Desselle-Reid’s protagonists as “garish homegirls.” What is it about the film’s playful exaggeration of Black style tropes that so deeply offended Ebert? How did a critic like Ebert, typically more sensitive in his coverage of Black film than many of his white contemporaries, so wildly misinterpret its loving subversion of “ghetto chic” stereotypes for negligent perpetuation? In “Notes On The Uses of Black Camp,” Pochmara and Wierzchowska look to Zora Neale Hurston’s theory of the “will to adorn” and her claim that “what white people may find in bad taste or simply grotesque stems from black people’s radical 'desire for beauty’” and “complete disregard for the regime of good taste.” One of the reasons Ebert and other white critics didn’t see what B*A*P*S* was actually doing is related to the restrictive notions of racial authenticity that originally emerged alongside the Black Arts Movement of the 1920s and re-surfaced with the emergence of Black cinema’s New Wave in the 1990s. White and Black theorists alike contributed to the confining of Black art’s value to its ability to communicate an authentic version of Black life. It’s this essentialism that cuts Black filmmakers off from credibly exploring vital creative avenues like fantasy and artifice that make camp such a great vehicle for subverting dominant culture.

But, Black artists and Black expression movements have always managed to make work that renounces the false division between camp and the political, between authenticity and an eccentricity. Artists like Prince, Kara Walker, Barkley Hendricks, Sun Ra, Beyonce, movements like Afrofuturism, Harlem dandyism, and elements of early Hip-hop have all employed aesthetics of excess to explore the bounds of white supremacy, patriarchy, and gender norms, and to imagine new frontiers for Black liberation via self-expression.

Pochmara and Wierzchowska give special mention to artist Renee Cox, whose photographic work, similar to Cindy Sherman’s cooptation of classic European art, “challenge the traditional representations of the Black female body by appropriating the stylistic masquerade of the affluent white female,” combining it with imagery of the Black slave experience. It’s impossible not to think of the bleach-blonde and faux brunette sculptural crowns, long lacquered nails, and gold facial accents that Nisi (Berrry) and Mickey (Desselle-Reid) wear with pride when we first meet them in the film. The DIY-high-fashion and Atlanta hair show culture from which the aesthetic hails is in itself an irreverently camp appropriation of Western European royal-court culture and a joyous ode to African style heritage born both out of the imagination of African-Americans who’ve never seen the continent and African immigrants who brought it with them to the American South. Academy Award-winning (Black Panther) costume designer Ruth E. Carter’s brilliant wardrobe, Berry’s and Desselle-Reid’s subtly astute comedic timing, Townsend’s keen eye for parody that pokes fun with, rather than at, and never dehumanizes its subjects; these are all uniquely Black camp interventions, hallmarks of the genre at its finest.

What makes the critical response to the film so troubling isn’t so much the negative assessment of its quality but the failure or refusal to even read it’s genre context correctly to begin with. This is particularly egregious given the oeuvre of it’s director. Robert Townsend is a master of camp aesthetics. While Hollywood Shuffle put him on mainstream Hollywood’s radar for its biting satire about being black in the movie business, his mostly impactful legacy is the string of Black cult classics he made after his debut that put him in a pantheon of filmmakers whose work is makes up the collective vernacular of Black American culture. The Five Heartbeats, The Meteor Man, Carmen: A Hip Hopera, Little Richard, Eddie Murphy Raw, the sitcom The Parent ‘Hood—for Black people of a certain age, even if they don’t remember these in detail, they remember them in spirit. Almost intrinsically, Townsend’s work is part of a collective memory. HIs signature mix of knowingly broad comedy and grounded sentiment is both what makes his version of camp so smart and enduring and perhaps what makes it so hard to read as such for white critics. When compared to the most widely recognized master of camp, John Waters, Townsend’s work almost seems too sincere. What makes Waters great is his refusal to allow the audience to distance itself from the grotesqueness of the social constructs he’s skewering, including, to his credit, race. But, where Waters employs irreverence and disturbance, Townsend’s tool for engaging the political is pathos. All the reviews of his films that characterize them “maudlin” or “sappy” aren’t necessarily wrong, but they’re not right it any of the ways that matter. It’s Townsend’s mastery of melodrama that keeps the audience from looking away, from fully detaching from the real issues that the camp elements of his film allows us to intermittently forget.

The film’s script is written by actress, psychologist, and director Troy Byer (who also plays Mr. Blakemore’s lawyer Tracy Shaw) who became a household face playing the role of Jackie Deveraux on Dynasty, the daughter of Diahann Carroll’s iconic and infamous Dominique Deveraux. She’d worked with Townsend previously, starring as Babydoll in The Five Heartbeats and would go on to write and direct two feature films. If there’s anyone who understands the nuances of melodrama and the importance of Black interpretations of camp, it’s Byer. And, it shows in the script. From the subtly subversive code-switching humor, to the genuine emotion and meaning in the conversations with Landau’s Mr. Blakemore, to the references to other Black cinema like Coming to America and Superfly, to the film’s many instantly relatable Black hair moments; Byer brings a warmth, understanding, and wit to B*A*P*S that cannot be faked. And, when Byers appears in the film as a sharp, vigilante, Black femme attorney, it’s as if Nisi’s and Mickey’s fairy godmother has been watching over them the whole time.

In The Five Heartbeats, Townsend uses the saga of Eddie King’s drug abuse to ground the camp and pageantry of the Motown fantasy film with very real stories of countless Black musicians like, Dave Ruffin, the inspiration for Eddie’s character, for whom the industry was a true taker of souls. In B*A*P*S*, a buddy flick about two best friends with entrepreneurial aspirations and doe-eyed confidence in each other, Townsend makes you feel for his Black women characters, as they face condescending white looks, hapless boyfriends, and career rejection with unflappably plucky self-belief. Much like in David Mirkin’s Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, another female friendship camp comedy that was more readily endorsed as a cult classic by the wider indie scene, Townsend never allows Nisi and Mickey to be the butt of the joke. He also never fails to do something that all good camp does in the end: provide ecstatic catharsis. But, whereas in Waters it’s always a transgressive catharsis—a perversion of the conventional happy ending that revels in the absurdity of trauma—Townsend knows that Black audiences don’t need more trauma, not only for their psyche but because in white America, Black trauma isn’t transgressive, it’s the norm. Instead his characters’ catharsis is the excess of ecstasy, the over-the-top Black wedding, the flamboyantly joyful, the almost-too-good-to-be-true. For Townsend’s Black camp aesthetic, the happy ending is the perversion. Nisi and Mickey get the storybook finale that Black people were never meant to have, the kind of ending that the trope of rawness that put ’90s Black cinema on the map didn’t allow for.

Perhaps the reason Ebert couldn’t read the B*A*P*S* as camp is because he didn’t know how to look for the signs, because his lens for Black film was only attuned to the seriousness of his of his own idea of Blackness. But, you’d think the film scholar in him would’ve at least noticed the Easter eggs. In the film’s first 30 seconds, Townsend tells the viewer exactly what they’re watching with the first of many iconic cameos. When the film opens at the greasy spoon diner where Mickey (Desselle-Reid) and Nisi (Berry) wait tables in Decatur, Nisi’s first regular, Nate, sends back his food because the toast is burnt. Mickey comforts her friend by lightly dragging, “Girl, don’t pay him no mind; he think he Dolemite.” The joke, of course, is that Nate, played by none other than Rudy Ray Moore, actually is Dolemite—the once struggling entertainer who turned his uniquely Black brand of live comedy, steeped in African-American folklore, into a wildly successful blaxploitation classic. Moore’s Dolemite was arguably the first of its kind to wholeheartedly embrace the full, knowing absurdity of camp from start to finish. The casting of Moore is Townsend’s tip of the hat to one of the true originators of Black camp film aesthetics and a winking reminder of just how long people like him have been pioneering the genre in the dark.

*For a synopsis of the film read “On BAPS, Black Femme Entrepreneurship & Hypersexuality” by M. Katrina Roberts for Film and Fishnets.

Watch Graham’s conversation with Ronnita L. Miller and Brooke Burnside above or listen on Spotify

---

Black Is Not A Genre is a film series highlighting the under-examined and under-appreciated contributions of black cinema to genre film. The title is a play on the paradoxical existence of black cinema. The acknowledgment of shared aesthetic and cultural languages across the Black film diaspora is integral to a deeper understanding of its value. However, the persistent marginalization of Black art and racist assumptions about marketability have pigeonholed the Black films into a commercial monolith, a commercially artificial ‘genre’ that makes a spectacle of their Blackness and ignores the specificity of their craftsmanship. As a result, Black films are only discussed in relation to other Black-made films and are excluded from essential, canonical discussions about genre that fundamentally shape the way we view what’s good, what’s good, what holds value.

In collaboration with Hyperreal Film Club, with the goal of illuminating new perspectives on Black genre filmmaking, the first edition of BINAG will recommend four Black-directed films for viewers to screen at home over the course of four weeks in July 2020. The emphasis will be on under-exposed films, films that have been largely miscategorized and warrant re-contextualizing, and films that have made major cinematic contributions to their genre. Each film will be accompanied by a weekly podcast in which series programmer Graham Cumberbatch will discuss the week’s movie and genre with a different featured guest.