Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma: Why the Past Never Really Ages

In his recent New York Times article, Carlos Lazado takes aim at the criticism that certain art ‘has not aged well.’ Take The West Wing’s workplace harassment and Looney Tunes’ racist humour. After the #MeToo movement and BLM, there has been increased vocalised criticism and opposition to these misogynist works, with certain audiences saying that ‘they have not aged well,’ that they do not fare well in the contemporary moral climate.

Lazado’s objection to these criticisms is the familiar ‘works of art come from their own time and place, and they should not be beholden to contemporary ethical standards.’ It is a historical injustice to write off works from the past due to contingent modern sensibilities. Despite the framing of his argument, the piece, more than anything, reads as a defence of the author’s enjoyment of certain media from feminist killjoys, to borrow a term from Sara Ahmed. He mentions enjoying the aforementioned works, but fails to address the complex relationship between enjoyment and the reproduction of surrounding power structures. Ahmed dispels the myth that humour and enjoyment are innocent constructs, unrelated to structural oppression. Lazado’s brief article erases the complex politics of enjoyment and how to negotiate between pleasure and critique.

On the other hand, Lazado’s article challenges the ease with which Gen Z can dismiss works from the past. Steven Shainberg’s Secretary, at first glance, seems to be a prime example of normalising workplace harassment. The setting, however,  plays a crucial role in the film’s interrogation of trauma, suicide, and powerlessness, complicating the subject’s inhabiting neat, stable positions. This does not come at the expense of feminist killjoy critiques; rather, such critiques enrich the film’s layered meaning. Dismissing the work immediately would compromise this meaningful encounter.

The works we consume comprise who we are, whether we want it to or not. The symbolic regime we live in, our world of meaning, comes from our identifications with visual art, literature, TV, and film. Dismissing works from the past evades the influence that they hold on our existence. For example, Secretary throws the disturbing realities of desire and self-harm into sharp relief. Similarly, Lazado’s critique of dismissing older work, perhaps unintentionally, retreats from the constitutive role media plays in our subjectivity, distancing the subject from their past. Both present the symbolic regime we live in and past films as separate worlds, instead of seeing them as threaded by historicity. The past is the foundation of our current values, and watching films in the past, instead of requiring a superficial disavowal (yes, but…), can affirm but also critique our understandings of the present. 

Jane Schoenbrun’s Camp Miasma confronts film’s relationship to our historicity. The film, like Fellini’s 8 ½, blends the artist’s life with their creation. Kris is a young, up-and-coming queer filmmaker who has been asked to revive the fictional film franchise “Camp Miasma,” comprised of low-budget slasher films at a sleepaway camp. In it, the main ‘villain’ is a gender-bending ex-camper who was murdered for their queerness, rising from the depths of the lake to murder the sexually charged staff. 

As part of her filmmaking process, Kris visits the ‘final girl’ of the Miasma films, Billy, in the camp itself. Kris’s film, like most slasher classics, features misogynistic and transphobic content. Kris’s directing style, with her first feature film interpreting Psycho from the perspective of the shadow curtain, failingly tries to intellectually deconstruct these tropes. Billy articulates her dislike of Kris’s early film, arguing that it misses a certain energy present in the early slasher films. 

To convey her point, Billy screens Kris the first movie in an isolated theater. Focusing on a disturbing scene in the film, Billy tells Kris about the deeply traumatic core of her experience with the franchise. The sex scene in the film involved, in real life, her being coerced into painfully losing her virginity. Kris, who shares a similar experience, bonds with Billy through their newfound vulnerability and understanding. 

Soon they attempt to have sex, with Kris adopting a confident persona before expressing that she cannot go through with it. In a tender moment, they sit together, with Billy patiently evincing that she bears no expectations of Kris performing any other role than the one she wants. This scene anchors the film; as the two begin to share their sexual desires and experiences, the space that each affords to one another is crucial to allowing their complexity to reside in the film. Schoenbrun’s understanding of consent is closer to Ellie Anderson’s phenomenological theory than a strictly legal framework. Consent is more than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but a mutual understanding of each other’s corporeal intentionalities in their excesses. Kris does not know what she wants, but rather than this leading to the rape culture language that ‘the man/partner truly knows what she wants,’ their ethical understanding of one another allows her to freely explore her desires in a safe openness. 

Kris discloses that, to survive the above traumatic experience, Kris dissociated herself into the worlds of films she has seen. Objectified in the real world, she finds agency by locating herself as characters in movies she recalls, especially Camp Miasma. The character type she identifies the most with is the ‘slut’– she has fantasies of running with exploitative shots of her breasts jumping, being degraded. To enjoy sex, she would project herself as that character, essentially as Billy. 

Billy tells Kris about a secret detail ambiguously located in the complex scene– her jouissance. In the midst of this deeply traumatic moment with a violent, abusive man, she experienced an orgasm. Its source did not come from the violence, but from her dissociating into a fantasy of her becoming the serial killer and stabbing him while simultaneously being penetrated. Death and sex, Thanatos and Eros, meet for the ultimate jouissance, with the final image reminiscent of Bernini’s St. Theresa. Both logics converge in an originary unity. 

After sharing their stories, Billy decides to help Kris stage her fantasy. Art and reality blur together; her death drive stages the brutal liquidation of all the extraneous figures in her life until she and Billy, now alone, are having sex. Their fantasies become one: at the culmination, they both are impaled together by the phallic spear of death and Cupid’s arrow of jouissance conjoined into one, new and distinct object. Dual logics, the masculine possessor of the phallus and the feminine bearer of the phallus, are queered into a third term, undoing heteronormative understandings of desire and the self.

Whereas Lazado’s hermeneutics attempt to suspend the self from the past, Schoenbrun’s fucks it. For both, the problematic nature of the past does not entail dismissing it. The issue with Lazado’s framework is that its moral relativism treats it as an abstract, distant world. On the other hand, Schoenbrun recognises the past’s value as a constitutive part of the self. 

Gender contains a historicity. One’s performance of gender fundamentally derives from imitating and disidentifying with others’ performances, with their performances deriving from others, ad infinitum. In the age of screens, people are surrounded by gendered performances defining who they are and who they could be, problematically or unproblematically. Past performances, the body itself is an assemblage of wounds, identifications, and desires that are all linked to the past. Billy and Kris, two generations, bridge over both the differences and similarities of their bodies, not only finding a beauty in the other’s but simultaneously in their own. Kris’s identity, her desires, sexuality, gender, interests, and aspirations are inextricable from the artwork she has consumed in the past. Watching slashers does not entail her stepping away from her ‘modern sensibilities.’ Instead, they have shaped her ‘modern sensibilities’ and the way she sees and experiences bodies in the world.

Therefore, the problematic nature of the past’s values is not something that one should just bracket, put off as ‘oh that’s just something they used to do,’ but connect with one’s present self. Camp Miasma bears similarities to Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman in this precise regard. In it, Dunye shoots a film about her research into a Black lesbian actor in the early 20th century who would play ‘mammy figures.’ Through critical fabulation, Dunye not only sees herself in these problematic stereotypical roles, but also sees the actors' own struggles off the screen navigating relationships and racism coming through in the archives.

Key to Dunye and Schoenburn’s historical understanding is that the challenges of the past persist into the present. Both not only struggle with the politics of representation but also with their own personal lives: what does it mean to desire and love in a patriarchal white supremacist society? Treating the past as a separate sphere with its own values obscures how archival explorations of women's resistance to these structures can bolster present efforts.

Central to both films is that the engagement with the past is not purely theoretical. For both filmmakers, gaining insight into these past figures required vulnerability in personally exploring who they were. Schoenburn’s movie is not simply a theoretical treatise on how jouissance lies at the intersection of the erotic and death drive, but it is a deeply moving story of someone grappling with her traumatic experiences and muddled sexuality. It is also fun; engaging with the past created a fun fantasy that referenced what made the original slashers such compelling works of art, while delicately critiquing the problematic elements of the pleasurable immersion. Schoenburn stresses that breaching those internal barriers, as both a viewer and filmmaker, is crucial in truly engaging with the possibilities laden in the work of art.

Image: Unsplash/Ivy Dao

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