Wait, is This Camp?
In defense of smart art about shallow people.
In the 2007 mockumentary series Summer Heights High, the titular school’s imaginative drama teacher Mr G showcases the litany of shows he’s masterminded. They include IKEA the Musical (A Furniture Song and Dance Spectacular), and Bali Nine, a jaunty show based on the trial of suspected heroin smugglers.
The joke is that these creations are so farcical they’d never actually exist. I thought of this sketch while watching the anomalous, awesome musical revival of American Psycho this week. It’s one of those batshit endeavors that, when it first premiered at London’s Almeida Theatre back in 2013, probably felt like its own far-fetched fever dream.
And yet, in the decade since it was last staged on Broadway, this whackjob show has become a cultish object amongst those too young to catch it the first time around. It has company: Insane, shimmering satires like Titanique and Oh, Mary! have become part of the fabric of Broadway and the West End. American Psycho’s legacy has survived thanks to so-called slime tutorials—that’s theater speak for bootleg recordings shared online—featuring a then-unknown Jonathan Bailey. Bret Easton Ellis’s novel and the 2000 film that it inspired have become totems for problematic men who see hotness, arrogance, and a thirst for wealth as a streamlined route to success. These same admirers carefully tiptoe around the misogynistic violence that gives the novel its name. Both the film and the novel are alpha catnip for those dumb enough to not see what’s right in front of them… so there’s something doubly subversive about turning it into a musical, an inherently campy medium.
This is the kind of culture that I like: Big swing material about shallow, vapid, narcissistic people. You can fit a few things into that subgenre, across all mediums. Gay cuspers remember the rush of Marina & the Diamonds’ sophomore album Electra Heart, for which she created its titular character to talk about the proud artifice of fame. Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, the Elle Fanning-starring thriller about an aspiring model landing in Los Angeles and superseding her terrifying competition, was mostly dismissed as surface-level slop when it first came out, yet it feels as severe and fascinating as the people it represents.
Our kneejerk reaction is to judge art based on the emotional complexity of the characters we’re presented with, so it’s easy to mistake the ditzy behaviour of the people it portrays for a kind of shallowness in the text. Purely decorative—all look, no touch. But I think the artists who scratch away at society’s self-obsession are doing the lord’s work.
Those grim, gorgeous people sit at the center of the new movie Rosebush Pruning, the dastardly new film from Brazilian director Karim Ainouz. Based on a screenplay by Efthimis Fillipou, the Greek guy known best for writing The Killing of a Sacred Deer, it’s like Saltburn-meets-The Cement Garden. A Piz Buin-slathered story of a wealthy American family who move to Spain and have little concerns beyond the four gilded walls in which they live. The movie gains steam when their tight-knit life is ruptured by the arrival of the new girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning) of their eldest son Jack (Jamie Bell). Callum Turner plays Ed, the middle child and the film’s narrator, Riley Keough is Anna, the weirdly sexual sister (“I know what turns all of you on,” she says to her siblings), while Lukas Gage is Robert: the frantic, horny, gay baby, who’s sort of got the hots for his eldest brother. Tracy Letts’ patriarch character is simply named Father, and is blind. Pamela Anderson, playing The Mother, is dead.
They are all concerned exclusively with two things: Each other and fashion. In a newly released clip, we see Father ask Anna to describe Martha—specifically what she is wearing. That she has a Bottega bag is important to him. The idiocy of these characters is highlighted by their knowledge of Dover Street Market and Gianni Versace’s murder. It feels ludicrous, but also gripping and sexy and hilarious, which makes it great. Shot by Hélène Louvart, the GOATed cinematographer behind Beach Rats and La Chimera, it looks like a fluro-slush cocktail melting in the sun. That makes the nasty turns—if you wanted Wuthering Heights to go harder, maybe look here—easier to stomach.
But what is it saying exactly? That insular families are likely to destroy themselves? That knowing every DSM location makes you a moron? Maybe there’s little sprinkles of both in there. Rosebush Pruning premiered last weekend at the Berlinale, and some critics have been harsh on it, and taken the film at face value. After all, it’s so pretty. Wouldn’t you?
If someone said you gave Patrick Bateman vibes, would you take that as a compliment? Arty Froushan clearly does, in some way. He won the part of the iconic character in the aforementioned American Psycho musical (currently running at the Almeida until 21 March).
I asked him: What’s something other people consider shallow that you find really interesting?
“UK Garage gets a bad rap. I think people see it as a flash-in-the-pan, gimmicky genre—annoying, sugary, commercial, Capital FM fodder. To me, it’s a cool, fascinating patchwork of UK musical and cultural influences that captures the glitz and shimmy of turn-of-the-century London and its murky underbelly. At uni, some friends and I ran a garage night called LoveShy and we’d give out candy necklaces and use mascots like Jigglypuff and Tracy Beaker to promote it. Shallow, but also: Millennial Cultural Heritage! Before PinkPantheress, there was Sunship, Wookie, and Groove Chronicles.”
Soon to come: Isabelle Huppert’s favorite vampire movies.
If you have any Christopher Nolan blindspots, the time to start filling them is now. His movies have been transferred onto 70mm prints and are playing at London’s BFI IMAX—aka the biggest screen in the country—from now until July, when The Odyssey hits theaters. I stand by Interstellar being his masterpiece, and you can catch that next month. All the details are here.
this is is such a non sequitur but if you’ve ever seen the UK version of skins they have an episode where they do a musical about 9/11 and given that it was just a couple years after the tragedy I have to give it props that in hindsight it was incredibly camp