When one performs camp, it is done with an ironic acknowledgement of the unstable and culturally-manifested notions of masculinity and femininity. Despite the fact that these gender roles remain touted as ‘natural’, their shifting boundaries and changing norms over different moments in history act to define them as cultural creations rather than natural by-products of the sexed human body. Camp, therefore, acts not simply as a performance style that imitates gender roles, but also as a style that acknowledges their power, while simultaneously dis-empowering them by mocking their claims to authenticity. For Hollywood, femininity became inextricably linked to notions of glamour and, therefore, to the artifice that glamour entailed. The musical, with its focus on spectacle and tongue-in-cheek humour, became the perfect vehicle for the subtle complexities of camp to be explored both consciously and unconsciously by male and female stars alike.

In Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical - Steven Cohan investigates the MGM musical of the early twentieth century and its association with notions of camp and queerness, naturally focusing a great deal of his book on Judy Garland, the quintessential queen of camp. By both examining her performances in musicals, and the performative nature of her public image, Cohan delves into the debate over the meaning of her life and career. At this present moment in history Garland’s image is embedded within queer popular culture as the perfect example of the tortured star whose public and private life was forever in conflict. This reading of Judy as a text takes as evidence the parody she displayed in her layered approach to her performances in musicals.

Garland’s incredible voice made her an indispensable commodity for MGM, although her appearance as a short and chubby woman conflicted with the screen siren image of other female stars she appeared alongside. While numerous ‘glamour’ photos of Garland were published in magazines of the period, Cohan cites her performances in musical numbers, in particular ‘A Great Lady Has An Interview’ (from 1946’s Ziegfeld Follies), as mocking the image of glamour that Garland never really fit into. Her popularity today, especially in queer circles, attests to her girl-next-door image resonating far stronger with fans than that of the many inaccessible, manufactured perfection of her blond bombshell contemporaries. Cohan argues that whenever Garland was called upon to perform a glamorous role, she did so in a multi-layered fashion that both imitated, referenced, and made fun of, the expectations of appearance and behaviour that female stars were pressured to conform to. Garland’s refusal, both in her pre-existing body, and in the way she chose to perform a musical number, led to her being adored by a homosexual culture that felt a similar marginalisation and need to imitate ‘straight’ behaviour.

Garland’s drug abuse is well-documented, and Cohan only briefly mentions her addiction to Benzedrine, the popular appetite suppressant of Hollywood women of the period. More pertinent to Cohan’s discussion of camp is the continuing debate among Garland fans who reject the queer and camp association of the star because they see these as detrimental to her legacy. In his investigation of Garland’s on-line fan clubs Cohan discovers many of her straight fans detest the ‘gay’ stereotype of a Judy-fan and wish this following would fade away because they fear it will turn off other straight fans who may fear being seen as gay. However, ever since the late twentieth-century, when the rainbow was adopted by the queer community as the symbol of the diversity of human sexuality, it is unlikely that anytime soon will the link be severed between coming out, and Judy wanting to get over the rainbow in The Wizard of Oz.

Likewise, Singin' in the Rain is similarly established as the definitive camp musical due in a large part to the complex notions of appropriation that run throughout the film. Cohan argues that while the plot concerns the shift from silent films to talkies in cinema, and the secretive dubbing of voices over silent stars with inappropriate accents that accompanied this shift, the film also displays the tension over the white musical’s appropriation of black music and dance styles. The film not only ‘steals’ musical numbers from the past, but internally it repeatedly has its characters steal ideas from one another. The film itself becomes a testament to Hollywood’s lack of originality (in a desire to keep audiences by regurgitating past successes) and its denial of the origins of many styles and ideas mainly because they are non-white.

Cohan discusses in depth the way that ‘whiteness’ was defined as glamour itself, and the way the MGM musical celebrated vaudeville, and the Ziegfied Follies in particular, was done in a way which re-invented these art forms as devoid of people of colour or ethniticity. Tap-dancing, in particular, was a medium that the MGM musical struggled to detach from association with Afro-Americans and homosexuals. Cohan focuses on the construction of the image of Gene Kelly, and the way his performances acted to destabilise masculinity, and even race. Kelly’s overt masculinity was deeply emphasised despite the objectification of his near-perfect dancer’s body in numerous musical numbers. While today the phrase ‘Hello Sailor’ is camp beyond belief, in Kelly’s day his appearances dancing as a sailor in Anchors Aweigh were attempts to associate him with a tough, masculine, heterosexual military image, paradoxically reinforced by his homoerotic interactions with co-star Frank Sinatra.

What makes Cohan’s arguments all the more convincing is the way he has been able to contrast the cultural knowledge, and therefore interpretations, of the historical periods in question, with the cultural productivity of later periods, which acted to re-interpret and re-invent the meaning of the MGM musical. He does this both by examining the way audiences of the day read the films (in the context of the popular culture they were embedded in at that time), and the way in which these films have been repackaged in recent times in their cable television broadcasts and re-releases in deluxe DVDs. By taking this approach of attempting to separate original and current meanings, as well as the mainstream and oppositional interpretations, Cohan shows the ways in which the idea of the musical has dramatically shifted in meaning despite contemporary attempts to market the musical as a fixed example of Hollywood excess.


Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical
November 2005

By Steve Cohan
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-82223-3595-6
$23.95 trade paperback
384 pp, 103 b&w illus.