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Believe it or not, studio heads rarely know what they're doing. Which is how you can have money catapulted at projects like Cleopatra or Mommie Dearest.

[Meme cutaway]: Joan Crawford taking an axe to a tree.

And especially in the case of the latter, all that ends up doing is giving an inflated budget to the kind of overwrought and overacted content that you would get in what is considered B-cinema.

And especially if that high budget B-movie pulls in an audience. Creators who love B-cinema are going to feel very validated. Like Quentin Tarantino growing up on martial arts movies, and then getting to make one of his own with a Hollywood budget. (And Kill Bill could also be described as camp, for any number of reasons.) But when it specifically came to feminine-centric burlesque esthetic, the 1980s opened a lot of doors to have producers approve movies with... more obvious camp sensibilities.

Nothing about a movie that was exclusively made to ape off of the success of a board game implies that said movie would end up becoming a camp milestone. But here we are!

In 1985, Paramount Pictures distributed Clue, the movie, which, yes, is directly inspired by the board game. And they didn't really seem to care what it was, as long as there was a movie based on it. The qualifications for meeting the outlined parameters were incredibly vague. Which could have gone one of two ways. Either you get a movie that follows the path of least resistance and you end up with a product that is phenomenally lackluster or lifeless, or you hand it to a bunch of enthusiastic creatives who really want to use that lack of specifics to play around with what they can do.

And really... when you're told you have to make a movie about a murder with a collection of arbitrary, if not otherwise, entirely mundane objects in a fabulous mansion with secret passages, with a number of outrageous murder suspects.. If you're not feeding into the natural absurdity, then you're not doing your job!

Clue, the board game, is focused around up to six players named after colors. There are nine rooms in the mansion and six murder weapons. The premise is that Mr. Body, the fabulously wealthy estate owner, is murdered at a party attended by all the suspects. Each suspect, weapon and room has a corresponding card. Each group is shuffled and one from each is selected and put in an envelope to be revealed at the end of the game. Players move select selected token around the board, going to each room looking for clues at any time after viewing any number of clue cards, not in the envelope, A player can make a guess at which three cards are in the envelope. To win, a player must guess all three correctly. If the guess is wrong, the player loses by default and is removed from the game. In game lore is that they're murdered by the real murderer.

Clue, the movie, features references to every single facet of the game, including corresponding secret passages, saying each room by name and having each murder weapon included. The primary difference is the addition of several characters: Wadsworth the butler (played by Tim Curry), Yvette the maid, the cook, the cop, the motorist, and the singing telegram girl.

Wadsworth and Yvette specifically adds an extra element to the story as they function as the rulebook. They explain to the players what this game is. Another difference is that Mr. Body is not the only body. Nearly everyone added to the plot is there to get murdered with a different murder weapon.

The way it goes is that six guests who seem to have no relation to each other are invited to Mr. Body's mansion for reasons unknown, presumably some costume party. They are told to only use provided monikers. Colonel Mustard, Mrs. White. Mrs. Peacock, Mr. Green, Professor Plum, and Miss Scarlet.

Wadsworth guides them through the rules of the evening's festivities, and after introductions, reveals that he has brought them here because they are all connected to their absent host, Mr. Body. Though none of them know Mr. Body directly, he has been secretly blackmailing all of them, and Wadsworth wants them to join together to testify against Mr. Body and to have him arrested. Mr. Body shows up, prepared for this mutiny, and has brought with him a number of murder weapons, and proposes that, instead, they murder Wadsworth and save themselves the public disgrace.

However, the lights go out and Mr. Body is murdered before the lights come back on. And then the plot gets too deliberately convoluted to really synopsisize^{[sic: synopsize]}.

They need to figure out who killed Mr. Body before the police arrive. But then people keep dying. And nobody out of the core seven can figure out who's doing it! So they all split up to search the manor in pairs for the murderer before concluding that the murderer is, in fact, one of them. All the while, new people are showing up at the house and also being murdered.

This movie racks up quite the Mr. Body count!

The film is less about plot and more about giving some of these outrageous personalities the chance to interact with each other. You've got war criminals and embezzlers, a phone service madam, a black widow who allegedly killed her husband, a professor on thin ice for having relations with his students, and a gay man. (So it's like the Republican National Convention.)

The film's plot is also a parody of McCarthyist Communist witch hunts and a juxtaposition of true American morality being upheld by this reviled group of people. And to top off the sundae, when the film was released, they shot three endings and shipped out versions to theaters at random. There was no way to be sure which ending which theater was getting.

Two of the endings incriminated either Miss Scarlet or Mrs. Peacock. But the third "true ending" revealed that Wadsworth was the real Mr. Body and that he brought them all there to cover his tracks and help him erase his evidence. However it turns out, Mr. Green, the gay one, was an undercover FBI agent and kills Mr. Body.

Now, like Martha, Baby Jane and Eve Harrington, Camp is used to highlight the ridiculousness of social conventions. In this instance, though, it's on purpose. But the primary reason why this movie gets remembered is because of this cast of characters. Specifically these horrible women who, in spite of being horrible, just slay -- in all cases literally, actually.

The difference is from the aforementioned examples is that Clue does not make any attempt to tone down these characters. They were deliberately comedic and what made them entertaining revolved around distilling the most outrageous elements of them and making that the whole character. Start with outrageous personalities and then build the world and plot to match that energy.

The shenanigans that are considered "normal" in this world fit... because everyone is living in it. If everyone's absurd, then absurd is the new normal. What also helped is that each caricature is built around a specific expression of gender, and so gender becomes the highlight of each character. Which is how you ended up with a cast that, more or less, focused upon a collection of very heightened women, and Tim Curry, and a supposedly gay character, which is what gave the gays something to latch on to.

And while Clue has its underground cult of queer fans who know this is a much better eighties comedy than the Reagan-era jerkoff-fest that was Ghostbusters, the movie did not make its money back at the box office. Part of the reason may have been the studio... overspending on a movie based on a board game. That mystery isn't so hard to figure out.

[Sound effect]: Womp womp wo--

For the longest time, campy movies were stuck to small budgets. And while it may have been because of Mommie Dearest that they began to get pulled into the mainstream, they struggled to perform well among mainstream audiences in theaters, as mentioned with Clue. But that isn't to say that there... weren't times when they did turn a profit and times that they did start getting handed substantial budgets and starring actors who were once again hot off of Oscar wins.

Believe it or not, actors are people too, which means a lot of them don't mind being in frivolously fun movies. They get to chew the scenery like Faye. But in a film environment that won't hurt their career because the movie was never meant to be taken seriously. Acting can be fun, but it's a bit of a drag if every role you do is choosing between which of your children should die in a concentration camp.

(Yeah, you'd be kidding yourself if I wasn't going to find a reason to talk about death becomes and Meryl Streep.) It takes a lot of talent to make bad acting look this good because it's not just about being a bad actor or giving a deliberately bad performance. Everyone in a scene needs to be collectively developing the sensibilities they want to project. If you have an over-the-top character acting off of a wooden character, it's just not going to be entertaining.

There are popular comedies where everyone is completely wooden, like Napoleon Dynamite. (If anyone remembers. Though, really, I'm not sure why it made such a splash.... Maybe I'm just gay. I don't know.)

If everyone is acting with the same kind of badness, than it generates a world state that the audience can take for granted and engage with. And people who act normal are the odd ones.

(I was actually tempted to talk about Rocky Horror as a case study in this one, but... th-there's enough there that's going to have to have its own video.) Anyway!

Death Becomes Her stars Meryl Streep, after she had already won two Academy Awards, and Goldie Hawn, who had already won one. Both had been receiving nominations since the seventies. Hawn was markedly more of a comedic actress, and Meryl herself was taking a turn toward more lighthearted material as she moved into her forties.

The film was also meant to feature Carrie Fisher, a good friend of Meryl Streep. Streep starred in Postcards from the Edge two years prior, a movie based on Fisher's autobiographical book of the same name. It was an ambiguously fictionalized account of Fisher's own experience with rehab and her own mother. She refused to specify which elements of the story were based on fact and which were fictionalized... for reasons.

Well, but Carrie's role was cut from the story to save time. (She was also cast as Miss Scarlet in Clue, but had to drop out of the role when she was admitted to rehab. Don't do drugs, kids.)

Anyway, without Carrie, Merrill, an actress who had come up via the stage, was nearly driven to the brink of madness due to the struggles she had while working with the special effects. (Something Princess Leia would have probably been able to help her with.) Because though critics didn't really "get" the movie, the special effects were cutting edge for the time.

Death Becomes Her fits all the stops^{[sic: ???]} of camp sensibilities to a science. It's vapid, conceited, feminine-centric, over-acted, and goes out of its way to try and tell you that it has no substance, but is instead a showcase of style. Merrill plays Madison Ashton--

[On screen correction]: "Her name is "Madeline Ashton" NOT "Madison Ashton" WHY DO I KEEP CALLING HER MADISON?!"

--a Broadway actress who's famous without anyone being sure why she's famous.

In spite of her acclaim, people struggle to tolerate her talent. Enter Helen Sharp, a childhood friend of Ashton's, played by Hawn, an author who is engaged to renowned plastic surgeon Ernest Melville. Helen takes him to see one of Madison's shows, and though the audience can't really stomach whatever it is that she's doing, Dr. Melville seems to be an avid fan. Sharp tentatively takes him to meet her old friend backstage, where we see that Ashton is frustrated with the growing lines on her face. What better fit for her than a plastic surgeon?

In their apartment, Helen confesses that this meeting was a test: that Madison has stolen every man from her, and that before they got married, she wanted to make sure that Earnest could be immune to Madison's siren song. He's not.

As one would expect, of a comedy pushing women into excessive levels of drama, Earnest's betrayal of Helen pushes her into a spiral that lasts over seven years. To articulate that she has hit rock bottom, Hawn is stuffed into an outrageous fat suit, lives surrounded by her cats, eats icing from the can, and torments herself by watching Ashton's horrible movies. Madison's career, in spite of her talentlessness, has skyrocketed due to her youthful visage, assisted by her husband.

Helen is dragged to a mental institution, where the very name "Ashton" drives other patients into a frenzy because she just can't stop talking about her.

And when she is reprimanded by a therapist for refusing to let go of Madison, she realizes what an excellent idea would be... to eliminate Madison.

Fast forward another seven years and we pick up with Madison in earnest. Earnest has been driven to dire alcoholism and is now a reconstructive mortician, since his career as a plastic surgeon fell through. Though he is considered the best at what he does: painting dead bodies.

Madison's career has also all but dried up, which she blames on her aged visage. They're invited to a party for the release of Helen's new book, Forever Young, a collection of youth and beauty tips.

Madison agrees to attend for the chance to torment her once-friend yet again, going to her spa for a regular face treatment and receiving an oh-so-sketch business card for an elite service. Madison initially blows it off, but when she finds Helen is shockingly youthful and gorgeous, she is thrown into a nosedive. Desperate, she drives to the address on the card, a grand Gothic castle in the heart of Beverly Hills... which is actually not that unrealistic.

The estate proprietor reveals herself to be 71 years old, despite appearing to be a woman in her thirties-- o-or her twenties.

She offers Madison an opportunity: a potion of eternal youth, for a steep fee. And the promise that Madison will stage her own death after a certain number of years, she hesitantly takes the potion and is left with a warning.

Meanwhile, Helen goes to Ashton's mansion and seduces her former fiance. She convinces him that they can be happy forever. As long as he kills Madison Ashton. She outlines her whole plan, and when it seems like he's committed, she leaves.

Madison returns. Now, youthful and without a single care in the world. And as one of those cares was once Earnest, she no longer has to hide her contempt for him. In a heated argument, he pushes her down their gorgeous marble staircase. But as earnest calls Helen to tell her in a panic that he accidentally killed Madison in a way that... doesn't fit the plan, Madison picks herself up and twists herself back together.

When taken to the emergency room, it is revealed that she's... dead.

What better fit for her than a reconstructive mortician? Earnest takes this as a miracle, and as a sign that he is meant to be with Madison forever, perpetually fixing her up and keeping her skin radiating that healthy glow that only a makeup airbrush can achieve. Helen... isn't a fan of the idea, as it so happens, Madison isn't a fan of her.

She takes a shotgun from a display and blasts Helen into a fountain in the atrium. Taking Earnest aside, Madison explains how they will hide the body while Helen picks herself up. Madison deduces that Helen drank the same potion that she did, and naturally, the first thing she does is read Helen for filth, for writing a book about "Youth Tips" after drinking a potion of Eternal Youth.

Fake pitches calling out fake bitches, an eternal deadlock.

There's only one way for them to settle the score:

Realizing the fight is going nowhere, the girls settle down to have a heart to heart. It turns out the reason Madison set out to steal every one of Helen's men is because, well, Madison grew up in a lower income bracket than Helen, and in high school, Madison thought that Helen thought she was trash. And Helen agrees: she didn't think that Madison was trash.

They realized that this petty squabble over boys was never real. It was just something that they were doing to hurt each other. And that they don't have to hurt each other anymore. Within 5 minutes, they go from literally killing each other to being best friends. Girls! (I'm so glad I'm gay.)

The last time Ernest saw these women, they were going for the throat. Now they're best friends! Begging Ernest to spray paint Helen into a normal skin tone. Nothing to be done about the hole in her stomach, but just means she can't wear a two piece anymore. Ernest now sees that... this is not a miracle. This is a curse. And that after giving Helen a fresh coat, he's done. And gone.

But the girls come to a realization: What happens when they need a touch up?And even if they hold him hostage, what happens if he dies?! So the kidnap him, and take him to the immortal woman where she makes a pretty convincing argument for him to drink the potion:

I mean, I'm sold.

Ernest decides that immortal living seems cold and lonely, and then tries to escape from the castle. And then immediately finds himself at the center of a convention of immortal celebrities, most of whom are those who we've speculated to have faked their deaths to escape the spotlight, like Elvis and Jim Morrison.

Helen and Madison chase him through the house, pressuring him to reconsider. Ernest chooses to fall to his death, but instead survives and escapes. 37 years later, we're at Ernest's funeral. With the rest of his life. He became a philanthropist, adventurer, and a wonderful person. (Hilarious, considering a point is made of him being a Republican.)

Helen and Madison sit in the back of the church, bitching at each other under their veils. The minister's eulogy says that... through kindness and charity and the people he left to remember him fondly, Ernest found the secret to eternal life.

The girls excuse themselves from the service, flipping off the veils and -- Oh God! They, uh... needle each other for their poor makeup skills and reference past injuries that further... deteriorated their bodies... while bickering about where they parked the car and whose responsibility it was to keep track.

Helen ends up teetering on the edge of some steps, with Madison considering just letting her fall. But they're friends! And Helen insists that they fall together. Girls!

The film didn't do great critically, but made a tidy profit, on top of becoming a mainstay for queer audiences. I feel that while Mommie Dearest typified camp on an accidental level, Death Becomes Her is the perfect instance of how to create intentional badness with a budget.

I find a lot of those intentionally bad movies tend to get a little stale halfway through because they keep leaning on the same sensibility. When it comes to good-bad movies. You really need to keep switching up the energy and leaning on plot inconsistencies to keep the audience on their toes. Like in Death Becomes Her when the story is retroactively changed in the second half.

In the opening, we see Madison as glamorous, successful ,and confident. Helen is mousy, dull, and does not seem to be thriving. However, later on, the backstory is seemingly changed, with no prior indication. Madison was the poor and unglamorous one, and it was Helen who was elegant. This is never addressed or explained, and in both instances the plot was crafted like this specifically to sell emotional development, whereas continuity... wasn't seen as important.

In many ways, this typify is the style of narrative that is trying to be everything. To the point where not only did critics not see the value in this comedy, but they wholly bought into the projected vapidity and shallowness of the characters. The film was decried as having no substance at all, when in fact, there's a strong communicated message about gender normativity and presentation, societal expectations, and the role of women in Hollywood.

It's not even that hard to see it unless, you yourself are embedded in the world that the movie is making a parody of. Because this movie, like all good camp, is criticizing the normativity of society, by highlighting the absurdity of social expectations. That an old man can become beloved by all, but old women fall into obscurity. This camp is funny because it's pointing out exactly why these social tropes are so absurd. By depicting these people as acting the way society expects them to.

And, you know, women like this... especially in Hollywood... are... rumored to exist.

Now, camp, as a style of comedy, was still a bit niche, and people who weren't in the know might not have bought tickets. What was mistaken about Mommie Dearest is that it was not necessarily the film that drew the fandom, but the diva herself. And indeed a large component of camp was rooted in diva worship. And there are few who so perfectly embody the deliberate camp diva than the mistress of the dark herself: Cassandra Peterson, better known by her stage name and iconic persona, Elvira.

A struggling actress, Peterson showed up to audition for what was meant to be a temporary gig to stand in for Vampira, a Morticia Addams-type host of a local Los Angeles TV show that showed bad, cheap, b-horror movies. Elvira was a sexy parody of Vampira, who is a parody of Morticia, who is a parody of the monster ladies of classic Hollywood horror movies.

With each separation from the source material, each version more honestly projected why the former woman had a fandom until you got to Elvira, who represented the purest expression of why producers continued to carry on the trope: boobs.

Peterson herself is a worldly and intelligent lady who specifically had a strong hand in crafting the character. The sexual exploitation of the character itself is a parody of Hollywood production values when it comes to designing women, and depicting women in general. Elvira was just stripping away the posturing: boobs.

And once again, we're in a place where the straights have... no idea why the gays are so drawn to a woman who builds 80% of her comedic material around her cleavage, without realizing that it's because she's making fun of the people who are too hypnotized by her undulating memories to notice that she's making fun of them, in a loving way, of course.

So every week, Elvira relaxed while gleefully torturing the audience with bad movie after bad movie, popping in once in a while to let the audience know she was in just as much pain as they were. Her popularity skyrocketed as the show started being syndicated around the country, eventually leading to her strutting her way onto the big screen in Elvira: Mistress of the Dark.

Absolute classic that must be seen by everyone, Mistress of the Dark follows Elvira as she angrily quits her job hosting a bad movie TV show when the station's new owner sexually harasses her. She's going to start an act in Vegas, but needs 50 grand to make the project work. That's a bit of a problem since... well, she doesn't have 50 grand. But as luck would have it, her great Aunt Morgana just bit the dust, and left her an inheritance.

So she packs up her fabulous convertible and heads on to Falwell, Massachusetts, which she soon discovers is filled with the most conservative, boring, uptight bunch of backward thinking people she's ever met. There's a reason the town is named after the notoriously conservative and queer hating televangelist, Jerry Falwell. And here she discovers that her inheritance... is actually her great aunt's dilapidated house and her poodle.

So she's stuck in this ratchet^{[sic: wretched]}-ass little town until she can sell the place. The only monetary offer she gets is $50 for a recipe book from her then-unknown Uncle Vincent. She agrees to sell it, but before she can, things go awry.

Almost every adult in town decides that she's basically the devil incarnate, though the teenagers love her. The townspeople try burning her at the stake anyway. But, as she has at least a little bit of luck, it turns out great Aunt Morgana was actually a witch. The recipe book was the spell book, and she can harness some elemental forces using her ring she found laying around the house, which brings a downpour that douses the fire.

But now there's a new problem, because Uncle Vincent is actually a warlock, and he wants that spell book so he can do evil warlock things. Elvira leads the vicious old man back to her house, where they engage in a magical battle that sets the place on fire. But Elvira wins out in the end and banishes Vincent to the underworld, while the house and all the magical artifacts are destroyed.

But silver lining? She was Vincent's only living relative! So she gets his estate after his death, leaving her with enough money to hit the road and start her Vegas show. The movie didn't do great at the box office, when first released, but has become a cult classic for gays and horror fans alike. The obvious parallels of being an outsider in a small town are, well, obvious. But became a big draw for queer audiences.

Not only was Elvira an outspoken ally -- even in the 1980s, holding fundraisers to help AIDS victims -- but she knew exactly what being in a small town and not being normal was like. She'd go so far as inviting all the town's teenagers over to her house to spruce the place up, transforming the dingy gray exterior into a cascade of rainbows.

And more than a few of the cast members actually were queer. Because Elvira attracts us like flies to a gorgeous corpse.

She also dedicated the film to Robert Redding, a close friend who helped create the iconic look of Elvira, but passed away from complications with AIDS in 1986. She even named the love interest in the film after him.

Since the film's release, Elvira has remained an icon in the queer and horror communities. And last year, when she released her autobiography, "Yours Cruelly, Elvira", she revealed to the world that she'd been in a loving relationship with another woman since 2002. Fully cementing her queer icon status!

She'd been worried about coming out for years... because she was convinced her fan base would abandon her. Of course, considering her fan base is made up of horny straight guys, women, and gay men with good taste, I don't think she had to worry nearly as much as she did.

But going back to Mistress of the Dark, an interesting tidbit of information is that Tim Burton was actually in the running to direct and was Elvira's pick for the job, since he'd done such a great job with Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, and she was good friends with Paul Reubens, Pee-Wee Herman. But Tim Burton didn't get his dark, campy hands on the Mistress Of The Dark.

He was too busy to take on the job because of two other movies. First came Beetlejuice, an exercise of pure camp in and of itself... and then the camp noir classic.... Ba--

Camp as an aesthetic can be seen in good cinema. The thing is... you need to build an entire world from the ground up. This world needs to visibly function on a separate set of established laws, laws to which the visual and written aspects relentlessly adhere. This must be a world where this manner of action and style is projected to an audience for whom their sense of reality is locked in the suspension of disbelief.

So everyone involved in the process needs to commit. Which is probably a rule for absurdism or fantasy rather than one exclusively limited to camp, which itself may be a subgenre of absurdism. Using these rules, there are times, albeit rare, where camp sensibilities break through a cult audience and end up being must-see movies. As is the case with Tim Burton's Batman movies, specifically Batman Returns.

But it's worth pointing out that 1989's Batman is something I like to describe as "camp noir", taking every individual trope of noir sensibilities and pushing it to impractical heights. Design to takes precedence over everything else. The Batsuit he could not move in. the Batmobile with the transmission that would just get ripped out from a single pothole. The Joker's singular marriage to his clownish brand.

It's usually not considered camp because... well, because it's enjoyed by straight men. And if straight men enjoy something, it must be higher than camp. But it does say quite a bit about being a social outsider. Batman Returns just does it all better.

Batman '89 was, briefly, the highest grossing movie of all time. And while Batman Returns made its budget back, and then some, it only made about half as much at the box office and cost much more to make. Batman Returns, though, is the one that does get remembered on account of there being more memorable moments. And though critics lauded this movie as being superior to its predecessor... parents... felt this movie was a bit too dark for their children.

[Disgusted] What a little nark.

No, really. This movie became a rallying cry for parents groups. This kid [Shows Danny again] can read off his memorized script that the producers fed him before the segment. Sure. But it doesn't change the fact that kids movies of the day... could get very violent.

Not to mention, Jurassic Park was only one year away, so parents groups can scapegoat the violence all they like. They can target the dark imagery. But what's really going on is an attack against what they really have a problem with.

I mean, Catwoman was... always meant to be a little sexy. And this is true going all the way back to Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt in early comic books. But this is a suit that Michelle Pfeiffer had to get stitched into. And this is a character that specifically used sex as a weapon in a way that was closer to Basic Instinct than Adam West.

And yes, the plot of this movie is that Batman is out to stop the penguin and expose him for being a gang leader while he's running for mayor. Such and such contrivances. The real throughline of the movie, though, is carried by Selina Kyle, her dual identity with Catwoman, and the chaos that occupies her mind. Burton's Batman movies were comfortable playing fast and loose with character lore.

The important thing was that the character represented the essence of what the character in the comics was. Which is why nobody is particularly up in arms about how the first movie gave the Joker a name and a backstory, and also why they were comfortable with the changes made to the Penguin and Catwoman.

Instead of being a street kid who deployed martial arts and gymnastics to carry out heists, Selina is an overstressed, overworked, underachieving assistant to Max Shreck. Shreck himself being this parody of Trumpian business moguls of the 1980s. While Selina is competent in her work, attempts she makes to break that glass ceiling... cut deeper the further she reaches. Her apartment is pink and bright, stuffed with dollhouses, frilly pillows, and stuffed animals.

And despite her attempt to appear as girlish as possible in order to seem attractive to men, she just can't bring herself to pretend to be less talented and smart than she is. She gets home to a message on her answering machine where her boyfriend is dumping her because she refuses to let him win tennis matches. She also hears a message she left for herself, telling her exhausted post-work variant that she needs to go back to the office to do something she predicted that she would forget.

So back she goes, where she, alone, finds the truth of a proposed power plant that Max is trying to sell to the city of Gotham. He plans to drain power from the city to hold it hostage. When confronted by him, she's perfectly fine to keep this all under the table and be a good little secretary. But Max doesn't really seem to like the idea of loose ends and pushes her out a window. Whether she miraculously survives with severe head trauma or whether she died and was resurrected by cat magic is unclear.

She makes her way home, a zombie of herself, and by force of habit turns her answering machine on. When she hears a message about a service offering tips for how to seduce and marry your boss, she snaps, ripping her apartment apart. She targets the soft pink things she had collected and takes a can of black spray paint to the walls and dollhouse. She...

Chaos. She chooses chaos. She becomes Catwoman and sets out to destroy any man who has wronged her. Which not only is Max, but anyone who stands between her and her plan to destroy him like he destroyed her. Which includes the Batman. And after an uneasy alliance falls out, the penguin, too. All while wearing a mask that she feels is more comfortable than her face. Not all that much unlike Joan Crawford.

Selena herself is locked in a dualistic psychological state, between the woman she convinced herself she had to be and the wild, unpredictable, hedonistic, and reactionary Catwoman. All the while, Selina goes through her nine lives for nothing but trying to exist separately from a man's world.

At a masquerade party where Bruce and Selina attend without masks (because their faces are the masks), Bruce tries his best to talk down Selina from outright murdering Max. But criminal justice in this society, even if he did get sentenced to more than just a slap on the wrist, is not justice for Selina. She uses up lives four through eight to get that revenge... and then mysteriously vanishes.

Now, aside from establishing an environment where line delivery like this is camp in itself:

It's kind of a crime that this movie isn't held up as a sleeper feminist hit from the nineties. It's very easy to read Selina's Murder by Max as an allegory for sexual assault, especially following her ongoing psychological breakdown over the course of the plot. But as I alluded, Selina's duality is indicative of the reality of women against the patriarchy's expectations of what "a woman" ought to be.

Selina herself fails at being "a woman" in all respects, except for the definition of woman that she creates. This woman, while dripping in femininity, expresses that femininity in a way that is neither meek nor subservient. But is still undeniably peak femininity.

Demonstrating that womanhood and powerlessness is an artificial construct generated by men to keep half the population subjugated, and thus decrease the number of people who can challenge their power.

So what happens when a woman does challenge their power? They kil her... again and again and again. Even men who are allegedly allies, simply by enforcing the systems of justice that enforce her suppression... the male ally, in turn, enforces her suppression without intending to.

With gender and gender expression being brought to the center of attention, yet obscured by character pathos, this is the kind of thing the queer audiences read into. Even if you're just plain gay, you end up doing a whole lot more thinking about gender mechanics simply because we live in a world that still precludes gay from various gender ideals. Specifically the core of what we consider masculinity.

So we tune in to this, the reclamation and redefinition of gender, in a way that works for us rather than suppresses us. And a process that Selina survives to boot. And these are messages that resonate with us in a way where Pfeiffer's Catwoman is still regarded as the best, in which any number of drag queens will attempt to depict.

But why does Pfeiffer's Catwoman get elevated to a pedestal when Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy is forgotten? Perhaps tragically.

Uma Thurman is a phenomenal actress, who deserves better than what she got, and deserves more recognition for the work that she's done. Joel Schumacher's Batman films themselves befit an entirely more shamelessly obvious definition of camp than Burton's. Whereas Burton's was a highly stylized depiction, linked together with a singular artistic theme, Schumacher's Batman is The Death Becomes Her to Burton's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Which more than valid.

But for most of his two movies, nobody really has the slightest idea what movie they're in. It's like a collection of movie stars were pulled together to shove their respective brands into the film. The ending result is something so disjointed and chaotic and... absurdly horny, that it's hard not to find it entertaining at the very least.

And Uma Thurman seems to be the only person who has gay friends, because she knew what was up. These films, unlike the Burton versions, were here to primarily sell toys, sure. But artistically, the intention was to present the idea of comic book characters. Because these were not the comic book characters.

Uma Thurman showed up to spill tea in a bodysuit. Her character was constructed around a quasi-eco terrorist vibe with a heavy overtone of magic. Dr. Pamela Isley in the comics, however, is usually depicted as independent, especially of male characters. In the movie, however, is tied to strong male characters who more or less run the show.

In conjunction with being scripted to be subservient to a man, all the while using her feminine wiles to manipulate him, she was also juxtaposed against this... version of Batgirl. So while Thurman's Poison Ivy was a powerful lady who served, she was foiled against the "good woman": one who worked with other men and whose plot was constructed around learning how to ask them for permission. At the same time ias doing that "Girlboss" thing.

But Camp... wasn't always destined to be married to strong feminine archetypes and subversions. Yes, all these films are remembered in no small part due to the strong queer following, and like Schumacher, queer creators work tirelessly to project camp aesthetic to an otherwise naive and innocent straight audience.

It wasn't long before the entertainment industry as a whole recognized the power of camp, not just as a way to covertly bring in queer audiences without actually showing queer characters, but as a way to bring in all audiences. You see Camp can be very all inclusive if you choose to let it be. The hypermasculinity of the works of directors like Michael Bay and Zack Snyder are just as campy as a busload of drag queens just pushed in the opposite extreme.

Instead of making a first set of the femininity, they make a farce of the masculinity. Whether the director is intended to or not. The glistening muscles of 300 Spartans, lovingly depicted in slow motion for maximum impact, led to posters for that movie adorning the walls of just as many gay boys as straight boys when it first came out.

The sequel was even supposed to feature a gay couple, which Snyder fought for but was overruled by the studio, at which point he left the project. The sequel instead features Lena Headey in the scene, stealing role of Queen Gordo, a badass, powerful woman ripped from the mind of John Waters and planted into a homo erotic Greek epic. I'd argue that this is another drag queen role that's played by a woman.

And while Hollywood was accidentally turning male power fantasies into peak camp cinema, knowing filmmakers were bringing camp into the mainstream, the over-the-top caricature of an aged actress played by Catherine O'Hara in Schitt's Creek, knowingly took the absurdity of Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford and turned it up to an 11 and then broke the dial off. Moira Rose, former soap opera starlet, seems to exist in a reality in which the golden age of Hollywood never ended.

Even as she lives in a rundown motel clutching on to her fabulous wigs and outfits for some comfort in the chaotic world of normalcy. But knowing Camp character earned O'Hara an Emmy for her career defining performance, whereas it earned Dunaway a Razzie. Decades before, though, nobody would argue that Moira and Joan are the same kind of character. The same kind of performance is given.

The difference being that O'Hara knows how far she's pushing it and then keeps pushing at the right moments but brings it back in when needed. Creating a camp character you wish you could be friends with instead of one you'd flee from. And of course, there's RuPaul's Drag Race now in its hundred and 44th season. Taking every possible aspect of a camp sensibility and making it mainstream.

Drag queens, who were once the camp idols drawing crowds at gay bars, are now filling stadiums as the absurdity of a man dressing as Joan Crawford becomes not so absurd. Camp has always had a loving, cisgender heterosexual audience who either discovered it through queer friends or just happened to be hetero. As with taste here on YouTube, Cold crush pictures has done more videos about camp classics than I ever have.

And he's got a girlfriend. Even anime has embraced camp. The intense masculinity of shows like Dragon Ball Z with the glistening abs and queer coded villains has an unintentional camp factor. Ed Wood would creamed their pants over and do not even attempt to tell me that Jojo's bizarre adventure isn't one of the biggest things ever created. In fact, one could argue that camp is the primary aspect that gives Jojo's bizarre adventure its primary fandom.

In Susan Sontag's defining essay on Camp. She explains that camp is a sensibility, a mode of estheticism, a private code, a badge of identity. The hallmark of camp, she says, is the spirit of extravagance. It can be broad, but not everything can be camp. Here I disagree, because everything can be camp. If it tries hard enough. And that, I think, is my definition of camp.

Trying hard enough, putting your all into something that others would expect little from seeing where the limits lie and then stepping over them, enjoying your exuberant love of something instead of hiding it. The brilliant cattiness of All about Eve, The venomous shade of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. The fabulous Bitchiness of Death Becomes Her. The beautiful absurdity of drag Queen road trips, the weaponized feminism of Pfeiffer's Catwoman, the voluptuous feathers and blinding sequins of Elton John.

The living art projects of David Bowie, the boundless genre defying queer energy of Freddie Mercury, and even the glistening muscles of 300 Spartans and enemy Superman. It's all camp. It's all more than a little queer. And it's all us. We queers not so secretly define the culture we live in, no matter what the straights think. So this June of 2022 Pride Month in the United States go to parties, parades, events, seminars, protests, as you normally would.

But for those of you who don't recognize entries in this list, I hope you make some time for movie marathons. By all means, watch the movies on this list. But there are so many other movies and shows that I haven't even mentioned here. These are the cultural milestones that have helped shape queer culture and have helped us endure persecution and scrutiny.

When the politicians and the zealots and the terfs and the homophobes and the hatemongers come for us and push us out the proverbial window. We just keep getting up. We've got more than nine lives. We've got hundreds, thousands, millions. We survived the trauma of our own Mommie Dearest and drink the potion of immortality. So we're going to be around forever.

No matter how many Eve Harringtons try to steal our luster, no matter how many small towns try to burn us at the stake. No matter how many fiends try to murder us with a candle stick in the library, we're not going anywhere. Hell, we can take over the whole damn world. Because if camp has taught us anything, it's how to make the absurd into reality.