(no subject)

[sekritomg]

skrtomg said:

You should probably write a paragraph of meta on "Asspen."

lalondes answered:

South Park's greatest metatextual successes frequently result from strict adherence to the esoterica of bygone media. The 2002 episode “Asspen” is one such success, constructing an exaggerated, artificial replica of 1980s sports films merely by cleaving precisely to their peculiar style and diction. Its plot and dialogue are virtually indistinguishable from those of its source material, and yet the result is mordant parody rather than sentimental tribute. As Sontag writes in her Notes on ‘Camp,’ the purpose of such technique is to “[see] everything in quotation marks” and to “understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” In “Asspen,” Stan Marsh assumes the role of victim-to-victor protagonist whose impoverished masculinity may only be rectified via an enthusiastic embrace of athleticism and the butch aesthetic. Kyle, in a markedly unsubtle queering of the episode’s inspirations, is rendered a pining, desperate lover, concerned above all with Stan’s well-being and, by extension, the survival of their relationship. In one notable scene, Kyle, looking moribund and gripping a photograph of himself and Stan locked in an embrace, stands in the shadow of a craggy, impossibly steep mountain. This begs the question: what messages about queerness are conveyed by the intentional deployment of obviously phallic imagery during a moment of severe thanatophobia? Although the implicit connection of queerness to peril is fraught with homophobic connotation, the scene functions to inspire sympathy for Kyle in his pining for Stan, and suggests a symbolic burial of the heteromasculine melodrama of Hot Dog… The Movie and its ilk.

This is everything I was dreaming of, thank you. I am so incredibly into this kind of over-the-top analytical stuff, and “Asspen” is a good episode for it because there is an intense Stan/Kyle theme running through the story, but it scarcely receives the kind of attention similar Stan/Kyle dynamics in “Guitar Queer-o” and “Follow That Egg” have garnered.

Well, this didn’t go where I thought it was going.

I think the defining aspect of your assessment here is the relationship between South Park and camp. Indeed, for a show that is primary-colored, a construction-paper farce that puts profane and sacred adult issues into the mouths of children, I am not sure if Sontag’s approach has been applied to South Park or not. (Note that hers is not the only definition of camp, but the one that seems to hold the most water when the topic is broached.) I want to put this notion of hers at the forefront: camp is a

sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous — these are grave matters …

The basest application for Sontag’s framework is the oppression of gay men in the postwar era. (She was writing in 1964, just ahead of the counterculture era.) “Camping” pertained to a system of language and behavior that in effect took the oppression and subjugation of gay men — ostensibly an immensely “grave matter” — and spun it into frivolity. This was accomplished through the adoption of artifice, particularly the artifice of gendered sex roles. Sex roles in “quotation marks,” as you might note. The primordial gay liberation activist Mattachine Society argued for the acceptance of homosexuality by constructing gay male identity as a sort of neutered, sexless, well-behaved lack of threat. Camp appeared to be absent from their agenda, as to treat a “grave matter” like gay acceptance with frivolity was to establish a threat to which mainstream society might act defensively. The camp paradigm is vicious and hostile when thrown into harsh light. It exposes the absurdity in structures we otherwise see as natural and accept widely. A man in drag highlights the flaws in how female gender presentation has been developed and dictated. (Notably, drag queens played a crucial role in fomenting the resistance actions that would later be called the Stonewall Riots.)

South Park as a TV show more often than not takes this tack. Staging adult behaviors and tropes that are widely viewed as normative with children playing all roles highlights issues with those behaviors and tropes. When, in “Lil’ Crime Stoppers,” for example, the 9-year-old characters act out beat-for-beat, the violence-, sex-, and class-motivated exploitation of a police procedural. When this exploitation is played by adults in a normalized setting is it normalized and accepted. Through the lens of four children a sense of discomfort that has been negated in the “normal” context is evident. Episodes of this type can be read as camp as they take the “grave matters” of income disparity, sex work, corruption in law enforcement, and brutal deaths and put them into a frivolous context. At one point in the episode the boys strip naked and shower together. When a group of grown men is shown showering together the viewer naturally assumes nothing that would offend the sensibilities is transpiring, as the viewer does not want to accept that there is something sexual and vulnerable in that act. When it is a group of children the denial of sexuality and vulnerability is discarded, leaving the viewer to find the scene humorous in order to negotiate his sense of discomfort. Likewise, when the group of exposed children is confronted by a group of nearly naked grown men, the incorrectness of such a scene demonstrates the extent to which crime dramas have become immune to critique based on “taste.” Casting a crime drama with children allows the subject matter to become queered through the lens of camp sensibility.

In many South Park' episodes this use of camp is highly effective. In some cases, however, the application of Sontag's paradigm ultimately fails. Often it might be said that the show is “in bad taste.”  Sontag defines “taste”:

Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea …

She then goes on to state that in order to define “camp,” it is necessary to rely on “jottings, rather than an essay” since the definition of camp requires the author to be “tentative and nimble.” Episodes of South Park have for years been infamously written in a period of six days, during which time the episode is conceived, scripted, voiced, and animated. Episodes often, and more frequently in recent years, seemingly stumble across multiple plot points, character perspectives, media references, and sociopolitical positions before ending on an ambiguous note, or one that ends the episode flippantly, or without closure. In this sense each episode can be said to represent “jottings” rather than an “essay” espousing a particular position or point. Through this limited methodology the show begins to resemble something with “no system and no proofs.” A viewer of South Park would be loathe to describe it without a “consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.” At the same time this fleeting tendency, difficult to define and subject to no “proof,” arguably becomes irresponsible when it attempts to make social and political arguments using Sontag’s camp sensibility as a tool. It is worth noting that when gay men in postwar, pre-counterculture Western societies, particularly Britain and America, used camp to subvert graveness with frivolity, they occupied a suppressed and oppressed position which camp existed to negotiate and make bearable. Camp was, in other words, a coping mechanism. The creators of South Park, on the other hand, occupy an almost opposite social position.

I invite commentary on whether South Park's use of camp as a sensibility is justified and/or effective.

Comments

[worstbehaviour.livejournal.com]

i just created this LJ account literally solely to reply to you here - i don't know if it actually gave me a journal? i signed up through twitter? anyway.

this is magnificent. truly. first of all, your point about the use of children to expose problematic elements of adult culture is really well-taken. i think it's interesting to note that for every l'il crime stoppers-esque thread where the boys are playing at adulthood and in the process exposing its flaws, there is an instance of the boys taking a more direct, didactic approach and naming the problem without any kind of pretense - like the end of cartman joins NAMBLA, for instance, or kyle's speech to his mom in the pivotal sp: blu battle scene. they also occasionally do the reverse - projecting childlike behaviours onto adults like randy and plumbing his babyish whining for comedy. that almost always feels less subversive, though.

i agree with you about the flaws in south park's writing - especially the frustratingly flippant endings - but it does seem to me that at this point in the show's life, the writing process has become pretty systematized, and there isn't a lot of variety in episodic structure from one week to the next. there have been a few exceptions in recent years, like the you're getting old/assburgers duo and the mysterion arc, but for a show that really takes pride in being bizarre and off-the-wall, things often do feel really formulaic. i can see some parallels between what's happened to south park and this whole notion of cramming a sensibility into the mold of a system. south park used to have this really anarchic, chaotic verve, and it's still there, but it's neutered. you're getting old and assburgers were pretty explicit on that count.

that very last bit about camp as a coping mechanism is interesting - the only really clear example i can think of where the creators use camp to cope with oppression would be in the little glimpses we get into kyle's family - you know, their jewishness sticking out like a sore thumb in a small, overwhelmingly christian town, kyle breaking into emotional song after being denied the opportunity to eat christmas snow. matt has said that a lot of kyle's experiences were his own, and those uses of camp would best fit into sontag's paradigm, i think. there are other uses of camp to talk about oppression (kenny's family, anything to do with token) but those obviously don't derive from matt and trey's own experiences. they do a very good job of positioning themselves as average american everymen just answering the absurdity of the world around them with more absurdity, and sometimes they hit and sometimes they miss. maybe the comedy would be more cogent if they were speaking from lived experience?

[sekrit-omg.livejournal.com]

>> projecting childlike behaviours onto adults like randy and plumbing his babyish whining for comedy

Ah, you're right, I wasn't even thinking of that, but it's there. Good point.

Camp was used by gay men in the early- to mid-twentieth century as a coping mechanism, for sure. It destabilized the systems that oppressed gay men by making light of and inverting those systems. Linguistically it allowed gay men (and on rare occasions, women) to pursue a social and sex life with other gay men by establishing a safe space that only other gay men were likely to recognize. I didn't mean for this to be an outright criticism of SP necessarily, but I think some of what is bothersome about the show is that it picks and chooses which tools it wishes to use, including camp, without acknowledging that it and its creators are in a position of power and that some of those tools, like camp, stem from the need to reclaim ground that South Park never lost.

I mean, I love this show, and I think it should be allowed to do whatever it wants because, like, free speech and whatever, and sometimes it's funny, and Stan and Kyle are cute gay loves etc. But it really bothers me that this show gets away with so much, and I think looking at it through this camp sensibility paradigm is helping me articulate where it succeeds and where it sometimes fails. And I don't mean it "gets away with" like talking poo, I mean it gets away with putting arguments about minorities written by white male millionaires in the mouths of minority characters, etc.

>> maybe the comedy would be more cogent if they were speaking from lived experience?

I have always personally felt that they do a lot better when they take on media tropes, banalities, and commonalities that are non-divisive. If you parody a genre no one gets hurt. If you parody shared childhood experiences (like, say, moving up a grade) you take on something that more or less belongs to and resonates with the entire audience. So, yeah, I think you're right; the show tends to do better and be funnier when it sticks to things for which Matt and Trey (more likely Trey) have a personal frame of reference. In this regard I'd point to "Scott Tenorman Must Die." Ridiculous, seemingly, because whose parents and have been killed and ground into chili? But I think everyone, including Trey Parker, understands what it is like to feel humiliation. And everyone knows what it's like to want revenge. That episode is successful because the pain and frustration of humiliation runs very, very deep and the drawn-out revenge fantasy is so dark, it actually becomes sort of terrifying. But we all have moments when we have emotions that run so deep we want to do that kind of damage. So, yes, the show is great when it's that kind of lived experience coming through.