Garland As Camp
See also: Camp (style)In discussing Judy Garland's camp appeal, gay film scholar Richard Dyer has defined camp as "a characteristically gay way of handling the values, images and products of the dominant culture through irony, exaggeration, trivialisation, theatricalisation and an ambivalent making fun of and out of the serious and respectable." Garland is camp, he asserts, because she is "imitable, her appearance and gestures copiable in drag acts". He calls her "ordinariness" in her early MGM films camp in their "failed seriousness" and her later style "wonderfully over-the-top." Garland herself acknowledged her camp appeal during her lifetime, saying "When I die I have visions of fags singing 'Over the Rainbow' and the flag at Fire Island being flown at half mast." Fire Island, a resort community with a large LGBT presence, is also referenced in Garland's final film, I Could Go On Singing, described as "her most gay film" and as the film most aware of its gay audience.
Read more about this topic: Judy Garland As Gay Icon
Famous quotes containing the words garland and/or camp:
“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“Men consort in camp and town
But the poet dwells alone.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)