Grant Yoon ’27 is a prospective English major. They enjoy writing poetry for the campus literary magazine, “The Gallery,” and reading whatever books have a good vibe to them (currently on Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies). They also like sitting by large bodies of water, drinking lots of coffee and overthinking movies, song and things in general. Contact them at giyoon@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
As I sat reading Susan Sontag’s famous “Notes on Camp” this summer, wondering how long we have to wait for the necessary emotional detachment that allows something to be camp, a sudden thought struck me: where can we find earnest, but technically flawless failures produced in real time? The Flat Hat opinions section. Thanks to its open invitation to submit, a few hidden gems lie among the otherwise reasonable and well-composed pieces.
For the uninitiated, camp taste is, as Sontag put it, enjoying something in quotation marks. “Saltburn,” for example, was COA (camp on arrival): a glitzy film so overloaded with the director’s pretentious “intentions” that its attempt was laughable but its style immaculate; the movie was incredibly enjoyable not in spite of, but because of how naively constructed and overdone it was. Elizabeth Brady’s article “The Children Yearn for Indie Sleaze” outlines and expresses this taste very well, and while a little too self-aware to be camp, helped lay out the criteria for my new project: finding the most camp Flat Hat Opinions articles of 2023-2024. Who went off the rails with their passion, but kept going full steam ahead anyway? Here are my top three.
- In the top spot is the infamous Student Election reaction article: “Student Assembly election reveals deeper problems at College.” Someone unironically comparing the election of a progressive campaign to a return to Jim Crow era discrimination after the Reconstruction is delightfully funny, absurdly serious while being received unseriously, or in other words, camp. The intensity of emotion motivating an essentially absurd position, and its patronizing tone, makes for a number of hilarious moments, again not in spite of, but because of the author’s complete lack of intention to be funny.
- Close in second follows the response to first place. Though “Comfortability is not the cause: Counter to SA election op-ed” is for the most part coherent, it was almost as stimulating and enjoyable as the first for different reasons: the piece was written by four freshmen boys (all majoring in government or history) collaborating in a highly formal and unnecessary argument, citing YikYak posts to respond to the first piece’s various outlandish claims (which virtually no one accepted). Even more camp was those authors ending their piece with: “Wang concludes by saying, ‘I made the claim that this election was a mark of white liberal comfortability. I ask that you prove me wrong.’ Consider it done.” Incredible.
- In third came “Stanley obsession exposes moral decay, brain rot rooted in American consumerism.” What I liked most about this piece was how it was seemingly addressed to the average consumer-maxxing Stanely cup enjoyer, and bashed that reader appropriately: Because you are collecting Stanley cups, the author asserts, “you can say goodbye to those baby turtles you claim to care so much about with your woke purchases of bamboo straws.” The author also throws her hands up at some points, saying “the average American simply cannot help themself but to indulge in capitalistic greed.” Capitalistic greed, meaning children buying more than one Stanley cup. The most camp part of the article, though, is again the ending, a confused kind of plea to “put that extra Stanley back on the shelf,” presumably to halt its proliferation as an “elite status symbol” that is apparently informing the social hierarchies of kindergarteners. I read the headline agreeing with the article and was left delighted at the hatred aroused by a few extreme cases of Stanley-cup collecting teenagers online.
This college is full of good writers and I am so tired of people using their words to say things that are deep and true and beautiful. And if this sounds condescending, camp is a finicky kind of thing to pin down, inexorably tied to how something seems right now. This article could be considered a hilarious failure to future students but because I pursued the idea passionately (i.e. committed to the bit), just like the authors of my top three, I could still qualify as camp. And genuinely, I really am glad that the pieces I wrote above were written by their respective authors. Camp is just a lens of “what if this was not so serious?” And for most students, the treatment of those topics exhibited by these authors were so poorly-fitted to the matter at hand that they were a pleasure to read.