A boy’s world: notes on “masculine camp” in Helter Skelter (2012)

An exploration of ‘camp’ in a masculine context through Helter Skelter, John Wick, and the “hyper-cool” worlds of Hideo Kojima.

A few months ago, Asian Film Archive screened Mika Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter (2012) as part of their Divine programme and I went in to see it with essentially zero idea of what I was in for except for a sultry poster. I loved it. It tapped into similar parts of my psyche that made me love Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls (1995). If anything, Ninagawa’s film is even more colourful, out there, melodramatic, and camp. While Showgirls is maybe more incisive with its messaging, I think Helter Skelter is more fun, self indulgent, and is, in some ways, camp for camp’s sake. 

I will not purport to be any expert on the subject of ‘camp’ which is a slippery term that has both been academically studied and casually bandied about in colloquial contexts. For me, the most evident marker of camp is an exaggerated, heightened visual palette and/or tone that tends toward irony or overly sensational melodrama. With its roots and influences from LGBTQ+ culture, camp is frequently rooted in feminine aesthetics as a performance or expression of femininity, like in drag or the films of John Waters. 

I could not possibly try to summarise the myriad forms that camp can take, and the subjects that we can take as camp, so if it helps, here’s the definition from the first sentence of its Wikipedia entry: 

Camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing or amusing because of its heightened level of artifice, affectation and exaggeration, especially when there is also a playful or ironic element. Camp is historically associated with LGBTQ+ culture and especially gay men.

I am not a fan of the “so bad it’s good” classification of films like Showgirls, although I concede that it is a perfectly okay way for one to craft their tastes and sensibilities with. While Helter Skelter and Showgirls might be ironic, melodramatic, exaggerated, and indulgent, they’re clearly sincere when it comes to their messaging, satire, and pursuits of artfulness. They may be created outside the realms of traditional good taste, but these areas outside the dotted lines do not automatically fall in the category of “bad taste.” I love these films for their sincerity, while pushing the extremes of melodramatic plot, sensory overload, and heightened performance. They are not camp in the pursuit of bad taste, but rather the genuine surface pleasures of a camp aesthetic. Most importantly, they’re fun. 

There’s a smattering of video essays on YouTube that go into further depth into the aesthetics and themes of Helter Skelter as it relates to the beauty industry, and the way it critiques society’s commercialisation of female bodies. I particularly like chai tii’s analysis of the style (fashion, cinematic) and themes in the film, which also gives a good overview of Erika Sawajiri’s star image and why she’s perfect for the part. 

However, while Helter Skelter largely plays in the hyper feminine world of commercial modelling, I found myself drawn to one of the male characters in a film mostly about women. This frickin’ guy:

Nao Ômori plays Prosecutor Asada who is searching for the aesthetic clinic giving life-threatening plastic surgery to top models for them to keep up their perfect appearances. From his first scene, I found myself laughing at every single line of dialogue coming out of his mouth. This man says the most out of pocket, overly dramatic, and unhinged dialogue in a film where Erika Sawajiri’s Lilico is already swinging for the fences. While his scenes and performance style might be aesthetically different from the rest of the film, they feel tonally on par with the rest of the film, and form a masculine complement to the hyper-feminine camp aesthetics of the film’s visuals and storytelling. To me, it is a form of ‘masculine camp’ that is less frequently categorised under the umbrella of ‘camp’, but that can be found across mediums without such a label.

What is “masculine camp”?

It is difficult to define an ideal of ‘masculine camp’ because its parent term is also slippery. In writing this, I struggled to find some semblance of language that could define the line between mere masculine signifiers towards something that could be considered camp. Many of these elements form the core of films that we can consider “for the boys” and yet maybe not necessarily camp. I think what becomes critical is the need for any of these elements to be pushed to some level of extreme for the principal work to be considered camp in a masculine fashion. The notion of what is “extreme enough" leaves much to one’s own interpretation and intuition. Feel free to suggest your own ideas for how best to define masculine camp, or other examples you might have.

If camp is an exaggerated expression of hyper-femininity, its masculine mirror is the pursuit of the extremes of macho cool. These masculine expressions can manifest in a film's stylistic choices, whether through visual language, costume choices, world building, and performance styles. 

In aesthetic choices, colour and frivolity is weakness. Prosecutor Asada’s outfits are shades of grey. His scenes in his office are also grey, noir-ish, and full of dramatic side lighting, complete with the stylised shadows of vertical blind slats. They are in direct opposition to the world of the female lead and her opulent, colourful, overly saturated home and work environments. Asada’s world is utilitarian. There’s no place for beauty because beauty has no bearing on his professional endeavours. 

In speech, there is a tendency towards terseness and stoicism. If words must be spilled, strive for badassery. Every line delivery from Ômori is hyper-serious and stark, and better still Prosecutor Asada’s dialogue reaches unnecessary levels of esoterism and metaphor. Classical art and mythology become subsumed to allow him to perceive the world in his eyes of law and order. One of my favourite line readings is when he finally meets Lilico. He declares to her, quite abruptly, that she is “Ariadne’s ball of thread.” A piece of myth-dropping I had to look up to mean that Lilico is the answer to the problem he has been trying to solve. Completely unnecessary, random and odd, Prosecutor Asada equally lives in his own version of a mythically lawful reality as Lilico lives in her warped world of beauty. 

Ômori’s heightened performance of Asada is of cool, maximum professionalism, emotional suppression, and a singular dedication to his job. With his glasses, he projects an analytical facade, as if he is constantly processing information. His masculine effort is in his intellectualism, and ability to see through the fog of evidence to find the aberrant clinic he is after.

In themes: masculine camp heroes can go off on the slippery slope pursuit of revenge, perfect versions of violence, ceaselessly protect loved ones, or die while fiercely adhering to age-old principles. In the face of evil, the masculine hero is never outraged, for evil is constant in his world and his only response is to squash it. Asada’s reaction to images of violence and depravity is nonchalance. In his worldview, that is just how the world is and his role is to constantly push back against the threat of evil. The masculine hero’s job is never done, and it is in his unending execution that he derives his worth. It is no wonder that so many of these hero’s journeys must end in death, because death is the only way to stop the constant toil. 

Mr. Wick 

The John Wick series is one of my favourite modern action franchises and I think with each chapter the films have gotten more macho, more campy, and I love them for it. Wick himself is a prototypical masculine lead, gruff, quiet, and highly skilled in various forms of violence. Masculine camp heroes stop at nothing to protect their number one, be it family, love, or principle. For Wick, his entire journey and trail of death is predicated on righting a wrong made against him and his already dead love interest. He has absolutely no good reason to go on his blood soaked, kill-crazy rampage, but for Wick it is necessary. I love that Wick’s catchphrase is quite simply a flatly delivered “yeah.” A masculine hero gets the job done, and the only thing he knows how to do is to get the job done, which is typically at the expense of his softer side.   

The series also has some of the most opulent and frankly ridiculous world building in a modern action movie in recent memory. In the city of New York, half the population are hyper skilled assassins looking to kill Wick. There are dedicated hotels to the assassin trade, and a sophisticated underground intelligence network of disguised homeless people run by Laurence Fishburne. Every subsequent chapter has taken large strides towards a higher camp aesthetic. John Wick: Chapter 4 is one of the most beautifully rendered action movies because of a heightened production design. There are beautiful, gothic touches to the world building of John Wick and they are all in service of its world of over-the-top professional assassination. 

Because the John Wick series has steadily increased its levels of exaggeration over each movie, it has raised our ability to accept the kind of world building it achieves at a measured rate. I believe if some of the elements that are present in the later chapters had been present in the first movie, they would have come off as more clearly “camp”, and would have been far more difficult to accept in a supposedly gritty action movie that the first film presented itself as. (Also, RIP Lance Reddick.)

While I have not seen any of the modern Fast and the Furious movies, I would imagine the later entries and their ubiquitous “family” memes suggest they land their heroes and their escapades into a version of masculine camp. If anyone is an expert on these films, please let me know. 

To further expand on this concept, I would like to also go on a tangent and present my favourite execution of masculine camp from a proper visionary: the works of Hideo Kojima. 

Super Hyper-cool EX Ultimate, or masculine camp in video games

As a disclaimer, I have not actually played any of the Metal Gear Solid series, but have some handle on it thanks to some video essays from Jacob Geller, one on Metal Gear Rising, and the following that references the final fight scene in Metal Gear Solid IV: Guns of the Patriots. 

I think when you watch Geller wax lyrical about these incredible looking games, the common thread is a go-for-broke aesthetic and storytelling style, where logic takes a backseat to emotional satisfaction and nostalgia. Like camp melodrama, Kojima’s goal with storytelling aims for emotional and sensational pleasures at the expense of quaint ideas of logic, reality, or expectation. 

While I have not dabbled with MGS, I have played Kojima’s more recent work Death Stranding, an odd masterpiece about saving the world as a high tech postman played by Norman Reedus. In terms of world building, character design, and storytelling, Kojima’s approach eschews ideas of predictable taste and goes for unadulterated emotional clarity. Reedus’ postman is called Sam Porter Bridges for god’s sake, could his name be any more on the nose? He is a man with only one purpose, to carry shit across bridges. You have characters called Heartman and Deadman (modelled after Guillermo del Toro and Nicholas Winding Refn respectively), whose names tell you exactly what they are obsessed with or are trying to come to terms with. My personal favourite character being Léa Seydoux’s Fragile and her ridiculously quotable “I”m Fragile, but I’m not that fragile”, perfectly encapsulating her strength and vulnerability. Also, if you’re completely unplugged from video games, this is me letting you know Léa friggin’ Seydoux is in this, with Margaret Qualley playing ‘Mama’ who’s always holding an invisible ghost baby. No, I will not explain Mama’s whole deal, but if you need to know.  

Each of these characters, in their run-ins with Sam Porter are helped along with their emotional baggage, typically a physical defect that forces them to be a certain way. Their physical problems are thus a metaphorical extension of their emotional ones. There is very little subtlety to the way Kojima executes his storytelling or paints his characters, but the power of this clarity and heightened melodramatic stakes are memorable characters that are exceptionally effective vehicles for the themes and emotional states that Kojima wants his characters to carry. The exaggeration here is rooted in a pure sincerity. 

Death Stranding’s convoluted world building also functions as a kind of camp exaggeration. To create a world that makes absolute logical sense to contain its disparate post-apocalyptic science fiction elements, the details and history of the world become so dense until their details become unperceivable. Yet, there’s no need to understand how this world works to the nuts and bolts, although you surely could if you wanted to, because the sci-fi world and its details become a sort of maximalist noise that ties everything together and you trust it all makes sense because the emotions make sense. 

At this point I have only touched on the aspects of performance and storytelling, but the surface aesthetics of Kojima’s games are also exaggerated, and you can find aspects of this in many other Japanese video games. Death Stranding’s colour palette is variations of black and grey with pops of caution yellow. There’s a utilitarian nature to these designs, and in costume design I think this “masculine camp” shines through visually. Aside from the baby in a bottle attached to his front torso, Sam’s outfits are heavy on straps, carabiners, ropes, attachment points, lugs: all put together with a reinforced polyester-esque tracksuit finish. His visual design is hyper-utilitarian. Everything is for the execution of his job, even the baby, but his job is a lot. It is an exaggerated uniform that is in contrast to the understated, but also inversely exaggerated, bulletproof suits in John Wick which I neglected to mention in the previous section. 

Staying within the Japanese video game context, the Final Fantasy series flirts with masculine camp as well. Final Fantasy XV’s surface aesthetic, emo boys with spiky haircuts and big ol’ swords going on a boys road trip, are a projection of a boyish or even juvenile idea of cool. 

Some entries of Resident Evil might also be considered campier, see: Chris Redfield punching a boulder in Resident Evil 5. Japanese anime and video games have been at the forefront of masculine camp! 

If an ironic bent is a fundamental component of camp, one must then ask: how can it also be sincere? I have been trying to reconcile this contradiction because my favourite performances of camp feel utterly sincere in their execution. Maybe it matters in the intentions in execution of these media. These examples of ‘masculine camp’ do not knowingly signal that they are self-aware that their expressions of masculinity are maximalist, which suggests they are meant to fall within typical spectrums of masculinity. They are thus unknowingly camp rather than intentionally so. However, I think because we have never thought of these expressions of masculinity as exaggerated in a ‘campy’ manner, we’ve never really considered the manner in which we find pleasure in these masculine exaggerations. None of us are punching boulders out of the sky on the daily. Is it enough for the audience to enjoy a piece of media for its exaggerations and affectations for it to be considered campy? Can irony stem from the beholder rather than that that is being perceived? 

I think the utility of looking at supposedly masculine themes and aesthetics through a camp lens is that we can uncover or outline new spectrums of masculine aesthetics rather than assuming men are interested in a singular monoculture of guns, muscles, and automobiles. A few days after the screening of Helter Skelter, a friend commented that it was surprising that I (a cis-straight dude) liked Helter Skelter because it has a “high-femme” aesthetic. I’m not going to unpack that at length, but it would be a shame for all the d00ds and br0s to not find something to love in worlds they find unfamiliar, both masculine and feminine. These examples of ‘masculine camp’ are also here to show that the underlying mechanics of their pleasure: artifice, heightened affectation and exaggeration, are agnostic of the masculine/feminine dichotomy. Fun is fun.

Notes

• As I was thinking about this I started wondering if aspects or manifestations of film noir could be considered camp. I found this article by Nandia Foteini Vlachou about parodies of film noir that proved quite interesting. I think Classical Hollywood tows the line quite well to not tip over into camp, but are there instances of neo-noir that specifically push the extremes into campier territory? Film noir and its trappings of the doomed, serious hero feel ripe for campier explorations. Maybe David Fincher’s recent The Killer could be considered a sort of self-serious parody of the hitman genre. Another genre to think about: Hong Kong kung fu movies. Some have a slapstick bent, some are hyper serious and grim. Donnie Yen has already appeared in John Wick… There's a connection.

• This article is late for my own schedule and was inordinately difficult to write. I was recently watching OliSUNvia’s video essay on video essays and my personal takeaway is the feeling of “scope-creep” as you expand on any one idea. A written essay feels decidedly more significant as an intellectual vehicle than a video, and there was a growing pressure as I was writing to be “accurate” or “correct” (see: me qualifying I don’t know much about camp). In fact, I was originally going to make this as a video reaction, but I kept delaying recording until it became more of an extended essay in my head. I think there is a feeling like all essays are inherently argumentative, in that they must present some defined perspective with proper substantiation, but I am finding that burden of proof to be quite a burden indeed. I’m not saying I want to make more floppy and poorly argued essays, but maybe it is important to give oneself the space to merely explore ideas through writing rather than define specific arguments. Partially a large reason why this was hard to write and put out is: I am not entirely sure I know what I am talking about. So why don’t you let me know if I make sense? 

• This is more of an exploration of an idea, I also know that masculinity can show up in our prevailing ideas of camp, i.e. drag can be performed in pursuit of exaggerated masculinity as well. Maybe there is a better name for what I am describing here.