The letters below were compiled from several issues; all concern Issue 11/12: Camp.
Cheese epiphany
I very much enjoyed the "Camp" issue [#11/12], perhaps my favorite Hermenaut to date. I was especially taken by the letter in the back of the issue [from Ernest Pascucci, author of "Leather and Lace: My Closet," in that same issue] defending the Village People. The Village People's song "Go West" has always struck me as poignant for the promise of a gay Utopia it held out. The all-male chorus sounds almost like some Air Force choir, so it would not be an exaggeration to say that the song has often seemed vaguely patriotic to me. The loss of that fantasia is a sad thing indeed. I once played "Go West" on an overnight radio show here in Minneapolis, and put forward my thesis on the air, launching a tangle of words into the sleepy void of daybreak. I think there was a fine mist coming down over the West Bank—and the phones, as ever, were dead. I felt glad after having done so that I had articulated, if only for myself, what it was about the song that had always affected me in some inchoate way. Reading Hermenaut, then, and discovering that someone else had had the same experience with the song, yielded one of those rare moments when pop culture brings us closer in more than a superficial way.
Michael Tortorello
Minneapolis, MN
Vertiginous laughter
Although I have laughed at "Mystery Science Theater 3000," I agree with Chris Fujiwara's assessment of both it and of the sad need for a comforting "distance" now required by unimaginative audiences ["I, Robot: The Shame of Mystery Science Theater 3000," issue #11/12]. This lazy fear masked as knowing snobbery has ruined many showings of older films that I have waited years to see on the big screen. Naïvely, I again and again forget to expect the incredulous tittering that pulls me right out of whatever movie I'm watching. The most blatantly awful was a screening of The Birds: I suspect these same snickering people would have no problem accepting the "reality" of a horrible, soon-to-be-forgotten film like The Rock. More personally disturbing was the reaction I experienced to the recent re-release of Vertigo. How can people laugh at Vertigo? I did a series of prints based on images from Vertigo several years ago; now I fear people may assume I used the images for some ironic effect. Well, I know I'm not better than Hitchcock. When North by Northwest was lambasted as "fake-looking" in a high school film class, I guess I should have learned something then.
Patrick Rogers
Dallas, TX
Chris Fujiwara replies: Patrick, I'm sorry to hear about your bad experiences at screenings of Hitchcock movies. I won't easily forget one time I saw North by Northwest at a Boston-area institution of higher learning: During the Rushmore sequence, a girl shouted out derisively, "Oh, come on, we know Cary Grant's not going to die!" I guess she felt Hitchcock was insulting her intelligence.
Sometimes movies are fun because of how they anticipate and even solicit certain kinds of audience response tending toward the participative (an extreme example would be William Castle), but the audience is supposed to be with the film, not above it. Video, I think, has aggravated the "above it" tendency. Many people today, who know genre movies only from video, model their in-theater behavior on what is closest to hand: their unpoliced, TV-centric home environment—and a culture of detached "appreciation" and consumption. (In the late '70s and early '80s, before the psychotronic video culture became big, audiences at screenings of these films might have been loud, but they weren't so stupid.) This state of affairs has a built-in historical irony: Thanks to video, 1998's audience "knows" a lot more about movies than its counterpart of twenty years ago... but it's clear what good such knowledge is.
Michael and Patrick, you both win Hermenaut T-shirts. Thanks for sharing.—ed.
Heston haunts Hermenaut
I don't know if Hermenaut fills me with hope or further confirms the oncoming apocalypse. Did you know that Chuck Heston ["The Giants of Philosophy" review by Susan Roe, issue #11/12] was granted a "Q" clearance by the U.S. Energy Department (its highest security clearance—Oppenheimer, et al.) in the early '80s? He narrated 6 top-secret films concerning the U.S. arsenal of atomics, and still is not at liberty to discuss this matter.
Arthur S. Aubry
Seattle, WA
Cox cracks up
I LOVED and I mean LOVED the "review" of the Melrose Place books ["Melrose Place Supermarket Paperbacks" review by A.S. Hamrah] in the "Camp" issue. Quoted it to people for days after, including the SF Chronicle reporter who called me for a quote about the importance of television in people's lives. She wanted a quote from me, but that guy was funnier.
Ana Marie Cox
San Francisco, CA
Tears of a clown
I enjoyed the "Camp" issue, even though I'm not a great Wilde fan ["Camp: An Introduction"]. He's a fascinating character and I love how he performed his life, but his writing is often, well, just clever. Wilde reminds me all too much of our own times, I suppose. Camp is a great send-up of the real and present, but in the end it leaves nothing to replace what it plays upon. It's always struck me as unbearably sad—sort of like Wilde himself.
As for the "Vertigo" issue [#13], I really like Josh Glenn's "Vertigo: An Introduction." Glenn is right on with his observation that the abyss is no longer something to fall into, leap over, be afraid of or learn from. Instead it's something we wallow in, blissfully collapsing into a groovy po-mo world with no belief. (Meanwhile, of course, the system that dares not speak its name chugs merrily along in all its meta-narrative glory.) Keep it up.
Steve Duncombe
New York, NY
