“Whats it like?”
“Losing your virginity?”
“No, dying.”
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, as it turns out, is about as strange a film as it was finding myself watching it with an audience of approx 10 middle aged men.
Was this normal? In the scope of the film, maybe. In the context of the films themes, normalcy can probably be deemed the enemy. If nothing else, the films messaging made any form of judgment of ourselves feel misplaced, but I digress.
Fair warning, jts impossible to say anything about this film without spoilers. But then again, even the most blatant spoilers won’t really give this film away. It’s the sort of thing that seems to broadcast its themes in clear bold letters straight across the sky, while also leaving you entirely to your own interpretive devices.
The first layer could be the simple interpretation or assumption that this film is about learning to be okay with sexual desire in the midst of a world of experience that also offers us those difficult feelings of shame and fear. In terms of where the director is coming from. They based this on their own experience of being offered the chance to reboot the old leprechaun franchise as a queer person. This would be, like I Saw The TV Glow, the Directors previous film, asking the aformentioned question (what does it mean to be okay with sexual desire) from the vantage point of a queer person navigating such desire from within a different or transformed body/perspective.
The movie however doesn’t quite let itself be reduced to those surface interests. Here we have to wade through a swirling mix of visuals and references and potential symbols and metaphors, including but not limited to:
– the endless scenes featuring what we might call junk food (namely candy, but also fried chicken, both sensualized to the point of clear metaphor)
– the phallic sword emerging from the water, and the constant references to penetration, be it the kills or the more symbolic internal process
And then there is the whole “cinema” motif, playing as it does on those classic horror films that mark so many of our first forays into the forbidden territory of things like sex and violence and language.
And this all just keeps digging a hole of potential interpretive moves deeper and deeper (and yes, a hole at the bottom of the lake where little death resides is also a metaphor).
In an interview with Them, the Director talks about how the images in this film function differenlty than their previous two works, moving from isolation (persons isolated from the world against extant forces) to connection.
“I thought, ‘I need to make sure this is a body movie, not a head movie,’” Schoenbrun tells Them. “It moves from the head to the body: skin performance, bodies moving and interacting with each other. I think it’s the best thing you can film.”
And in keeping with the Directors own story, this is a film that is fundamentally about ones experience of the world, shifting between the particular and the master narratives that govern our stories against such questions of what one might call our essential humanity.
There is the very clear and very broadcast early scene where the main character writes the word DESIRE on a sheet of pape. On one hand blatantly obvious in its definition. On the other hand, emphasizing a point where we need to then actually begin to flesh out what this means, especially as an embodied word, and further yet, as the film clearly notes, allowing it to reach further than the boundaries of sex. And certainly, desire here is manifested in many different forms throughout the film, playing with its unrestricted human capacity for both pleasure and destruction.
From this word desire comes another word that reoccurs over the course of the film: judgment. A word that seems to keep bringing us back to ones judgment of themselves. At one point the main character, who has lobbied a diatribe about her “work” as a director in repsonse to a question about her life, is called to redirect her words towards answering instead “who she is” as a person. The journey of the story would then suggest an exercise of self discovery on a broader scale
But it pushes further yet. How do we make sense of a story in which, at one point, our main character is instructed to smoke a joint and free her mind by getting out of her head, as the thing standing in the way of her experiencing and enjoying sex is her own fears about her own self. Only to later have the entire metaphor shift this perspective on its head, however subtly, by indicating the equal tension that such perceptions of liberation require, playing with what is real and what is not. How is it that we one needs to escape the fears of our minds, and yet sexual desire, as explored in this film, is fundamentally liberated by opening up our capacity to be formed by a fantasy, teaching us to ignore the world thats right in front of us for whatever mental escapes happen to turn us on. Getting out of ones head becomes a stepping off point for leading our main character, and indeed teaching her how to get lost even further “in her head.”
A mental escape that then brings us back to the horror movie motif, where what we have is a deluge of “fantasy” that tears down the walls between the different dynamics of the genres fascination with those taboos of violence, sex, fear.
What emerges here as something of a revelatory point in the arc is the main characters central coveted desire to secretly “occupy” a role in the very film that she states led her to her sexual awakening as a queer person. The same film she is now adapting. A role that, in the span of this plotted movement regarding her characters adaptation of the film within the film, then becomes a muddied fusion of both victim and perpetrator (with, I think, intentional commentary).
As it’s said in the film, letting go is part of the process that really, when it comes to the subject of desire, underscores the fact that all of us are essentially occupying roles in what is a game. Life is a process of role playing, so give yourself over to it, becomes the mantra.
I’m not sure the character in this film can actually escape those lingering sentiments that creep in along the way about loneliness and depression and destruction, embodied feelings and experiences the Director seems inately aware of. These are the destructive things that work their way in from the real world on the outside into our constructed worlds on the inside. For example, the main character describes her polyamorous relationship in terms that reflect an incredible distance between carnal expressions of desire and the words actual sought after meaning. Here both uses want to masquerade as one another. The way she comes to take on the character of her obsession (the actress who plays the main character in the film within the film) is predicated on this same distance, pulling self wanted and self created pleasure out of a superficial relationship. What makes this intriguing to then unpack is, it seems like this theme of distance is something the Director really wants to tackle head on.
To go back to that quote I started with, “What is it like?” Here there seems to be a deep rooted sense that a sex obsessed culture is synonymous with a dead one. Which certainly throws those easy metaphors into disarray. This is purely an interpretive move on my part, but I do wonder if the Director’s own interests were seeking to play the metaphor of death into an exploration of what stands in the road of a liberated relationship to sexual desire, and yet, from my own vantage point, bringing my head back into that experiential lens, I couldn’t help but sense that this same sought after liberation made desire synonymous with the very thing it sought to escape.
It’s curious to me how this is a film directed by a millennial telling the story of a Gen Z building a relationship with a Gen X. I was listening to a podcast the other day where they were commenting on how this recent barrage of films about “enjoying sex” that have come out this year is a repsonse to Gen Z’s documented growing disinterest in it. There’s a rooted irony in the fact that this disinterest emerges from the so called liberated sex obsessed culture the millennials created. I half wondered if such sentiments are built on a degree of defensiveness on the part of millennials, not of self correcting but of needing to justify themsleves on this front. After all, if the world they created has led to an entire generation growing tired of all the “sex,” it does challenge that worldview.
Borrowing from that same article mentioned above, it would seem the Director was interested in this same phenomenon.
“Everyone’s always on about how Gen Z doesn’t want to have sex. I was like, ‘I get it. I didn’t want to have sex, either,’” they tell. It’s a dark space, and it means looking at parts of yourself, the world, society, that are gonna be ugly or make you feel scared. And the movie is trying to talk about [exploring] those things in a way that is safe.”
It’s an interesting thought anyways to bring into this film, where the need to recover sex from the grips of fear essentially mean giving the fantasy precedence over reality. Here the problem to be overcoome is the fear that emerges with society’s struggle with larger human tendencies such as shame and vulnerability. Staring the percieved ugliness we find in its place. And certainly, this is where the particularness of their queer experience clashes with larger and more fundamental questions regarding desire itself. That’s the jumping off point into a more robust interpretive exercise.
For me, it seems that the reigning image here is of desire that needs to be satiated, and I have to think there will be a plethora of readings that see this film as a necessary embrace of the taboo, where overcoming fear means learning how to turn those taboo sources of ones sexual desire into a normalized and virtuous expression of ones identity. Where ones identity is tied to sex, but also where desire is desire and sex is sex and candy is candy and death is death, and jts all just part of the same mess of those human animal instincts. Something horror then helps us comment on and understand and perhaps hone into something the film seeks to name as human. Building a world inside our heads where this claim on individuality is able to imagine its own existence as working fantasies purely by placing a barrier between actual, real world destruction.
And yet the irony is, the destruction does exist. That’s the real thing that needs to be grappled with. The greater irony? Grappling with that just might be found in looking at the reality of a whole culture responding with a well documented disinterest in sex. Perhaps this is indicative of what happens when those lines between fantasy and reality get blurred.
For me, one of the powerful take aways on this front is that subject of distance.
And just to be clear, one of the things I deeply appreciate about this Director is their ability and intention to allow their film to be open to different interpretations. That it can work to foster conversation rather than stifling it.
I found myself being struck by the distance the wanted seeking after such forms of individual liberation (desire) creates. One of the things about desire is ists ability to hand us a world devoid of actual definition. And once I bring my head into the picture, such an explanatory lens doesn’t seem to make sense of my actual experience of this world. Sex can’t be both meaningless and meaningul at the same time. It can’t be distant and intimate at the same time. This is the wrong place to locate a necessary dualism. Rather, where we need to shift that dualism is towards the nature of desire itself.
In the scope of this film, I found a portrait of reality where complex people end up being trapped inside these holes by desire, needing to feed on this desire just to stay alive. A commentary perhaps on how we arrived at a documented epidemic of depression amidst a world that seems to have lost all sense of desires dual edge. A world where meaningful sex is attached to our ability to guard ourselves against such wanted attachment and where the sex act has been relegated to role playing in our safely guarded fantasy worlds. Satiated desire in a fantasy world we have been liberated to indulge and create. A place where carnal nature and elevated humanness don’t have to be rationally attended for, because we have convinced ourselves we can indulge it without such logic implicating our preceptions of actual reality. Where the fantasy need not bleed out into destructive forces with the world itself.
Sure, that might create the appearance of saftety, but I find myself deeply skeptical that it translates to a coherent logic in the face of actual human experience. The hard truth is, this percieved liberation doesn’t escape the hole, it creates it. The only true escape is found in the hard work of defining the terms of our partcipation in this world. That’s where we can contront the ugliness and percieve the beauty.
A final note. I find myself juxtaposing many of these films about sex this year against Olivia Wilde’s The Invite. I’ve made no secret of how much I hated my experience with that film, and how frustated I was with the incoherence, and in many ways lacking in responsibilty and integrity, of its worldview. There a similar subject shows its face, only in this case it writes itself as defensive and reactionary grandstanding of the millenial narrative. A way of saying to the world, hey, we see the problem and it’s not our fault. That the world is going to hell in a pit of depression and sexless angst is simply the loss of the “good old days.” So here’s a story about a couple finally coming around to see that we were right. Finally stripping away those enslaving definitions and cultural constraints and indulging what’s been buried deep inside for far too long. The secret to fixing that broken marriage? Strip meaning from the construct, reject the institutions restrictions, and satisfy that hunger with whatever fantasy walks through that door. Zero interest in fleshing out a backstory that can tell us why this marriage mattered in the firs place, or etablishing why its deterioration should be seen as tragic. or a problem. Little more than, at best, a deceptive way of intellectualizing a superficial view of sex without any actual definition, and at worst a way of shaming ones experience of the destructive feelings by writing it as a failure to strip off the chains of those definitions. I found Camp Miasa to be far smarter and far more coherent in its themes, more integral in its investment, and more challenging in its revelations. Will it inspire viewers to think more deeply and more broadly about the real point of concern? I hope so, butI admit I remain cynical. My own generation had to reconcile our own relationship to the world of our making in all of its complexities, and it took a good while. I do hope that the same thing happens for millenials as they age.
The Stories of my Life 