Before audiences ever saw alleged Oscar frontrunners Lady Gaga and Kristen Stewart deliver their performances in House of Gucci and Spencer, they had already ascended into an ostensibly rarefied tier of internet fame: memedom.
In a first look photo, Gaga stood as Patrizia Reggiani, posing in cozy ski lodge wear against an ivory backdrop next to adam Driver’s Maurizio Gucci, her black blouse and white fur hat an implication of a kind of “too muchness,” or blithely artificial glamor, that the film promised to deliver.
Similarly, long before we heard her say, “Don’t,” in a practiced British accent, Kristen Stewart sported Princess Diana’s short blonde cut, a sanguine tweed jacket, a black bow, and a black hat that dangled its spidery veil like a shield around her face.
Both of these photos were published early in 2021, when not even the faintest whisper of a teaser or trailer could be heard. And yet, an extremely online subculture could still feast.
Trailers would eventually drop, with memes being made all the while, and the movies would be released to varying degrees of satisfaction and disappointment. But all of that is besides the point: What matters these days is that the memes will continue to proliferate. In 2021, House of Gucci and Spencer became self-perpetuating machines of internet production, especially because they appealed to a particular (read: queer) community.
It’s not that these films didn’t have more to offer — House of Gucci has a love of doubles and knockoffs, and Spencer’s faux-biopic histrionics betray the genre’s artificiality — but the current cultural landscape tends to process these works in a narrow way. A friend called me one day to describe his experience seeing House of Gucci at the movie theater, the sharpness of his thoughts a stark contrast to an audience who had engaged with it not as a movie, but as a meme.
Gucci and Spencer can, in certain circumstances, exist within this space of being both cinema and meme, both an entire gift and the cheekily cheap ribbon wrapped around it. But this year, the borders between movie and meme became blurrier than ever.
House of Gucci, which chronicles the downfall of the Gucci family empire, is a fascinating and bizarre film, pitched at a myriad of different tones and registers, with actors like Lady Gaga and Jared Leto acting against director Ridley Scott’s more subdued, almost anti-spectacular approach. It’s both gaudy and banal, cheap and aspirationally chic.
Gaga’s performance is like watching Stella Adler do Medea wearing a clown outfit; the weird aberrations of the performance and the artifice are worked with and incorporated into the experience and the text, her accent the opposite of a hindrance and instead becoming a rococo tool for achieving greater emotional depth. Jared Leto’s prosthetic-covered bombast is caricaturish, as beautifully bogus as a knockoff purse in Times Square, unsightly and aurally unbearable.
Spencer, meanwhile, claims to be less interested in the histrionics of family dysfunction and the uncontrollable proliferation of a woman’s image wrenched from her autonomy. But the film still features Stewart roving around hallways, walking with studied technique through dark rooms, moving her head in slight, jittery staccato bursts, and clenching her jaw while doing an English accent and saying things like “What happens to the pheasants that my son will be shooting?” At one point, Diana is even confronted by the specter of Anne Boleyn (Amy Manson).
The film is theatrically unsubtle in presenting infantile pseudo-intellectual ideas about Princess Diana, relishing too much in melodrama and the hushed whispers of Tudor halls. Kristen Stewart, too, uses the illusory nature of her performance to her advantage, elevating the film so that Diana the idea can confront Diana the character, as if coming face-to-face with a hallucination of herself.
But regardless of the quality of either of these movies, we inevitably end up dissecting and regurgitating mere snippets of them online, like Diana running, or Jared Leto auditioning for the Super Mario Bros. movie; all of them fragments of a whole, disconnected from each other. There will even be crossover.
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Does it really matter anymore if House of Gucci or Spencer were “good” movies? Does it even matter whether or not they operate within the realm of the elusive “camp,” their artificiality and theatricality somehow rendered fashionably subversive? When all we do is compress them into JPEGs and GIFs, flattening them for easier consumption, questions of quality seem to be losing relevance.
Though neither House of Gucci nor Spencer are exactly unique in this way, they are certainly emblematic of a shifting pop-cultural landscape in which conventional ideas of “good” and “bad” now matter less than being “meme-able.” The breakneck pace of internet consumption has accelerated a certain postmodern way of engaging with any given text: through decontextualization, pieces of that text become, in and of themselves, new standalone texts.
Which is to say that a clip of Lady Gaga snarling, her eyes feral, “Who does what?” — or one of Kristen Stewart twirling around in a Chanel archival piece — is now its own piece of media. Those new pieces accrue new readings basically independent of the films they’re taken from, repurposed for anyone’s idiosyncratic needs.
Camp, though traditionally understood through the lens of style and aesthetics, also has proximity to concepts of labor. For scholar Matthew Tinkcom in Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema, camp can be seen “as a form of queer labor that has shaped a way of knowing capital in its lived dimensions,” which is to say that the act of consuming, engaging with, and recontextualizing cultural artifacts through the lens of camp — and then interpreting and thus creating new work from those interpretations and reactions — is a form of production.
Tinkcom frames his scholarship around the work of filmmakers like Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Vincente Minnelli, and John Waters — all artists whose theatricality, and often vulgarity, are predicated on consumption and, if not regurgitation, then extreme forms of remixing.
And while not everyone who’s posting a lip sync to Lady Gaga saying, “Father, Son, and House of Gucci” is exactly a pop art icon, they are engaging in relatively similar practices that ultimately force —as camp does — ideas of taste to collapse. So, too, does the line between consumption and production crumble, the detritus left over from our feast becoming found materials for creation.
Much of this, to cite Tinkcom, hinges on the contradictions between Marxist and queer theories of value. If Marxist critique analyzes the discrepancy between workers and those who control them, queerness tries to imagine a space or a politic that challenges the ways in which those components are always caught in a constant interplay between those who have power and those that do not. The dour, dystopian nightmare of labor exploitation is rendered utopic out of spite; in contrast, as Tinkcom puts it, the priorities of a camp lens are “cheapness,” “work-as-play,” “performance” in the face of “exploitation,” “misuse,” and “nostalgia.”
In the nearly two decades since Working Like a Homosexual was published, it’s not that these concepts of camp as labor are no longer valid, but they have perhaps been made even murkier by the fact that, as queer punk filmmaker Bruce LaBruce declares, “the whole goddamn world is camp.”
Even in that relatively short time, the ways people engage with taste, with cultural artifacts and with how those things are directly impacted by (d)evolving economic and political frameworks have all irreparably changed. Every platform for self-expression provided to us by some institution, as theorist Walter Benjamin predicted, is now suffused in a hodgepodge of cheapness, work-as-play, performance, misuse, and nostalgia.
If camp’s favorite guise was once that of, “private language” as Emily Nussbaum put it, its tittering secrecy is now open, exposed, like a gossipy quip that has consumed the entire conversation at the cafeteria lunch table that is the internet.
We’ve been primed, then, to engage with movies this way, so long as they have the critical signposts of something that could become a self-reflexive discourse-making machine. For queer audiences, these signposts of the artificial, the parodic, and the excessive were once a kind of secret vocabulary. But queerness itself, and its public expression, has also changed in dramatic ways, so that signifiers of subcultural aesthetics now exist simultaneously within that subculture and outside of it, many of them having been assimilated into broader contexts.
Perhaps what is to be salvaged — what can still be precious — is a certain level of self-awareness on Gaga and Stewart’s part, both of whom identify as queer and have long courted an LGBTQIA+ audience. Their fluency in not only recognizing but performing those camp signifiers gives them the advantage of being able to provide something fuller within the performance, something whole, compelling, and magnetic.
For them, it’s vulgarity and, theatricality and, artifice and. So when their performance gets cut up and repurposed, it still feels like something. They know, just as well as camp progenitor Christopher Isherwood, how to make fun out of it.
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