So, I saw the above trailer  last night, and my first reaction was, “Come on, seriously? Nazis, zombies and Beethoven’s 9th? Really? Are people even trying anymore?” Normally, I just get a little irked by lazy moviemaking and move on, but, inexplicably, this trailer continued pissing me off. Now, keep in mind — this is a movie that I haven’t seen. Everything I know about it is in that trailer, but somehow I also know that my opinion is going to be in the minority. Dead Snow is going to be a huge hit (at least as judged by the standards of Norwegian cinema). Millions of people — many of them my friends — are eventually going to own that DVD. The reason for this is camp.

Here’s something about me you should probably know: I don’t get camp.

In Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” she lays out an extremely abstract description of the phenomenon, which essentially boils down to “monumentally sucky” — “bad to the point of being enjoyable” as she puts it. But the fundamental question to me is about the kind of enjoyment that camp produces. After all, she calls The Maltese Falcon “among the greatest Camp movies ever made” (note 20), which confused me at first. The Maltese Falcon isn’t one of the greatest camp movies ever made; it’s just one of the greatest movies period. What was Sontag getting at when she called this stone-cold classic “camp”?

I think it all begins with when she was writing. Her essay was first published in 1964, an era when, to my understanding, there was a much more rigid separation delineating high and low art. The folks in Snootytootsville listened to Prokofiev and appreciated Shakespeare. Everybody else listened to Chuck Berry and Elvis and watched The Maltese Falcon. Appreciating camp was a way for the high brow to recuperate their low brow tastes. It wasn’t “so bad it’s good;” it was just plain good, even if the cultural gatekeepers were not ready to admit it (notes 45, 46, 48).

Once it was no longer shameful to have Britney on your playlist, this definition would fall away, but the other kind of pleasure is already there, implicit in Sontag’s description. And that’s where my problem comes in. Describing camp as modern Dandyism, she writes “The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity. Where the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted” (note 48). Camp, to Sontag, is fundamentally about slumming it — a high-culture aesthete deigning to spend time with those things she knows are irredeemably below her. Camp is nothing more than condescension. She makes this point (note 50) when she writes that “Camp taste is part of the history of snob taste,” but never pursues it much further.

There’s little surprise there. After all, it’s a fine line that she’s trying to draw. Camp has to be extravagant, silly enough to be laughed at (note 29), but not so serious or pretentious as to make its own failure too obvious. Because that’s what camp is celebrating: artistic failure. “Pure Camp,” she writes, “is always naïve” (note 18). It’s a way of laughing at the rubes who couldn’t make a movie (or write a book or whatever). To lose that naïveté is to acknowledge the failure, which consequently takes away from the viewer’s enjoyment of it. Enjoyable camp has to be earnest, too ignorant to realize its own weaknesses. ”Camp and tragedy,” she argues “are antitheses” (note 39), but that’s not entirely true. A work of camp art is itself a tragedy, but for camp to be enjoyable, the viewer must deny that tragedy.

Take the constant celebration of Tommy Wiseau, the filmmaker behind the new camp classic The Room. Does anyone, other than Wiseau, really think that he isn’t being mocked in one interview after another? The tone is probably best summed up by Nathan Rabin in the Onion’s AV Club when he calls it the “Nelson Muntz School” of criticism. Rabin’s review of American Gladiator Dan “Nitro” Clark’s memoir is at least fair enough to admit that realizing Clark’s humanity ruined the artifice for him. It brought him too close to the tragedy, so suddenly enjoying the campiness of the story couldn’t be nearly so much fun.

Sontag is smart enough to see this, but not honest enough to call it what it is. In notes 55, 56 and 57, she tries to argue that camp isn’t half so bad as you might imagine. It’s a “sweet cynicism,” “a tender feeling,” but her claims strike me as unconvincing. Even her strongest defense in note 57 (“Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles. The absence of this love is the reason why such kitsch items as Peyton Place (the book) and the Tishman Building aren’t Camp”) really serves as nothing more than a reassertion of her point that camp has to be naïve to be “true camp.” It can’t have been created by a cynic; it can only be appreciated by one. Like the dandy, it allows the viewer to feel more sophisticated than the artist and his art, to laugh at his work and exult in his failure. Camp is, at its cold, dead heart, nothing more than aesthetic schadenfreude.