Guest Post: "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma"

As Sondheim wrote, "Every Day a Little Death."

By Jonas Schwartz-Owen

 

Two worlds run through Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, and the whole trick of the movie is watching them bleed into each other. World one: the present day, where Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder play actual people. World two: Camp Miasma, a fictional 1980 slasher — a movie inside the movie — that Anderson's character starred in as a teenager. Schoenbrun shows us both. Then they collapse them.

Start with the fake franchise. Camp Miasma launched in 1980 and sequelized into oblivion: one in 3D, one at Christmas, one in Manhattan, one somehow in medieval times (or at the theme restaurant Medieval Times — the film enjoys the ambiguity). The rights-holders want the IP revived, but the series is blatantly homophobic, misogynistic, and transphobic, so they hire Kris (Einbinder), an up-and-coming queer filmmaker, to give it a modern edge. Kris decides the reboot needs its original final girl: Billy Presley (Anderson), a recluse who fled moviemaking as a teen and now lives at the real lakeside summer camp where the splatter films were shot. Something in that lake is hungry. Something miasmic gets into everyone.

That's the present-day thread. The 1980 film runs alongside it, and Schoenbrun signals which is which — until they stop.

Any suspicion that the David Lynch of it all is coincidental dies the moment Patrick Fischler, unforgettable in the opening scene of Lynch's Mulholland Drive, turns up inside the fake slasher as the harbinger, warning a slew of camp counselors that they're doomed. Every gag here is also a reference and also an existential tome on the unreality of reality.

Schoenbrun reassures us early that it's all tongue-in-cheek. The killer, a gender-fluid ghost named Little Death (as in the idiom for orgasms), wears an air conditioning vent as a mask, and it looks as silly as it sounds. Camp Miasma spoofs the genre while living in the same video store as Jason, Freddy, and Michael — competitor and parody at once. The homages come by the cornucopia: the spear through the lovemaking couple (à la Bay of Blood and its own ripoff, Friday the 13th Part 2), music suspiciously close to Charles Bernstein's A Nightmare on Elm Street score, a killer's weapon reflected in an eye in close-up (Argento's Opera).

The sly move is that the supposedly real world gets the same treatment. Schoenbrun shoots Kris and Billy's story through The Shining — days of the week stamped on screen, a snowbound resort, a creative type coming apart — so reality is skewed from the jump. If Camp Miasma is Friday the 13th, the outer world is a blood-drenched Oz (Lynch's Wild at Heart got there first). The natural world is unnatural; the fake film defies logic. By the end, characters with no business being anywhere near each other show up in the same frame for the slaughter, and the border between the two worlds is gone.

Einbinder and Anderson are extraordinary as women from different planets pulled into orbit. Einbinder's performance is weighted in reality; Anderson's heightened southern drawl, seductive movements, and slippery asides make her a 1940s femme fatale who wandered in. They tango to the death like the leads of Mulholland Drive.

Schoenbrun shoots the '80s footage on film stock, with the sleazy rhythms of the pre-studio slasher wave, then stitches the worlds together with rhyming images: the killer's vent becomes spiral paintings becomes a whirlpool opening at the bottom of the lake. Sometimes the mask reads as a movie camera. The 1980 cast is wiped out in a brisk five-minute massacre scored to Counting Crows' "A Long December" — a song from 1996, in a movie from 1980. The impossibility is the point. A song that cannot exist inside Camp Miasma plays over Camp Miasma anyway, and the seams of the fiction show without anyone onscreen noticing. The absurdity isn't a wink at us; it's the movie admitting it was never a movie from 1980 in the first place.

Because,  Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, seems to be saying, none of us are really here. We all are in a movie for someone else's pleasure — the killer's, God's, take your pick. All the world's a stage, and we are merely players. Blood is orgasmic, flesh is fragile and penetrable, and what we do here doesn't mean a thing in the scope of the universe, at least according to this tasty but poisonous morsel of a movie.

Considerably heavier than Jason Takes Manhattan.