A S K C A M I L L E
| Camille Paglia's online advice for the culturally disgruntled |
+ + + + + + +
Illustration by Zach Trenholm
Of Versace and killer prom queens
Dear Camille:
Do you share the gushing press appraisals of fashion mogul Gianni Versace that have appeared since his murder? Do you agree that he showcased Madonna's and Courtney's and Uma's and Naomi's bodies in a way no other designer has? And by the way, what's up with his suspected murderer, this gay serial killer. What movie is this guy acting out?
Ready to wear
Dear Ready to wear:
Yes, indeed, I am a Versace fan and in fact defended him to the New York
Times in 1992 when he was under heavy feminist attack for his S&M designs
(see index of "Vamps & Tramps"). Gianni Versace was a true decadent
artist -- that is, a visionary of a "late" phase in culture, with its
cosmopolitan breadth, sexual pluralism and stylistic "too muchness."
With his deep knowledge of art history, theater, opera, ballet and film,
Versace synthesized Western sexual personae and re-projected them not just on
the fashion-show runway but in his brilliant magazine layouts, where the
models seemed like towering, brazen, pagan idols. I loved his deft allusions
to classical antiquity, the Renaissance, Weimar Berlin and so on. His
gaudy, glittering, iridescent patterns always reminded me of that master
genius of the Baroque, Bernini (one of my idols), who used 20 different
colored marbles for the Cornaro Chapel in Rome. Artistically, Versace
understood both surface and structure -- a rare combination.
And yes, I do think Versace had a wonderful instinct for how to present
public women on key occasions. His eye-popping, see-through, Oscars-night
dress for Elizabeth Hurley -- a couture version of a feverish Frederick's of
Hollywood fantasy that 20 years ago only S&M call girls would have
worn -- instantly propelled her onto the world stage. Versace's simple,
elegant white dress for Courtney Love at this year's Academy Awards not only
exquisitely redefined her in the public eye (after her tacky, grungy past as
rock-waif/widow and strung-out porn-concubine in Milos Forman's film) but
seemed to magically reshape her own worldview, so that as an on-stage
presenter, she floated above and outclassed the formidable Madonna herself,
who was huffing and puffing through a flat "Evita" tune.
Versace clearly had a symbiotic relationship with his tough-as-nails sister
Donatella, who was not only his creative Muse but in some way his transsexual
alter ego. She's like a School of Monica Vitti tigress/drag queen. It's
very interesting that Versace's omnipresent logo is the head of Medusa. He
constantly acknowledged how much he owed to his seamstress mother, who ran a
factorylike dress shop with a corps of toiling females. Versace was a
classic example of the kind of mother-dependent, mother-adoring, but
mother-fearing gay man who ruled the pre-Stonewall fashion and performing
arts world. Snaky Medusa is, of course, the ultimate earth-cult symbol of
woman as barbaric dominatrix of the universe. (Freud interpreted her
writhing hair as a pubic motif, representing boys' castration anxiety at
their horrifying first sight of female genitals.)
As for Versace's suspected murderer, Andrew Cunanan, he seems to be under the influence of "Cruising," the
1980 William Friedkin movie starring Al Pacino that very few people besides
me seemed to have liked. Gay activists carried on against it (as they would
against "Basic Instinct," which I defended). For all its exaggerations,
"Cruising" did indeed capture an important, enduring aspect of gay male
sexuality -- that grim, thrilling, half-primitive hunt-in-the-dark game that
has ended in so many gay men getting beaten up, robbed or murdered. There
is no parallel to it in lesbianism, and its hypnotic perversity is
inseparable from its flirtation with danger.
The Versace shocker is also reminiscent of another of my favorite films, "The
Eyes of Laura Mars" (1978), where Faye Dunaway at her most fabulous is a
take-it-to-the-limits fashion photographer trifling with Helmut Newton/Deborah Turbeville S&M scenarios. It degenerates after 45 minutes, but that
mix of fashion, decadence and murder was amazing and amusing. I also recall
a made-for-TV movie -- possibly "She's Dressed to Kill" -- from the late 1970s or
early 1980s where Jessica Walter (I've loved her since "The Group" and "Play
Misty for Me") imperiously presided over a resort fashion show inconveniently
strewn with corpses.
It's outrageous, by the way, that one PC gay activist after another
(including some numbingly monotonous and colorless specimens of Dreary
Dykedom) has trundled onto TV to complain about the FBI's lack of warning to
the gay community. Where have these ostriches been? Before the attack on
Versace, Andrew Cunanan was covered not only in national magazines and
television shows but in the alert gay press as well. Furthermore, the FBI
had no evidence whatever that Cunanan was targeting prominent gays or
prowling the bar scene for victims, since the only gays among his four prior
victims were two quite ordinary people he knew and apparently had a beef
against.
If the Miami gay establishment did not adequately warn bar-goers, then we
have a major scandal on our hands: We should focus our attention not on
overburdened national police agencies but on local gay greed -- and on the kind
of drug-addled, solipsistic hedonism that Randy Shilts documented in the
AIDS-imperiled San Francisco bathhouses in "And the Band Played On." Did
the business interests on South Beach deliberately suppress early warnings
about Cunanan? In his 1911 homoerotic classic, "Death in Venice," Thomas
Mann shows how the masters of the tourist trade (in this case
cholera-infected Venice) never want any bad news to spoil the fun.
Dear Camille:
As one of the few relevant social critics of today with a sensible
outlook on life, I must ask you: Why are girls throwing their newborn
babies out in the garbage? And at the prom of all places! Is this a
new thing in our society? What the hell is going on in the minds of
these young mothers?
Shocked
Dear Shocked:
I totally agree with your reaction to the grotesque incident in Forked River,
N.J., where an 18-year-old gave birth to a baby in the ladies'
room at her high-school prom and disposed of the newborn in a waste basket.
A grand jury must decide whether the girl will be indicted for murder or
not. There have been a half-dozen such cases recently involving middle-class
white girls, who hid their pregnancies from friends and parents, secretly
gave birth, and abandoned the baby in a toilet bowl or trash dumpster.
The video footage of the Forked River girl sailing serenely into the prom
with her date should be put in a time capsule: behold late 20th century
America! -- where the social forms are everything, and nature is nothing. That
docile, unthinking, unformed, overprotected student with her simpering little
smile is typical of the White Girl Robots whom one sees everywhere in this
country. Send her to the Ivy League, and her mental vacuum would be quickly
filled with postmodernist or feminist theory. These dependent, witless,
unresourceful girls have been entirely shaped by suburban shopping malls and
smarmy, post-music MTV.
In the old days, when virginity was a prerequisite for marriage, girls often
ditched their newborns to avoid lifetime disgrace and community ostracism.
It was easier to conceal a pregnancy when women wore long skirts and when,
in the absence of schools, most teenagers were working on the family farm.
While infanticide was a regular feature of antiquity (the baby Oedipus,
ankles pierced and bound, was left to die on a mountaintop) and still is
practiced in China, Judeo-Christianity has a different code, made even more
compassionate by the radically higher value accorded children in European
culture after Rousseau and Romanticism.
On Joan Baez's first album (released in 1960, when she was only 19), there is a
remarkable folk ballad, "Mary Hamilton," that I often play for my classes
when we discuss the roots of modern popular music. Possibly dating from the
Stuart period of the 16th century, it chronicles the disasters befalling a
naive, young maid to the queen -- seduction by the king, a secret pregnancy and
childbirth, then the drowning of the baby, the girl's arrest and trial, and
her wagon ride to the gallows. The song, especially as performed by the
awesomely gifted Baez, gives a very vivid sense of the terrible isolation and
despair of girls suffering an illicit pregnancy.
The recent flurry of infanticides (I keep hearing the booming voice of Dame
Edith Evans as Wilde's Lady Bracknell: "Prism! Where is that BABY?")
illustrates many social failures of the past three decades. When families
are broken, weak or inattentive, public-school sex education -- cold, clinical
biology, amplified by guilt-free condom demonstrations -- is a disaster.
Second, mainstream and campus feminism, in promoting professional career
success for women, systematically devalued motherhood. Today, upscale white
girls wouldn't dream of having or keeping babies: how vulgar; how
lower-class. Get thee to an abortionist!
In creating the sexual revolution and rebelling against organized religion,
my 1960s generation also bequeathed a moral chaos to those who came after us
(a question repeatedly raised in my essay collections). The casual disposing
of infants in toilets and dumpsters chillingly suggests that the amoral world
of "A Clockwork Orange" is already upon us. History tells us that such
periods are ripe for a major religious revival -- meaning conservative
fundamentalism, which cleanses and purges and brings "order" by fascistic
means.
How can we avoid this reactionary nightmare? My urgent recommendation is
that a basic course in ethics (a discipline of Greek philosophy) should be
required in the primary-school curriculum. It would address not only
troublesome sexual matters (like rape and sexual harassment) but all of the
ethical dilemmas that students will face when they enter the adult arenas of
business and politics -- where throwing the baby out with the bath water is
currently the name of the game.
NEXT PAGE | Paglia on John Travolta and Georges Bataille |
