In this episode, Fern teaches Julia about Camp! Camp is a mode of aestheticism that focuses on exaggeration, artifice, and playfulness. It is, according to Susan Sontag, “the good taste of bad taste,” a way of looking at a text that encourages readers to be “serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.” Is Star Wars, with all its focus on visuals and aesthetics, its exaggerated characters, its juxtaposition of sci-fi glamour and dirt, Camp? What do we gain if we choose to read it as Camp? Does its overtly political themes and messaging negate a Camp reading of the text? And is “Somehow, Palpatine returned” the Campiest line in contemporary cinema?
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