Jane Schoenbrun‘s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is, of course, an ironically conceived, self-referencing, garbage-level “slasher film” in quotes. It was shot by Eric Yue with the intention of looking low-rent and generally shitty. It constantly, relentlessly praises the joys and comforts of junk food. I sat there muttering “go fug yahselves, stab yahselves, obliterate yahselves.”
The irony element doesn’t excuse the fact that Teenage_Sex_and_Death_at_Camp_Miasma is essentially a flat, empty, boring serving of spiritually-barren, freeze-dried slasher crap. It was made, in part, to not only tickle and engage the under-45 queer-trans community but to alienate and anger people like me, and in this respect has clearly succeeded.
I am very, very sorry that I spent 112 minutes in the presence of this hellish creation this morning. Any film from Un Certain Regard is presumed to be challenging or allienating in certain ways, but this…holy moley.
It’s essentially a two-hander between Hannah Einbinder (Hacks) as “a young queer filmmaker hired to direct a reboot of the Camp Miasma franchise” blah blah, and poor Gillian Anderson as 50something Billy, a glammy blonde actress who not only starred in a previous Camp Miasma film but was consumed by the bullshit lore and theology blah blah.
The fact that Eva Victor, whose Sorry Baby I quite admired when I saw it here last year, decided to costar in this thing…it just sends me into a depression pit. Ditto poor Dylan Baker…what are you doing, man?
One idea of a truly agonizing nightmare, I’ve imagined, would be to suddenly find myself in Schoenbrun’s 39-year-old head and body. This would mean, obviously, that I would no longer be an individual dude in a conventional biological or spiritual sense but (gasp!) a “they”. Which, of course, would make me trans and non-binary or, in HE shorthand terminology, a transie.
This might also mean estrangement from the chilly, judgmental straights in my immediate family, which I don’t believe in — live and let live, I say, It might also mean being “polyamorous with three or more partners”, to quote from Schoenbrun’s Wiki bio. It would also mean being “anti-capitalist” and “an enemy of Zionism and the Israeli genocide of Palestinians,” etc.