CAMPING OUT : 'Sing-A-Long Sound of Music'. - movie review

Commonweal, May 17, 2002 by Rand Richards Cooper

"This is the most fun I've had in a long time," the guy next to me says.

"Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment," Susan Sontag wrote in "Notes on Camp," her immensely influential 1964 essay. "Camp is a tender feeling....What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures." Paradoxically, camp revels in what it parodies; thus the affectionate mockery of Sing-A-Long Sound of Music, its attitude of worshipful irreverence. "You can't camp about something you don't take seriously," Christopher Isherwood noted a decade before Sontag. "You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it."

But what to make of the fun of Sing-A-Long Sound of Music? "Wave your edelweiss to distract the Nazis," Sister Kate instructs, "so the von Trapps can make their escape." From one perspective, to boo and hiss at Nazis, and wave fake flowers to facilitate a getaway, is to risk grotesquely trivializing the material. Yet there's a way in which this radical innocence suggests the same pointed contrast of styles--Rooseveltian cheer (or Churchillian humor) versus the deadly earnestness of Hitler--that divided the Allied sensibility from the Axis one, our democratic breeziness from their fascist pomposity. To be sure, camp will change the subject on a moral argument every time. It's absurd to divide people into good and bad, Oscar Wilde remarked; people are either charming or tedious.

The charm of Sing-A-Long Sound of Music puts irony to the service of an ultimate innocence. Camp, it has been said, is first and foremost a second childhood, and the sing-a-long form invites us to playact our way back into the child's point of view. All villainy is the same, whether the scheming Nazi or the scheming would-be stepmother; as for character development, there is none--camp, like opera and like a child's imagination, conceives character as unchanging and essential ("a state of continual incandescence," as Sontag wrote.) Sing-A-Long Sound of Music celebrates both the simplicity of romance--when Plummer breaks into song with his children, allowing music back into his sorrowing widower's life, the audience cheers--and, at another level, the sublimity of cinematic illusion making. During the scene in which the Trapp family hides at night in the convent graveyard as the villains search for them with flashlights, a group in the back of the theater pulled out flashlights. The beams played across the theater and the screen itself, an oddly thrilling conflation of the real and the make-believe. For a moment, Sing-A-Long Sound of Music was every movie, only more so; it felt as if the silly, glorious artifice of it had laid bare the heart of moviemaking itself.