Kitsch! Camp! Schmaltz! Schlock's! Person of the Year
Late Stage Bimbo, Icon, Everything: Jennifer Coolidge
You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it, you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is basically camp about religion. The ballet is camp about love…
Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening
I actually started this newsletter because I wanted to publish an ode to Jennifer Coolidge. To be clear — I’ve been wanting to do this way before the White Lotus fame, way before actual Time Magazine selected the star as one of the most influential people of the year, before PETA named her their 2023 Vegan Queen. When the internet started celebrating the Fourth of July with “makes me want a hot dog real bad” memes, I thought: do not cite the deep magic to me, witch. For I was there when it was written.
I’ve loved Coolidge since I was younger than however old Sydney Sweeney is supposed to be in White Lotus. I’ve loved her since American Pie, actually, a terrible film my friends in high school made me to sneak into the theatre to see repeatedly. I’m not shocked, but I’m little annoyed, to learn that “Stiffler’s Mom” in that film — a woman who is supposed to be old but, amazingly, still hot! Can you even believe! — was younger when the movie was filmed than I am now.
Coolidge’s career is almost entirely comprised of bimbo roles, often ones that suggest her sexual viability and stereotypical beauty are especially hilarious because she is “old.” In my personal filmography of the actress, American Pie was followed up by her performance as Sherri Ann Cabot, the wife of a nearly dead Patrick Cranshaw in Best in Show. Coolidge’s Sherri is surprisingly straight, with timing and poise that convey the performer’s background as a graduate of the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts. In my memory of Best in Show, Coolidge plays a vapid, gold digging beauty. On rewatching, however, I can see the performer’s original wish to be the next Meryl Streep. Coolidge isn’t the bimbo in this movie — the world around her is.
In her next (and prior to White Lotus) most iconic role as Paulette Bonafonté Parcelle in Legally Blonde, Coolidge makes two choices that resonate throughout the rest of her career.
1.) She does indeed fully embody the bimbo archetype with her squeaky Jersey voice, Monroe wide-eyed stares, and klutziness.
But!
2.) She radicalizes the bimbo trope by refusing to play Paulette as though she does not have an interior.
Her portrayal of Elle Wood’s hairdresser/manicurist/best friend shows a profound vulnerability and, at points, aching sadness in response to her belittling ex and growing sense that she’s too old not so much to be desirable, but to be loved. It’s the oldest theme in the novel of manners — Edith Wharton’s Lily Bart or Jane Austin’s Anne Elliott. As my algorithm insisted on telling me again and again around my birthday earlier this year: Miss Havisham was only forty. So, my age.
Mike White’s vision for the character of Tanya McQuoid (a part the writer/director wrote specifically for Coolidge and then had to cajole her into accepting) is a crystallization of Coolidge’s unique affectual mix of stupidity and vulnerability. In an attempt to write something about why not just I, but everybody, fell so hard for this performance I started researching the function and possibilities of Camp aesthetics. It seemed to me — and still seems — Coolidge’s outsized, hyper stylized blend of cartoon and raw emotional core personify the very idea of Camp.
This led me to the above Isherwood quote which begins Susan Sontag’s foundational essay, “Notes on Camp.” If, as Isherwood suggests, the ballet is Camp about love, then I wonder if Coolidge is Camp about Feminism. “You can’t Camp about something you don’t take seriously,” Isherwood notes. It strikes me that for her entire career, Coolidge has taken the objectification and marginalization — specifically age-related marginalization — very seriously indeed.
What I love most about her is that her bimbofication dialogues with these ideas at the same time that is absolutely refuses to be diminished by them. In direct contrast to trends toward the dissociative feminist as seen in characters like Fleabag or Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation narrator (sorry — that’s an awkward sentence to write because both those characters are so untethered they don’t even have names), Coolidge chooses to show her pain, grief, humiliations, and hope.
The term “dissociative feminist” was coined by Emmeline Clein in a 2019 article for Buzzfeed News, “The Smartest Women I Know Are All Dissociating.” If you’d like to know about this from a more academic perspective than I’m offering here, check out “To Feel or Not to Feel: Dissociative Feminism and Modalities of Unfeeling in 21st-Century Literary Fiction” by Cleo Miki. Miki defines the dissociative feminist trope as marking:
“A new affective tone which shifts from the declarative protestations of ‘girlboss feminists’ to detached, flat descriptions of ‘overtly horrifying facts’ which comprise the everyday existence of women today. Abuse, depression, and burnout are all treated with a ‘so what?’ attitude. In addition to a generally marked dispassion, many argue that this emerging archetype ‘glamorizes her own destruction’ to the point that she knowingly engages in self-interested, fatalistic behaviors, only to scoff in the face of the subsequent fallout. The dissociative feminist deems emotional reactivity trite; she is ‘aware that ‘woundedness’ is overdone and overrated.”
While much of the comedy of Coolidge’s characters comes from her lack of awareness of her surroundings, much of the emotional core of her performances comes from that same source — the deep, highly self-focused belief that her feelings and pain matter. Leslie Jamison comments on the shift toward dissociative feminism, observing that is a
“performance of a ‘post-wounded’ affect: an affective treatment which neutralizes dramatic or otherwise anguished reactions to pain. Rather than indulge in melodrama, dissociative feminists lean into their own awareness of hurt and elect to ‘stay numb or clever instead.”
I think that right there is the key to understanding the way Coolidge has harnessed the Camp aesthetic — she indulges in the melodrama and refuses to be numb or clever. Again and again, we see her characters choose to present themselves fully in an attempt to be seen and understood.
Maybe she plays dumb, but she knows something many brilliant people never learn: to really be loved is to really be known. And I love how loudly, generously, and stylishly she lets us know her.
I wonder if this capacity is especially profound for my generation — the Miss Havishams of the world. Women who grew up with Daria Morgendorffer and Jenny McCarthy as twin poles of two very different forms of dissociation. The conditioning that came from these “role models” left me, personally, totally unequipped to handle failure or rejection. It was not supposed to happen to women “like me” (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean—educated?) and if I did — what if that meant I wasn’t a woman “like me” anymore?
On The Daily’s December 15th episode, “The Year of Taylor Swift,” Taffy Brodesser-Akner analyzes Time Magazine’s actual person of the year, Taylor Swift, by arguing that the artist’s’ success is due to her ability to internalize pain and failure only to later express it through her music. Brodesser-Akner suggests Swift’s success lies not so much in her relatability, but in the idea that if even someone “like her” can be humiliated, lied to, and most famously, broken up with, then maybe it can happen to anybody. And maybe it’s okay. Maybe you still get to be you after.
Arguably, the hallmark of my generation is the way it has been shaped by systemic failure. (Think infuriating suggestions about Millenials not being able to afford homes because they bought too much avocado toast.) If you’re reading this, you probably know that suggestion isn’t just stupid — it’s a violence that flagrantly ignores many much realer factors: the wealth hoarding of previous generations; shifts to a gig economy and its wealth adverse 1099 tax forms; the financial crash of 2008; predatory student loan debt; the pandemic; and the subsequent housing crisis.
What I am trying to say here is that this is a generation that has experience systemic and largely unexpressed pain. There is no national monument for people who graduated the year the economy collapsed. And there is certainly no memorium for the millions of people whose lives have been permanently mutilated by student loan debt. On the contrary — we live in a country that fights to keep these people ashamed, and silent.
Re-enter Jennifer Coolidge, who, to use a Taylor Swift lyric, is the loudest and most shameless woman this town has ever seen. I’m selecting her as Camp! Kitsch! Schmaltz! Schlock’s! Camp Person of the Year for the obvious reason that she is fabulous. But more so — for the less obvious reason that her highly stylized and yet utterly penetrable, totally vulnerable, and radically raw aesthetic is what the moment calls for.
In moments of pain, Coolidge calls it for what it is. Then she moves on, ever hopeful.
My Camp rec for the week is: Coolidge’s 2023 Golden Globes acceptance speech.
Here’s the transcript:
“Thank you, thank you so much, wow, and thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. It really means a lot. Thank you. Wow. I can put this down, right? I don’t work out, you know what I mean — I can’t hold it that long. But, you know, this is such a great night. I’m so glad to be here and be in the company of all of you. Hollywood Foreign Press, thank you. I just want to say, some of the people in this room, there were like five people that kept me going for, you know, 20 years with these little jobs. And Ryan Murphy, you were one of them. It’s these little jobs that kept me going, it was like five — it was like you, Ryan, and, let’s see, we got — who else was there. It was … just you, Ryan.
[Laughter] No, but, I mean — I didn’t know anybody, and it just was sort of this thing that wasn’t going anywhere. Then there were these people who would give me these cute little jobs and it would just be enough to get to the next one. Michael Patrick King, you kept me going for a long time, and Reese [Witherspoon], you got me in Legally Blonde. And then the Weiss brothers would keep me going because some of these would go like five different episodes, and five different sequels of American Pie. I’ve milked that to death. I’m still going for six or seven, whatever they want.
But I just want to say, I hope my agent at UTA and Tiffany [Kuzon], you all forgive me because the hook came out at the last thing I got an award at, this giant hook, and I thought it left when vaudeville ended, and this hook came and took me off the stage at the Emmys. And I didn’t get to say what I really wanted to say at the Emmys, which is Mike White … I just — truly, I just want you all to know that I had such big dreams and expectations as a younger person, but what happened is they get sort of fizzled by life and whatever. I thought I was going to be Queen of Monaco even though someone else did it. [Laughter] But I had these giant ideas. And then you get older and, oh, shit’s going to happen. And, Mike White, you have given me hope. You’ve given me a new beginning. Even if this is the end, because you did kill me off, but even if this is the end, you changed my life in a million different ways. My neighbors are speaking to me and things like that. I was never invited to one party on my hill, and now everyone’s inviting me! I just — you know, it’s to you, Mike White.
This is something all of you, if you don’t know Mike White, this is what you should know: He is worried about the world, he’s worried about people, he’s worried about friends of his that aren’t doing well, he’s always worried about people, you’re worried about animals, and he really is one of the greatest people I’ve ever … He gives me so much excitement to be — you make people want to live longer, and I didn’t. [Laughter]
So anyway, I just want to say, Mike White, I love you to death. I just want to say, this is a real fun night, thank you. Thank you!”
Kitsch! Camp! Schmaltz! Schlock! is a reader-supported publication. The support of “like five people” keeps this newsletter going. If you’d like more CAMP in 2024, please consider subscribing or gifting a subscription 💋
And if you feel like hearing me talk even more, this time about post-modernism and whiteness in my novel, MONARCH (plus some book recs), you can listen to my interview at: