Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma left me both captivated and slightly disoriented.
I walked out of the cinema thoroughly entertained, even exhilarated at points – one bloody sequence set to the drifting sounds of Counting Crows’ A Long December stands out as a particular highlight. Yet, I was also entirely unsure if I could properly explain what I had just watched, at least not in the way the film seemed to demand.
That feeling is rather uncomfortable when you run a website about cinema.
You leave the screening with a companion, the credits have barely finished rolling, and soon comes the inevitable question: “So, what did you think?”
Normally, I have an answer ready. I can talk about the performances, the imagery, the structure, and the themes. I can start pulling coherent thoughts together, albeit nowhere near as clearly as when I have a pen in hand. But with Camp Miasma, I found myself less interested in explaining the experience than wondering whether I was actually equipped to do so.
I, admittedly, do not possess a particularly deep knowledge of queer cinema history. Camp Miasma is a profoundly queer film about the trans experience, and there are references, histories, and conversations within that tradition that I simply haven’t encountered enough to unpack.
And that raises an uncomfortable question for anyone who writes about art: Does being a critic give you the automatic authority to interpret everything you encounter?
When I was in my early twenties, I probably would have said yes. Having fallen deeply, obsessively in love with cinema during my university years, I briefly fell into the trap of thinking I understood everything. I was pretentious, opinionated, a Communist (at least for a semester). Having discovered that films could be about things, I wanted everyone to know that I knew exactly what those things were.
The irony was that my cinematic range was incredibly shallow. I hadn’t seen a single second of Kurosawa or Akerman. Entire movements remained complete blind spots. But I had seen just about enough to feel like an authority.
The older I get, the more amusing that certainty seems. The more films I watch, the more aware I become of how much I haven’t seen.
And that is exactly what Camp Miasma has made me confront: not that I don’t understand cinema, but that sometimes I can appreciate a film on an artistic level without feeling like I have accessed every single thing it is offering. There are difficult films I feel perfectly capable of wrestling with. I walked out of Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice already feeling an essay forming in my head. Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid was overwhelming and surreal, but I still felt I had a direct point of connection through the anxieties of my twenties.
But for Camp Miasma, I could only give you surface level observations.
I could tell you what I saw. I could praise the compelling chemistry between Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, pick out visual references to Wes Anderson, and opine on the striking use of painted backgrounds. What I am less certain I can do is tell you what it definitively means…
We live in a culture that demands art become legible almost immediately. Films are reviewed, ranked (as we love to do here on Close-Up Culture!), and reduced to a punchy (and often wildly entertaining) sentence or two on platforms like Letterboxd. Everyone wants to be an expert on everything.
I am not above that impulse. But I’ve come to learn that sometimes criticism isn’t always about having the most sophisticated interpretation. Sometimes, it is simply about knowing the limits of your own. There is a vast difference between saying “this is what I saw” and “this is what the film means.” In this instance, the first belongs to me; the second would demand considerably more than a standard two hours in a cinema.
When we reach that limit, the responsible response isn’t always to manufacture, or even Frankenstein into existence, an answer. It is to listen. It is to seek out writers and critics who have a deeper, more personal relationship to the work, and to allow someone else to reveal what you missed. Fortunately, I saw Camp Miasma with a fiercely intelligent person who was much better equipped to understand and explain the film!
I’ve spent a long time wanting to know more about cinema. I’m increasingly comfortable with knowing that I’ll never know enough.
So, what did I think of Camp Miasma? I thought it was exhilarating, strange, and visually arresting. I thought Gillian Anderson was great. I enjoyed the heck out of it. And, still, as frustrating as it is to admit, I didn’t fully understand it.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma releases in cinemas August 21: https://mubi.com/en/campmiasma
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