The Miseducation of Cameron Post
Sep. 17th, 2018 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI missed The Miseducation of Cameron Post when it was in theaters here, but sometimes the world offers you a second chance: the IU cinema showed it last weekend, and my friend Caitlin and I caught it then.
My shorthand description of the film has been “the drama version of But I’m a Cheerleader,” which is… yes and no. There are definite similarities between the two films. In both films, the heroine is sent to a gay conversion camp intended to turn her into a heterosexual; in both, the proximity of other gay teens instead helps the heroine embrace her sexuality, leading in the end to her escape from the camp.
But the difference in tone is more significant than that capsule summary suggests. But I’m a Cheerleader is an over the top comedy in bright pinks and eye-searing blues. The Miseducation of Cameron Post is earth-toned, muted, downbeat. Mountain sunlight streams in through the windows, but rather than brighten the place up, it washes it out.
As with the color palette, so with the emotional tone. But I’m a Cheerleader is, in the end, a joyous movie. The Miseducation of Cameron Post is not a tragedy - the ending is ambiguous - but it is a sad movie.
Not in any dramatic, flashy sense - the movie eschews big dramatic setpieces - but in a small, muted, quietly devastating way, where the sadness grows larger the farther you get from the movie. It feels like the whole world is ranged against these kids. There are moments when Cameron wavers, when she’s tempted to get with the program and try to be “cured,” even though she never really believes it would work, just because everything is so hard.
Late in the film, an investigator is sent to the camp in the wake of a suicide attempt. (It is typical of the film’s approach that we only see the blood left behind, not the attempt itself.) He’s meant to find out if the camp is abusing the kids. But as Cameron points out to him, the point of the program is to make them hate themselves. Isn’t that abuse?
At the end of But I’m a Cheerleader, you know everything’s going to be okay. Megan and Graham are together; they’ve got a soft place to land in the halfway house run by two gay ex-patients of the camp. And Megan’s parents have joined P-FLAG (her mother rather reluctantly, it must be admitted) so they can learn to accept her as she is.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post, on the other hand, ends on a much more ambiguous note - and it’s an ending that only grows darker the more you think about it. Cameron and two friends have run away from the camp; they’re hitch-hiking in the back of a truck to get as far away as they can. But they’ve got nowhere to go, no money, no prospects: one of the characters earlier made a bitter comment about “turning tricks on Times Square,” and while you don’t want that for any of them, it’s hard to see how they’ll end up anywhere better.
***
Only semi-related, butkore linked me to an article about The Original Six: The Story of Hollywood’s Forgotten Feminist Crusade, which is about six female directors who sued the studios for gender discrimination in the late seventies/early eighties - only to have their case dismissed in court - and I thought everyone ought to have a chance to see it.
The article mentions some of these directors’ would-be projects, including a biopic of Emma Goldman and “a buddy road-trip comedy called Bad Girls.” I would kill for a road-trip comedy made in the late seventies or early eighties starring a pair of wise-cracking women.
My shorthand description of the film has been “the drama version of But I’m a Cheerleader,” which is… yes and no. There are definite similarities between the two films. In both films, the heroine is sent to a gay conversion camp intended to turn her into a heterosexual; in both, the proximity of other gay teens instead helps the heroine embrace her sexuality, leading in the end to her escape from the camp.
But the difference in tone is more significant than that capsule summary suggests. But I’m a Cheerleader is an over the top comedy in bright pinks and eye-searing blues. The Miseducation of Cameron Post is earth-toned, muted, downbeat. Mountain sunlight streams in through the windows, but rather than brighten the place up, it washes it out.
As with the color palette, so with the emotional tone. But I’m a Cheerleader is, in the end, a joyous movie. The Miseducation of Cameron Post is not a tragedy - the ending is ambiguous - but it is a sad movie.
Not in any dramatic, flashy sense - the movie eschews big dramatic setpieces - but in a small, muted, quietly devastating way, where the sadness grows larger the farther you get from the movie. It feels like the whole world is ranged against these kids. There are moments when Cameron wavers, when she’s tempted to get with the program and try to be “cured,” even though she never really believes it would work, just because everything is so hard.
Late in the film, an investigator is sent to the camp in the wake of a suicide attempt. (It is typical of the film’s approach that we only see the blood left behind, not the attempt itself.) He’s meant to find out if the camp is abusing the kids. But as Cameron points out to him, the point of the program is to make them hate themselves. Isn’t that abuse?
At the end of But I’m a Cheerleader, you know everything’s going to be okay. Megan and Graham are together; they’ve got a soft place to land in the halfway house run by two gay ex-patients of the camp. And Megan’s parents have joined P-FLAG (her mother rather reluctantly, it must be admitted) so they can learn to accept her as she is.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post, on the other hand, ends on a much more ambiguous note - and it’s an ending that only grows darker the more you think about it. Cameron and two friends have run away from the camp; they’re hitch-hiking in the back of a truck to get as far away as they can. But they’ve got nowhere to go, no money, no prospects: one of the characters earlier made a bitter comment about “turning tricks on Times Square,” and while you don’t want that for any of them, it’s hard to see how they’ll end up anywhere better.
***
Only semi-related, but
kore linked me to an article about The Original Six: The Story of Hollywood’s Forgotten Feminist Crusade, which is about six female directors who sued the studios for gender discrimination in the late seventies/early eighties - only to have their case dismissed in court - and I thought everyone ought to have a chance to see it. The article mentions some of these directors’ would-be projects, including a biopic of Emma Goldman and “a buddy road-trip comedy called Bad Girls.” I would kill for a road-trip comedy made in the late seventies or early eighties starring a pair of wise-cracking women.
no subject
Date: 2018-09-18 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-09-18 05:37 pm (UTC)Whereas to an audience now, Cameron's doubts show that the program is taking her apart inside and she needs to get out before the self-hatred gets even deeper.