Notes from Camp Uncanny, or Maybe Weird Movies Made Me Queer

by Isaac Essex

I was a weird kid. I know this because other kids told me so, and their words had that much power. I could make a neat symbolic connection to this being the first moment I understood the power of words and was thus inspired to be a writer. That would be a lie. What actually happened is I felt further disinclined to be around other kids. I retreated into the unsteady safety of my own mind. This apparently only made me more weird. That’s what the kids told me, anyways. 

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In an animated movie, wood screams when it is cut into beams for building. Waves of oil envelop everything, mouths rise from nowhere and belch. It’s called magic when the animals talk and humans shrink to fairy-size. I find their faces so eerie, so unnerving. A tree is cut down and it releases a demon that feeds on pollution. It becomes vast and wants to poison everything. Maybe this is supposed to be a fairy story; it is terrifying. 

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I had a therapist once who suggested watching a sad movie when I felt overwhelmed by my feelings. His logic, which worked, was that sad movies are supposed to make you sad, and it’s easier to process feelings when you can put them somewhere. I wasn’t very well at the time, and while it is sometimes a strategy I turn back to, it has become one that I play with. I’ll watch movies to stretch what I feel, to see if there’s an expansiveness of feeling that is made possible by this encounter that tests and broadens what I understand myself as capable of feeling. 

This therapist shepherded me through several coming-outs, which certainly helped me not feel so overwhelmed, but it didn’t really touch the weird feelings, the out-of-step strangeness that still lurked within. So I watch weird movies and let them estrange me from what I think I know about myself, how I understand what I think I know of my being in relation to others, how that can be opened and pressed in ways I didn’t know to be possible. This is not to suggest that these affects activate in the same way, but rather to recognize the breadth of what my then-therapist invited me into: a way to be with these big emotions that can feel bigger than I know how to bear. It can be a weird feeling, but it’s also kind of wonderful. 

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Mark Fisher makes the clarification that “what the weird and the eerie have in common is a preoccupation with the strange. The strange—not the horrific,” that the allure of the eerie “has, rather, to do with a fascination with the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition, and experience.” I find there’s something strange about watching movies, a kind of pact we as viewers make that requires that we suspend logic to allow ourselves to be engrossed by the screen. We know the film is a kind of artifice, the people on screen are actors pretending, and we give ourselves over to the power of film to be moved, to feel deeply, to let these feelings touch the crevices of our bodies and spread outward. Afterwards, even though the film is over, it stays with us. 

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There’s this movie where a boy who is bullied falls into a book and there are talking rocks and friendly dragons and a turtle the size of an island. Another boy is pursued by a giant wolf who wants to kill the child. A girl-child needs a name. The land of fantasy where kids can be the hero is besieged by a consuming sadness so powerful it touches everything. In the movie, children have so much power. It always fills me with dread. 

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Fisher teases out the translation of Freud’s unheimlich as the uncanny, suggesting, rather, that we think of it as “unhomely,” that the unheimlich is “the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange.” (10) Running with this, he writes that the weird and the eerie “allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside,” that “the weird is that which does not belong” and yet “brings to the familiar something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled.” It is this lack of reconciliation which hails me, the eerie sense of something unconcluded, unconfirmed, unsteady, that best articulates how I feel as I move through the world. Fisher: “It is this release from the mundane, this escape from the confines of what is ordinarily taken for reality, which goes some way to account for the peculiar appeal that the eerie possesses.” 

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Another movie opens with a young girl scared. Scared, because she can’t make sense of her own dreams. She’s dreaming of a place with good witches and bad witches and talking lions and a man made of tin where the roads are made of yellow bricks and monkeys can fly. She is disbelieved by grown ups. 

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Among the dedications Kate Bornstein offers in her book Hello, Cruel World she says her book is “For all outsiders, freaks, misfits, nerds, geeks, queers, and outlaws.” The subtitle of this book is “101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws,” and it is an incredible text that honors and takes seriously the bad feelings that besiege young people. Kate Bornstein is a trans elder to us all; she says to call her Auntie Kate. In Hello, Cruel World she wants to make sure her reader stays excited by life’s possibilities—even if life feels very, very hard. She insists that “the world is healthier because of its outsiders and outlaws and freaks and sinners,” and Hello, Cruel World makes it feel possible to be alive. She understands that we sometimes wear costumes to try and feel out who we are, and she makes it clear that that’s okay; it’s a practice, and it’s part of how we survive. Auntie Kate reminds us that we are constantly changing, constantly shifting, because the world around us is always in flux so we have to keep updating who we are within it, which she calls its own kind of talent. She closes her introduction with tenderness: “[T]his may be a scary time for you, and if that’s so, I hope I can help you find your courage again.” What does this courage look like, I wonder. I imagine Auntie Kate would say: whatever you need it to, my darling.

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In practically every coming-of-age film I saw as a kid, there’s a scene with boys (always boys) at summer camp toasting marshmallows by the campfire and telling ghost stories. I never went to sleepaway camp as a kid, and while I felt bereft at the time, in hindsight it’s clear that camp is much less fun for kids like me than the movies make it seem. 

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Jack Halberstam dedicates The Queer Art of Failure to “all of history’s losers.” He writes that “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world,” that “failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well.” He continues, “failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development,” that engaging failure “provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life.” There’s something liberating in thinking about queer failure, a kind of release from sense-making, legibility, conformity, and logic, a disinvestment that becomes an invitation. If I think about queer failure in relation to the movies that make me feel weird, my feeling weird becomes its own relationship to knowledge, one that releases me from appropriateness, respectability, normativity, possibly even propriety, and instead gives the discordant feelings I’m left with permission to be nonsensical.  

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I keep watching this movie about women who lived despite being dead. Their belief in their own beauty and sexual allure kept them going, sort of. They’re catty, they fight each other (like, really fight each other), one gets potions from a basically naked woman while the other has sex with the potion-seeker’s husband. Holes are blown through stomachs and heads twisted impossibly backwards, bodies pasted back together and become not at all like new and live forever becoming grotesque. It’s giving cunt. 

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In her canonical essay “Notes on Camp,” Susan Sontag writes that camp “is not a natural mode of sensibility. … [T]he essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural,” that “Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment.” The weird movies I love have been called bad, cult, classic, niche, trite, over the top, unbelievable, unrealistic, zany, flops, failures. I’m not disinterested in these namings, but it doesn’t sway my interest, it piques it: “To camp is a mode of seduction—one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation.” Sontag suggests that a connoisseur of Camp finds pleasure in “the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses.” The judgment of whether a film succeeds is so often determined by financial gains, box office attendance, and awards won. A lot of the films I love, then, are failures. If, as Sontag suggests, Camp is a sensibility, it is also a complexity. She writes that “Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation—not judgment,” where “people who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as “a camp,” they’re enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.” I am deep in this tenderness. 

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Every October, queers who aren’t kids any more get dressed up to go to the movie. The one with singalongs and sex and a dark and rainy night which makes it oh so seductive. There are lipsticked beings from other planets and floating lips that call it science fiction and isn’t that a funny phrase: something framed as objective truth spliced next to something defined as make believe. Maybe we get a little tipsy, maybe we kiss our friends, maybe we’re the brave one to volunteer to wear the gold spandex trunks. Maybe. The possibility is titillating which makes it oh so seductive. 

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Perhaps there is a mode of viewing that makes these movies queer. There’s certainly a strangeness, or at least an estranging feeling, that I’m always left with after watching them. Perhaps it’s in the eeriness of animated movies, or the flagrant campiness of so many ’80s movies, or the terror of certain children’s movies. When I watch them I always feel a little weird, and whenever I try and describe what that means for me I always fail. I do not feel the need to discipline myself into categorizing my feelings into legible terms and this, to me, is a queer feeling. When I think of these films as queer, it’s not in the way that Joe Vallese so accurately notes where “queerness is used [as] a sloppy framework for getting the film to its shocking finale,” but rather as a structure of feeling, a way of engaging and being that is disinvested in normative meaning-making and instead is a kind of affective relationality that gets us closer to understanding who we are. 

“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality,” José Esteban Muñoz writes. In his worldview, queerness is something we can never touch, but we can feel. “Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” When I taught this text, my students asked me what it meant. I asked them what it made them feel. 

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After class, a friend suggests that the rest of us are cool and we were quick to clarify that we’re actually just weird. We’re also all queer. For me there is something weird about being queer and this isn’t the bad thing I believed it to be when I was a kid. For me, queerness is a way of being in the world that is out of step with the world. That is, I feel that my queerness gives me an outside-ness to everyday happenings that lets me see them in a different way. This way is one that is critical but always engaged, distant but inherently bound; it’s a kind of disaffected relationship that is nonetheless deeply committed to possibility. The weird movies I watch give me a queer way of seeing and engaging when I don’t otherwise have language to describe it. There’s an eerie out-of-step-ness I felt when I first watched them, that I still feel when I watch them, and to me that’s where my queerness lives. I’ll keep writing about them in an attempt to explain what their queerness means to me, but I’ll fail to provide an answer—I think feeling weird about it is cooler. 

Isaac Essex (they/he) currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island after stints in Philadelphia and Lincoln, Nebraska. Their work is interested in queer and trans endurance amid hostile climates, extractive economies, and ecological precarity. He thinks particularly about what it means to be queer and have bad feelings, how to move through them, and how to find common places for persistence. You can find Isaac’s work in places like Apiary, Pank, and Red Door Magazine, and on social media as @completenovice.