Beyond Sontag

There’s a difference between “high camp” and “low camp,” between a witty, smart, mostly gay (excepting Radley Metzger) style and a physical, primal, mostly straight (excepting John Waters) sensibility. It’s not that gays are generally more intelligent than heteros – just that they’re forced to work harder, to subvert society through code (i.e., to sculpt it to conform to their own reality). Watching Metzger’s soft-core sex farce “Score,” I was reminded of Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” – both being tales of an older couple artfully dragging an unwitting younger couple into their games. (When I later learned “Score” was based on a stage play it all made sense – how brilliant of a “pornographer” to use a theater script as his foundation!) Radley Metzger is the thinking man’s Russ Meyer.