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| Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson |
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is Jane Schoenbrun's most successful and accomplished film to date. The 1980s inspired mise-en-scene from I Saw the TV Glow is repeated and elevated thanks to a first rate cast and knowingly cheesy special effects. Schoenbrun's themes of transgression, sexual fluidity, and dysmorphia are once again articulated, perhaps overly so. However, Schoenbrun's love for pop culture permeates and lifts the film. The artifacts of pop culture litter the film: 1980s horror film bespoke ephemera, KFC, and lots of brightly packaged candy. Sch💜enbrun 💙s them all, but she is ambivalent enough to fear what pop culture has done to our psyches and bodies. This is the Cronenbergian strain in their work and they toss in a Videodrome reference in acknowledgement.
Teenage Sex... is, of course replete with film references: Sunset Boulevard, Psycho, Nightmare on Elm Street, etc. Schoenbrun is savvy enough about her obsessive cinephilia to joke about an overly academic or meta approach to movies in the flick. Her surrogate in the film, Kris (Hannah Einbinder), is a rising queer indie filmmaker who wants to remake a beloved horror film of her youth. The final girl in that film was played by a young actress named Billy Presley who eventually disappeared from view. Now older and embodied by Gillian Anderson, she lives a reclusive existence living, holy Miss Havisham, in the abandoned set of the original Camp Miasma film. The mousy and frigid Kris visits Billy to talk her into participating in the new film. Einbinder reins in her charisma nicely and has a winning rapport with Anderson that papers over the film's flights of fantasy. Anderson is transfixing in full diva mode, Norma Desmond with the voice of Bette Davis.
Billy gets Kris to loosen, plying her with grass and candy and serving as a sex therapist for the uptight younger woman. Eros and thanatos are at the core of the movie: the monster at the bottom of the lake who comes out to murder campers has an air vent shaped head, a shout out to Silent Hill, and is named "Little Death." The film posits that all one has to do to gain agency is repossess the male gaze and then liberation and orgasms will follow. This aged voice says it ain't necessarily so. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is entertaining on its own terms, but is overly enamored with its own artifice. I also thought it was too long. The satiric scenes of Hollywood players are overly broad and not particularly funny, but Schoenbrun could not resist nibbling the hand that feeds her. Still, I value the personal vision that lies at the heart of the film even if I find it a bit naive. The flirting between a Kwik-Mart clerk and an oblivious Kris is the kind of little touch that uplifts a cockeyed genre film like this.
