Susan Sontag’s essay Notes on Camp describes some of the characteristics which designate a piece of art as camp. It needs to be overambitious, exaggerated, and not too popular in mainstream culture. Perhaps most importantly, it needs to be done in earnest; not for the purpose of creating something ironic or bad-on-purpose, but for making a genuine piece of art: “Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much'” (284). Not only does it have to fail, it has to fail spectacularly, in a way that entertains the viewer. If something is just bad and not camp-bad, it’s because the creator wasn’t ambitious enough in their aspirations.
Neil Breen is a filmmaker whose films are so laughably bad that it seems inconceivable that their bad quality could be unintentional. By all accounts, though, it is. Every time a cast member of one of his movies has spoken publicly about working with him, they’ve said that he takes the process incredibly seriously and refers to himself as a legitimate filmmaker while on set. Breen’s genuine intentions, combined with the enormous ambition that’s evident in his films, makes his work extremely camp. It’s reasonable to assume that most filmmakers working on a low budget wouldn’t bother to include scenes like buildings exploding or humans fighting tigers, knowing that they don’t have the funds to make them look convincing, but that doesn’t stop Neil Breen. He includes every single idea he has, no matter how ridiculous, and the resulting awful-looking scenes are what makes his films camp, rather than just bad.
Additionally, Sontag (and Ross and Babuscio, in their own essays) points out that camp is creating by playing with gender roles, especially overexaggerating them. This can be done through men dressing as and acting like women, and vice versa, or it can be done through men and women leaning so far into the stereotypes of their own genders that it becomes comical. In the realm of camp, gender becomes (though arguably it already is) a performance, not to be taken seriously.
In his films, Neil Breen leans so far into manly stereotypes it becomes ridiculous. He’s constantly shooting people, yelling, running from explosions, seducing women, and beating up tigers (ok fine, that one only happened once). In one film, Fateful Findings, he expresses anger by repeatedly breaking the many laptops which for some reason surround him in every scene. To have these overexaggerated “manly” traits be embodied by a middle-aged man in a crewneck sweater and jeans, who can’t act very well and therefore does not make any of it look convincing, reduces these traits to a silly performance to be laughed at.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIzT7wBjfBs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtpT99CzeVc
Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London Penguin Books.
Neil, Breen, dir. 2013. Fateful Findings. Panorama Entertainment.
Breen, Neil, dir. 2023. Cade: The Tortured Crossing. Neil Breen Films, LLC.
This is such a great example! It really fits into Sontag’s assertion that Camp is created naively (the filmmaker not intending it to be camp). Personally, ‘Pass Thru’ is my favorite Neil Breen film! It is filmed in the desert and also involves a tiger, and has very fantastical elements that shoot for the stars but do end up failing pretty miserably.
I love Fateful Findings so much, I’m so glad you chose to write on Neil Breen! The insanely ambitious and rarely successful special effects tie in well with Sontag’s descriptions of Camp showing clear artifice too.
I’ve never heard of Neil Breen before, so it was really interesting to read about and see how Sontag’s naive camp effectively reflects why Fateful Findings successfully achieves a camp aesthetic.