According to Susan Sontag, the camp sensibility is a kind of aesthetic attitude that ‘revels’ in artifice, exaggeration and the stylisation of cultural artefacts. I would like to consider the ways that the live action film Scooby Doo (2002) can be read through the Camp sensibility, sitting somewhere between Sontag’s dichotomy of ‘pure’ and ‘naive’ Camp, through its outlandish setting, stylised characters and overly ambitious uses of CGI.
The film plays into a Camp sensibility through its emphasis on theatricality, style and artifice, aligning with ‘pure’ Camp. Sontag notes that, the Camp sensibility offers a ‘vision of the world in terms of a particular kind of style’, that favours the ‘exaggerated, the ‘off’…’, as well as ‘extravagance’. A key site for Scooby Doos‘ high degree of stylisation is the costumes of the main ‘gang’, which all heavily exaggerate the features of the characters from the cartoon and employ a seamless blend of 1970s vogue, with the contemporary trends of the early 2000s, such as Freddie’s chic blue shirt and flare jeans. The film also embodies the ‘spirit of extravagance’ and artifice through the absurd setting of ‘Spooky Island’, a horror-themed tropical resort that is rife with surreal iconography of monsters, including skulls and bones, as well as tacky artefacts. The extras on the island are defined by artifice, with elaborate costumes, makeup, jewellery and masks that evoke imagery of a kind of ‘Day of the Dead’ celebration. The films appeal to artifice is exaggerated to an absurd degree when the islands owner, Rowan Atkinson’s character, is eventually revealed to be a robot, controlled by a CGI dog called ‘Scrappy doo’.
The ‘naive’ campiness of Scooby Doo can be seen from its heavily-dated CGI effects and cheesy dialogue. Initially viewed as relatively advanced for its time and backed by a large budget, the CGI in the film now seems to be comically over the top and of jarringly poor quality.
In this particular scene, the CGI monsters try capture the ‘gang’, who attempt to fight back physically and verbally through a barrage of sassy one liners. According to Sontag, for something to be Camp, it must be overly ambitious. Thus, this poor attempt to blend the real world with computer generated characters, encapsulated by Velma’s effort to cartoonishly stretch and contort the CGI monster’s mouth with her foot and grab its ears, marks the films Campiness. There is arguably a necessary temporal distance between the films production and one’s current context to for one to see a film as Camp. We appreciate these CGI effects now because we are ‘no longer frustrated by the failure of the attempt’. Thus, when viewed in contrast to contemporary technological developments in computer graphics and the sensibilities of popular culture, we are granted an ironic distance that enables us to enjoy the film because of its poorly executed CGI, exaggerated settings and stylised costumes, which become endearing.