Susan Sontag considers the essence of camp to be its love of the unnatural, of artifice and exaggeration. She also defines camp as a way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Camp is considered the love of the exaggerated and extravagant, a kind of love for human nature. Yet, nothing in nature can be campy, and nothing is more unnatural than the undead. The film, Death Becomes Her,
perfectly encapsulates this ideology as camp visual aesthetics are used to address ageism in the entertainment industry; The use of exaggeration identified within camp aesthetics complements the film’s social commentary, highlighting the absurdity of wanting to look young forever and the lengths that women will go to for such aesthetic consistency as its central characters are hyper-fixated on their appearances to a degree that becomes self-destructive. So too do the theatrics of camp humour complement the film’s in-cinema universe, as the film is set in Los Angeles and both of the central characters work in the performing arts – with Madeline being a Broadway actress and Helen an aspiring writer. The film’s camp humour derives from the theatricality of their deaths and fatal accidents – ranging from falling down a flight of stairs, getting shot and being beaten over the head with a shovel – combined with the obscure unnaturalness of their physical appearances and their calm and even at times disgruntled reactions to their bodily changes caused by such antics, shrugging them off as if they were common inconveniences.
Madeline and Helen’s mean-spirited nature also allows the audience to distance themselves from them, which is also crucial to the comedic appeal of campness, providing the audience with more satisfaction as they watch them attack and abuse each other in slap-stick fashion.