Camp's Prisoners Became Its Jailers
John Waters and Ryan Murphy built empires on the same principle. They believed in fucking the gatekeepers.
When they sat down at Provincetown this fall, both men were asked about critics. Both gave the same answer—bad reviews don't touch them. They're past that.
Camp was born as a weapon. Susan Sontag understood it as the last refuge of people locked out of the institution—a way to read power as style, to treat the respectable world as material for reinterpretation. Camp required an enemy, required that the gatekeepers actually gate something.
Waters today controls a legacy and teaches at universities, receives retrospectives from museums. Murphy runs two of television's most visible franchises. Neither man is outside anything anymore—they are the thing they used to critique. And here's where the logic collapses. They still talk as if they're not.
They've become what they were arguing with.
The indifference to critics that once signaled freedom from institutional judgment now signals something else entirely—it signals the freedom that comes from winning. When someone with institutional power tells you they don't care what you think, that's not camp. That's just indifference. Camp was the aesthetic of the weak. This is the indifference of the strong.
The tragedy isn't that Waters and Murphy have sold out—it's subtler. They've become what they were arguing with. They've moved from "the critics can't hurt me because I don't need their validation" to "the critics don't matter because I have power." One statement comes from the outside. The other comes from within the gates.
