Willful Infidelities: Camping Camille

Abstract

This essay examines one cinematic and one theatrical adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas fils novel La dame aux camélias (1848), which appeared in the years of the sexual revolution as camp was emerging as a more visible and pervasive representational trend. The first is Radley Metzger’s Camille 2000 (1969), a film that helped secure Metzger’s reputation as an auteur of “highbrow” erotica for mixed-sex audiences. The second is the Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s Camille (1973) by Charles Ludlam, who also starred as the title character. Individually and together these texts complicate the artificial binary between notions of adaptive faithfulness versus infidelity. Considering both as camp adaptations renders such a distinction inoperable and instead opens critical space for a queerer understanding of textual relationships to take hold.