September 13, 2024

(Chappell) Roan d'Arc

Some thoughts on camp medievalism from Prof. Megan L. Cook.

Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

(from Matt and David: This is a guest post from Megan Cook of Colby College. The moment we saw Chappell Roan, clad in armor, firing a flaming crossbow bolt, we reached out to Dr. Cook for her expertise.)

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Chappell Roan's performance at the VMAs, in which the singer performed her single “Good Luck, Babe” clad in armor before a burning castle, was a tour-de-force of what I might call camp medievalism, and as such has everything and nothing to do with the Middle Ages.

Roan has been vocal about her own struggles with the pressures of fame as of late, and so the fact that she, along with stylist Genesis Webb, gravitated toward a look that telegraphs protection and strength makes a lot of sense here. At the same time, the whole performance reads legibly as camp within the context of Roan's other looks for high profile performances, like her black/white swan get-up on Jimmy Fallon, her Divine-inflected bouffant on NPR's Tiny Desk, and her paired Statue of Liberty and NYC Taxi looks at the Governors Ball festival this summer. None of this gestures even remotely to the Middle Ages, though it's very clear that Roan and Webb are well-versed in their pop culture history. (And among other things, the VMAs performance seemed to draw inspiration from Madonna's "Like a Prayer" video.)

I've written elsewhere about dirtbag medievalism, the weirdly pervasive and enduring presence of medieval themes and motifs in the grungy corners of American popular and consumer culture. This seems to me to be something slightly different, more overtly performative and celebratory, but camp medievalism shares with dirtbag medievalism a delight in putting the medieval—its visual, sonic, and narrative tropes—in places where no medieval needs to be, and doing it without any particularly attachment to historical specificity. The medieval has popped up in Roan's looks before, in her red carpet look at the VMAs (very Lady of the Lake/strange women lying in ponds distributing swords), in the cover for the Good Luck Babe single and in her look for the 2024 Grammys party, both of which featured an elaborate bicorn headdress paired with a prosthetic nose. To me, the headdress reads as straightforwardly medieval (albeit by way of a community theater costume closet, as is appropriate for Roan's Midwest princess persona), but Webb's comments on that look cite Chris Cunningham and Thierry Mugler. Similarly, any medievalism in the VMAs is filtered through a host of intermediary interpretations. 

Camp medievalism shares with dirtbag medievalism a delight in putting the medieval—its visual, sonic, and narrative tropes—in places where no medieval needs to be...

We'll have to wait for any official comment from Roan's camp on the specific inspiration for this performance (among other things, I'd be willing to bet that there are some nods to video games that have passed right by me, an elder millennial) but I really loved the way it played with our expectations of medievalism-- which of course means that it's predicated on the idea that the medieval is readily recognizable in the first place. We see a relatively petite person (Roan is 5'2") in armor with a flaming crossbow, surrounded by much taller figures also in armor, standing before a castle, complete with crenelated turrets.

The first place my mind goes is Joan of Arc, doubly so given that Roan is lesbian and Joan is a queer icon. But if we're getting Joan of Arc here, we're also getting a delightful subversion of it: Joan's iconography includes a short haircut; Roan's trademark red mane, here in two long braids, was visible throughout the performance. Joan ends up burnt at the stake, an archetypal display of the violence we associate with the Middle Ages. Roan exits the gates of that castle, turns around, fires that flaming crossbow, and burns it down! She is the heroine of the story and she is triumphant. The chain-mailed men, whom I initially read as menacing, are of course her backup dancers and once they get in formation, we glean that any violence is strictly pantomime. Roan's armor reads as less of a necessary protective measure than as a form of drag. Some of the pleasure in watching this performance, then, is in the way that it subverts our expectations that masculinity + medieval = violence (see Pulp Fiction) while also playing our templates for pop stardom-- here we have woman at the center of the performance, and while the male dancers may once again evoke Madonna, whatever is going on her doesn't seem to be catering to the male gaze in the way we expect.

The medieval signifies as temporal other-than, a site of fantasy, adventure and potential danger. 

What does this have to do with "Good Luck, Babe," a midtempo ballad about loving someone who is unequipped to love you back (the addressee of "Good Luck, Babe" is a woman who, disavowing her attraction to the singer, will one day realize that she's become "nothing more than his wife")?  I couldn't say nor, I imagine, could most viewers. But judging from the reactions I've seen online-- and from the dozen college seniors I had in class at 8am this morning-- it doesn't matter. And it is here that the weird durability of the medieval comes in: the performance was a successful spectacle for a mass audience—an audience that, given the performer and the venue, seems like it skews young-- with an aesthetic POV centered around a historical period that ended centuries ago. It was at once emotionally resonant and historically vague. One could attempt a breakdown of the historical references in the costuming, and their accuracy or lack thereof, but that doesn't really feel like the point here. The medieval signifies as temporal other-than, a site of fantasy, adventure and potential danger. 

In Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag begins with the assertion that camp "is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization." Without getting bogged down in historical particulars, Roan's VMAs performance recognizes the affordances of the medieval aesthetic-- its ability to suggest a wide range of things both good and bad but definitely not now-- as a premise for queer pageantry. To borrow a coinage from her own song, Chappell Roan's medievalism is an aesthetic feminenomenon.

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Megan L. Cook teaches medieval literature at Colby College and is your favorite medievalist's favorite medievalist. She's the author of The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History (Penn, 2019) and is currently at work on two book projects: one on dirtbag medievalism, and one on the poetics and politics of language change.

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