OREGON FILM
MONSTER CAMP
2007
Cullen Hoback, Director
Aaron Douglas Enterprises
Documentary
Available: Click Here
The temptation would be understandable, in a documentary about live-action role-playing (LARPing), to depict the gamers as living along an escape route or somehow pursuing an inauthentic life. LARPers travel deep into the woods, after all, to pursue improvised adventure in fantastical worlds. Accountants become on the weekend flannel-cloaked elves in ancient wars, and thwack each other with swords. IT professionals channel ancient magicks governed only by the roll of a twenty-sided die.
But while Monster Camp does indulge the average viewer's natural voyeurism about the alien world of exurban-Seattle war-fantasy weekends, its makers also take care to show that corporate America's estranging roles are equally artificial and equally constructed, and that the naugahyde and linoleum of the real world provide no greater or more natural comfort. Sensible people, after all, do not willingly spend their days under fluorescent lights facing up shelves of perfumed antiperspirant. With loving editing, Portland director Cullen Hoback counterposes the arcane mathematics and ritual of PVC-pipe battles against the equally arcane, though more familiar, mores of home and office and family. The escapism of Seattle's Monster Camp--even with its occasionally claustrophobic subcultural intensity--here takes on the character of any old vacation from a world whose strangeness is equal to any fantasy.
With only a fixed camera and natural light, Hoback's nervy, sympathetic editing creates a rhythm and movement otherwise foreign to single-camera documentaries. The director favors the Erroll Morris approach, vanishing the documentarians and their questions, but the subjects are never shown sarcastically or exploitatively but are instead humanized, their uncommon hobbies shown to be contiguous with more popular pursuits. In the sections that focus on the tightly-circumscribed social and dating universe of this minute subculture, the dynamics are shown to be familiar to any grad school or glee club.
In the end, Monster Camp is a meditation, a film that derives its substance from the two-beat pause at the end of a sentence, a quick cut to the way things were before the relationship soured, or the editor's patience in letting a man's face relax into a quizzical, surprised contentment. What could have been a pruriently outsider glimpse at a little-understood hobby instead uncovers the LARPers' painted-face stick battles as an improvisational riff on golf obsession or tech-wonky fishermanship. Monster Camp, above all, shows a jargon-riddled community that remains communal.
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