The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but in The Miseducation of Cameron Post, it is those who outwardly wield the word of Christ who are most likely to fall into eternal damnation. Director Desiree Akhavan’s second film adapts Emily M. Danforth’s coming-of-age novel to offer a genre-bending film about a teenage girl who is sent to a gay conversion camp, made with equal parts gutting heartbreak and quiet joy. This year’s winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Cameron Post offers a timely tale about how good intentions can destroy the ones we love; how children become the victims to the lack of empathetic imagination of their elders, and the necessity of killing your darlings and finding your own way.
Cameron Post (Chloë Grace Moretz) is a quiet but thoughtful high school girl living in deeply religious Montana in 1993. She attends Bible study with her secret girlfriend of sorts, Coley. Their secret gets blown when Cameron’s ‘boyfriend’, blissfully unaware of his status as a Beard, walks in on the girls hooking up during their homecoming dance. Cameron is sent in disgrace by her aunt to the optimistically titled ‘God’s Promise’, a quiet retreat that turns out to be a gay conversion camp for young teenagers. There, she meets her fellow so-called ‘disciples’: her roommate Erin (Emily Skeggs), an enthusiastic sports lover who is seriously committed to reforming her past ways; Erin’s crush – or so she claims – the kindly Mark (Owen Campbell), and the two cool kids of the camp, the so-named ‘Jane Fonda’ (Sasha Lane) and Adam (Forrest Goodluck) who take Cameron under their wing.
Leading the dubious ‘reformation’ of these children are brother-sister duo, the austere Dr. Lydia Marsh (Jennifer Ehle), a ‘psychologist’, and the depressingly chipper Reverend Rick, a former sufferer of ‘Same Sex Attraction’ – as the camp calls it – whose success story offers some of the more guileless children of God’s Promise hope for their own salvation. Their rehabilitation techniques, based on novelist Danforth’s conversations with former attendees of real-life camps, are a mix of pop Freudian psychology and self-abasing evangelical exhortations. Before beginning their road to repentance, the disciplines of God’s Promise must draw their own ‘iceberg’, a Freudian map of the past psychic and emotional traumas that have resulted in their ‘Same Sex Attraction’.
In a particularly clever montage of the various icebergs drawn by the disciples of God’s Promise, Akhavan offers a sharp overview of the reasons its inhabitants have been encouraged to attribute to their latent homosexuality. It’s an incisive look into how the camp attempts to form these young teenagers at their most vulnerable, trying to tame their ‘deviant sexualities’ by attributing them to identifiable, localised traumatic events. Erin has gender confusion from being exposed to masculine sports at an early age; Mark had a bad relationship with his father; Jane Fonda was raised by “morally confused” free-loving hippies, and Adam’s Native American Two Spirit background was suffused with “confusing”, androgynous beliefs. As for Cameron? “My parents are dead”, she discloses in an early conversation with Jane – “You should probably put that on your iceberg”, she retorts. It’s an obvious attempt to delegitimise the sexual desires of these already confused teenagers, who are still struggling with the how of loving, never mind the if-you-should. You never really loved her, Dr. Lydia Marsh tries to convince Cameron – you just wanted to be her.
For Lydia Marsh, the resident therapist at God’s Promise, homosexuality is a clear-cut pathological deviation that must be rooted out through methodical clinical intervention. In her sessions, she encourages these ‘confused’ children to identify what ‘pushed’ them to ‘Same Sex Attraction’, encouraging them to plumb their emotional depths for suitably tidy and traumatic answers that will pave the way for their ‘reformation’. It’s another step in the grand tradition of subjecting human sexuality to social and clinical policing, as part our culture’s misguided quest to ‘demystify’ – and thereby neutralise – that which is always going to be a bit strange, a bit unknowable, and thus, very beautiful.
What does it mean to ‘succeed’ in one’s sexuality, anyway? As the teenagers slip into their late-night gay hookups and vivid gay daydreams, a foil emerges in the figure of ex-gay Reverend Rick and his wife, God’s Promise teacher Bethany (Marin Ireland). Rick is regarded by some of the less jaded members of the camp as an icon of hope, a sign that one can successfully shake off one’s sinful gay club-hopping past to become reborn as a haver of healthy, God-sanctioned heterosexual sex. And yet – with credit due to John Gallagher Jr.’s masterful performance – Rick comes across as a very sad, confused man stuck in a sexless, passionless lifelong relationship, not so much capable of caring for children as in need of genuine, unconditional care himself. Who, Akhavan’s sophomoric debut makes us think, are the real deviants?
The ultimate evil in The Miseducation of Cameron Post is not the leadership of the camp per se, despicable as Lydia Marsh may be. It is rather the human inclination to pathologise and render ‘deviant’ anything that is remotely different, and the ways in which we cowardly try to justify our prejudices by burying them in supposedly value-neutral, scientistic systems. It is a clinicalisation of prejudice that obscures the very real, human collateral from our collective meanness: for every well-meaning conversion camp staffed by cheery, guitar-slinging preachers, there is a teenager driven to such self-hatred that he turns to self-mutilation. Cameron Post does not quite fit the label of a comedy, nor a drama, but manages to do the best of both. There is something tragic but also deeply human about seeing children who are abandoned by their fathers, mothers and aunts to a hell-on-earth camp “for their own good”, only to end up in the care of another group of well-meaning adults who are even less equipped to guide these teenagers through a healthy and loving adolescence. “Maybe as a teenager you’re supposed to feel disgusted with yourself”, remarks a perceptive disciple when questioning the mission of the camp. Yes, you are – do not trust anyone who tells you otherwise.
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review, and tweets at @becbecliuliu
