Cabaret

I love Cabaret. I’ve watched it many times, and rewatching it now only confirmed how much it still thrills. Berlin, 1931: there is art everywhere, flaunting itself, sharpening itself against what’s coming. And of course we know what’s coming. The film certainly doesn’t let us forget it. It’s a cultural milestone, the shameless youngest daughter of Some Like It Hot, with a jagged smile, a drinking problem, and a raspy voice. Fosse builds the film with ruthless clarity. Nearly every number is performed inside the Kit Kat Klub, so the songs can’t be dismissed as fantasy. The cinematography smothers the city in haze, the editing cuts comedy into menace, and the score propels everything forward. It’s all calculated, all deliberate. My favorite part, with all that said is not the music, the photography or the acting—it’s the style. Cabaret doesn’t flirt with camp, it declares it. It demonstrates the line of good taste by pressing tightly to it, millimeter for millimeter. And when it breaks a rule, it does so with such confidence that you simply concede. The rule is now where the film says it is. That authority is carried by its visuals. Sally’s bob, bowler, and green nails, Joel Grey’s painted leer—these aren’t just costumes, they’re icons. They’ve slipped into our cultural bloodstream as shorthand. We don’t just remember them; we reference them without thinking. Watching Cabaret now, I’m reminded of Paris Is Burning. Its ballroom mantra, “Opulence, you own everything,” was both joke and spell: you claim power in a world that denies you any, and by claiming it, you make it momentarily real. The Kit Kat Klub works the same way. Its costumes, gestures, sly glances don’t merely suggest freedom or decadence—they alchemise it. Performance itself is proof. For the length of a number, you own everything, because the audience believes you do. And then the light comes back on. And it’s 1931, Berlin Another thing that comes to mind is Sontag’s Notes on Camp. She describes camp as a sensibility, not a doctrine—playful, anti-solemn, in love with artifice and exaggeration, always seeing things in quotation marks. At its most subversive, camp dethrones seriousness by showing that power is a performance, a costume that can be imitated and mocked, as in ballroom’s “executive realness,” where drag performers reduce the ruling class to suits and briefcases without needing to own or even completely understand the power behind them. That joke is liberating because it exposes authority’s absurdity. Cabaret takes that same sensibility but turns it mean. Fosse gives us deliberate, razor-edged camp that doesn’t just puncture solemnity—it strips it bare. The laughter, the polish, the stylized poses don’t dissolve seriousness into parody; they deliver us to something darker. In Weimar Berlin, there is little room to manoeuvre. Strip away the mask of authority and you don’t uncover pretension—you uncover horror. Camp here is not release but trapdoor.