You Survived Camp Mona and All You Got Was This Hall of Mirrors
The Pretty Little Liars glamping episode, having more than one body, and looking
Chanting, “Owning a sunrise lamp is like going glamping,” doesn’t make this gospel. Still, you lie inside your lavender shoebox in the thumpless heart of a Brooklyn railroad. No windows but your own paintings on their slim silver nails and the framed photo of your friend Kate posing beneath a sign bearing the declaration, “I can ACHIEVE anything.” No birdsong but the sunrise lamp’s alarm; no deer grazing the glampsite or grizzled bears invading. The animals are all stuffed and the fire is all in your head, burning brain. These walls aren’t all there is but yes they are. A lake will wait, in a sequined gown of dappled sunlight or otherwise. The mysterious fish beneath its slippery skin survive without your gaze. Feckless and hookless, breathing their chemistry and depositing their eggs.
In Pretty Little Liars season one episode ten, “Keep Your Friends Close,” the girls go glamping at Camp Mona in the Pennsylvania woods, frienemy Mona’s birthday party replete with strings of fairy lights and pastel pendant flags, massage tent, mani-pedi tent, “blow me” bar and minibar, swagbags pink mesh containing CAMP MONA hoodies, white text boldly on black like closed captioning. They go not to celebrate Mona, but to scavenge, invited to that hunt by texts from straight-up-enemy A. Come and get me. Mona holds court in sunlight, pink drink topped with a berry and a lavender sprig in a glass with a gaping bass-mouth, quoting herself as explaining, “If you were invited, you would have received an invitation,” just barely not tautological, and nameless girls press play on a laughtrack while our named girls huddle elsewhere.
You first watched this elsewhere, Narberth, not far from the show’s imagined Rosewood, twenty miles outside of Philadelphia. Now, you sweat in the Brooklyn shoebox to the tune of a rewatch, lifting gleaming charcoal ten-pound weights, the numbers square and silver at their two-headed-calf bulbous ends. Forcing your own heart into thumping, pumping one form of iron while another cools beside you. Sunrise lamp unglamorously a slice of boiled egg, it’s joined in its illuminating pursuit by the UFOish ceiling fixture with only one bulb burning out of three to reproduce the out-there light of this summer that slicks your body, a different body than first watched. Better at building muscle and growing woods-dark hair (the woods when the Liars arrive are drenched in sun, but we know that murderous melodrama’s coming and with it, night), pores more prone to volcanic eruption, outpouring goo like Elmer’s glue, and blood (but less blood pours from you, too, on the whole).
Setting out to twelve stops from the hawthorn tree while Emily and Aria depart to “get blown,” Spencer says, “It has to look like we’re here for the party. Go glamp. I’ll be back before it gets dark,” which could be ominously incorrect, but she, in this moment, does not lie. At the spot where A’s sent her, she finds a card: LOOKING FOR ME IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES, and returns to an Aria and Emily with Dolly Parton hair-helmets haloing their heads. Dollyed-up Aria asks, “If this is the wrong place, then what’s the right place?” That’s the last time we see them before dark settles on Camp Mona like a flock of rock doves alighting on your fire escape, the one resiliently safe slice of outdoor life, the only right place there is right now. Fairy lights and fire circles try to bat the night away, but everyone, toasting marshmallows and limned in lake-blue, becomes a shadow. Even moreso for how they all wear their black CAMP MONA hoodies. Unsettling, the shots of anonymously CAMP-MONA-branded body after body stalking through this post-gloam, now-gloomy glampsite.
Excess stuffed animal eyes become buttons on a shirt’s pockets, khaki button-up spruced into something zanier and all-knowing, and less anonymous. Not the panopticon’s unseen watcher, but someone who wants to be watched watching (while light still shone into her Rosewood kitchen, Hanna, on the phone, held up a pair of binoculars to be packed, and said, “If A’s watching you, I’ll be watching her,” while you watched Hanna). You draw white and black around the staring glass (different from a looking glass but barely), and press iron to cotton so the fabric crayons set in stone. The left eye does not do a good job fitting through the buttonhole, pressed too flush to the pocket to worm through like a fish slipping its unsuspecting throat into plastic from a six-pack. So you take its hand and ease it into this trap by seam-ripping the buttonhole wider until some of the surrounding pocket material also fits through. Produced: an effect of a mutated iris, a frayed lion-fur-colored waning moon surrounding the initial slick amber. You never remember what it means that your eyes could go rogue if you leave your contacts in too long (not if, really, because you do, always, same as how it’s not really if whether A will be watching), but maybe it’s this, this duality, one form of a thing humping another form of the thing, both demanding to be seen at once in their incongruous vulgarity. Rouge as in a knave, a scoundrel, a scamp, or should we scamper over to the mirrored image of Rogue the X-Man who cannot (should not) touch skin-to-skin, and say, this is if skin-to-skin—melting into one another while maintaining the sexiness of a distinct boundary—is all she knew.
Hoodied, everyone melts into everyone at Camp Mona, imitating their marshmallows melting and darkening in the fire. And you can just tell that A, that scoundrel, that knave, will take advantage of this to be the unseen watcher that your transformed shirt (and shirted transformed body) is not. Spencer, hoodied, tells Emily, hoodied, that she’s figured it out. Not right place but Wright place, Wright the name of a playground. By simply suggesting the word “right” by writing its opposite, rather than calling it more directly into existence, A allowed the W to remain silent, cutting out any need for invisible ink that might have come alive around the fire, or for making us forget that there is a difference between seen and heard. Cut to the sight of Hanna with her binoculars, deep in the blueing woods, pink floral bag a crumpled lump in front of her alert body. High, doorbellish music dances impatiently from one foot to the other, and just as Hanna becomes impatient too, lowering her binoculars with a visible sigh—headlights. Those thick white streams, practically snowdrifts that could bury a person alive, in contrast to the secrecy of a rural night. Reflected, in miniature, by the cut of Spencer’s flashlight through all this blue as she and Emily sneak to the silently named playground. The squeak of a low-hanging swing is itself a miniature reproduction of Psycho’s shower scene soundtrack, driving the girls to swing around and catch it in the flashlight’s glare. Catch nothing, though, really; that black rubber U is empty, a hook without a fish.
You swing from mood to mood despite Abilify, hand-over-hand from emotional monkey bar to bar—and to the minibar known as the fridge, stocked plentifully with hard seltzers and lemonades. There is no blow-me bar though you wouldn’t mind that were it to take on the obvious lewd meaning. Not enough hair remains on your head, in this body, for the show’s more sculptural intentions behind the name. Anyway, already you’ve turned it green as the hawthorn tree’s leaves, which when Googled (rather Startpaged, because, to be preachy, privacy’s important and enough eyes exist in the sky), appear as spiky at the edges as Lisa Simpson’s dress (itself red as a Hawthornian A). There is only so much room for transformation in this box where you alternate sweating and lying, painting yourself in thick crimson acrylic and gazing up into the mirror to make sure all the lines are correctly laid on the canvas, which much like the room, is a small, confining square.
Hanna watches as a hoodied shadow enters the stopped car. But unlike her, we’re allowed to see identities. This clandestine meeting is to hash out the teacher-student relationship we as viewers are all supposed to accept as romance rather than repulsive. No A here but Aria. No murder here but the one you would like to commit against her teacher. When the headlights die out, then Hanna can see their faces, clued in, the viewer herself. As if speaking for her, here comes A, anonymous in hoodie and black leather gloves and the dissection-effect of a close-up shot, writing with one skin-covered finger in the fog on the car’s back window: I SEE YOU. In a role-reversal, Hanna becomes more clued-in than the viewer, because when she spies the fleeing A through her binoculars, she sees something we don’t, and texts Emily and Spencer that S.O.S. she knows who A is. Too bad she’s hit by a car before she can say more, rolling over the hood to land in the dirt, body going limp but eyes staying open just long enough for a view through them of her blurring friends running close, and then they close, dumbbell-charcoal eyeshadow and her name hysterically screamed. After noting that she’s not breathing, Spencer wails, with a long space between them to make two different thoughts, “Somebody,” and, “Help.” Even somebody itself is two thoughts—somebody (who?) and some body (Hanna’s). How finely can we chop here? Well, we stop here. End scene, curtain drawn urgently shut.
Besides no sun and no glamp, no night and no blue, no windows mean no curtains and no shutting. On goes the you of it all, and forget the difference between heard and seen to allow this to settle in your mind as synonymous with the U of it all. U for swinging back around to the starting point; U for the bend in the pipes that prevents unwanted flow; U simply for embracing the concept of anonymity through singleletterhood. U have a lot to learn from A, who texts without fear and rams right into problems when they bud, who does not necessarily glamp—unless she does (no spoilers!)—but slips into the identity loss of glamping like a selkie donning her seal skin. U can ACHIEVE anything, and that includes the nefarious if so desired. Something as breathtakingly awful as inviting a hunt, or accepting a dissolution of identity between the woods and (yo)ur own shoebox-dollhouse world.