(Originally published in: Globe and Mail, March, 3, 1989)

As the credits roll up at the end of Fiddle Faddle, Colin Campbell’s very funny new videotape about the foibles of feminism (which premiered last night at Art Metropole), a rocker belts out the line: “Who needs Lacan when we’ve got Dr. Ruth?” Now you know who Dr. Ruth is. If you’ve been following the fortunes of Toronto video art for the last twenty years, you know who Colin Campbell is, since he’s responsible for some of the best video to come out of the city since the art of the tiny screen was invented. But you have to be very stylish indeed to know who Lacan is – or, rather, to know who contemporary art-world feminists think he is. Not being very stylish myself, I can’t tell you much about Jacques Lacan, except that he was a French psychological theorist whose writings are solemnly alluded to nowadays in every piece of feminist art writing that wants to show it has its intellectual socks pulled up.

The irony of such old-fashioned name dropping by the most new-fangledest feminists – the bourgeois bookishness of the most anti-bourgeois radicals has always been one of their charms – has not escaped the gaze of Colin Campbell, who has managed to produce a marvelous send up of it all without so much as a dusting of malice or mockery.

A good share of the credit for the tone of the tape should go to Janice Hladki, of Clichettes lip-sync fame, who here plays a Toronto photographer and journalist named Rosa Cosa. As it happens, pert and bubbly Rosa – a politically incorrect lesbian if there ever was one – has been dispatched by something called the Canadian Literary Journal of Social and Political Post-modern Theory to cover a conference on semiotics and erotics at the University of Toronto. In the past, she hasn’t had much luck with this august publication. As prim and proper editor Inez Pincer-Hooper (played by Johanna Householder) tells Rosa after rejecting some of her pix, “Putting spoke heels on the feet of your pink couch and typing it up like that is all a big no-no these days, my dear.” But Rosa needs the money, so off she goes to the U of T.

Like all academic conferences devoted to sexuality, this one turns out to be all high-toned gab and never a hint of getting it on, at least not on the podium. (One naughty thing does lead to another in the pews, however, during a boring sermon by one of the academic theoreticians). During breaks, Rosa kibitzes with her fellow-lezzies radical girl-talk, a la Colin Campbell. (“The freedom-fighter look!” exclaims Rosa upon seeing a comrade’s khakis. “How rigorous!”) Then it’s back into the lecture hall, where the assembled right-thinking (and not so right thinking) guys and girls are treated to addresses on psychology and sex with titles like “Cuisine and Cruising: The Scrambled Ego,” and “Simulac and Simulation: the Infant Choice,” Rosa Cosa tries to write the story straight, but she just can’t take the combination of sex and high-toned psycho-babble seriously. Result: a rejection of her story from Inez, who tells Rosa she’s been “a very bad girl.”

Like all Campbell’s heroines (Robin in Modern Love, the woman from Malibu in the tape of that name), Rosa is exactly that, but innocent too. In fact, Rosa’s is an innocence kept by being bad – by keeping in touch with all the mixed signals her body is always sending her, and not pretending that the sharp scissors of theory can do something about the unruly mop of adult sexuality. The tape itself is unruly, the by the way – offhand, causally acted and indulgently edited, as Campbell’s best tapes have always been. Colin Campbell has always been Toronto’s best satirist of the folly of mass society, and he’s not less good now that he’s looking at follies of the advanced art world.