The Body in the Library is Not a Body

The murder mystery has always been camp. The 1980s were simply the decade when the genre stopped pretending otherwise. Because if you think about it, the classic “whodunit”¹ is already absurd: a mansion full of suspiciously glamorous people, all hiding secrets, and dressed like caricatures of themselves, while a detective theatrically explains human psychology in front of a dead body and a bloody candelabra. Nobody behaves normally in a murder mystery, and that is precisely the point.

For decades, the genre insisted on taking itself seriously. Agatha Christie’s world is full of impossible murders, elaborate poison plots, hidden wills, and dramatic revelations in drawing rooms, but these stories are presented with complete sincerity. The theatricality was there, but it was restrained.

Then came the 1980s. A decade in which audiences had finally seen enough to know what they were watching and what to expect. VHS rewound the same films until their seams showed. Roland Barthes, in Mythologies (1957), argued that myth operates by transforming history into nature, making constructed meanings appear inevitable and given. VHS undid that process. When one could rewind, pause, and study the same scene at home, genre conventions stopped being invisible machinery and became something everyone recognized. For the first time, a film could wink at its audience and trust the audience to wink back. And suddenly, the whodunit no longer had to pretend to be realistic. It could finally become what it had secretly always been: theater.

Television melodrama accelerated this shift. Dallas (1978-1991) and Dynasty (1981-1989) were, in semiological terms, murder mysteries in evening wear: serialized structures built entirely on the suspicion of hidden motives, secret identities, and the performance of innocence. Every lingering close-up of a character’s face after a dramatic revelation was a sign asking the audience to decode it. The 1980s viewer was trained, weekly, in the grammar of suspicion.

Poster for Clue (1985) by Nate Gonzales @thedarknatereturns on Instagram

No film captures this better than Clue (1985). Everything in Clue appears almost absurdly artificial at first glance. The mansion looks less like a believable home than a stage set. The dialogue moves too fast, and the performances are theatrically exaggerated. The characters are less people than archetypes in costume: Miss Scarlet as seduction itself, Colonel Mustard performing masculinity like a cartoon, and Mrs. White turning widowhood into performance art. But that artificiality is exactly what makes the film work. 

Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay Notes on Camp, describes camp as a sensibility rooted in artifice, exaggeration, and failed seriousness. Camp sees the world in quotation marks. Nothing is entirely natural. A lamp becomes a “lamp”. A butler becomes a “butler”. Identity becomes performance. Camp loves exaggeration and stylization not because they are fake, but because they reveal how performative everything already is.

In Barthes’ analysis of myth, he describes how signs accumulate a second layer of meaning, how an object stops being itself and becomes a cultural code. The candlestick in Clue is not just a candlestick. It is the sign of “murder weapon in a detective story,” loaded with decades of accumulated genre meaning. The revolver, the pipe, the secret passageways: none of these are practical objects in any realistic sense. They are connotations masquerading as denotations: cultural codes wearing the costume of neutral things. Clue does not hide this. It puts the codes on display and invites the audience to enjoy them as such.

Candlestick gifted to Miss Scarlet in Clue (1985).

The mansion itself becomes the perfect metaphor for camp semiotics. Every room conceals another room. Every corridor hides secret passages. Architecture mirrors identity. The house is not merely a setting but a symbolic system where meaning constantly slips behind surfaces. Doors open onto performances. Conversations conceal motives. Even the act of moving through space becomes theatrical choreography.

The people inside the mansion operate along the same logic. Every character is performing innocence. They all have an alibi, and a role: a carefully constructed version of themselves presented to the detective’s scrutinizing gaze. The detective’s job is not just to solve a crime, but to read signs and decode performances, gestures, costumes, and appearances. Barthes, in S/Z (1970), described the act of reading as the pursuit of a hidden truth through layered codes. The murder mystery is almost a literalization of that theory. The plot is nothing but a sustained question — who did it? — that organizes every detail into potential significance. The body in the library is not just a body. It is text to be deciphered.

This is particularly resonant in the context of the 1980s as the decade itself was saturated with performed identity. Power dressing turned professional ambition into a visual language of shoulder pads and sharp lines. The “yuppie” was not simply a person with money but a sign of money, performing a mythology of meritocracy. Ronald Reagan, formerly an actor, occupied the White House and demonstrated that political authority had become, in part, a matter of semiological competence: knowing which signs to deploy and when. The 1980s were a decade living inside quotation marks, where everybody was performing a role.

What makes camp fascinating is that it does not reject artifice, it embraces it. Parody laughs at something. Camp, on the other hand, loves it too much to destroy it. That is why Clue never feels cynical. The film is clearly aware of how ridiculous the genre is, but it adores that same ridiculousness. That affection is what transforms it from parody into a cult classic.

Silent film title card from Clue (1985).

One of the film’s most interesting decisions lies in its multiple endings. Originally, different theaters received different final reveals, meaning that audiences experienced different “truths” depending on where they watched the film. There is no definitive solution. The “real” ending becomes interchangeable, unstable, a matter of which movie theater you happened to walk into. The performance matters more than the revelation, which is, ultimately, very camp.

That is why Clue still feels so modern. The movie understands that the murder is almost secondary. What matters is the spectacle of suspicion. The murder mystery genre turns social interaction into theater where dinner parties become stages, mansions become labyrinths of identity, and every raised eyebrow is a clue. The 1980s did not invent this. They simply handed the audience the decoder ring and trusted them to use it. What emerged was a genre that could finally be read for what it always was. Not a puzzle to be solved, but a game to be played with a candlestick, in the library, by an audience that knew exactly what it was doing and enjoyed it all the more for that.

---

Sources & References

¹ “A story or other work of fiction about the solving of a mystery, esp. a murder; a detective or murder story.” 

Oxford English Dictionary, “whodunit (n.),” September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/2322094093.