I remember living near "Jane and Finch" during Toronto's highly sensationalized 2005 "Summer of the Gun," when 52 people were killed in gun violence in one year. Most of the victims were black youth and many of the shooters were also black youth who then became victims of violence in the criminal justice system and the prison industry. The responses fuelled by that media sensation typically involved anger, disgust, an ever-expanding border to the "Jane and Finch" neighbourhood that allowed media to lump more and more violence in with the same group [1], calls for crackdowns on immigration, Jamaican youth and drug users...

We are all stunned, shocked, and distraught by these tragic shootings, by these violent acts, and by the loss of so many young children. Our hearts go out to the families and friends of the students, teachers, and educators killed and wounded in Toronto, Ontario. The entire nation will continue to stand as a source of support to this community in the days and weeks to come.

...said no politician, ever, about most of the shootings in Toronto in 2005. (Nancy Pelosi said this today about the killing in Connecticut. I wonder what poor neighbourhoods would look like if they could get that kind of commitment of support.) But there was one death in Toronto in 2005 that did prompt a massive outpouring of public sympathy, sadness and support, which continues right up to this year: the shooting of one young white woman at the Eaton Centre on Boxing Day, which was described in a 2012 article as caused by "rival gangs" from the Elsewhere of a stigmatized, poor neighbourhood inflicting shocking, "indiscriminate violence," where it didn't belong. 

Sensationalizing serial and spree killings is a part of how the media conditions our response, but they play the numbers game when they want to sensationalize black shooting deaths, too, just with a different response. When the race of the victims changes, so do our feelings about what constitutes "innocence" and whether the deaths are shocking or just disgusting, a time to mourn or a time to crack down, a time to identify with the victims or a time to fear them. A similar pattern exists with responses to violence against women: consider how your community, especially if you are in a big city that has annual events attended by provincial and federal politicians, commemorates December 6th, a date marking the murders of 14 women engineering students, usually well-attended by politicians and media, versus how it commemorates October 4th, when Sisters in Spirit vigils are held in memory of more than 600 missing and murdered Indigenous women. 

This isn't to say the shooting on Boxing Day 2005 or the one today aren't worthy of grief and sadness. And as far as I'm concerned, it's never a bad idea to hug the people you love because you're grateful for them and happy to see them alive and healthy. But it is to say that the grief we experience in response to events that are purposefully sensationalized by the media has also been conditioned by the media, and that our responses, while heartfelt and justifiable, are also responses to labels and images (like "school shooting" and pictures of white women hugging their daughters in gratitude, as well as sensationalist rankings like "second highest death toll" or "most rounds fired") designed to make us see this shooting as different from all the ones where black kids die instead. 

[1] When I lived there, I was at York University, which exists more "on" than "in" or "with" the community. But later, when I was paying more attention, I learned that people in the Jane and Finch area worked hard to change how media describes shootings, by lobbying to get journalists to use the address of the events instead of neighbourhood names that clump them all together and stigmatize the entire mostly-black neighbourhood that was sort of near some of the shootings.

Also, please thank your friend for their thoughtful and honest comment. As you can see, it gave me a lot to think about. 

Katie Baker, at Jezebel, published an article yesterday titled "Have You Noticed That White Dudes Keep Mass Murdering People?" She analyzes an American media hissyfit over some news guy's comment to that effect, and takes a look at the hypermasculine ads for the gun used in the crime in CT. 

When anyone who isn't a white and relatively well-off man strides into a public place and guns down innocent civilians, we attack his race and/or religious beliefs before we bury his victims in the ground. But when yet another privileged white guy storms into a school or movie theater and kills dozens of people, we assume there's something wrong with his brain instead of wondering whether his murderous rage has anything to do with good ol' American macho entitlement. Are we ready to talk about it yet? Let's.

This is hardly the first time we've questioned what makes white middle-class dudes more prone to shooting up public spaces; last summer, after the Aurora movie theater massacre, Hugo Schwyzer wrote that "the fact that these white male mass murderers felt so confident choosing public spaces to commit their crimes reflects a powerful truth about the culture in which they were raised."

Huh, how about that? We wondered, briefly, and then we moved on with our lives. Gun sales spiked, as they always do after highly publicized mass shootings. The NRA — White Men Central — stayed silent via social media, but doubled its followers even though it shut down one of its Twitter accounts. Some more white dudes shot a bunch of people at temples and shopping malls. Now, twenty little kids are dead because another privileged white guy literally shot his way into an elementary school with a gun made by a company that tries to convince people to buy their killing weapons by telling them they're crybabies if they're not packing heat.

The canonical theorization of "camp" is by Susan Sontag, and it's been hugely influential, but it's also been critiqued to bits.

Identifying the film as surrealistic is accurate, but this accuracy, I'm afraid, also applies to its heteronormative mises en scène, rather than pointing to more subversive possibilities for estrangement in representations of sexuality. The French Surrealist movement is distinguished not only by its radical political fusion of Marx and Freud and its aesthetics of détournement, but also, and rather unfortunately, by its consistently heteronormative representations of human sexuality. Whether in the litany of enumerated sex positions for "man" and "woman" in Éluard and Breton's Immaculate Conception, the drastically and sometimes obscenely objectified female figures of Dalí's "paranoiac" landscapes, or the visual "dirty joke" of Man Ray's "Prayer", the Surrealists do not distinguish themselves as capable of imagining anything close to queer. That said, I suppose the Surrealist canon could be (and perhaps has been) subjected to queer misreadings and appropriations.

Lastly, the Cream of Wheat sequence is perhaps best contextualized according to the legacy of African American slavery, which (as carefully documented in the alternate-history "documentary" The Confederate States of America) continues to inform the advertising of products like this (see also Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben...). Note too that the song played back during this sequence is an anthem from the racist musical Showboat, which has a long and hotly contested performance history in Noerth America.

I didn't know that about surrealism and heteronormativity. I had sort of just made a "common sense" assumption that if the rules of "reality" don't apply, then of course a dead fetus can show up where a cock "should" be; sex can be and look like and produce anything. 

One of my frustrations with studying queer and feminist porn has been its embrace of this kinda stubborn literalness, often in the name of producing "better" porn that portrays "authentic" pleasure and serves a pedagogical as well as entertaining function. That's not all bad (as remarked above, no one should have to sit through bad pussy-eating), but it doesn't get very far away from the more-standard argument that porn is a window to someone else's sex, and that it should be studied (and suppressed, for radical feminists; or produced, for sex positive feminists) primarily for its effects on society. The pro-porn "movement" posits itself as opposition to earlier feminist calls for state censorship, but it seems to confirm the same premises about what sexual representation is and does. It's not like it's unwatchable, but if I'm considering affect as a part of the power of narrative, then I am more interested in images to which my response is more complex that just being turned on. (In this case, the images I do find sexy are also disgusting, confusing [and even more so because it's straight porn], frightening, embarrassing... there's just a lot more there than in a film that re-presents a sex scene that I could act out in my own life.)

What I liked about the surrealistic quality of Nightdreams -- what I thought was especially promising, even if it didn't wholly deliver -- was the potential to surprise me with things I would never think of as sex, as embodied, as pleasurable. Maybe something like Pink Narcissus, which we looked at but which got dropped from my MRP list (not twisted enough, I guess), could be read as a queer appropriation of the aesthetic of surrealism. It's not nightmarish the way this one is, but it does have that same absent-augmented sort of reality, in its non-linear plot and in some of its uses of animation as literal augments to the live-action film. I'm sure there are more; a quick Google turns up papers that mention the surreal in queer art, though not (and this seems to confirm what you've said) as much as my "common sense" would have guessed about queerness in Surrealism. 

On further thought, the star's direct implication of the viewer ("I know you're watching me..."), her own apparent reading of voyeurism as a kind of interaction ("I can feel your eyes..."), and the placement of the audience behind a window (a one-way mirror, actually, which both allows and obscures vision) -- all could serve as critique of the attitude treating porn as a transparent window to someone else's sex, instead of the scripted, stylized and mediated performance that it is.