I’ve been mum about it for several days because frankly, I’m still not sure how to talk about it. But I’ve got to try, dammit. I’ve got to try.
And really… what else but Rupaul’s Drag Race could confound me this way?
Reading that last sentence, I hear both a knowing joke and a sincere sentiment, and that captures what makes the show itself so fascinating, so entertaining, so improbably moving.
Fortunately, Roommate Joe binged on episodes the way Andrew and I did, and over at Low Resolution, he just posted a very smart analysis of the show’s many, many levels. To accompany his piece, I’m focusing on the specifics of my favorite episode, which encapsulates what I love about the series in general.
It’s time for me to criticize… for my life.
Note: If you haven’t seen the show, you can watch every episode here.
Though every installment of this series—including the reunion special and the clip show—is amazing, my favorite is “Drag School of Charm.” That’s the episode where the drag queens turn some butch-ass lady fighters into pretty women, then teach them fully-choreographed lip-sync performances to Beyonce’s “Freakum Dress.”
This episode rules for many, many reasons. For one, there’s the fact that Bebe and Ongina are the ones lip-syncing for their lives.
Okay, if you’ve never seen the show, let me explain: RuPaul’s Drag Race is a competitive reality series that aims to find America’s next drag superstar. The bottom two contestants in each episode must compete in a lip-sync face-off. After watching them, RuPaul decides who stays and who goes. To the winner, RuPaul says, “Chantay, you stay.” To the loser, “Sashay, away.” And honestly, if you don’t want to watch a show that uses the phrase “Chantay, you stay,” then you may want to stop reading right now. You may also want to turn off the sun and stab the prettiest deer in the forest.
Anyway, at the end of “Drag School of Charm,” Bebe (pictured) and Ongina work it out in their sync-off. Ongina does a good job, and Bebe… Well, Bebe leaps to a cosmic plane that enables her to shoot silver necklaces from her mouth. My girl actually pulls off her wig to prove how serious she is. The look in her eyes could drop a rhino at fifty paces.
In that moment, you see once again what the series keep demonstrating: These contestants are not just boys in dresses. They are professional performers. They’ve developed unique personae, gifts for illusion and fashion, and a fireball-hot stage presences. Whereas Make Me a Supermodel still hasn’t convinced me that modeling involves actual skills, every second of Rupaul’s Drag Race proves that being a good drag queen means being a clever designer, a charismatic performer, a subtle actor, and a damn fine dancer. All that plus hiding your junk? Shoot. These girls work harder than Malaysian children in a Nike factory.
So that’s what you get from the lip-sync challenge alone. And then you get RuPaul’s reaction to the face-off. Bathed as usual in diffuse light filtered through Vaseline, RuPaul says she can’t choose a winner. She says she has to leave for a moment and collect her thoughts, and then she gets up and leaves, as the judging panel and the contestants look on in amazement.
And do you know why this moment is awesome? Because RuPaul is such an empathetic person that even though she’s wearing a wig the size of Atlanta, her outburst seems authentic instead of campy. Or at least it seems like a mixture of the two. She doesn’t storm out of the room or even raise her voice. She just quietly announces her dilemma, then walks regally away.
This moment blows my synapses because I can’t figure out how RuPaul simultaneously conveys sincerity and irony.
Joe and I have discussed that drag queens may be the only people capable of striking this balance on a reality show. Drag is inherently about commenting on everything around you. It’s about turning yourself into a performance, so that even at your most emotive, you are still commenting on your emotions. The kindest queen in the world is still projecting a constructed ideal of femininity.
It’s hard to make a fool out of someone who is so obviously aware that everything around her is a performance. If these performers found out they had all been tricked into competing for a bachelor’s hand in marriage or whatever, they’d probably just shrug, pin on a veil, and tell the DJ to crank up “Going to the Chapel (After Luv Dub).” That kind of knowingness makes the contestants seem as smart as the show, so it’s easy to trust and root for them.
And RuPaul, of course, created the show, so when she has to collect her thoughts, you know she’s aware that she’s making good drama. And yet that falseness somehow creates space for utter sincerity.
Aaagh! I cannot understand this contradiction, yet I love both sides of it.
However, there are also moments in the show that read as either completely ludicrous or completely honest. The fact that half-naked men escort RuPaul into the room at the start of this and every episode? Ludicrous. The awkward shyness of the female athletes being turned into “real women” for the first time? Toally pure. I fell in love with Sweepee (a boxer) because she had never worn make-up before, and she was legitimately nervous about it.
And yet no one ever made fun of Sweepee for being butch, just like none of the women mocked the queens who bombed the fitness challenge at the beginning of the episode. No matter how many bitchy comments get hurled around, this show is ultmately about empowerment, respect, and kindness. RuPaul has always exuded that energy, and the contestants generally exude it, too. The show is designed to demonstrate how talented and resilient they are. I like that. It’s rare for a reality series to spend this much time being positive, and it makes me feel good.
Finally, I like the “Drag School of Charm” episode because it proves how fluid gender roles are, but it doesn’t preach. There’s never a moment when RuPaul turns to the camera and says, “See, world? Men can be women, and women can be men. Free your mind!” She doesn’t need to say that. That’s the point of the entire episode, the entire series. RuPaul’s Drag Race trusts us to understand that we’re all performing an identity every second of the day, so we should admire the people who are brave enough to put on the drag that makes them happy.
So there you go. That’s my first pass at this show. What do you guys think? What have I missed? Help a sister brother broster out!
And in case you forgot, this is what I look like in drag:
7 responses so far ↓
1 Beth // Mar 30, 2009 at 8:44 am
I adore this show, and I think you’ve really hit so many of the best points about it. It’s this perfect blend of America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway, and yet it’s unique. Plus, RuPaul is perhaps the most stunning human being on the planet and seems aware of that and almost without ego about it.
2 Garry Posey // Mar 30, 2009 at 10:48 am
where can I find this? I have been fascinated by drag queens since I saw my first pageant in Charlotte while I was in undergrad. I hate going to gay bars because of the meat-market-mentality, but I just happened to be persuaded by some friends and was thoroughly surprised by getting to watch this amazing evening of competitive impersonation.
And I agree with Mark that everything about drag queens is impressive. The performer, the designer, the commentator and the junk hiding (although I prefer my queens to be like a 1920s voter turnout, all male). I have a trilogy of ten minute plays kicking around in my head about drag queens and I have even started a “monologue play” (for lack of a better phrase) called I WANNA VAGINA MONOLOGUES. Both because of my fascination with drag queens.
When I lived in DC, I frequented this drag/d*** bar called ZIEGFIELD’S . As a musical theatre queen, the name certainly appealed to me and the queens never failed to impress. I remember spending hours on the internet researching who these “men” were and then going to the show and trying to imagine sans get-up and in their real life. Ziegfields has since closed because of another national pasttime, baseball. The Nats stadium was built right around where the bar was located. But I hear its reopening…
and Mark, you in drag has made my day…
3 Mark Blankenship // Mar 30, 2009 at 11:12 am
Hi Garry,
If you get extended cable, you can find “RuPaul’s Drag Race” on Logo (the LGBT channel.) It’s in reruns, but it still comes on almost every day.
You can also see full episodes on line here:
http://www.logoonline.com/shows/dyn/rupauls_drag_race/videos.jhtml
4 Dandy Darkly // Mar 30, 2009 at 5:05 pm
There’s too much good stuff to say about this amazing show, but one comment you made above stuck with me regarding RuPaul’s delicate balance of sincerity and irony.
RuPaul pulls this off with aplomb because once you take off the wig and lift up the gown, once the camp illusion is removed and the boy bits cut loose, ideally all you have left is sincerity.
Now I say ideally because one such Medusa-wigged harpy (who shall remain nameless) proved to hold no such sincerity in her words or actions, but the goddesses we do remember – Bebe, Nina and (especially) Ongina had it in spades. In fact allow me to point out that moment where Bebe took off her wig and lip-synched her soul to us. That was humanizing and we saw right there how badly she needed to win. She was Miss Real in that moment.
Now also remember a similar moment in the series when a dance move resulted in Juggles-McStubble’s snake wig falling off her head, but she WORKED it. She took that moment and she ran with it. At the time I thought “finally she’s found a soul and she’s going to let us in…†I was wrong. If you’ve seen the reunion special, you learn she had apparently planned to do it to win the judge’s vote, it was all a ruse, she’s really Ben, blah blah blah.
Whatever. It’s a sad and obvious lie, but that’s a canyon’s width distance between sincerity and irony, because some drag queens – even when dressed like Medusa and lip synching for her life – can’t seem to grasp the silliness of the entire situation. But you gotta own that shit! And RuPaul owns it – everything. There’s no need to wink at us because we get the joke. She knows we get the joke. She’s not performing for people who aren’t in on the joke. When Tyra does her hammy shtick to squealing modelettes, she must acknowledge its all for fun. RuPaul doesn’t because her realness is her camp, and her camp is her realness.
I also think Betty Butterfield strikes a similar balance.
5 Jen // Mar 31, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Okay, as soon as I finish my casebook, I’m all about watching the whole series, addict-style. You’ve convinced me, especially since they’re all online! Woohoo!!
Ps. I think you meant “ones” in the sentence about who has to sing for her life. And you’ve got an extra word in the sentence about cranking “Going to the Chapel”…damn, you, crit class! I can’t stop editing!!!!
6 Mark Blankenship // Mar 31, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Ha! Thanks, Jen! Typos drive me crazy, and while I do my best to catch them all, I never do.
7 Rube Goldberg // Mar 31, 2009 at 10:26 pm
“Because RuPaul is such an empathetic person that even though she’s wearing a wig the size of Atlanta, her outburst seems authentic instead of campy. Or at least it seems like a mixture of the two. She doesn’t storm out of the room or even raise her voice. She just quietly announces her dilemma, then walks regally away.”
This is the only real problem that I had with Drag Race. I first found out about the show when The Soup played the clip from the first episode showing the highlights of the season. The highlight that caught my attention (and seemed to be the reason why it was on The Soup) was where RuPaul was screaming “How dare you?! I flew you first class to be in this…COMPETITION!!!” Anyway, I watched the first couple episodes and was hooked and eagerly awaited Ru’s smackdown.
It never happened. Well, it happened — it just didn’t make the final cut. Going by the hair and outfit in the clip, I’m 99% certain that Shannel was on the receiving end of the tirade. I’m really bothered by this edit as I can see no reason for its omission.
Shannel was totally disrespectful towards the competition in how she chose to exit and I think Ru was within her rights to call her out on this. If the fear was that it would be inconsistent with Ru’s character on the show, consider how emphatic Ru was during the Reunion regarding self image.
Of course, now that I think of it, male Ru is the practitioner of tough love (directing the screen test, explaining challenges, offering Tim Gunn critique) while female Ru is more of the nurturer. It was male Ru who was emphatic at the Reunion, but female Ru who shouted down Shannel.
Even with this dilemma I love this show. I can’t think of another program that has made me think this deeply about gender and queer theory or the conventions of reality television (or created a linkage between gender and queer theory and reality television).
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