WIGSTOCK: THE MOVIE
A film review by Gary Mrak Morris
Copyright 1995 Gary Mrak Morris
It's tempting to complain--so tempting I'm going to do it--that WIGSTOCK the movie, and the annual New York drag queen musical street fair it documents--should have been called DRAGSTOCK. Then it would be accurate in two senses: drag meaning transvestite, and drag as in "what a ...."
Insider views of any subculture have a certain built-in interest; we want to see how the strategies of oppression brought against marginalized cultures by the Big Bad "mutha culture" work themselves out, and conversely, how the Davids of this world (or in this case, the Girlinas) manage to at least bite the heel of Goliath.
However, WIGSTOCK, directed by Barry Shils, is like a 1950s grindhouse revue, stitched together by a core group of drag queens whose highest aspiration is to shock middle-class sensibilities by mimicking the June Cleavers and Liza Minnellis of kitsch Broadway/TV culture. Drawing almost exclusively on rigid, unpleasant models of "feminine behavior," they mindlessly lip-synch to third-rate Broadway tunes and ditties from forgotten camp musicals and bad-girl movies of the 1940s. The spontaneity promised by the film's opening pastiche of WOODSTOCK, with writhing funseekers publicly baring tits and grinning in a drug-induced haze, collapses under the joyless rigors of LadyBunny's and her fellow drags' insistence on hiding any talent they may have under these tiresome, regimented, archaic routines.
While LadyBunny expresses shock that some--no doubt those with more than the minimum brain cells required for active thought--have objected to Wigstock and leads some of the drags in a childish a capella "Fuck You!," there's little of interest in the event unless you find thousands of tortured camp hairdos deeply, endlessly fascinating. Let's face it, there's not much in life less interesting than a wig, even when the queen wearing it imagines she's busting taboos. Tell that to the armies of straight people who flock to movies like LA CAGE AUX FOLLES.
There's something disturbingly conformist and self-indulgent in most of these routines, and relatively little balancing commentary to give us a sense of personality behind the gaudy camouflage. Broadway is the most commonly mined source for the song-and-dance numbers, and the standout irritant here is Lypsincha, who pontificates about his Art in bringing back the Pushy Broads of the Great White Way. There are, to be fair, a few high points in this realm, most notably the pair of Tallulah Bankhead imitators--the Dueling Bankheads--whose crazed rendition of "Born to Be Wild," complete with slinging purses, twisted liptsticked mouths, and air guitar succeeds on sheer absurd bravado, something woefully missing from the rest of the numbers.
There are a few other startling moments that give us a thread of hope that these queens will someday step out of the 1950s. L.A.'s cool fat performance artist Jackie Beat does a screaming, punkish--and shockingly modern for this crowd--number called "Kiss My Ass!" Jackie's deglamorized drag--she rips off her wig--should have gotten her excommunicated from Wigstock. Her buddy, dolled-up Alexis Arquette, has an amusing exchange with a couple of straight festival workers. Then there's the requisite Shocked Old Ladies who view the goings-on with a mix of disgust, indifference, and indulgence.
One of the big problems here is that the filmmakers have brought no sensibility to the proceedings; that is, they just seem to aim and shoot, so we get few insights beyond the usual vexation some of the queens feel about not being able to afford a bigger wig, or not being able to tease one into the stratosphere. Some of the names are redolent of camp decades past: Flotilla de Barge, Girlina, Glamazon, and the inescapable RuPaul, whose 15 minutes are surely up.
PARIS IS BURNING succeeded brilliantly with some of the same raw material--the fascinatingly unassimilable drag queen. The rough edges of that film showed the combative, struggling side of drag life and exhibitionism. Where PARIS IS BURNING's queens emerged as real people whose lives were comic and tragic in about equal parts, Wigstock's denizens are dimwitted middle-class party-girl ciphers whose lives appear to have about as much meaning as the garish wigs they worship.
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