Manuel here to talk about that wonderful Drag Race episode this week which was dedicated to, as Ru called him, “the Sultan of Sleaze, the Baron of Bad Taste,” Mr John Waters! Seeing RuPaul and legendary auteur John Waters together judging drag queens on their “ugly dresses” was many a gay cinephile’s wet dream.
How does she manage to look this AMAZING every week?
John Waters: She was not afraid to play not glamorous. A lot of drag queens I know, they’re afraid to do that.
RuPaul: You were looking at me when you said that!
And, can you blame him?
RuPaul, the drag superstar par excellence is glamor (or, her latest incarnation is, as “No RuPaulogies” taught us back in season 5). Even when she camps it up (look at that dress!) she is glamor incarnate. Now in its seventh season, RuPaul’s Drag Race has, for better or for worse, created a seemingly new kind of drag, one that insists on glamor above all else (or in addition to everything else): how many times have we heard Santino, Michelle Visage, Ru herself or any of the rotating cast of guest judges complaining that a certain girl’s look wasn’t “couture enough," "not high fashion" or that “it didn’t look polished enough”? Even when challenges call for camp, humor, and/or stylized aesthetics, glamor has remained the requirement on the runway. It’s not for nothing Ru has coined the term Glamazon to refer to her queens.
He'll give you filth, not glamor.
In an episode wholly dedicated to the highs of low of drag, the queens were tasked with creating screen tests for musical reinventions of famed John Waters/Divine scenes. Asking her queens to dive headfirst into this hysterically sullied territory (“And remember: fuck it up!”) was a stroke of genius for it not only paid great homage to a type of drag that Ru and the producers have seldom prized, but it put in stark relief (as John Waters himself put it in Untucked when saying hello to the girls) how insane it is to see a television show nonchalantly riff on those old movies that scandalized and titillated select audiences so many decades ago.
We’ll skip the Library though not before sharing my favorite read of the night:
“Violet Chachki, you keep training those corsets, girl, pretty soon your waist size will be lower than your IQ.”
But let’s look at how the queens did this week:
Kennedy Davenport & Katya in Cha Cha Heels
"Nice girls don't wear cha-cha heels!"
This scene from Female Trouble (1974) which pit Divine’s increasingly deranged anger (“I said I wanted black cha cha heels!”!) against the measured calls for calm of her parents turned into a madcap escalation on Drag Race and the energy almost burst from the screen. Finding new ways of contorting her body for a laugh, Katya took, as Michelle noted, this “nothing role” and turned it into something “meaty and substantial.” Never have choreographed flailing legs made me laugh so hard. And props to Kennedy for turning Dawn Davenport into an angry mash-potato dancer. Sure, costume-wise she read more like Motormouth Maybelle than Divine, but the frantic rawness of Divine’s Dawn was there.
Ginger Minj & Trixie Mattel in Eggs
"Hasn't that eggman come yet?"
You gotta hand it to Ginger & Trixie, they both had the look down (a bit glittery in Trixie’s case, but that’s to be expected by now). In Pink Flamingos, the scene has remained fascinating these many years later for the matter-of-fact tone with which it presents its bizarre setup (Edie is Divine’s mother, sleeps in a pen and yearns for eggs “sunny side up because it’s sunny outside”). Ginger, never one to let a laugh get away from her, totally slayed. She drowned out Trixie who was competent but was left playing second fiddle to Ginger’s performance which so carefully balanced the biting sweetness of Massey’s Edie.
Violet Chachki, Miss Fame & Pearl in Poo!
"Well, you think you know somebody filthier?"
What. A. Mess. Right? It’s a tall order to be asked to recreate Divine’s infamous scene from Pink Flamingos (1972). It’s another to do it while singing to a not particularly inspired song (I mean, “Don’t play with doo doo, don’t play with poo!”?) But then, these three queens have made it very clear they’re not performers. They may be able to work it on the runway (see last week’s conjoined twin performance from Pearl or Violet’s death-by-corset walk from a weeks back) but put them in a group in front of a camera and they clam up. And so, try as they might, they could never work together, letting their personal aspersions seep through their performances. Kudos to Violet who, awkward pregnant padding aside, looked like funhouse mirror version of Divine.
Unsurprisingly, it was the three of them who found themselves at the bottom two with ultimately the episode’s core drama (Pearl vs Miss Fame) getting replicated in the lipsync which found the latter leaving the competition. It is perhaps a tad too perfect that Miss Fame, the epitome of an earnest drag queen, would leave the competition on a John Waters/camp challenge. Spouting platitudes that read as sincere yet hollow, she always struck me as a fascinating queen whose depth only ever read as depthlessness. Does that make sense? Katya’s tweet from a few weeks back remains a grade A example of a subtle read.
Only John Waters can state "You need ugly lessons" and make you feel like you've been read.
Oh, and what to say of these “ugly dresses”? My favorite was Katya’s who is definitely at the top of my list for MVP this season. For my money, it’ll be a fight between the two queens that make Untucked such a hilarious mess. Confession: I would watch all the footage of Ginger and Katya’s smoking breaks. They’re the one thing I think the new "Untucked" format allows, a look at the queens pretty much just chilling without the all-so-contrived Gold/Interior Illusions games/ploys to get the queens to catfight for the camera.
Have you been watching this season? Which queen are you rooting for and do you think the right queen went home this week?