Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar

1995 · Beeban Kidron · To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar on Sightlines

A signed photograph of Julie Newmar rides with them the whole way. The inscription on it is addressed to somebody else — To Wong Foo, thanks for everything! — and the three queens carry it anyway, propped up like a relic, a blessing meant for a stranger that they have simply decided is theirs. Start there. That photograph is the film's entire operation in miniature: something borrowed, held with total sincerity, and it works.

Beeban Kidron made this a year after The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and she took Priscilla's chassis essentially whole. Three drag queens, one continent, one vehicle that dies on them, a town full of squares, diva numbers lip-synced at full commitment, the Australian outback swapped for small-town America. The borrowing isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is the casting, and the casting is not a marketing stunt. It's a formal device. Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, John Leguizamo: three of the era's most conspicuously macho stars, in gowns, for two hours, without a wink.

Deleuze has a precise word for what those bodies are doing. He takes the gest from Brecht — a bearing, a posture, an attitude that carries a whole social relation inside it, so that you read the relation straight off the way a person stands. Not a gesture that signals a meaning. A carriage that is the meaning. This is why Swayze's performance is the film's argument rather than its gimmick. He plays Vida Boheme grave, maternal, wounded, and he plays her as a full characterization rather than a stunt, which on screen amounts to a spine. He holds himself the way a woman of a certain vintage and a certain hurt holds herself, and the history is legible in the posture before a line is spoken. The Golden Globe nomination was for a bearing.

That matters, because the argument about To Wong Foo is almost always conducted at the level of content. Is it brave enough. Is it too nice. Why are the queens kept so chaste. The gest moves the argument to where the movie actually lives, which is in bodies. Some Like It Hot built both its comedy and its tenderness on the gap between the actor's body and the gown, and Tootsie turned that same gap into an engine for re-educating everyone around the dress. Both films need you to keep seeing the gap. Kidron's specific invention is to stop the double-take. She directs the gap as tenderness instead of as a joke, and the film's whole optics follow from that one decision. The camera never checks in with the audience to confirm that a man is wearing that.

And what these bodies do, off stage, is mother. Which brings in the other debt: Paris Is Burning had already codified the house mother, the poised protective queen with younger charges to raise, and the ballroom discipline called realness. Realness is worth slowing down for, because it is a whole theory of the image. It doesn't mean passing off a lie. It means producing a truth by carrying it well enough. Documentary's old contract is that the camera doesn't lie, and Paris Is Burning honors that contract while filming people for whom truth is something you manufacture nightly. Deleuze calls this the powers of the false — not deception, but the point where correspondence stops being the useful question and the only question left is what the image makes.

Which is where the names come from. Vida Boheme. Noxeema Jackson. Chi-Chi Rodriguez. Nobody was born with those. Deleuze's term for a person composing a self out loud until it holds is fabulation: subjects caught in the act of legending themselves, and he pairs it with a hard political claim, that modern cinema works under the condition that the people are missing. There is no constituted community waiting to be represented, so the filmmaker's job is to help invent one. Keep that in your ear when the town converts to fabulousness, because that conversion is the standard charge against this film. A fairy tale. Too easy. Nobody's America. All true. It is also the point. In 1995 the audience this film needed did not exist yet — RuPaul presides over the opening pageant here in the years before drag conquered television — and the movie does what fabulation does, which is tell the legend forward until somebody shows up to live in it.

Structurally, be honest: this is a movement-image film, and an unembarrassed one. The dead Cadillac could have opened into a stalled, aimless middle, the road movie where the trip transforms nothing, and the film declines the offer. Instead the town becomes an encompassing situation that presses until decisive acts transform it — the large form of the action-image at full power, the same circuit The Rocky Horror Picture Show used when it dropped gender-outlaws into middle-American innocence. What's more revealing is how the town gets rendered: as a dividual, a collective treated as one affective unit, converting as a single body. That is the actual source of the fairy-tale feeling. The town has no individual resistances to overcome because it isn't individuals. It's a chorus at one temperature, and it warms all at once.

And the photograph keeps riding along, a symbol in the strict sense, the object that condenses the film's organizing relation. An autograph inscribed to a name belonging to none of them, kept as scripture. Adopted grace. The queens live entirely on borrowed goods — a chassis from Priscilla, a domestic warmth from La Cage aux Folles, an archetype from the ballroom, a blessing from Julie Newmar. None of it is theirs and all of it holds.

What the film did to the art is narrower than Priscilla's and consequential in one specific way: it ran drag's self-legending through the American star system and asked the biggest, straightest bodies available to carry it without irony. That is a change in what a leading man's body is permitted to mean on screen, and everything after it inherits the permission. The cost is visible too. The queens stay chastely unattached in ways the film's own descendants would flatly refuse. Vida is granted grandeur, grief, a mother's authority, and no desire at all. So take the question back to it with you: is the maternal here a gift, or a tax — the price of getting those particular bodies into those gowns in 1995?

Watch the carriage. Watch Swayze's shoulders when nobody in the scene is performing.

Concepts in play

The gest — Swayze's Vida Boheme played grave, maternal and wounded as full characterization rather than stunt — the social relation is legible in how he holds his spine, before dialogue; the Golden Globe nomination was effectively for a bearing.
Fabulation (story-telling / legending) — Vida Boheme, Noxeema Jackson, Chi-Chi Rodriguez — self-authored names carried as fact; the queens compose selves out loud, the ballroom practice inherited from Paris Is Burning.
The people are missing — The town's conversion to fabulousness as an admitted fairy tale, made in 1995 with RuPaul presiding over the opening pageant 'in the years before drag conquered television' — the film invents the audience it needs rather than depicting an existing one.
Powers of the false — The ballroom discipline of 'realness' inherited from Paris Is Burning — a truth produced by carrying it well enough, so that correspondence stops being the operative question.
The forger (le faussaire) — Three invented identities lived without irony — the drag name as a forged and fully inhabited self, with Vida's poised authority over her younger charge Chi-Chi as its social form.
Symbol — The autographed Julie Newmar photograph, inscribed to a name belonging to none of them, carried across the country like a relic — the borrowed blessing that condenses the film's whole operation.
Dividual — The small Midwestern town rendered as a single affective unit that converts as one body, which is what makes the politics read as fairy tale rather than argument.
Action-image, large form (SAS) — The town functions as an encompassing situation that presses on the queens until decisive acts transform it — the Rocky Horror conversion circuit intact, the stalled-road-movie option declined after the Cadillac dies.
Cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Lip-synced diva numbers as ceremonial body, and the off-stage maternal carriage as everyday body — the film transmits its meaning through posture and deportment rather than through what characters say about themselves.

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