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Paris Is Burning (1990) by F.X. Feeney Paris Is Burning is one of those rare documentaries that actually gets noticed by the press and public; it pulled in several million dollars at the box office last year, garnered rave reviews and helped inspire Roger Ebert's personal crusade against the Motion Picture Academy's documentary division when it failed to gain a nomination for an Oscar. Paris Is Burning is provocative filmmaking, and not simply because its subject is Harlem's grand balls for drag queens and cross-dressers. It is a joyous anthem of alternative lifestyles--but more than that, it's a subtle, scathing, unforgettable indictment of the Reagan '80s and our '90s. Its most shocking revelations aren't sexual, but economic. In this film, we see society through the eyes of men who are not only poor, black or Hispanic, but gay--the most disenfranchised men in America. The film is structured around their drag balls--tightly organized, highly ritualized, extremely competitive events in which participants are judged on custume, attitude and an ever-elusive quality called "Realness." The judges are rude, funny, shrewd and pitiless, flashing their scorecards like judges at the Olympics. The contestants have their own version of teams, called "Houses," which are, more to the point, a non-violent alternative to the street gangs they might otherwise end up in. These balls are their rumbles: ironic parodies of savagery, with attitude and spiked witticisms as their weapons. |
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What unfolds throughout the rest of the film, in probing interviews, are the inner lives of these men, several of whom we get to know well (director Jennie Livingston, a documentarian by way of Beverly Hills and Yale, has gained the confidence of her subjects to a remarkable degree). We see Pepper Labeija, "Legendary Mother of the House of Labeija," strutting wildly under a neck-high mountain of hooped skirts at the film's outset, but in private conversation he proves to be wiry, smart, uncompromised and beautifully sure of his male identity. "I've been a man," he tells us. "And I've been a man who's emulated a woman. But I've never been a woman." When we first meet Dorian Corey, oldest of the "Legends," it's in a 1967 photo where he looks for all the world like Joey Heatherton, svelte in a string bikini with great go-go legs. When we discover him in 1987, he is plump, regally bald--a perfect double of the late Divine--and a wise, deeply philosophical man. Asked what he wants, what anyone wants, from the ball circuit, he replies quietly, "It's fame. A small fame, but you can absorb it." Most movingly of all, there are "the children"--newcomers to the scene who don't yet have the hard-won wisdom or sense of irony of their elders. Venus Xtravaganza--slim, blond, young, Hispanic--can pass smoothly for female, but one remembers him very much as a young man trapped in a male identity he wants very badly to quit. As such, he carries the film's moral weight on his stubborn shoulders, along with its sense of tragedy. When asked what he wants, Venus, who works as a prostitute, replies: "A normal happy life, getting married in a church in white... I want to be a spoiled, rich white girl!" |
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It is here, in dreams of whiteness, of so-called normalcy, that we come up hard against the hull of the American dreamboat. Early in the film, we see categories of cross-dressing that defy our conventional definition of the word "transvestite" and center on that term "Realness." In "Military Realness" young men in store-bought costumes conduct by-the-book precision drills. In "Executive Realness" cross-dressers promenade down the runway in three-piece suits, swinging attache cases, checking their watches. The desired response here is, "You really looked great up there. You would have made a great executive." Paris Is Burning indicts the obsession with wealth that characterized our so-called "Morning in America," but it is not simply an ad hominem attack. Far from it. Above all, Paris Is Burning is alive. It never condescends to explain "these people" to "us." Instead, it takes every person at face value, until we are shaken by the unexpected discovery that these people are us. The masks may differ, but who's to say whose three-piece suit is the costume? Sexual identity and its attendant terrors may prove to be the one great theme in any true history of our culture--but here these terrors and their attendant ironies are very gently approached, and displayed with a healing hand, by a filmmaker of great empathy and promise. What did you think of this movie? Sound off in the Movie Forum. |