Drag Queens on the Screen: There to Prove a Woman’s Authenticity

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/movies/a-star-is-born-drag-queen.html

Version 0 of 1.

As gender norms become more elastic, drag has burst like a glitter cannon into the mainstream. Think “RuPaul’s Drag Race” on TV or “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” on Broadway. Drag queens are appearing more frequently onscreen to “pull the wig down from the shelf,” as Hedwig might put it.

But in three recent films and shows — “A Star Is Born,” “Dumplin’” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — drag queens play second fiddle to the straight women who take center stage. They prod these films and shows, which are all about performers and performances, to work out what “real” and “authentic” mean, sometimes at the cost of the drag stars.

At the beginning of “A Star Is Born,” the director, co-writer and lead Bradley Cooper has his country singer, Jackson Maine, wind up at a drag bar and discover Ally (Lady Gaga, no stranger to drag herself), her fake eyebrows as thin as pencil lines to evoke the French chanteuse whose song she will interpret for the audience. While the show is emceed by D.J. “Shangela” Pierce and Willam Belli, actual drag stars, Ally is notably the only performer that night who doesn’t lip-sync, and the only woman, a privilege she acknowledges to Jackson in the dressing room after the show. “I mean they would never normally let a girl sing one of these shows,” she says modestly, “but they’ve always loved my voice. It’s an honor really. I get to be one of the gay girls.”

The movie’s distinction is clear: what the drag queens do is artifice, predicated on a kind of fakery. What Ally does is real, daring to look the audience in the eye as she pauses her performance of “La Vie en Rose” to gaze at Jackson, who gazes at her, because, unlike the other women performing that night, she has truth in her.

It’s that truth that Jackson wants to foster. Ally can accentuate qualities of femininity and female aesthetics for her drag persona, but Jackson sees her talent in spite of the drag, not the drag as an augmentation of her talent. Fittingly, then, the pop star Ally will eventually become is just another kind of drag queen, all about flashy costumes (orange hair, prismatic colors), her modified persona reliant on what the film sees as soulless excess. While “A Star Is Born” is fond of its drag queens, it ultimately condescends to them. For Jackson, and for the film, the artifice of drag (or pop stardom) is an obstacle to authenticity, not another path to it.

[Read our review of “A Star Is Born.”]

Conversely, the drag queens in the Netflix movie “Dumplin’” encourage Willowdean “Dumplin’” Dickson (Danielle Macdonald) to use the illusion of drag as a way to express her true self. Willowdean is an alienated, overweight high school student and Dolly Parton fan whose mother’s former glories as a pageant queen have dogged her all her life. Spurred by the discovery that her late aunt almost competed for the crown but decided not to, Willowdean signs up for the pageant that made her mother (Jennifer Aniston) famous. But she struggles to really understand why she’s doing it and who she might be if she does enter. Then she learns that her aunt was a beloved patron of a Dolly Parton-themed drag bar.

There, the drag queens Lee (Harold Perrineau) and Candee Disch (Ginger Minj) take Willowdean under their wing, as if teaching her how to use the artifice of performance and femininity to understand her relationship to societal standards of beauty. Lee quotes Parton joyfully saying, “It’s a good thing I was born a girl, otherwise I’d be a drag queen.” Keen on Willowdean’s mind is the thin line between the personas we create for ourselves and the ones we want to present to the world, whether glamorous or restrained.

In the film’s effort to upend notions that a pageant is a one-dimensional showcase of beauty, one scene is especially striking: Willowdean is finally able to connect with her hitherto neglectful mother, Rosie (Jennifer Aniston), in a backstage dressing room; they’re both in their own kind of drag, Rosie in the dress and tiara she wore when she won Miss Teen Bluebonnet, and Willowdean in Dolly-as-magician regalia, including ferocious red lipstick, for the competition’s talent section. For them, the performance of beauty can be as honest a place of vulnerability as something more conventional without ornamentation.

[Read our review of “Dumplin’.”]

So, too, does Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) find comfort, catharsis and truth in performing as a stand-up comic in the Amazon show “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” created by Amy Sherman-Palladino. In the Season 2 premiere, her mother has fled to France, frustrated by her marriage and her life in New York. Midge ruminates about her own complicated marriage as she drifts through the streets of Paris, only to end up in a drag bar, where her incisive comedy style, exposing herself in a bracing, sarcastic manner, is juxtaposed against the drag performances, including a trio singing a song about gay Paree.

She’s mesmerized and entirely shocked that they are, in fact, drag queens, blithely unaware of their existence outside this club, never mind in New York, or in the Village where she often performs. She loudly exclaims at how “real” they seem, quipping, “Dammit, your waist is small, smaller than mine.” With an impromptu translator at hand, she delivers a set about her tempestuous marriage, which, even across a language barrier, turns tragic, leaving the crowd in tears. But that’s what makes her brilliant, her husband argues on the phone later: “It’s real, it’s authentic” — no matter how constructed.

[Read our review of Season 2 of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”]

As much as I enjoy seeing drag queens sashay across the screen with more frequency, it’s hard to get around the fact that they are, in all three works, primarily playthings or props. It’s not just the condescension in “A Star Is Born.” In “Dumplin’” (directed by Anne Fletcher), Lee is essentially a “magical Negro,” the racist trope of a black character who, without agency of his or her own, doles out wisdom to the main white character. The drag queens in “Mrs. Maisel” are something for her to gawk at and use in her comedy. Because all of these projects are about straight women, the way they depict drag queens feels little more progressive than the convention of the gay best friend, popular in 1990s romantic comedies like “My Best Friend’s Wedding”: neutered, a sidekick existing solely to catalyze change in the main character.

During her set, Midge Maisel riffs on what makes a woman, poking fun at her drag queen props and the ideals that they would have to live up to. Imagine if the actual queens got to express that themselves.