When the luxury shopping platform Farfetch exclusively introduced the fashion brand Faith Connexion this spring, it quoted the title of the documentary Paris Is Burning to describe the grand occasion of the Paris International Garment Fair. So I looked for this film more than 20 years ago and found that many vocabularies and behaviors that exist in mainstream pop culture today are rooted in the documentary that reflects the influence of the black gay community in Harlem, New York in the 1980s. Underground culture.
As the most prestigious work of filmmaker Jennie Livingston, Paris Is Burning can be regarded as a milestone in the category of queer movies in the documentary category. It has been watched countless times, discussed, caught up in controversy and imitated to pay tribute.
Black, male, and gay, the film reveals the triple barriers of this group in the world from the beginning. For this reason, they still use their inexhaustible vitality to develop voguing dances and other cultures to enter the mainstream cultural circle. If you have something to do with drag queen, you should know the vocabulary such as read, shade, realness, category, etc. The film uses this series of "black words" as the subtitles, and completes the vocabulary through the mouth of this group of underground cultural makers. Interpretation and deduction.
Ball is the most important activity of this group and the focal point of the whole film. It literally means a dance party. Here it refers specifically to an event in the Afro-American gay community in the 1980s. People buy clothes, apply grease and powder, and gather in the ballroom to carry out "competitions." The competition is divided into multiple categories, covering catwalks, dances and other forms. The judges will score points one by one to determine the ownership of the winners in each category. If football and basketball are games that make Naoto mad, then ball is a gay costume carnival. Here, they don’t have to hide their gay identity, but show themselves openly, showing beauty and coquettishness, desire and desire. dream.
Realness is an important basis for the formulation and scoring of the theme in the ball. It literally means real and true. For example, school realness, from clothing to gait, it is necessary to do everything possible to reflect the theme of "school" and deduce a natural sense of scene. With this kind of role-playing, gay groups can express their understanding and feelings about different lives. For example, executive realness, which is the theme of workplace elites, is confined to the social class of black gays. It is basically impossible for them to experience the life of Wall Street professional elites, but in the ballroom, they can pretend that they are the stereotype of the American dream: white skin, wealth, and suits. Leather shoes linger on the taste of champagne, coffee and cigars. What is revealed in this lively performance can be a dream come true after a long time of admiration, or it can be a mockery after insight into everything.
House is another impressive concept, namely "family". Different from the family based on blood relationship, the families here are mostly founded by the prestigious ballroom competition winners, and they are maintained by a similar aesthetic appeal and deep emotional connection. Ball is a "race" in name, but it is actually regarded as a "war" between houses. For novices to get tickets to join a favorite house, veterans will fight for the glory of their own house on the ball. Comrades who were disgusted and abandoned by their parents, and even homeless, found material and spiritual support through house. This support made them forget their surnames that only brought them humiliation in the past, and instead use house names as their current names. Surname. "I'm a LaBeija / Ninja / Xtravaganza / St. Laurent / Pendavis..." The pride expressed in the "family oath" does not even need to use words, just watch their every move on the ball, and every look All actions can be experienced.
Read and shade are probably the two most familiar words in the queer subculture. Read means to catch the opponent's shortcomings and make precise complaints. Unlike hostile verbal abuse, read is often smart and humorous, which can dispel the nervous atmosphere and make the person read laugh with it, subdued by the cleverness and wit in the words. Shade is a hidden struggle, with words hidden in words. To apply the classic interpretation of Dorian Corey in the film, "Shade is… I don't tell you you're ugly, but I don't have to tell you because you know you're ugly." Throw a shade is the action of shade, and the adjective shady is used to describe such words.
Shade is not limited to language, voguing is a dance that originated from the use of body movements to throw a shade. On the ball, the two rivals, who are indistinguishable by their appearance, often compete with voguing. Voguing's name is taken from the fashion magazine Vogue, because most of his dance moves are poses of magazine models. After Madonna's Vogue became popular, voguing entered the mainstream pop culture field of vision. Several standard moves of Madonna in Vogue, learned from House of Ninja. The father of Voguing was Willi Ninja, the "patriarch" of the House of Ninja at that time. He named his family Ninja because of the ninja’s ease of coming and going, as fast as the wind, and his own spiritual attainments and incisive interpretation of voguing dance are just like the name of this family, neat and tidy. People are impressed.
The title Paris Is Burning comes from Willi Ninja's monologue in the film: "I want to take voguing, not just take it to Paris Is Burning, but to the real Paris, and make the real Paris burning." He wants the vitality of voguing Not limited to this documentary titled "Paris is Burning", but ascended into the room and came to Paris, the beautiful flagship in the minds of these New York drifters, and Paris was also burned. Paris is no longer a super metropolis on the map, but a synonym for all beautiful words such as world, light, fashion, hope, dream, beauty, fame, wealth, power and so on. Burning means that this group of dancers dig deep into their lives, using verbal and physical language to shake the "Paris" that gathers the beauty of all the beauty, and let the world know that this "Paris" is not a special jurisdiction of the so-called white upper class society. Forbidden, their lives and expressions deserve a place here.
In New York in the late 1980s, the gay community was living in the threat of AIDS and social discrimination. The ballroom was to these people what the hallucinogenic nutmeg was to their black slave ancestors. It was a path to joy in suffering. There is no stereotyped gender and sexual orientation. Everyone can freely choose gender: male, female or gender-fluid; freely choose clothing: menswear, womenswear, and neutral; freely decide whether to take sex hormones to change their appearance. Because of its concealment and humbleness, this community has the greatest tolerance for diversity. Everyone fights for beauty together, entertains themselves, and amidst the hustle and bustle, it is truly becoming someone who cannot be in the Naoto society.
However, this self-contained underground culture creator is also admiring the happiness in the mainstream society of straight people. The beautiful and moving Octavia St. Laurent went to participate in the model show and took sexy photos, trying to make a blockbuster, but at the same time dreaming of "live a normal, happy life", having a lover and adopting children. The petite and exquisite Venus Xtravaganza bluntly said that he most envy is the kind of spoiled rich white girl who dreams of getting married in a church in a white wedding dress. Their pride is not impenetrable. No matter how radiant and award-winning in the ballroom, they cannot withstand the erosion of years and the call of a "happy life" from the mainstream perspective-they will eventually face aging, poverty, loneliness and loss of control. Find the ultimate comfort and support for yourself.
And Dorian Corey and Pepper LaBeija, as representatives of older comrades, do not have the anxiety of young people. They have a deep experience and seem to have insights into the delicate relationship between beauty and age. In the ballroom, they have won with a sense of proportion and skillful aftertaste dancing, telling the audience that drag queen can also be a lifelong business, and old drag queen is not. What synonymous with shabby and miserable. Pepper also explained what is lengendary based on his many years of operation of the LaBeija family. Taking in homeless children, fostering them to become the stars of tomorrow, and inheriting the ballroom culture; participating in fashion design and model training, raising the construction of a new ballroom venue, and letting the excitement in the ballroom refill the mainstream fashion circle. Such a career is enough to exhaust a person's life, and it is also enough to create a legend.
But fate always follows the Matthew effect, and will not give even a drop of water to the poor soil of these sexual minorities. Venus Xtravaganza's dream of sex reassignment surgery had not yet been funded, and she died of murder. The body was found in an unknown small hotel four days later. The murderer is still unknown. In most of the glorious rising stars in the ballroom, the clothes on the body are actually stolen. To investigate their sources of income, most of them are sex workers or engage in other illegal transactions. The bright and idealistic tone of the documentary cannot conceal the cruelty of the mainstream society to them. The spectacle they created in the airtight ballroom, in the eyes of some straight people outside, is extremely boring and worthless. The magnificent underground landscape, but for self-entertainment; the elements exported to mainstream popular culture are slowly forgotten; what’s more sad is that the ballroom culture has never evolved non-linearly, and any kind of subculture In the same way, we must face urgent practical problems such as the changes of the community, the decline of resources, the transfer of interests, and so on. Can we still keep the original freshness and glamour?
The documentary is condensed with idealistic bright tones, which is the best bright side in the gay circle of that era. While dazzling, it is inevitable that people can make a comparison between the past and today. The results of the comparison vary from person to person, and in my case, it is a bit mixed. The gratifying thing is naturally that under the struggle of generations, the understanding of gender and the tolerance of sexual orientation are improving. The worry part has nothing to do with gender. It is the general loss that people in this era of materialized consumerism will inevitably experience when they face the prosperity and splendor of the 1980s and 1990s. Interpersonal relationships have not become intimate due to the development of the Internet. Social apps are used to solve sexual and material needs, and at the same time make people more embarrassed to confide in their hearts. The manufacturing of spectacles such as Pride parades and sexual minorities movies and televisions has become more commercial and streamlined, inevitably evolving into a "pink economy", and under the command of economic laws, it lacks the originality and sincerity of the original underground subculture period. The gay community is experiencing a crisis of involution, that is, falling into growth without actual development, relying on the copy expansion of inherent experience to barely maintain.
The descendants of Willi Ninja can indeed easily fly to Paris on the map and perform their proud voguing in the fashion capital, but the audience has long been not a knowledgeable ballroom player, but a pair with a curious and entertaining mentality. In the eyes of boring spectators, it is still the upper class people who monopolize media resources and mainstream discourse power. Voguing dance and Synth-Pop music have become a nostalgic landscape of the 80s under the retro vision, which is only for leisure after dinner, or sampling as scraps of new popular items. The external environment in the 1980s was depressing and boring for comrades, but the clothes and shadows created within the community culture reflected the creative power of life that is hard to see now; His intelligence and warmth, humor and demeanor are also good attitudes that few people have today. In the fast-paced Internet society, human beings want to intubate dopamine secretion from the back of the brain to obtain endless happiness. How can they have time to indulge in the former model of beauty, to think and refine the new forms of the new era? In Paris Is Burning, whether "Paris", which gathers the beauty of all the beauty, is still a common pursuit of the gay community, has to be put on a question mark.
Are we now farther and farther away from "Paris"? This is a new problem that arises when I look back at this film more than 20 years later.
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