affection is a conviction

Back in April, my local indie theatre announced a screening of a movie I had never heard of and knew nothing about, beyond that it was filmed and set in Toronto (a rarity; many movies are filmed in Toronto, but few are ever set there) and was about drag queens. Since I like to support queer cinema and my local indie theatre, I bought a ticket and headed on down. The movie was an unexpected delight - definitely a little rough around the edges in the way that indies are, but sweet and gentle and quite funny. I was also lucky enough to attend a Q&A with a cast member (Kiriana Stanton), hosted by - as it turns out - one of my high school classmates who is now a professional drag queen. Canada really is that small.

Queen Tut is the story of Nabil, a young gay Egyptian man who moves to Toronto to live with his estranged father after his mother passes away. On his arrival, he's quickly adopted by Malibu (Alexandra Billings, who also executive produced) the den mother of a local drag bar who is fighting to keep from losing her business to real estate developers . . . including Nabil's father. It's a timely story: arts in Toronto are increasingly under threat from landlords and developers, none more so than historic queer spaces. But the fight to save the bar is really a subplot: the main thrust of the movie is Nabil's coming of age as he discovers drag, finds love, and figures out his place in the world.

I knew immediately that I wanted to vid this; the question was what approach to take. "Lola" was pretty much my first and only pick for a song, but it's also a very smoky, sexual song that doesn't fit the movie's vibe. So I chopped it up a fair bit so that it fit what I wanted to do: maybe the real Lola is the shoes we threw at city counsellors along the way. Also, you know, the friends we made and the adoptive mom figures we found and the sequined dresses we sewed. (Oh god, as a seamstress I was watching those scenes through my fingers. WHY ARE YOU GIVING A SEWING NEWBIE SEQUINED FABRIC. HE'S GOING TO BREAK THE MACHINE.) (He did not break the machine. That's movie magic for you.)

 

Title: Rabbit Hole

Fandom: Homicide: Life on the Street

Music: "Rabbit Hole" by Natalia Kills

Summary: Oh my god, you raised a good one.

Content Notes: Referenced child sexual abuse/murder, gun violence, and depictions of police brutality, all canon-typical.

The seed for this vid was planted back in 2017, when skazka said offhandedly, "what if someone made a Mindhunter Holden/Debbie/FBI vid set to Rabbit Hole?" Obviously I did not make that vid, but the idea percolated for awhile, and then when I started watching HLOTS, I went "oh, this fits." The thing about Tim's arc in the show - well, most of the arcs in the show tbh - is that it's a descent into lawlessness under the cover of being lawful good, and that gets laid out very early. So what I tried to do with this was parallel his relationships (I'm afraid I over-used the sex scene with Emma, but it's the only one I had to work with, since NBC would absolutely not let him fuck a man onscreen in 1998) with the seduction of the Box scenes/his relationship with Frank, and by extension his relationship with policing. (I did not actually intend to make this a Frank/Tim vid, but all Tim fanworks eventually become Frank/Tim anyway because they're just Like That. Ask me about how their final scene in the movie is the eroticism of the interrogations culminating in their natural conclusion!) He falls in love with the job, with Frank, with any number of passing flings, and falls down a rabbit hole into a Wonderland where the rules don't apply. We're the kids your momma warned you about, and that warning is "don't talk to the cops."

 

Notes:

[watch this space]