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\n This very sensible piece of advice couldn\u2019t ring truer for Tess and DeeDee (played by drag queens Ginger Minj and Jujubee), two spirited train stewardesses working for the decidedly downmarket Stank Rail. When the duo spots an opportunity to better themselves and wangle their way into the far more prestigious Glamazonian Express, they realise that they will need all the luck they can get.<\/p>\n Not only do they face a gaggle of snooty first class mean girl stewardesses, demanding passengers and hapless train conductors; they also come up against faulty brakes and an unprecedented weather event called Stormaganza. To tackle this smorgasbord of challenges, they team up with the country\u2019s commander-in-chief \u2013 President Gagwell, played by RuPaul.<\/p>\n Stop! That! Train! is a lot of fun \u2013 so long as you\u2019re someone who doesn\u2019t take yourself too seriously. Minj and Jujubee are both Drag Race veterans. Their performances are gloriously camp, ridiculous, over the top and very watchable. The film also sports a head-spinning number of celebrity cameos and bit parts. This includes Sarah Michelle Gellar, living in constant expectation and hope of being recognised and The Real Housewives\u2019 Lisa Rina, who is billed, rather splendidly, as \u201cSceney Celebrity\u201d. <\/p>\n Given all this, you could be forgiven for thinking that Stop! That! Train!, among all its high jinks, may offer a robust critique of celebrity culture. And, to an extent, it does. But it is surface deep; definitely shallower than the layers of a drag queen\u2019s make-up.<\/p>\n Pastiche and parody are hard to do well. And it can also be hard to know what you can reasonably expect from them. On the one hand, the very nature of the spoof genre (and its reliance on exaggeration, ridiculousness and snubbing realism) prevents the viewer from caring about the characters too much. On the other, it allows comic artistry to expose the constructed, mawkish and cheaply sentimental nature of caring encouraged by the very genre that\u2019s being parodied. <\/p>\n While Stop! That! Train! feels sanitised for mainstream audiences, it does have moments of real, bawdy edge and darkness that would probably not pass muster (or the morality test) in a \u201cstraighter\u201d or more serious context. The merciless and sustained mockery of straightness, encapsulated in the hunky himbo of a co-conductor, Cal (played by the excellent Brian Jordan Alvarez), is particularly funny. It feels like a fitting payback for the numerous caricatures of non-straight characters in mainstream films.<\/p>\n Perhaps it\u2019s an unrealistic expectation, but I wanted more paybacks and more subversion. Good queer, camp humour \u2013 and good drag, too \u2013 can take stereotypes and rigid social norms used to marginalise queer people and exaggerate or appropriate them, turning them into tools for mocking and challenging those norms.<\/p>\n If, as the American critic Susan Sontag claimed, camp is all about \u201cartifice and exaggeration\u201d<\/a>, it is also \u2013 especially in recent years \u2013 about fighting back. This feels particularly important now, when attacks on drag performers have reached new heights<\/a>. Drag, it has been argued by researcher Ella Greenhalgh, has become a force of queer resistance<\/a>.<\/p>\n This resistance is not very visible in the largely depoliticised Stop! That! Train!, any more than it is visible in RuPaul\u2019s Drag Race. <\/p>\n
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\n Read more:
\n RuPaul\u2019s Drag Race: our research shows how it helps destigmatise the LGBTQ+ community<\/a>
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\nThe limits of pastiche<\/h2>\n
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