31 Movies of May, Day 25: Trapped in the Closet

May 25th viewing: Trapped in the Closet, Chapters I-XXXIII, chosen by Chicago Cinema Workers Fund donor Steven Shutt. Shutt also donated extra money for me to take a shot of Malört, which tasted like the toilet wine R. Kelly is making right now in his jail cell.

Year(s) of Release: 2005-2012

Directed by: R. Kelly, Jim Swaffield, Victor Mignatti

Written by: R. Kelly

Starring: R. Kelly, Eric Lane, Rolando Boyce, Michael Kenneth Williams, LeShay N. Tomlinson, Cat Wilson, Tracey Bonner, Rebecca Field, Drevon Cooks

Accompanying Beverage of Choice: Fantasy Factory (IPA, 6.3% ABV), Karben4, Madison, Wisconsin
(Support Independent Breweries - buy local when getting buzzed during quarantine)

People have dedicated a lot of thought to what we do with great art made by bad people in recent years. We’ve been reckoning with how our relationships to things like The Cosby Show, The Usual Suspects, and Annie Hall are different given that we now know (or, more accurately, now that we broadly acknowledge) their creators are monsters. In cases of cultural touchstones like those just listed, the most commonly accepted approach has been to acknowledge the value of this work and how the work previously shaped us, while also conceding that it’s impossible and improper to consume these materials without the context of what their creators have done. As for work that has come out since their creators’ moral reckonings, such as Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York or Louis CK’s I Love You, Daddy, most of that work has been shelved as the industry and its consumers seek to avoid morally imperiling themselves by supporting these people commercially. 

But that’s all dealing with art that is, at least supposedly, good. What do we do with bad art created by monsters?

The easy answer to that question is to just ignore it. And I was more than happy to do that with sexual abuser R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet hip-hopera. I was familiar with it entirely as a cultural joke, most notably from the South Park episode which provided this post’s header, until my old friend Steve Shutt saw fit to torture me a little and change that with his donation pick. And my realization while watching it is that the “cultural joke” justification is absolutely, 100% justified. The whole production is awful. It starts out as sincerely awful, depicting Kelly singing the same 5 or 6 bars of music over boring dialogue for 45 minutes with a story that ranges from sexist to homophobic to gross jokes about little people. It’s as if R. Kelly was under the impression The Umbrellas of Cherbourg didn’t exist and he thought he was making the first 100% sung movie musical, and thought all he needed to do to accomplish that was talk in a vaguely sing-songy cadence the whole time. In the latter two thirds, which were released in 2007 and 2012 respectively, Kelly seems to be trying to get in on the joke, much like Tommy Wiseau has in the years since the release of The Room, but since Kelly doesn’t have any real understanding of comic timing, the result feels like a craven Tyler Perry knockoff. 

So yeah, we can just resign this to the dustbin of history, right? Well, it may not be so simple. When I tried to figure out more about the type of reception Trapped in the Closet got in its initial release I went to trusty ol’ Wikipedia, only to discover that everything in the “Reception” section of the Trapped in the Closet article was positive. That includes praises from Chuck Klosterman, Pitchfork, and IndieWire, and ranges from the so-bad-its-good type of praise to the no-it’s-secretly-very-deep-and-genius type of praise. The latter feels like grasping for means to justify your own reaction, while the second only feels possible when the work of art comes from a place of harmlessness. And that’s no longer the case with R. Kelly. 

It really wasn’t the case when Trapped in the Closet was released, either. Music critic Jim DeRogatis has been reporting on allegations of statutory rape and child pornography against Kelly for twenty years. Kelly married a 15-year-old girl in 1994, and despite increasingly ridiculous attempts to explain away the crime, that was well known to the wide world. I wasn’t clear on a lot of the specifics until recently, but I’m sure I probably knew enough that I shouldn’t have bought a ticket to go see Kelly at the Pitchfork Music Festival in 2013. 

So does all this boil down to, basically, your music’s bad and you should feel bad? Maybe. The conflict over what to do with art by bad people is that the art supposedly has value, and how to weigh that value against the harm the artist caused. And R. Kelly has, by well documented accounts, caused a truly immense amount of pain, whereas the value of some so-bad-it’s-good chuckles out of Trapped in the Closet is merely a trifle.

Then again, I wrote an entire blog post about the community I felt from laughing at bad movies all the way back at the beginning of this month. I expect some people got a similar amount of value out of Trapped in the Closet at some point in their lives, and to the extent that it gave them some escapism or joy, that escapism or joy is a part of their own personal cinematic histories, regardless of what surrounds the film. If that’s the case, I hope they’ve found some way to approach this… thing with new eyes that can properly contextualize it within the evils that surrounded it. If we can learn to approach The Purple Rose of Cairo with new eyes, then fans of Trapped in the Closet certainly can do that as well.