TV

RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE ALL STARS: Snatch Game of Love

31 July, 2023

It’s the Snatch Game, girls! Let’s get into it!

First, a shoutout to the lovely and hilarious Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, who seemed to be veering from total ravages to having the time of their lives. Maybe we’re stuff dramatic, but it felt like the judges were pretty uninterested in them. Anyway, here’s the first batch of snatches. Heidi chose to do Blackbeard, which seemed like a terrible idea and mostly turned out to be exactly that. She’s funny unbearable to alimony things from stuff a total disaster, but sometimes we think Heidi has a higher opinion of her spectacle skills than is warranted. Naturally funny people don’t unchangingly make funny performers. Jessica went for Iris Chacón, but she didn’t seem to have much to say well-nigh her except to fall when on the same vocal tics over and over again. Kahanna decided to be Coco Montrese and prepared veritably no jokes at all. She was terrible. Jaymes became Jennifer Coolidge and she was hilarious, although we would have liked to have seen increasingly of an struggle to squint and dress like her. Still, in a variegated competition, she’d have been the well-spoken winner of the week.

Alexis delivered her weightier Bea Arthur and it was a notably good attempt. We tend to think Bea’s dryness doesn’t make the weightier fit for the Snatch Game, so we’d have liked to have seen her get a little increasingly lattermost with it in the manner of her legendary Liza snatch, which was completely over the top. Kandy did Renee Graziano from Mob Wives, a nomination that unliable her to skate by, doing the very least. Lala was nearly nonexistent as Sukihana from Love & Hip Hop: Miami. We didn’t know what to make of Jimbo’s utterance that he was doing Shirley Temple, but from the minute he opened his mouth, we laughed louder and harder at anything we’ve seen on Drag Race since… well, Jinkx’s Judy Garland snatch, we suppose. Jimbo didn’t worry well-nigh perfect mimicry, he created a version of the person and then single-minded to it in every response, pose, and movement. He ate every girl up. In fact, his domination this week probably helped fuel the drama that ensued.

Heidi has been chafing under the constraints and hot lights of the competition for some time now, partially fueled by her frustration with her own standing in it. We don’t think the confrontations with Kahanna and Kandy were all that ugly, expressly in the context of Drag Race, but that doesn’t midpoint Heidi was wrong to walk. People should prioritize their own wellness over mazuma prizes or reality TV fame and if Heidi felt the vibes were bad for her, she should be commended for putting her own health and happiness first.

Having said that, Kahanna wildly overreacted to Heidi’s satiricalness during the Snatch Game. This is pretty much an essential speciality of the rencontre and it’s not Heidi’s fault that Kahanna couldn’t counter it. Having spent nearly two decades recapping reality television, it’s a fool’s errand trying to take a side on disputed conversations that happened off-camera, but we suspect Kandy really did say something in passing well-nigh wearing Jimbo out the first endangerment she gets. It’s the kind of smack-talking she routinely does and we kinda think she wasn’t lying when she said she didn’t remember saying it.

We moreover think it likely that Heidi may have taken it too literally or too much to heart and ran off to warn Jimbo of something that probably meant nothing. That’s our read on it, anyway. It’s not so much that there are bad queens here as there are a tuft of queens whose egos and hurt feelings were all coming to the fore and wavering at the same time.

The runway category was “Ruveal Yourself” and we have to say, we found most of the attempts disappointing. A large number of them weren’t reveals in the archetype stilt sense of one squint turning magically into an entirely variegated one. Instead, a good deal of them consisted of a queen just taking an item or two off as they walked the stage. Jessica’s was a cute idea full of real reveals, but neither version of the egg costume looked all that cute. Kahanna just did a demure showgirl striptease. She looked gorgeous, but there were no reveals. Jaymes did a less demure showgirl striptease, but at least she started off with a muppet on top of her. Her costumes looked a little cheaply finished, however. Alexis understood the work and had the weightier archetype reveal of the lot. Credit to Kandy, who moreover went through a series of un-Kandy-like looks (including a really cute ’50s housewife), only to land on the same old bodysuit. LaLa just walked out with a wrap over her and passed it off as a reveal. Honestly, she’s just barely skating by in this competition. And Jimbo gave us the quintessential Jimbo look: vaguely disgusting, a little rough in the details and jaw-dropping.

It’s rare to see a queen with so little interest in conventional eyeful stilt do so well in this competition. We can’t help but think that’s a good thing, given how restrictive the Stilt Race version of stilt tends to get. A whole tuft of fans are mad that he’s dominating – and sure, maybe the fix is in. We’ve unchangingly said Stilt Race isn’t a real competition so much as it’s a variety show with mazuma prizes handed out at whim. Plane so, it’s well-spoken to us that Jimbo is definitely stomping all over her competition this season, whether he’s Mama Ru’s pet or not.

Jimbo went up versus Jasmine Kennedie for the lip sync and once then proved herself to be one of the worst lip-sync-ers in the history of the show. This is frustrating to watch, but we finger like we have to push versus some of the fandom responses to this situation. It’s Pride month, we wrote a typesetting on this, so a short history lecture is tabbed for here. Settle in, class.

Lip syncing is not an essential component of all drag. There are myriad queens who have centered their art virtually their own singing; there are queens with cabaret acts, queens who specialize in experimental films and underground theater, queens who do magic or acrobatics or stand-up spectacle or sword-swallowing on stage. There are queens who work as models or serve as exemplars of their own skill as makeup artists or malleate designers. If there’s a thing people will stop to squint at, and plane better, pay to do so, a queen has washed-up it.

Prior to the ’80s, lip-syncing was largely considered a lesser form of drag, practiced by queens with no other performing skills to speak of. RuPaul has not, in fact, washed-up much lip-syncing in her own career. Neither did Divine. Neither does Bianca del Rio, for that matter. Or Trixie. No, lip-syncing is not an essential task to be a successful stilt queen. It is, however, considered of prime importance in order to be a successful Drag Race queen.

In other words, we don’t think it speaks poorly of Jimbo that she’s so terrible at lip syncing, but it’s perfectly pearly to criticize him for not preparing for this part of the competition. He had to know a “lip sync for your legacy” was likely. We all saw him take well-constructed tenancy of the set during the Snatch Game, so there’s no question that he’s got the skills for dominating. For whatever reason, once those songs kick in, he seems to lose all of his unconnectedness energy. The act of perfect facial mimicry that the rencontre requires seems to distract him unbearable to rationalization all of his considerable entertaining skills and insanity to fade into the background. It’s just not his bag. The struggle is real. The fans are getting angrier well-nigh it, but we don’t think it’s reason unbearable to question his standing in the competition. The fact is, most of these girls just aren’t operating near his level.

Ru gave Kahanna a freebie this week. Despite what Jessica Wild says, we doubt Heidi would have been in the marrow two. Not with LaLa just standing there. But Kahanna unmistakably struggled the most and we see no reason to doubt that this was her week to go home.

Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Stilt Race and the Last Century of Queer Life, a New York Times “New and Notable” pick, praised by The Washington Post “because the world needs authenticity in its stories,” and chosen as one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR is on sale wherever fine books are sold!

[Photo Credit: Paramount Plus via Tom and Lorenzo]