written by R. Kelly
directed by R. Kelly and Jim Swaffield

I’m not up on these things so I hadn’t heard of this prior to seeing it, and I think that was probably for the best, because it meant the impact was maximized. It seems like this has gotten sort of popular among non-R. Kelly fans because of how phenomenally, shockingly goofy it is. I enjoyed it. Briefly, for those of you who, like me, have absolutely no clue what’s going on in the world of pop music (or whatever this counts as): R. Kelly wrote this meandering thing for one of his albums, wherein he sing-narrates a scatterbrained quasi-story full of “surprises” over an endless, oddly emotional vamp. Then they filmed it exactly, creating a fully-produced world in which R. Kelly’s voice is coming out of everyone’s mouth while they go through the motions of a dreamily arbitrary series of events. The short attention span and stunted imagination of the writer are apparent at every turn; his effort to create a seamy, melodramatic world of deception and tension is tangibly hopeless – the characters pace around a small set agonizing over incoherent nonsense, caught in the grip of some idiot god, while the slow-mo poignant dream vamp rolls on underneath them. The overall effect is unique, and in the first few minutes I was thinking “Wow, this is a new, powerful weirdness.” Not least because there was obviously an element of utter trash at work, but it wasn’t clear at what level – was it all some kind of irony? The intensity of my initial response was in great part because it wasn’t clear how weird the thing was intended to be – did they or didn’t they know what they were doing? Without a sense of the mind behind a work, you’re forced to engage with the surface as it stands, and in this case the surface was really weird.

But after watching all 12 episodes it became a lot clearer where it was coming from, and I know what to compare it to – it was like reading the stories in the yearly compendium of student writing from my elementary school. It was clearly assembled with all the distractable gusto of a fourth-grader, the type who likes to punctuate his crazy stories with characters saying “this is crazy!” And really, what’s the craziest thing there is? R. Kelly or any fourth-grader can tell you that it’s a midget. Yes, there’s a midget. But it’s something apart from and above fourth-grade writing because a) it’s sung, lazily, and b) it’s a fully realized production on DVD!

On the “behind the scenes” feature(tte), we see R. on set getting worked up about how exciting the whole process has been, and saying that he just made up all this shit and now here he is and there’s an actual midget there! So true; watching it, we’re all equally blown away.

Another thought – the darkly sentimental quality of the musical vamp wraps the whole thing up in its sound and makes it seem as though it should be coming from somewhere, with something human to say. I think it’s the tension between that promise and the overwhelming inability of the material to justify it that makes the thing compelling. R. Kelly, as the vaguely tortured protagonist – or, when he forgets that he’s the protagonist, as the narrator (a second R. Kelly pops out of another closet in order to justify the switch to third person) – personifies this yearning, implicit in the music, to overcome the utter idiocy of, essentially, himself. The terribleness of the material manages to seem like an existential riddle, and because of the rolling waves of the music, R. Kelly seems, in a distant vague way, to be aware of it. But I’m sure he’s not. From the extra features on the DVD, he seemed like an out-and-out moron.

In writing this I realize that I’d actually LOVE to see attentive, faithful productions of stories written by fourth graders. Maybe that would make a great opera. On which note: I know R. thought this had some relationship to opera, but it didn’t. Its closest musical kin was the self-narrating improvised nonsense song that lots of people spin out in indulgent company, or more often, when they’re alone.