ABSTRACT
It is not necessarily a slick, professional performance but the spectacle of Mitzi singing the drag cabaret classic “I’ve Been to Paradise, but I’ve Never Been to Me” is nonetheless a spellbinding opening to Stephan Elliott’s road movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). The song is an aphorism for the consequent road trip from Sydney to Alice Springs embarked upon by drag queens Mitzi and Felicia, and transsexual Bernadette so that they can perform their cabaret act in a club owned by Mitzi’s estranged wife. Priscilla, a bus acquired for the trip, not only provides an eponym for the movie, it also embodies what Michel de Certeau calls a spatial story because it places a high value on the geographic coalescence of identity politics and mobility. The journey to Alice Springs is about how mobility, scale, and space “disassociate” Mitzi, Felicia, and Bernadette from their local roots in Sydney, but it is Priscilla that furnishes a haven from which the three friends can safely face issues of sexual identity, home, family, and community. The bus – replete with drag wardrobes, bar and vanity dressers – encapsulates a classifying frame within which the
protagonists’ gay identity is reified in contrast to the homophobic environment through which they pass. The vehicle is a safe haven because it is the embodiment of the protagonists’ drag identity, but it also extends their bodies and enables them to disrupt the scale of the local. Before leaving, for example, Mitzi confides that he needs to “get some space.” Speeding through the vastness of the Australian Outback enables him to unshackle the fetters of his home in urban Sydney. For Felicia, riding the vast open spaces in a giant slipper atop the bus with the wind blowing out fifty feet of silk behind him represents a transformation into Cinderella and Diva. The Outback seems to offer space for sensational self-affirmation. At the same time, Bernadette, Mitzi, and Felicia are visual spectacles agitating the cultural contrived meaning of Outback identity: strong heterosexual men and women up against an indomitable environment. Various conflicts and encounters during the road trip highlight important tensions between the social and the spatial. After Felicia gets beaten up by a group of drunken miners, Bernadette points out how space contrives boundaries that reify fears about difference: “It’s funny, we all sit around mindlessly slagging off in that vile stink-hole of a city, but in some strange way it takes care of us. I don’t know if that ugly wall of suburbia has been put there to stop them getting in or us getting out.” The road trip to Alice Springs is an attempt to contest these contrived spaces of difference, but it is also about coming to terms with other hegemonic norms such as family and fatherhood. In Alice Springs, Mitzi is reunited with his son and his wife who is portrayed as a stereotypically strong and capable Outback woman. Issues of fatherhood, family, and belonging are highlighted against the full spectacle and fiasco of the cabaret act. Priscilla ends with Mitzi and his son returning with Felicia to the gay, drag community in Sydney. They leave Bernadette with her new-found lover in Alice Springs. The last scene of the movie is Mitzi’s and Felicia’s spectacular performance of an ABBA song to the applause of an enthusiastic Sydney audience.
