Kinky Boots is a feel-good movie turned feel-good stage production based on a presumably slightly more grounded real-life documentary about a struggling shoe factory turning to a niche market in order to survive. And for the most part, it works. The romance is predictable but cute. The hero’s journey is predictable but executed well. What I think isn’t that good is the writing of the lead woman.
Chiwetel Ejiofor shines in the part of Lola. He’s a great counterpart to Charlie, the stubborn sort of character that Joel Edgerton seems to be made for. The problem is with Lola’s portrayal. The letter of the script says she’s a drag queen, and definitely not a transvestite. Let me quote her directly: I’m not merely a transvestite, sweetheart. I’m also a drag queen. It’s a simple equation. A drag queen puts on a frock, looks like Kylie. A transvestite puts on a frock, looks like… Boris Yeltsin in lipstick.
It’s obviously written as the sort of shade a drag queen would throw, but Lola is a successful queen: she doesn’t need to attack anyone but hecklers and bastards. When she’s heckled at her own show, she not merely responds weakly, she’s actually crestfallen and retreats miserably to her dressing room.
The film in no way suggests that it is somehow not congruent for Lola to say something negative about transvestites, or to be so hurt when challenged on the fakeness of her breasts. If we’re reading the film more critically, there are a few things that should give pause, and the above quote is, to me, the core of the issue. When we read it now, eleven years later, Lola is a drag queen who doesn’t yet realise that she’s a trans woman. In this context, her remark is a statement of insecurity: ‘I am more than just the clothes I wear, unlike other men in women’s clothes’.
Can you out a fictional character? Well, here we are. It is not common for drag queens to be dressed up all of the time. Most drag queens are men who dress up for entertainment purposes – and not just as women, but as larger-than-life goddesses. Lola is always in drag. She’s always Lola. Calling her Simon – her name assigned at birth – is used as an attack, as a means of dragging her down. There certainly are drag events in this film: they are the exception in Lola’s life, not the rule. As I read it, she’s a woman first, drag queen second.
The story’s plot, ultimately, is about Charlie’s arc. His journey takes him from insecure to not so insecure. Lola is not provided the same courtesy, and it’s a missed opportunity. She never finds closure on her father, she never accepts her own identity, and we’re left to wonder what becomes of her after she quits her drag show (spoilers!).
At the end of the film, we are given the underlying moral lesson that the writers had in mind. After all the struggles, Lola is considered more of a man in a dress than Charlie will ever be as a ‘regular’ man. It seems a massive irony that this is what Lola takes away from it, but then again, she opens her show with the phrase Ladies, gentlemen and those who are yet to make up your mind
. Maybe it is you, Lola, who has yet to make up your mind.