In 'Stop! That! Train!', the American president’s struggle against an apocalyptic storm and a locomotive filled with drag queens finally answers the structural questions that Godard was simply too frightened to ask. The film's transit crisis provides a punishing, necessary corrective to an audience thoroughly infantilized by traditional narrative.
For decades, the cinematic intelligentsia has been forced to subsist on the meager, trembling gruel of post-war European cinema, waiting in vain for a work that might properly articulate the spiritual rot of modern rail infrastructure; it is therefore with a weary, almost resentful gratitude that we must turn our attention to Stop! That! Train!, a film in which RuPaul, portraying the President of the United States, attempts to manage an unfolding transit crisis while surrounded by an ever-multiplying chorus of drag queens. Where Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves merely whimpered at the edges of municipal transport failure, RuPaul’s administration attacks the locomotive dilemma with a muscular, sequined ferocity that exposes the fundamental inadequacy of the established canon. The dangerous storm approaching the train is not merely meteorological, but a brutal indictment of the audience’s own pathetic, pedestrian expectations of narrative cohesion.
One cannot observe the film’s central set piece—a high-stakes federal transit meeting conducted entirely in six-inch heels as barometric pressure plummets—without recalling the suffocating, seven-hour atmospheric dread of Bela Tarr’s Satantango; nor can one ignore the heavy-handed structural debts the director owes both to the existential bleakness of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L'Avventura and the frantic, anti-authoritarian slapstick of the 2007 computer-animated feature Bee Movie. It is a synthesis that demands a certain intellectual rigor from a theatergoing public that, frankly, has done nothing to deserve it. The drag queens, acting as a sort of Greek chorus draped in marabou, provide a dialectical counterweight to the president’s executive panic, forcing the viewer to confront the inherently performative nature of emergency logistics.
The tragedy of the modern audience is that they will look at RuPaul desperately trying to reroute a runaway locomotive through a Category 5 hurricane and see only a camp spectacle, entirely missing the devastating critique of Hegelian dialectics occurring in the dining car.
Ultimately, Stop! That! Train! leaves us standing on the desolate platform of our own cultural ruin, clutching our metaphorical tickets to a destination that RuPaul has conclusively proven does not exist. It is a punishing, essential masterwork that will inevitably be misunderstood by the very demographic it seeks to elevate; one can only hope that, perhaps in a century or two, a more evolved civilization might sift through the wreckage of our current era and recognize the profound, glittering sorrow of a commander-in-chief who simply needed the transit system to function.