R. Kelly: Trapped in the Closet Chapters 13-22 review

R. Kelly: Trapped in the Closet Chapters 13-22

Reviewed by William Wheaton

As fate would have it, soul performer R. Kelly has released the second volume of his video narrative in serial Trapped in the Closet on DVD a few weeks before his child pornography trial involving an alleged videotape of R.Kelly engaging in oral sex with and urinating on a 13-year-old girl. The child sex video will be viewed during the trial; however, Trapped in the Closet Chapters 13-22 is probably only a little less disturbing. R, Kelly wrote songs that Michael Jackson used. Trapped in the Closet, in particular the new chapters are almost like R.Kelly’s version of Michael Jackson’s face as public evidence of insanity. In a certain way it reminds me of the Virginia Tech gunmen’s plays. Cho Seung-Hui’s short plays Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone were taken to be signs of mental instability by his creative writing teachers. Why? Because they contained extreme violence, logical incoherence, and utterly unreal dialogue or human speech. The same could be said easily of Trapped in the Closet. Popular American talk show host Don Imus was fired for saying “nappy-headed hos” on air because it was deemed misogynistic and racist, if you watch Trapped in the Closet you will probably lose count of the number of times the word appears. The same could be said easily of Trapped in the Closet. I’m not telling you at all not to watch it. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, myself.
R.Kelly wrote all the words and the music and he co-directed and produced this epic. The music, by the way, is pretty much the same few minutes of contemporary soul played over and over with a sample of a dripping water faucet carried throughout. R. Kelly sings the story line as actors play the action out on screen.
The complex story line is mostly based around a chain of infidelities involving Sylvester, who slept with Kathy, his wife Gwendolyn, Kathy’s husband Rufus, a pastor who is sleeping with Chuck “the gay guy”, James the police man who slept with Gwendolyn, only to find his wife Bridget to be carrying the child of Big Man, a midget stripper. You also have Tina and Roxanne, two ex-hookers who run a diner, and Twan, the brother of Gwendolyn who’s just gotten out of jail and blames his three year sentence on Tina and Roxanne. Tina claims to have had Twan’s child, but Tina and Roxanne are lesbian lovers now. When all this is revealed Sylvester is pointing around his Beretta handgun. There’s a lot that’s hard to swallow, Kathy asks to meet Sylvester at a dinner with Twan in the back seat only for Twan to be told over the phone that Tina and Roxanne are working at the very diner his car’s in front off. That’s the basis- Trapped in the Closet is a series of coincidences and melodramatic revelations, building up to a climax. Characters are in many cases based on stereotypes of ethnicity, my favorite being the Italian-American mobster that Sylvester meets up with who’s eating pasta.
But that’s nothing compared to the madness that transpires when Rufus the pastor takes a phone call from his gay lover Chuck, who reveals that he’s in the hospital. What the Pastor doesn’t realize is that Randolph, the husband of the character Rosie the Nosey Neighbor, is hiding in the closet listening in, (a recurrent plot device in Trapped in the Closet) and word gets out that “the pastor got the package”. The climax is when you see the characters appearing in these floating circles that look like almost like white blood cells nervously talking on cell phones about “the package” through their chain of infidelity, meaning that they’re all scared that they got AIDS.
Wait, would that mean Bridget is carrying an HIV positive midget fetus?
I guess we’ll just have to wait for the next installment-that is, if R. Kelly can beat his child pornography charges. I’m not sure why he chooses to release this shit when the trial is a few weeks away, but I’m certainly amused.
He’s quite the video artist.