A music video? A soap opera? 'Trapped' defies conventions

Quick review: Sylvester wakes up in the bed of a strange woman named Cathy after a wild night out. Her husband, Rufus, unexpectedly shows up and catches Sylvester hiding in the closet. Rufus, as it turns out, is a pastor, and he's been getting a little action on the side as well, but his paramour is a man. Sylvester rushes home when a man picks up the phone at his house, and after a steamy rendezvous with his wife, Gwen, he discovers a condom in his bed. Gwen's secret lover is James, the police officer who pulled Sylvester over on the way home, and just as Sylvester and Gwen bust out laughing, amused by the mutual deceptions that form their marriage, James busts in, gun drawn. The two men wrestle for the gun and accidentally shoot Gwen's brother Twan, newly home from a stint in prison. The cop rushes home, where he catches his wife, Bridget, hiding a pint-size stripper named Big Man under the sink. Bridget and her husband face off with guns, Sylvester and Twan burst into the house, and Big Man passes out. Bridget announces that she is pregnant, and Big Man is the father of her baby.

Got all that?

You better, because R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet," the deliriously trippy 12-part soap opera video series he debuted in 2005, is growing even longer. Starting today, IFC.com will show the next 10 installments (chapters 13-22) of "Trapped in the Closet," promising yet more in the way of sexual high jinks, violent antics, and shocking plot twists.

"It does what great independent film should: [It] challenges the traditional mores and stereotypes of the current cultural climate as boldly, and hysterically, as most films coming out of Hollywood or the indie movement," says IFC executive vice president and general manager Evan Shapiro. "The cheating women, the closeted preacher, the pop star hiding in the closet -- it's kind of like John Waters for the new millennium."

Co-directed by Kelly and Jim Swaffield, the first 12 parts of "Trapped in the Closet" were far removed from the average music video. Clocking in at an epic 43 minutes, "Trapped in the Closet" relies on mediocre acting and apathetic mise-en-scène that put the production closer to community theater than MTV. Instead, the video's allure stems from its intense devotion to storytelling -- which is highly unusual in the world of the music video -- and its depiction of a Chicago in which everyone, it seems, has their secrets.

In the conformist atmosphere of contemporary R&B, Kelly has long stood out for his iconoclasm, embracing the outré aspects of his loverman persona. This fearless attitude has cast him into real-life hot water, but it has also been an artistic boon. The cheaters and liars who inhabit "Trapped in the Closet" are contemporary versions of the doomed, tormented souls of classic film noir, dropped headfirst into a daytime soap opera, with Kelly as both ringleader and narrator. With the various characters lip-synching their dialogue, the entirety of "Trapped in the Closet" feels like a direct emanation from Kelly's lurid, sex- and fidelity-obsessed brain.

"As in a Bollywood musical, extravagance is the art," says Imran Siddiquee, who writes the music-video blog Obtusity. That so much of it is (purposefully or accidentally) hilarious stems from the unending parade of crescendos -- the narrative equivalent of Kelly hitting the same high note for 45 minutes -- and the perverse oddity of the twists. The next installments of "Trapped in the Closet" should provide more betrayal, more surprises, and more unlikely comedy emerging from the clash of Kelly's vocal grandeur with its absurdist subject matter.

For Saul Austerlitz's daily updates on "Trapped in the Closet," visit boston.com/ae/music/blog.