Stanley Kubrick Wouldn't Do This
The Mellowing of John Waters
by Michael Dare
(Originally printed in Movieline Magazine, February 19, 1988)
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Like George Lucas, the films of John Waters take place in a galaxy far far away. I know he claims that all his films were made in Baltimore on shoestring budgets with his friends, but it will take more than the words of an ex-underground filmmaker to convince me that performers like Edith Massey and Divine are not the creation of special effects. I say ex-underground because Waters is working for Hollywood now, a situation nobody would have bet on based upon his previous work.
The films of John Waters often play like porno films but they're definitely not. Though they might contain the exact same type of sexual or scatological material, there's no doubt that Waters is not trying to turn you on. Quite the opposite, he's usually stretching your taste to its limits, demanding that you stare at something that you never would have asked for in a million years.
With an audience hungering for the outrageous and a quite understandable dearth of material like the work of John Waters, films like Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos simply had to become popular. Where else were you going to see a 300 lb. transvestite throw her mother under a Christmas tree because she didn't get cha-cha heels for Christmas? Waters films are populated by people who are so strange you know they're not acting; you stare at them and wonder where he dug them up. Waters is somehow able to take this freak show and make it funny instead of pathetic. He only makes fun of what he loves.
You go to a John Waters movie expecting it to be sick, and there's certainly something a bit twisted about redoing a 60s style film with an unattractive fat girl in the lead instead of Annette Funicello. With a $2.7 million budget, Hairspray is his latest and biggest movie, and also his tamest. It's a fluffy little '60s musical that might wear thin for Waters freaks waiting to get grossed out, but it's also so much fun fun fun that one can imagine it capturing thousands of new Waters fans who will check out his old films in utter horror.
Waters' early films have an unquestionable raw power. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, they're so sincerely weird that you can't take your eyes off them. If Diane Arbus were the casting director for a Fellini movie in hell, she would come up with a cast of crazies very much like the ones Waters parades in front of us.
Now that they are all out in home video, you can't use the old excuse that you don't like going to midnight shows to avoid seeing them. The wonders of remote control allow you to either fast forward through or freezeframe on the most disgusting parts, depending upon your bent, so they're even more tolerable. I recommend watching them when visitors show up so you can sit back and watch them as they scream "What the hell are you watching!?" Chances are they will either force you turn it off or start laughing and gasping "I don't believe this." Waters films are neither good nor bad, they are simply beyond taste, and it's the ultimate cinematic goof that they've become popular.
Of course John Waters' most famous, most fabulous, most nauseating and sickening discovery is Divine, a 300 lb. creature unique among the annals of anything. When Divine plays regular male parts such as in Alan Rudolph's Trouble in Mind, he seems wasted. It's hard to believe him as a male, and who needs him when there are already plenty of strange overweight male character actors who can play males. But if you're looking for a male who can play a crazed femme fatale, the list stops here.
Divine is at her best when she's in her grand opera mode, emoting up tempests of Joan Crawford rage at the slightest provocation. She's uncontrollable, trapped in a world that will never understand her divine frenzy. No actress on earth could pull off this character, it takes a man to prance around with such outrageous Shakespearian authority. Like watching Sid Vicious singing My Way, you want to see Divine's Lady Macbeth or Madame Butterfly, to see him play Romeo and Juliet.
Waters and Divine made their first feature,
Mondo Trasho (1969)
for $2,100. It's black and white, extremely raw. and since the sound is
awful and never in synch, it's a perfect Waters film to fast forward through.
An innocent young woman goes to the park where she dreams of her wicked
stepsisters while a crazed longhair attacks her and licks her feet. Her
misery is short lived as she is soon run over by Divine, who eventually
dies in a pig pen from an injury in her expansive bare midriff. Ionesco
would have loved it.
Waters' budget nearly doubled when he made Multiple Maniacs (1970) for $5,000. In it, suburban housewives wander into Lady Divine's travelling circus, the Cavalcade of Perversions. They're eventually captured and humiliated and tortured and killed, but not before Divine chews up the scenery in a fiery blaze of overacting. She acts like she's trying to explode with sheer force of will. In many ways, this is a giant step forward from Mondo Trasho since it features synch sound and the premiere appearance of Edith Massey, the only woman on earth who is actually less appealing than Divine. (She died recently, and Waters claims that she could only be replaced by Anne Southern.)
Then came Pink Flamingos and the midnight film circuit would never be the same. The Village Voice called it "ten times more interesting than Last Tango in Paris," and it's unquestionably one of the funniest and most disgusting movies ever made. Parts of it were actually shown to a judge during an obscenity trial for another movie, a serious porno film, as an example of even worse filmmaking. One can imagine the bold voice of the defense attorney saying "Your Honor, how can you hold my client in contempt when they allow Pink Flamingos to be shown to college kids?" Well if not college kids, who else would want to see the deranged tale of the fight for the title of the filthiest person alive? It's Divine vs. a couple who deal drugs, and run a baby ring by kidnapping hitchhikers, chaining them to the basement, artificially inseminating them, and selling the babies. It's got more gross outs than the Reagan administration, though simple shots of Divine walking down the street are the most fun as you watch innocent pedestrians shudder in horror.
Though it's predecessor is the one with the reputation, give me Female Trouble (1974) any day. It is an epic tale of crime, show biz, and hairdressing, featuring Divine as Dawn Davenport, youth. She eventually becomes a famous fashion model, kills a bunch of people, eats some mascara brushes, does a dance number on a trampoline, and fries in the electric chair. Movies do not get any stranger than this.
Desperate Living (1977) starts out as John Waters' Bergman film. A suburban housewife (not Divine) has a nervous breakdown that's not pleasant to watch. She and her 400 lb. maid Grizelda kill her husband and escape to Mortville, a concept right out of a Jim Thompson novel. It's a city for outlaws ruled by Queen Carlotta in her cardboard castle. Fans of political intrigue with a dash of lesbianism will wallow in this one.
Filmed entirely in "Odorama", Polyester (1981) examines the heart-wrenching domestic problems of housewife Divine, whose husband is cheating on her, and whose only son is on angeldust. But hope springs eternal in the transvestite's breast, and Divine eventually gets to do a love scene with Tab Hunter.
Hairspray is a nostalgia piece about all those things you'd rather forget about the sixties. The Corny Collins Show is a popular local music show where groovy white kids can dance on TV to colored music. Divine's daughter is a teenage Jezebel who dreams of dancing on the air, and she proves it by participating in dozens of tacky musical numbers like The Madison or The Roach. Deborah Harry plays a woman with the largest pompadour on earth and Divine is double cast as a hillbilly mom and a segregation leader. Fans of fat girls dancing will have a ball.
Another difference between John Waters and Stanley Kubrick is that Kubrick wasn't arrested for "participating in a misdemeanor to wit: indecent exposure" during the making of his first film. And how many filmmakers can claim this - "I always shoot one shot that I know they'll make me take out, but this time the preview audience liked it so much that I had to leave in the vomit scene."
One of the main changes in how Waters gets his films made is that now he has to pitch them. "I never had to pitch my earlier movies," he explained. "I made them the stupidest way possible, I borrowed money from people and owed them the money. I borrowed the money to do Pink Flamingos from my father and that was the exact opposite of a pitch. He wanted to know the least about it he could possibly know. I didn't say 'Hey dad, theres this fat guy who lives up the street. He's gonna eat shit and we're gonna make a lot of money.'
"I pitched Hairspray all over Hollywood and it almost got made at one of the majors, although a dance comedy about integration isn't exactly the high concept they want to hear. It's actually a satire of message movies but I pitched it as a real one. It got two levels up, and then the head guy watched one of my early films at 10 AM in his screening room at home, which ain't the way to see those movies. Eventually we did it at New Line, and when I pitched it to them, I stood up and did every one of the dances. Being a filmmaker is like being a traveling salesman. You come in, you've got fifteen minutes, and you've got to make them laugh."
Waters likes to confuse people, he likes irony, and he's firmly convinced that bad taste crosses the thin line into good taste when used with humor. He's always on the side of the underdog, and he's learned how to make fun of people without putting them down. The key to the success of his early films was that they shocked liberals. Now he's making films that even conservatives might be able to abide. If he realizes his dream project (Confederacy of Dunces), he may make a film that's a gross out and commercial. I can't wait.
| CAN YOU MATCH THE DISGUSTING EVENTS BELOW WITH THE CORRECT JOHN WATERS MOVIE? | |
| 1. Divine clubs a policeman to death
and eats his leg
2. A theme song called "I've got lots of problems" 3. Dozens of naked men on pogo sticks 4. Divine's son gets off on stamping people's feet 5. A man sings Papa Ooh Mau Mau with his rectum 6. The actual smell of old socks 7. Divine and her son drool all over their enemy's furniture 8. Divine's mama sleeps in a crib and eats nothing but eggs 9. A teenage girl pops a pimple in close-up 10. Divine runs into the Virgin Mary in a laundromat 11. Divine gets a rosary job from Mink Stole while we watch Water's version of Christ feeding the multitudes with tuna sandwiches on white bread 12. Divine stabs everyone else in the movie, then gets raped by a giant lobster, foams at the mouth like Cujo, and finally dies in the street like Queen Kong 13. Divine (as a man) picks up Divine (as a woman) hitchhiking and rapes him/herself 14. Divine gives birth and bites through the umbilical cord 15. Divine mainlines eyeliner |
A. Mondo Trasho
B. Multiple Maniacs C. Pink Flamingos D. Female Trouble E. Desperate Living F. Polyester G. Hairspray |
| ANSWERS: 1-C, 2-D, 3-E, 4-F, 5-D, 6-F, 7.C, 8-C, 9-G, 10-A, 11-B, 12-B, 13-D, 14-D, 15-D | |
