GLR May-June 2024

Waters movies” because they humorously explore and critique the same aspects of American culture as his earlier ones. Wa ters is gay, but queer characters and culture are not the main focus of his work (with the exception of Desperate Living, which has

rectors, including Fassbinder, Otto Pre minger, and Kenneth Anger. Waters’ deep love of cinema—from the exploitation films of Russ Meyer and Herschell Gordon Lewis to the highbrow art films of Pa solini—is on display in many of his

JOHN WATERS Pope of Trash

Edited by Jenny He and Dara Ja ff e DelMonico Books. 255 pages, $59.95

lesbian protagonists). Rather, he applies a queer or camp sensi bility to examine and parody heterosexual social norms, partic ularly the nuclear family. It’s an approach that has won him a wide audience. Queer people go to John Waters’ films to see movies made by one of their own, while straight audiences at tend to laugh at how their lives are portrayed onscreen. The American family, particularly in its suburban mode, is subverted, stressed, and stretched to its breaking point in many of his works. For example, in Pink Flamingos Divine’s mother (Edith Massey) spends her days in a playpen eating eggs, and Divine’s character has sex with her son, while in Female Trou ble , teenage schoolgirl Dawn Davenport assaults her parents on Christmas morning for giving her the wrong type of shoes and runs away from home to have a daughter out of wedlock, whom she eventually murders when the daughter grows up to be a surly adolescent. In Polyester , Waters flipped the script, this time casting Divine as Francine Fishpaw, a long-suffering sub urban housewife who’s married to a cheating, abusive spouse while raising violent adolescent children. And, in Desperate Living , Waters’ longtime collaborator Mink Stole plays Peggy Gravel, a wealthy suburban housewife who incites her maid to murder her husband, comes out as a lesbian, and murders the outcast denizens of a small village with a man-made rabies epi demic. Another murderous housewife is the focus of 1994’s Se rialMom , where Beverly Sutphin murders neighbors who don’t meet her high standards of behavior. As you might guess from those brief plot summaries, Waters is also fascinated by crime. The director used to attend court room trials for entertainment and has a large collection of news paper clippings about serial killers. Criminals appear in almost all of his films. He has a particular fondness for juvenile delin quent characters, whether the aforementioned Dawn Davenport, Johnny Depp as Crybaby Walker in Crybaby , the Fishpaw sib lings in Polyester , shoplifting sidekick Matt in Pecker , orTracy Turnblad and her friends in Hairspray . Many of these charac ters are broad caricatures of the dangerous teenagers the media warns us about, but in Hairspray, Tracy Turnblad breaks the law and defies her parents for a good cause: to integrate The Corny Collins Show , a racially segregated TV dance show sim ilar to American Bandstand . She’s a juvenile delinquent with a political agenda. Waters based The Corny Collins Show on The Buddy Deane Show , which aired in Baltimore when he was a teenager. In Hairspray , Tracy’s rebellion successfully integrates the show, but in real life The Buddy Deane Show was canceled, possibly due to protests from both pro- and anti-integration ac tivists. Perhaps because of its feel-good message, Hairspray has become the most popular of Waters’ films, spawning a Broad way musical and, in turn, a film version of the musical. The renegade filmmakers who kidnap actress Honey Whit lock (Melanie Griffith) in 2000’s Cecil B. Demented are per haps too old to be juvenile delinquents, but they’re still young enough to think they can destroy the Hollywood system. They’ve tattooed their arms with the names of their favorite di

movies. Todd Tomorrow, the handsome hunk played by Tab Hunter in Hairspray , owns an artsy drive-in movie theater showing a Marguerite Duras triple bill. Movie posters, includ ing one for Pasolini’s Teorema , decorate the home of the vil lainous Marbles in Pink Flamingos . The title character in 1998’s Pecker ends the film resolving (or threatening?) to become a filmmaker himself, but most of Pecker is about how his amateur photography garners the attention of the New York art scene. Art and the art world are another of Waters’ obsessions. Artists of all kinds appear in his films: painters, singers, dancers, per formance artists, musicians, even fiber artists like Lulu Fish paw in Polyester , a delinquent teen who finds redemption through macramé. Waters has a rich knowledge of cinema history, but where does he fit into that history? B. Ruby Rich’s essay, “From Un derground Movies to the New Queer Cinema,” positions him as an important bridge between America’s early underground gay filmmakers (like Kenneth Anger, the Kuchar Brothers, and Andy Warhol) and the filmmakers of the 1990s who are con sidered part of the New Queer Cinema (a term Rich herself coined), such as Todd Haynes, Cheryl Dunye, and Gregg Araki. Waters has acknowledged the influence of George and Mike Kuchar, the twin Bronx filmmakers who made hundreds of often tawdry shorts starring their friends. In turn, Waters’ own influence can be seen in the work of the New Queer Cinema di rectors, whose films often focused on similar themes: crime, so cial outcasts, the American family, and troubled teenagers. After reading Rich’s essay, I thought of how Gregg Araki’s films, such as The Doom Generation (1995) or Nowhere (1997), with their garish costuming, deliberately stagey dialogue, and troubled young people, take aspects of Waters’ work and use them in a more æsthetic and erotic way. And, much like Waters, Todd Haynes made his own Douglas Sirk-inspired film, Far from Heaven (2002), while Haynes’ most recent film, May December (2023), is focused on a dysfunctional suburban family with a monstrous mother. Julianne Moore’s character in that film, a quietly psychotic cake-baking mom who’s married to the man she seduced when he was only thirteen, is clearly a cousin to the serial moms and abusive mothers Waters featured in so many of his classics. Like Waters, Haynes is a gay man using a camp sensibility to examine straight social norms. The New Queer Cinema directors didn’t shy away from portraying sex, and sex, particularly of the fetishistic variety, is also a subject Waters has returned to repeatedly. Waters has spoken often about his fascination with sexual fetishes, and fetishists of all kinds appear in his movies, including voyeurs, foot fetishists, adult babies, and leathermen. Multiple Mani acs features Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions, a carni val sideshow of sexual fetishists, including bicycle seat sniffers, puke eaters, and armpit lickers. These fetishes may not be your thing, but that’s okay. Sex scenes in John Waters’ movies are played either for laughs or for shock value, not for erotic impact.

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