Female Trouble (1974)

Trash-cinema auteur John Waters took a step backward with this picture, perhaps because he knew he couldn’t get any more outrageous than he did with his first color film, Pink Flamingos (1972). And since he returned to form with his next picture, the giddily perverse Desperate Living (1977), it’s probably best to regard Female Trouble as a minor effort from a prolific period. As always during Waters’ early days, the star of the show is rotund transvestite Divine. He plays a teenager (!) named Dawn Davenport, who runs away from home. Soon afterward, she has a tryst with a scumbag named Earl Peterson. He’s also played by Divine, leading to the strange image of Divine, dressed as a man, humping Divine, dressed as a woman. (Oh, the things a resourceful filmmaker can do with body doubles.) Anyway, Dawn becomes a hardened criminal and gives birth to Earl’s baby, not necessarily in that order, so adventures ensue, leading to Dawn’s final showdown with the law. Waters has said the picture was inspired by his conversations with an imprisoned member of the Manson family, and that’s telling. Whereas in other pictures Waters celebrates societal rejects looking for acceptance, in Female Trouble he crosses a line by celebrating irredeemable sociopaths for no edifying reason. Partially because of this thematic problem and partially because the story is episodic and weak, Female Trouble drags, no pun intended. There’s plenty of Waters’ usual repulsive stuff, but none of it feels truly brazen. Sure, some of the lines are enjoyably crude (“I wouldn’t jump in a bed that had been defiled by you—I’d sooner jump in a river of snot!”), but too much of Female Trouble comprises such pointlessly grotesque imagery as the shot of dark skidmarks staining (male) Dvine’s tighty-whities while he screws (female) Dvine. So by the time Waters recycles the image of a performer shooting a gun at an audience, previously seen in Multiple Maniacs (1970), it’s clear he’s running on some very unpleasant-smelling fumes.

Female Trouble: LAME

Multiple Maniacs (1970)

          Baltimore provocateur John Waters got closer to perfecting his signature style with Multiple Maniacs, an extremely low-budget comedy starring the director’s longtime muse, overweight transvestite Divine. Whereas Waters’ best pictures have a strong element of sociopolitical satire, usually by means of presenting criminals and degenerates as outlaw heroes, Multiple Maniacs has a more scattershot approach. The playful notion of transforming perverts into romantic rebels is one element, but the movie also gets into rape, religion, and revenge. At the risk of giving away one of the more outlandish gags, the fact that the picture’s climax involves a giant lobster indicates that Waters wasn’t aspiring to artistic legitimacy when he made Multiple Maniacs; more than any of his other ’70s features, this one feels like a lark that Waters made with his pals for kicks.

          Divine plays Lady Divine, the proprietor of a freak show called “The Cavalcade of Perversions.” Occupying a series of tents in a suburban neighborhood, the show features people who are odd (the woman who fellates a shoe), repulsive (the self-explanatory “Puke Eater”), and socially marginalized (the amorous dudes billed as “actual queers”). Lady Divine uses the show as a means of luring normal people into the tents so she and her accomplices can rob them, but one day she decides to kill spectators instead. This transforms Lady Divine into a fugitive, so Lady Divine and her boyfriend, Mr. David (David Lochary), take separate escape routes.

          Waters spends a lot of time cutting between Lady Divine’s misadventures and Mr. David’s entanglement with a new lover. In Lady Divine’s scenes, the heroine endures two rapes, one of which leads to a religious conversation, complete with visions of Jesus. Eventually, she finds her way back to Mr. David and she learns he’s been unfaithful. Cue the “hell hath no fury” bit. Most of Waters’ beloved tropes are here, including comically upbeat dialogue, gleeful excess, and hopelessly inept actors. Yet poor cinematography, editing, and sound make it difficult for Waters to cast his special camp/trash spell, especially since the story frequently devolves into nonsense. (Remember the lobster?)

Multiple Maniacs: FUNKY

Desperate Living (1977)

          With his fifth feature, trash auteur John Waters came close to a perfect synthesis of irreverent comedy, rebellious attitude, and vulgar excess. Like most of his early efforts, however, the movie has too much shock-value material for its own good. Everything is pitched so loudly, in terms of disgusting visuals and histrionic acting and vile behavior, that Desperate Living becomes monotonous despite its upbeat tone. And while nothing in Desperate Living surpasses the apex of Waters’ onscreen grotesquerie (that would be the indelible image of enormous drag queen Divine eating real dog feces in Waters’ 1972 opus Pink Flamingos), it’s not as if Desperate Living wants for transgressive signifiers.

          In no particular order, the movie features a babysitter who stuffs her young charge in a refrigerator; a close-up of an insect crawling out of someone’s rear end; a cop who makes women hand over their underwear so he can put the garments on himself; a disgusting matriarch who uses leather-clad dancing boys for sex slaves; an intercut scene that juxtaposes two energetic cunnilingus sessions (one gay, one straight); countless semi-explicit sex scenes featuring grossly overweight performers; and an incident of self-castration performed with scissors. Compared to everything else with which Waters bombards viewers, the big cannibalism scene at the end is tame. The thing about Waters, of course, is that he conveys such a strong sense of delirious joy while presenting outré images that he rarely seems mean-spirited, especially since the story of Desperate Living—as with most of Waters’ depraved narratives—celebrates freaks and skewers conformists. In fact, when it’s viewed as an over-top metaphor representing the beauty of inclusion and the evil of othering, Desperate Living is oddly inspirational.

          To that end, the movie is constructed like a fairy tale. When the adventure begins, neurotic housewife Peggy Gravel (Mike Stole) enlists her maid/nurse, Grizelda Brown (Jean Hill), for help in killing Peggy’s overbearing husband. Then Peggy and Grizelda escape to Mortville, a remote shantytown inhabited by deviants and weirdos. Ruling over Mortville is the domineering Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey). As Peggy jockeys for position in Carlotta’s court, using insidious means to push likely successor Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce) out of the way, Grizelda joins with the “good” people of Mortville for a rebellion. Meanwhile, lots of screen time is devoted to the exploits of Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe), a bullish lesbian with a face full of sores who pursues a sex-change operation in order to wow her buxom girlfriend, Muffy St. Jacques (Liz Renay). Carnality, crime, and cruelty ensue. Waters, per his norm, exceeds the limits of good taste whenever possible, but he never loses sight of his underdogs-vs.-the-system theme. (It just happens that most of his underdogs are criminally insane.)

          More importantly, Desperate Living has moments of laugh-out-loud absurdity, making it perhaps the most entertaining of Waters’ early films. Consider the moment when Peggy goes ballistic upon receiving a wrong-number call: “How can you ever repay the 30 seconds you have stolen from my life?!! I hate you, your husband, and your relatives!!!” Desperate Living is foul, tacky, and wrong, but that’s why it’s a fitting denouement to the first phase of Waters’ outrageous career—starting with his next picture, the comparatively restrained Polyester (1981), Waters began a steady drift into the mainstream, eventually making a pair of PG-rated studio comedies before inching back into extreme material.

Desperate Living: FREAKY

Pink Flamingos (1972)

          Indie provocateur John Waters’ breakthrough movie, Pink Flamingos, is currently rated NC-17, and the text provided by the MPAA to justify the rating sums up the nature of the film: “For a wide range of perversions in explicit detail.” After directing two no-budget black-and-white features, Waters was ready to make a big noise with his first color feature, so he applied his signature cheerful insouciance to the task of creating the most disgusting characters ever filmed. Accordingly, Pink Flamingos depicts a war between two depraved criminals for the title of “Filthiest Person Alive.”

          The star of the show is, of course, Waters’ singular muse, the 300-pound drag queen Divine, who plays a character named Divine—although the character often travels under the alias “Babs Johnson.” Living in a trailer with her odd family, which includes an adult son and daughter as well as Edie (Edith Massey), an overweight senior who sleeps in a crib and spends every waking hour eating eggs, Divine/Babs finds fulfillment by committing crimes and grotesque acts. For instance, she nearly runs over pedestrians while driving, and she urinates in public like an animal. Meanwhile, Connie Marble (Mink Stole) and her husband, Raymond Marble (David Lochary), lead a similarly revolting lifestyle. They kidnap young women, hold the women hostage in their basement so the women can be impregnated by their servant, Crackers (Danny Mills), and then sell the resulting babies to lesbian couples—using the profits to bankroll their drug operation.

          Even a partial list of taboo acts performed in Pink Flamingos is startling—especially when one considers that only some of the following behavior is simulated. Divine/Babs performs fellatio on her son. A flasher ties sausages to his penis before displaying himself to innocent bystanders. A party guest does a strange puppetry routine involving his sphincter muscle. Revelers kill police officers and eat the bodies. Two people have sex while mutilating chickens. And, in the most notorious scene of Waters’ filmography, Divine/Babs eats dog feces. (As Waters himself proclaims in the exuberant voiceover that precedes the dog scene, “This is a real thing!”)

          Crudely made and deliberately tasteless, Pink Flamingos ventures so far past revulsion that it enters the realm of the surreal—and yet in a (very) strange way, it’s a rather sweet film. Waters’ affection for the weirdo characters (and the brazen performance-artist types portraying them) is contagious, and Waters has an unmistakable flair for comic irony. Scoring a montage of Divine/Babs doing foul things with ambiguously gendered rock star Little Richard’s classic tune “The Girl Can’t Help It” is droll, and it’s hard not to laugh at such stupidly funny lines as, “I guess there’s just two kinds of people, Miss Sandstone—my kind of people and assholes.”

          Which, incidentally, encapsulates the whole perverse joie-de-vivre that drives Waters’ cinematic exploits. In the world of Waters’ movies, freaks are the cool people and straights are the ones who don’t get the joke. That’s a beautiful thought, even if Waters delivers it in Pink Flamingos via some of the ugliest imagery ever captured on film. In other words, if your tolerance for the repugnant is low, give Pink Flamingos a wide berth and content yourself with Waters’ later work, which explores similar thematic material in a less confrontational way. But if you’re eager to prove your mettle by enduring something truly nasty, rest assured Pink Flamingos goes about as far as any movie you’ll ever encounter. Word to the wise, though—don’t eat while you’re watching.

Pink Flamingos: FREAKY