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
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