At some point during the last year, I wrote my one hundredth "Great Directors" post, and there are so many directors I'm aghast that I haven't profiled yet. Chief among these is Baltimore's own John Waters, the beloved purveyor of filth and trash. His transgressive cult films of the '70s attacked good taste and were designed to shock. However, he slowly transitioned to more mainstream comedies over time, often spoofing the media of the '50s and '60s. Waters films are characterized by their celebration of the seedier, uglier, side of life. He embraces the outcasts, the perverts, the vulgarians, and the unfortunates, casting his films with a regular band of inelegant, but ferociously talented actors, dubbed the Dreamlanders.
His most iconic star was the great drag queen Divine, who played monsters and maniacs in Waters' earliest films, and then troubled women and lovable maternal figures. I find most of John Waters' films fascinating, but there's only one that I truly adore, and that's because of Divine's performance as the tragically neglected suburban housewife, Francine Fishpaw, in "Polyester." Francine is meant to be a spoof on the heroines of women's melodramas of the '50s. In modern times, she'd be the protagonist of a Lifetime Original Movie. Francine is a good Christian woman who is plagued by a horrible family - an abusive pornography-peddling husband, a thieving harpy mother, and two degenerate children. She also deals with drug abuse, abortion, alcoholism, infidelity, murder, mayhem, and a wide variety of other social ills. Her only friend is her former housecleaner Cuddles, now a fabulously rich socialite.
I frequently forget that Divine is a drag queen when watching "Polyester," and that the movie is meant to be a satire. Sure, it's funny when she's cavorting around with ex '50s hunk Tab Hunter in typical movie romance scenarios. The awfulness of her relatives is wildly over the top. However, Divine plays it straight as Francine, full of familiar feminine vulnerabilities and insecurities. This is one of her first films where she isn't made up to be garish and off-putting, and easily passes as a biological female. There's something wonderfully empowering about seeing an obese woman, so often a figure of ridicule, as a heroine. Cuddles, played by the snaggletoothed, graying Edith Massey, is someone you'd never see cast in any other movie, except as a grotesque. Here, she's the most positive, adorable creature onscreen.
"Polyester" in many ways follows the usual Waters formula of charting his heroine's fall from grace, following Francine as she becomes a victim of a parade of salacious and sinister vices, each more gasp-worthy than the last. However, there's a much more cohesive story this time out, with an unambiguously happy, crowd-pleasing conclusion. Francine doesn't get her man in the end, but she does get revenge and she does figure out who really loves her, which is plenty. I think of "Polyester" as the last hurrah for the Dreamlanders, as John Waters' subsequent films would put them in smaller and smaller supporting roles as he moved toward the mainstream, and started working with more well-known actors.
"Polyester" was Waters' first film with a substantial budget, thanks to the newly formed New Line Cinema, and he used it as an opportunity to really skewer suburbia in a way he hadn't been able to before. He toned down his usual incendiary style and content to achieve an R-rating, and "Polyester" remains one of his most accessible films. However, as with all of his projects, he set and shot it in Baltimore, and took pains to feature the local community. HIs filmmaking was noticeably improving with each picture, as he took on more and more ambitious scenarios. I think he plateaued around "Hairspray," but to his credit, John Waters never sold out and he never betrayed his origins as a schlockmeister.
I have to mention the Odorama, the William Castle-esque gimmick that invites the audience to scratch-and-sniff
their way through the film with special cards. I have not had the pleasure of attending a screening with the full Odorama experience, and have no real wish to. The gimmick sounds fun, but I find it unnecessary. I love "Polyester" as an audio-visual experience, and don't need to involve any other senses.
What I've Seen - John Waters
Mondo Trasho (1969)
Multiple Maniacs (1970)
Pink Flamingos (1972)
Female Trouble (1974)
Desperate Living (1977)
Polyester (1981)
Hairspray (1988)
Cry-Baby (1990)
Serial Mom (1994)
Pecker (1998)
---
No comments:
Post a Comment