welcome to John Waters's world
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/dec/04/john-waters-role-models
The Hairspray and Pink Flamingos director is no stranger to irony.
But would you buy a book of Role Models from the Pope of Bad Taste?
Jim Shelley
4 December 2010
What is the ultimate John Waters anecdote? A master of irony, a man
renowned for his outrageous, scandalous wit, most conversations with
the film-maker, artist and raconteur turn up stories of dark bars in
Baltimore, cult criminals and obscure dangerous movie stars. My
favourite story, though, concerns a chicken.
The animal featured in Waters's 1972 classic, Pink Flamingos. Branded
by Variety as "surely the most vile, stupid, repulsive film ever
made", it's remembered by most for the scene in which Divine eats dog
faeces. But that was not even the film's most controversial shot. No,
there was also a sex scene in which a chicken is both molested and
killed on camera. Let Waters take up the story: "The son is fucking
Cookie. The chicken's in the middle. He cuts the chicken's head off
and he shoves it in to his crotch." A disgusting act of animal
cruelty? Put you off your roast dinner? Well, Waters couldn't care
less. "It got to be in a movie and it got fucked. That's more than
most chickens achieve in their lifetimes!"
Waters is one of the great independent film-makers, a true
subversive. He once told me his early films were "made as terrorism",
political acts directly influenced by 60s radicals the Weathermen and
the Yippies. Articulate, seedy and obsessive, his films, his art
books and installations, even his one-man show This Filthy World have
incited acclaim and disgust in equal measure across the world.
Waters's new book, Role Models, a memoir recording some of the
influences that shaped him, has given him another chance to add to
his repertoire of tales. A few of the people featured in the book
include: Tennessee Williams ("Hoping to one day own a dirty movie
theatre, I planned to show Baby Doll for the rest of my life"); Rei
Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons ("fashion having a nervous breakdown");
The Wizard Of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West ("who I have been copying
my whole life"); and Patty McCormack, the 11-year-old who played
Rhoda the heartless child murderer in The Bad Seed ("I wanted to be
Rhoda. I pretended I was her. Why? I wanted to strike fear in the
hearts of my playmates") .
Genuinely odd, intensely angry, Waters spent his youth rebelling
against the church, his school and his suburban surroundings.
Luckily, his parents stuck with him. "My parents never blamed the
crowd I ran with," he writes in Role Models. "They knew I was the bad
egg." When his mother saw his 1969 movie Mondo Trasho, the poor woman
started crying: "She said I was going to go crazy and die in a mental
institution."
The success of films like Polyester, Cry-Baby and, most famously,
Hairspray ("Their Hair Was Perfect But The World Was A Mess") changed
that at least. Whether he has become "respectable" is another matter,
even though he has been on the jury at Cannes and taught in prison.
"I can't help it," he says of his visits to jail. "I enjoy the
company of murders, rapists and child molesters."
William Burroughs dubbed Waters "The Pope of Bad Taste" but his
current acceptability within the mainstream he insists is down to
changes within society, not himself. "I have become more popular
without softening my viewpoints. I don't think the word 'trash' works
any more. And I would never utter the word 'camp'. My tax form should
say 'irony dealer'. But then irony is elitist. I mean, does 'camp'
exist in Albania? Is Show Boat good when you're hungry?"
Waters describes himself as "a workaholic six days of the week and an
alcoholic on Fridays" when he hits the town "like a coalminer". Role
Models details his passion for strip bars gay and straight ("as
long as they're bad ones") not to mention trawling what he calls
Baltimore's "monster bars": "I've danced with the monsters I had
brought home from my favourite redneck bars blurting out 'it was a
graveyard smash' while sniffing poppers," he recalls. His favourite
song, he says, is The Monster Mash.
Waters's outsider obsessions also extend to porn. He once spent weeks
searching for a shot of what he calls "the last taboo in porn" a
dirty foot. "The lowest-level entry job in showbusiness," he says,
"is the crew member who has to wipe dirt off the bottom of porno
stars' feet." Role Models contains an entire chapter on his porn
fetish and ends with Waters (who says necrophilia and scatophilia are
"the only perversions I haven't tried") advocating the parlour game
'Which dead celebrity would you like to fuck?' Waters's selection?
Italian arthouse director Luchino Visconti.
The most shocking chapter of the book is probably the first, which
begins thus: "I wish I were Johnny Mathis." In person, Waters is
happy to elaborate on his veneration of the 70s crooner. "So
mainstream. So popular. So unironic, yet perfect …" he sighs. "It's a
cult! He's beyond fame and beyond race."
Other Waters obsessions are equally unlikely but rather less savoury.
Another chapter is dedicated to his long friendship with Leslie Van
Houten, one of the convicted murderers who followed Charles Manson.
Waters writes that, when he saw the photo in the New York Daily News
confirming the Manson Family's capture, "I almost went into cardiac
arrest. The Manson family looked just like my friends."
Waters attended the Manson trial, and claimed to be so "jealous of
their notoriety, I went back to Baltimore and made Pink Flamingos."
To the critics' horror, he even dedicated the film to Van Houten and
Manson acolytes Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkel. "Maybe I had
taken too much acid myself," he later acknowledged.
Van Houten has now served 40 years and Waters admits he himself is
"less smart alecky" about criminality. The extensive collection of
memorabilia once displayed around his house (a piece of serial killer
John Wayne Gacy's front lawn here, some of Charles Manson's hair in
the shape of a swastika there) has been put away. These days he
prefers collecting abstract artist Cy Twombly. So maybe it isn't only
society that's changed. Nonetheless he can't help sniping, "These
suicide bombers … All this training and they forget fashion training.
And that's how they get caught! Cos of the bad fashion and haircuts!"
Role Models charts his obsession with style, firing off aphorisms
such as "you don't need fashion designers when you're young. Have
faith in your own bad taste", and, "Get on the nerves of your fashion
peers, not your parents."
He also reveals the secret behind his trademark moustache, first worn
in tribute to Little Richard and now maintained with the help of
Maybelline Expert Eyes in Velvet Black "applied and sharpened twice a
day." Says Walters, the 'tache is "both iconic and ironic: the
original pencil moustache!"
Youth and beauty have often featured in Waters's work. He now
believes the only radical trend left would be for young people to
imitate the old, and approximate our fear of ageing. "Teenagers
dressing old, drawing on bags, receding hair and a beer gut!" he
chortles. "Faux old people!"
He says he has "no idea" when the next John Waters film will be
coming out and is developing something for television. To me, John
Waters will always be an outsider, the King of Outsiders, and their
jester, their storyteller. But he disagrees: "The word 'outsider'
meant something when there was a cultural war going on but there
isn't one any more because everybody's on the internet."
The only form of subversion left, he says, is being a hacker "and
hacking has not led to good haircuts or new fashions. I don't feel
like an outsider at all. I used to but now everyone feels like an
outsider. My parents feel like outsiders. I feel like a happy
in-sider, which is ironic. It's the last irony in my life in a way."
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