An Evening with John Waters

John Waters still has it: that gleeful transgressiveness that makes him one of the most delightful personalities working in entertainment today. Nowadays, Waters does a lot of touring (because making movies has become almost impossibly expensive). Last night, Waters came to Jacksonville and treated a sold-out theater to a live commentary of his 1994 film Serial Mom, the deliciously nutty Kathleen Turner vehicle, in which she plays a suburban Baltimore housewife who becomes addicted to murder. The event was held at Jacksonville’s beloved independent movie theater, Sun-Ray Cinema, as part of their inaugural Sleeping Giant film festival.

Sun-Ray Cinema has been working hard to bring a vibrant film culture to the city of Jacksonville, and last night was a reminder that they’ve more than accomplished their goal. All this weekend, movie-goers can attend a variety of eclectic film programming at Sun-Ray, ranging from new release features and documentaries to repertory films, including Serial Mom, Donnie Darko, and the Herschel Gordon Lewis exploitation classic Blood Feast. (You can check out the festival’s website for more information about the schedule for this weekend.)

Of course, the pièce de résistance of any event is the appearance of John Waters, the Prince of Puke, the Pope of Trash, the Duke of Dirt. A man whose movies have delighted and enraged movie-lovers (and movie-haters) for decades. (Also, have you read his books? They’re fantastic.) Waters appears in a bright-orange-red suit with a red tie (he has always possessed a sense of fashion daring), and suddenly I’m ashamed for coming to this event in a t-shirt and shorts like some cretin; where is the reverence that our self-called “Filth Elder” deserves? In fact, I’m amazed Sun-Ray Cinema patrons didn’t burn incense, and imbibe the elements (a single leaf of arugula, which is what John Waters says he would have for his last meal, were he ever given the death penalty), for this movie-goers' mass, a sacred night in any psychotic cinephile's calendar. But I digress.

As the production logo appeared, Waters remarked, “That company [Savoy Pictures, which financed Serial Mom] is out of business. Probably partly because of this movie.” The audience laughed; we cheered every time a familiar name appeared on the screen: Kathleen Turner, Ricki Lake, and of course, the Dreamland players, performers who’ve been working in John Waters’ movies for years, such as the great Mink Stole, and more recent Dreamlanders like Patty Hearst (playing a jury member here). As the names of longtime collaborators behind the camera appeared, Waters spoke fondly of them: the now-deceased costume designer Van Smith, production designer Vincent Peranio, and his longtime friend and casting director Pat Moran, who’s made a name for herself in their native city Baltimore. These people are part of a cult that any self-respecting Waters fan wishes he or she could belong to. 

John Waters was seated in the front of the auditorium, illuminated under a slightly green spotlight, the perfect color for a man like Waters, who made his reputation with offensive, naughty, “sick” movies like Multiple Maniacs (1970) (recently re-released in theaters and now on Criterion Blu Ray and DVD), Pink Flamingos (1972), and of course, his more mainstream films Hairspray (1988) and Cry-Baby (1990). 

I was just a kid when I accidentally discovered John Waters, in a book about midnight movies; at the time, I was obsessed with Night of the Living Dead, another cult classic, and read any book which even mentioned that movie; after reading and re-reading the chapter on Night, I began exploring the rest of the book, which contained chapters on films such as El Topo, Eraserhead, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and of course, Pink Flamingos, opening my eyes to a film world I never knew existed. 

Who is this man? I wondered. Part of me was deeply alarmed. But the other part of me was fascinated. Like most suburban kids of the 80s and 90s, I bided my time until I was able to seek these movies out. 

Serial Mom is one of John Waters’ best films. Waters himself said last night that it is his best-made, “because we actually had enough money.” Even though his early, guerilla films possess a certain magical lunacy that can never be reproduced, the fact that Serial Mom had an actual budget, and the fact that it came later in Waters’ career, after he had learned so much more about not only the craft of filmmaking but the business of filmmaking, means we are seeing an artistic mind at its peak. All of the transgression is here, but merged with an eye for detail that finally has the means to reach its fullest expression. 

We see Waters’ artful eye in the construction of the first murder scene, when Beverly Sutphin runs over her son’s high school math teacher (after a conference in which he criticized her son’s obsession with horror movies and suggested she was a bad mother). This scene has a demented rhythm all its own as the camera cuts between Turner’s maniacal rage, the spinning wheels of her blue station wagon (a hilarious concept for a murder car), and the terrified expression on the teacher’s face right before he’s squashed to death like a cabbage that’s fallen off a produce truck. His chewing gum falls out of his mouth as Mrs. Sutphin skids away, a visual gag that reinforces her character's bizarre sense of moral outrage: She hates chewing gum. Earlier in the movie, she asks a detective to remove his gum before entering her home; it’s an offense (like not brushing your teeth or wearing your seatbelt) that will get you killed in Serial Mom.

Indeed, Beverly is dictated by her own feverish, psychotic sense of morality. When people break her code, she exacts severe punishment, and the more Beverly plays executioner, the more she likes the power it gives her. Is she insane, or simply more consistent than the rest of us? Beverly’s son Chip, played by Matthew Lillard, works at a video store (the real-life Video America, a now-defunct store in Baltimore), which gives him easy access to trashy horror movies. But Beverly doesn’t find his obsession with gore flicks the least bit troubling. It’s the self-righteous assholes, like the stodgy customer who refuses to rewind videotapes, that piss Beverly off. And Beverly isn’t someone to wait around for the slow-burn effects of the justice system, or Karma. Beverly beats the video store customer to death with a leg of lamb while she’s watching the musical Annie. (“That [Annie] cost us $40,000 dollars,” Waters observes; “It was worth it.”) In a John Waters movie, capital punishment is reserved for people with bad taste in movies. 

What makes Serial Mom so great is two things: its wickedly sharp depiction of suburban American culture (and how suburban people really are insane, only their madness disguises itself as banality), and its ingenuous attack on suburban American morality. The morals of suburban America enshrine blandness, safety, and cleanliness above all things; any thought or desire which transgresses against these values is deemed a dangerous, infesting disease; and enjoying even the slightest bad behavior (like Beverly getting a kick out of making obscene phone calls to her prudish yet Tourette's-inflicted neighbor Mink Stole), can lead to greater and greater crimes. 

Today, Serial Mom is more relevant than ever, in this age of fake news and Trump’s politics of chaos. (The caption at the beginning of the movie assures us that the events of the film are completely true; Waters laughs to himself, saying, “People actually believe this.”) In the big courtroom scene at the end of Serial Mom, Beverly defends herself against accusations of murder. Beverly fools the judge and the jury, even the media, although her family knows, deep down, that she’s completely bonkers. When the not-guilty verdict is announced, Beverly beams across the courtroom at her husband, played by Sam Waterston, whose face is a such a perfect blend of relief and horror that the audience erupts in giddy laughter. 

By the end of the night, my face hurt from laughing, and I felt a remarkable sense of relief. I think everyone in the theater did. Serial Mom is the kind of movie we desperately need more than ever, because it gives us permission to laugh at (and criticize) the ridiculousness of our own world. John Waters, and his movies, have always provided a visceral liberation from the constraints of reality. I suspect they always will.

Cry-Baby

300th review

Cry-Baby (1990) is writer-director John Waters' second mainstream movie, and it's a charming, surprisingly good-natured parody of Baltimore in the 1950s. It's about two rival gangs: the Squares and the Drapes. The Squares follow the rules, the Drapes break them, and goody-goody Allison Vernon-Williams (played by Amy Locane), feels caught in the middle. "I'm tired of being good!" she moans. She's pressured by her grandmother (Polly Bergen) to follow a conventional path. (Her grandma runs a sort of adolescent finishing school where she teaches teenagers the tenets of suburban social etiquette and good taste.)

But Allison is in love with Cry-Baby (Johnny Depp), who represents freedom from conventions. (He's eventually arrested and convicted of "juvenile delinquency!", which I didn't realize was an actual charge.) Basically, Cry-Baby is the James Dean of Baltimore. He's loved by the Drapes and despised by the Squares.

Cry-Baby is a musical, but not the kind where a song interrupts the story every five minutes as padding. Its musical numbers are mostly amusing riffs on 1950s culture, mimicking the songs that were popular then (or in some cases reproducing actual 1950s songs; these are generally the ones performed by the Squares' hilariously unhip all-male quartet, which performs at various Baltimore social functions throughout the movie.) I've never responded to 50s nostalgia. Hoop skirts and Elvis aren't my idea of a good time. But in the world of John Waters, even the 1950s can be entertaining. 

Johnny Depp's performance is wonderfully sincere yet ironic. He's reminiscent of teen idols Sal Mineo and the afore-mentioned James Dean, but he's also subtly funny. Depp had of course become something of a teen idol himself, thanks to the success of his show 21 Jump Street. So playing the lead in a John Waters movie--even a relatively clean-cut one like this--represents an attempt to move away from that image. I'm not sure it worked, because he's so likable in this film, and he certainly hasn't dimmed as a star in the last 20 years. 

The Johnny Depp we get in Cry-Baby is the Johnny Depp I miss. He's not hiding under piles of make-up and a zany wig, or an affected voice, or a character who's completely alien to society. He's a social misfit, to be sure, but he's not pandering to the audience for laughs by being needlessly eccentric. Perhaps he's so appealing to audience members because they find those ostentatious roles (e.g. Willy Wonka, Jack Sparrow) more colorful and therefore more entertaining. But it's become the norm for him to do something commercially weird. (Because, let's not forget, commercially weird is nothing compared to genuine weird, which is why John Waters going semi-commercial was actually a good thing. More on that later.) What has happened in the process of all those oddball commercial roles is the unavoidable plateau: one performance hardly distinguishes itself from another.

Frequently, Waters' movies peter out about sixty minutes in, so I was pleasantly surprised by Cry-Baby, which is perhaps his most sustained movie. Waters was working at his peak, in a sense. He had achieved a little bit of mainstream popularity with Hairspray in 1988 (even though that film wasn't a runaway success), and was given a bigger budget with which to explore his usual theme of social anarchy in the suburbs. But even when his movies run out of steam, they're still a lot more interesting than big, lumbering commercial comedies and musicals. He finds colorful people who aren't all beautiful. He pokes fun at our very conventional discomfort (or is it horror) when we're confronted with the abnormal. 

Cry-Baby has a lot of bizarre characters, most of whom are drawn with love, not scorn. Even the stodgy grandmother is redeeming, allowing her granddaughter to choose the man who loves her the most rather than the one who wants to confine her to a life of suburban drabness. The 1980s represented a sort of neo-50s return to the pernicious rot of banality. Those who find that depressing will likely respond to Cry-Baby, a movie which gleefully disrupts suburban mores. 

With Ricki Lake, Susan Tyrrell, Iggy Pop, Traci Lords, Kim McGuire (who plays a character called "Hatchet Face"), Mink Stole, Patricia Hearst, Troy Donahue, and Joe Dallesandro. 92 min. ★★½

Serial Mom

Imagine if suburban moms everywhere just...snapped. All the minutiae of daily life, the endless little grievances of maintaining a home, of being a wife and mother, of putting up with the monotony of the PTA and the neighbors and all the stale, banal conventions of middle American values, building and building until they just couldn't take it anymore. John Waters' Serial Mom (1994), starring Kathleen Turner as a Baltimore housewife, imagines for us. 

Turner plays Beverly Sutphin, whose descent into serial killing starts with a little harmless social anarchy: she's been harassing one of her neighbors (Mink Stole) with obscene phone calls (in a disguised voice). She giggles at the thought of this little secret. The police have been in the neighborhood asking questions, but nobody would ever suspect Beverly. But then, Beverly is angered by her teenage son's math teacher, who thinks he's too obsessed with horror movies and that Beverly is to blame. She backs over him with her car, and soon it seems that anyone who gets under Beverly's skin is a potential victim. Not rewinding your video before returning it to the rental store? Dead. Wearing white shoes after Labor Day? Dead. Beverly can't stop.  There are too many rule-breakers out there who evade any kind of consequences for their utter disregard for the social conventions that matter to Beverly.

Her bewildered family (husband Sam Waterson, adolescent kids Ricki Lake and Matthew Lillard) doesn't know what to do, and meanwhile the police are putting two and two together, waiting until they have enough evidence to nail Beverly for six gruesome murders. (The piece de resistance is when Beverly bludgeons a woman to death with a leg of lamb while "Annie" sings "Tomorrow" on the television set.)

Serial Mom is a bit slapdash, in typical John Waters form, but it's such an audacious little slice of insanity that it's hard to be overly annoyed by its faults. This is, after all, a funny movie about social anarchy. It doesn't hold up very well as a movie (the sense of pacing is minimal, and at times you wish Waters would build things up with more restraint: Beverly is already cuckoo by the time the opening credits finish, so we don't get the pleasure of watching the progression from "normal" to "crazy.") But as a piece of satire on suburban mores, it's pretty watchable stuff, and it certainly taps into the culture's commercialization of crime and criminals. The people's obsession with Beverly and the accusations against her turns--like all American obsessions--into a capitalist endeavor by the end of the picture. She's a celebrity, and Suzanne Somers (who makes a brief appearance) is vying to play her in a TV-movie. And her daughter is even selling shirts and pins with the emblem "Serial Mom" emblazoned on them. Meanwhile, Beverly agrees to act as her own attorney (Charles Manson/Ted Bundy style), and it's fun to watch all the little surprises she has up her sleeve, geared toward winning over the jury.

With Scott Morgan, Walt MacPherson, Justin Whalin, Patricia Dunnock, and Mary Jo Catlett. Written by John Waters. 95 min. ★★½

Hairspray

It was inevitable that filmmaker John Waters, Baltimore's King of Trash, would go mainstream, if only briefly. His Hairspray (1988) is an affectionately kitschy tale of dancing and integration in 1962 Baltimore. Ricki Lake plays the heroine, Tracy Turnblad, who is probably the first fat girl to be the star of any teen comedy. It's a wonderful thing: finally a movie that doesn't glorify skinny little things. It vilifies them instead. Waters revels in the bad taste of middle-class Americans, and even when he's doing it for a mass audience, he manages to be coy and ironic (without seeming mean-spirited, no mean feat.) The mainstreaming of Waters' schtick works for him: it evens out some of the over-indulgent aspects of his brand of filmmaking. Hairspray feels like a movie, where some of his earlier films (such as the notorious 1972 cult film Pink Flamingos) had that insufferable "home movie" feel to them which made watching tedious, even as you waited eagerly for the next shocking moment.

Lake's mother is played by the inimitable Divine, the drag queen who worked on almost every John Waters picture. Divine died unexpectedly, just a week after Hairspray opened. Divine has always imbued Waters' pictures with a sense of legitimate American white trashiness. As Tracy's mom, Divine is quite a showpiece, draped in a moo-moo, sporting a long black wig, and that wonderfully campy, butch persona. Divine's bizarreness keeps Hairspray from ever looking like some benign Hollywoodized teen comedy.

And the supporting cast is equally marvelous and macabre: Sonny Bono (the ultimate used car salesman of cinema) and Debbie Harry (sporting an outlandish blonde wig that transcends the campy fashion that Harry has always brandished as the frontwoman for the punk rock band Blondie) as the villains, Franklin and Velma Von Tussle; Colleen Fitzpatrick as their daughter, Amber (she looks like Kelly Preston), who hates Tracy because she becomes a popular regular on a local TV program called "The Corny Collins Show," whose host (played by Shawn Thompson) is sort of Baltimore's Ed Sullivan (a young Ed Sullivan). Ruth Brown turns in a deliciously fun performance as "Motormouth Maybelle," the black diva who is friends with the "Corny Collins Show" and helps unite the black and white communities with her goofy rhyme-speech. She's a hoot; The always hilarious Jerry Stiller plays Tracy's dad. He has a wonderful kookiness about him that makes him look simultaneously out of it and sharp as a tack; Michael St. Gerard plays Link, the boy who falls in love with Tracy on the dance floor (he looks astonishingly like Elvis Presley, and even played him in the movie Great Balls of Fire!); Leslie Ann Powers plays Tracy's best friend Penny; Clayton Prince as Seaweed; Waters regular Mink Stole plays Corny's assistant, Tammy; and Joanna Havrilla plays Penny's uptight mom, Prudence, who's so terrified of black people that she hands a black man her wallet while walking through the Baltimore ghetto, assuming he's trying to rob her when he isn't.