![]() ![]() ![]() In his attempt to invigorate the experience of movie-going with a new form of comedy, he has been willing to take the chance of offending nearly everyone. He has become a mass-audience filmmaker without remaking himself into the industry’s image of a director, and without suppressing his hostility toward more conventional film and television content. Whatever one feels about Waters, whatever reservations one may have about the political implications of his films or of his charming, troubling new book Shock Value (New York: Delta, 1981), Waters’ career has been a lesson in courage and persistence. No contemporary actress is more stunning than Divine at the end of Pink Flamingos and in many scenes in Female Trouble. At first, one may only laugh at the idea of Divine (in Female Trouble) as “the Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” but by the end of the film the courage, commitment, and skill of the actor have rendered him beautiful and allow us to be comfortable with a definition of physical beauty that centers on imagination and distinctiveness, rather than on adherence to a simply, industry-promoted standard. ![]() Waters has consistently cast actors (Divine, Edith Massey, Jean Hill, Danny Mills, for example) whose physical appearance and way of talking would be anathema in Hollywood, except perhaps as fodder for cheap shots the result has been new and interesting kinds of movie performances that effect a healthy extension of the movie-goer’s ability to accept people for themselves. Similarly, technical tackiness makes way for the surprising skill of other sequences, such as the series of vignettes in Female Trouble dramatizing Dawn Davenport’s high school experiences and her attempts to make a life for herself in the late ’60s, which are as insightful about that period as anything I’ve seen. The tastelessness of certain moments sets us up for the anarchic elegance of others: witness, for example, the elegance of the opening image of Divine driving a Cadillac convertible (in Mondo Trasho, 1969) while Little Richard’s “The Girl Can’t Help It” plays on the soundtrack. Waters’ films bring to the fore many social assumptions we’ve unwittingly internalized and remind us that despite talk of the preponderance of sex and violence in the media, most films are relatively benign.Īctually, Waters’ films are not all that sleazy: most pornography I’ve seen is much sleazier, and Otto Muhl’s Sodoma makes Divine’s performance with poodle shit look like child’s play. Later I realized that the unexpected horror those scenes provoked was a symptom of the subtle power religion has maintained over me. Though I do not consider myself religious, I both laughed and was appalled when I first saw the scene in Multiple Maniacs in which Waters incarnates the Infant of Prague to lead Divine to the church where she gets a “rosary job” from Mink Stole while contemplating the Stations of the Cross. Waters’ audiences can’t willingly suspend their disbelief or allow themselves to be carried away by reassuring fantasies they have to remain alert, waiting for Waters to surprise them by confronting yet another taboo they may not have known they brought with them to the movies. His plots, which seem like genetic malformations of traditional Hollywood plots, involve attacks on conventions and also on the traditional audience relationship to film. Along with the films of the Kuchar brothers (to whom Waters admits an important debt), Waters’ films are some of the most powerful send-ups of conventional film forms and expectations since Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou. Its most important function is to catalyze other, more far-reaching experiences, the most interesting of which may be the undermining of viewers’ willingness and ability to accept wimpy Hollywood fabrications at face value. While Waters correctly predicted that by developing a reputation as the “Master of Sleaze” he could catch the attention of a substantial portion of the movie-going public-especially the big city midnight crowds and college audiences-tastelessness is only part of the appeal of his films. YVES KLEIN, MESSENGER OF THE AGE OF SPACE
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