Culture Club

There’s a morality to the weird but unique body of work of John Waters

Where to begin? How can I condense the career of legendary auteur John Waters into 500 words? Possibly I’ve bitten off more than I can chew ( geddit?) with this one.

Joking aside, it’s important that all queer people see the unique works of Waters. I worry that 14 years on from A Dirty Shame, his most recent feature film as director, younger readers may only know him from a cameo appearance on a 2015 episode of RUPAUL’s Drag Race.

If you are already aware of

Waters’s work, it’s probably thanks to Hairspray. Although the 2007 musical remake with John Travolta is fine, I also hope you’ve seen the 1988 original which Waters wrote and directed. This superior version features a young Ricki Lake, Blondie’s Debbie Harry and was the last film to star the late, great Divine.

Hairspray, while still a colourful pastiche of 1960s Baltimore ( where most of Waters’s films are set), was his first move into the mainstream. Divine plays downtrodden housewife Edna Turnblad in this sweet story of how a plump teenager spearheads the racial integration of a televised dance show.

Dowdy Edna is a far cry from how we perhaps best remember the normally outrageous drag queen — but frankly, Divine warrants her own column, so let’s stick with Waters.

Although his later, mainstream fi lms such as Cry- Baby and Serial Mom are wonderful, treat yourself by tracking down Waters’s early works: Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Desperate Living. They are, and there’s no other way to describe them, simply bonkers. There isn’t a trigger warning strong enough and those easily off ended would do well to avoid them. Or perhaps don’t.

In these early films — dealing with incest, rape, transsexualism, fetish and, yes, eating dog shit — Waters seems to be playing a very knowing game with both his audience and the film censors. Pink Flamingos even deals with Divine’s status as the “filthiest person alive”.

Speaking to the BBC in 2013,

Waters said: “I made my career on negative reviews. In the early days, censors made my career — the scariest was the censor board here in the UK. They said [ of Pink Flamingos]:

‘ We don’t know how to deal with intentional bad taste’.”

It’s a valid point. The obvious cat- and- mouse game Waters plays with censors cannot be compared with the almost titillating nature of torture and sexual violence in, say, Hostel or Saw. Waters instead seems to be asking: “What is decency?” and “Who decides what is decent?’

There’s a morality to Waters’s work and those who seek to hurt others usually get their comeuppance. The villains are often those who would stifle sexual freedom.

Moreover, no one — before or since — has replicated Waters’s trademark wit and weirdness. No one, with the exception of perhaps artistic duo Gilbert & George, would dare.

The Farrelly Brothers briefly revived “gross- out” in the Nineties with There’s Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber, but they have nothing on Waters.

Audacious barely covers it.

Waters’s early work, existing in the sweet spot between horror and comedy, almost has its own genre.

If nothing else, that one episode of Drag Race will make a lot more sense if you dig out Waters’s back catalogue. In closing, Waters is also responsible for the single best piece of wisdom I’ve ever heard: “We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.”

“Waters’s villians are often those who would stifle sexual

freedom”