John Waters: Celebrating the Pope of Trash
“To understand bad taste one must have very good taste.” No other quote captures John Waters in a better, more succinct way. This Baltimore filmmaker is a true cult legend, the self-professed Prince of Puke, the Pope of Trash, and one of the most important and influential gay directors of the 20th century. Throughout his six decades as an artist, he has touched every art form in ways that are wholly unique and hilariously tongue-in-cheek.
Waters is more known for his film output, which is made up of underground shorts in the ‘60s and twelve feature films, from 1969 to 2004. He started out making no-budget projects with his fellow friends and group of outcasts, the Dreamlanders, primarily made up of Mink Stole, Mary Vivian Pearce, Susan Lowe, George Figgs, Pat Moran, Van Smith, David Lochary, and Divine.
Divine, whose real name was Glenn Milstead, was the centrepiece of all of Waters’ early work. He became the first truly iconic drag queen in entertainment, going the extra mile to realise his friend’s twisted visions of the films he wanted to make. John Waters was influenced by both prestige melodramas by the likes of Douglas Sirk, and trashier, pulpier, controversial films of Russ Meyer, Kenneth Anger, and Herschell Gordon Lewis, not to mention the queer experimental projects of Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol.
His first films, like Mondo Trasho (1969) and Multiple Maniacs (1970) were underground successes in Baltimore and New York, opening multiple doors to Waters to meet some of his idols and taste a bit of fame and success. But it was 1972’s Pink Flamingos that turned him and his actors into legends of cinema. One of the biggest films of the “midnight movies” phenomenon of the ‘70s, it was deemed incredibly shocking and of incredibly poor taste, with some countries heavily censoring it or downright banning it, which became a badge of honour for its creator. Screenings either had audiences laughing at the shenanigans of (fictional) Divine and her incestuous family of cannibals as they defend their title of “filthiest people alive” from the evil Marbles or puking and crying at the explicit sexual content and the infamous final scene where Divine indulged in coprophagy.
Pink Flamingos not only helped in turning everyone who worked on it into nationwide stars, but it became a strong symbol and point of reference for the gay and LGBT+ communities of the time. After all, going from watching the rather tame and prestigious Midnight Cowboy to the colourful, pre-punk, Pink Flamingos was a breath of fresh air for that youth, portraying queer behaviour as fun, naughty, transgressive and, most importantly, free. This freedom would be present for the rest of John Waters’ career, pushing the envelope of controversies with his next two features (1974’s Female Trouble and 1977’s Desperate Living) before starting to make more audience-friendly films.
Polyester (1981) was a fundamental movie in making both Waters and Divine’s reputations more positive, effectively bringing them into the mainstream with a parody of All That Heaven Allows and other melodramas of the ‘50s, with the added gimmick of the Odorama to draw a bigger public. The film’s success would see the two working on the biggest hits of their career: 1988’s Hairspray, which spawned live musicals for decades to come and even a remake in 2007. Unfortunately, just when Divine was starting to be taken seriously and Glenn Milstead was reshaping his identity as a male performer too, he tragically died of a heart attack just a mere weeks after the film’s premiere.
The post-Divine period of Waters career saw more commercial success with the Johnny Depp-starring musical Cry-Baby and Serial Mom, before making increasingly less profitable films with Pecker and Cecil B. Demented in 1998 and 2000 respectively, finally making his (likely) final movie in 2004: A Dirty Shame, a highly sexual comedy that hearkened back to the filmmaker’s most transgressive days. It is unfortunate that these last three films were looked down upon in their initial release, because not only are they fun movies in their own rights, but they work as three separate manifestos for everything that John Waters fought against in his life.
Pecker ridicules the world of art galleries, how exploitative it can be, and how easily it chews up and spits out newcomers who only get 15 minutes of fame (Waters himself has an extensive collection of the weirdest and most irreverent paintings and photographs imaginable). Cecil B. Demented is more effective now that the film industry is dominated by Disney and studio films, where a group of cinephiles kidnaps an Hollywood star to act in their underground film that directly attacks mainstream establishments and the studio system (marquees for Scream 4 and Lake Placid 2 are jokingly shown before either movie was announced, and there is a running gag about a 65-million dollar sequel to Forrest Gump titled Gump Again!). Lastly, A Dirty Shame tried to criticise the return to sex-less cinema after erotic thrillers and sex comedies lost their eroticism and edge, painting the picture of a world in need to get back in touch with their own sexuality, regardless of gender and sexual identity.
It is unknown whether John Waters will be coming back to filmmaking any time soon, but the man has definitely been enjoying life in the meantime. He sometimes appears as a secondary character in campy films that clearly homage him (Seed of Chucky, Excision, and Jackass 2 just to mention a few), and he does tours of stand-up comedy every few years both in the States and some European cities. He also translates his witty, irreverent sense of humour into the written form, with hilarious and easy-to-read, hard-to-put-down non-fiction books like Role Models and Mr. Know-It-All.
To this day, he lives in Baltimore, his hometown and setting of all his movies, taking care of his trademark pencil moustache and his (literal) baby doll Bill, collecting underground pieces of art and books of all kinds, and visiting retrospectives of his work, often signing peculiar body parts or bloodied objects. While so many subversive artists are known to very few, John Waters managed to break through to a wider public all over the world, showing that members of the LGBT+ community should be proud of who they are, shameless and bold with their lifestyles. He has influenced countless people before him, and he will keep disgusting audiences long after he has joined Divine and the other late Dreamlanders to the sweet hereafter.