One of America’s great subversives, John Waters drags his filth to Auckland on Wednesday.
John Waters
It’s an image etched indelicately in celluloid history, and once viewed, it’s impossible to erase. Two hundred pound cross-dresser Divine watches a small dog defecate, and – sporting shocking couture anticipating punk fashion that doesn’t yet exist – chews and devours the fresh doggy-do, smiling salaciously as his gag-reflex kicks in.
Divine plays Babs Johnson, a crazed freak who would do anything to prove she’s “the filthiest person alive”, in John Waters’ no-budget Pink Flamingos (1972). Another memorable scene depicts sex with live chicken as marital aid, just one of many disturbing scenarios that still trouble censors.
Thirty-nine years on, the man whose fevered imagination created this twisted and “degenerate” underground classic is about to peddle yet more filth in 100% Pure New Zealand. This Filthy World is a one-man stage-show in which Waters will expound, with wit and elan, on a career that many consider the very embodiment of bad taste.
It’s a career that saw gargantuan battles with America’s legal system and moral guardians, all captured with acute detail and no shortage of sidesplitting one-liners in his three books, Shock Value, Crackpot and last year’s Role Models. It’s also a career that had to come up for air sometime, and did so with the smash G-rated success of Hairspray (1988), a movie Waters still considers his most subversive work with its multi-pronged attack on racism, the justice system and conservatism of any colour, and its tacit celebration of those of a portly disposition. Revised in a Broadway incarnation in 2002, Hairspray proved a Tony award-winning smash, and was followed by an only slightly revolting John Travolta-starring 2007 film remake.
Waters is clearly stoked by the way America took Hairspray to its collective bosom, and is especially proud of the musical’s strangest manifestations. “It played all over America,” he says. “I’ve even seen it with a skinny black girl playing [fat girl lead] Tracy, and it still works … In public schools they can’t discriminate by saying it has to be a fat person or a black person or whatever. It’s hilarious, I think. I’ve seen it even in a class of – what’s the correct term – mentally challenged kids, and it was really moving. They get it.”
The films that made Waters’ reputation were slashed to ribbons by New Zealand’s vigilant censors, and are still seldom seen here, but his influence on American satire has permeated through the layers of popular culture like a subtle tsunami. The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy, South Park, Family Man, any number of Farrelly Brothers movies and the likes of Jackass are all unthinkable without Waters and his pencil-thin moustache having ploughed the turf in the first place.
“They weren’t just meant to be shocking, they were meant to be funny, and surprise you with wit,” says Waters of his landmark works. “It’s easy to be shocking, but much harder to make an audience laugh when they think they’ve seen everything. In 1972 when I made Pink Flamingos, it was right when [America’s first big-screen porn movie] Deep Throat was about ready to come out … there were no taboos left. What couldn’t you do any more? So it was a joke on that.” Waters made the mistake of thinking that because the Museum Of Modern Art had bought a print, it would be considered culturally and socially redeeming, and therefore, would avoid the censors.
“I thought that would help us in court, but we never won a case, ever. We always lost, because if you see that movie at midnight on marijuana with your friends it’s loving and wonderful. If you see it in court when you’re sworn in with jury duty, it’s obscene. It’s about context.”
Waters’ films, all set in his hometown of Baltimore, are peopled with a subculture of misfits straight from the streets, like the unforgettable “egg lady” Edith Massey, Divine and Mink Stole who, as one of the few surviving players, is still part of the Waters repertory. His films often cast controversial characters from America’s cultural milieu, like former teen porn star Traci Lords and convicted bank robber (and newspaper heiress) Patricia Hearst, reflecting Waters’ fascination with weird behaviours, crime and the justice system.
“My movies are all based on what I’ve experienced and seen in Baltimore, where everybody thinks they’re normal, but they’re crazy,” says Waters. “Baltimore really is a character in my movies, and when I write a scene the neighbourhood is exactly the way it is. I know where my characters live when I’m writing it; I’m doing the location scout as I’m thinking it up.
“I love human behaviour. It fascinates me, the strangeness of it. For some reason, people tell me anything. I’ll get on an airplane and be sitting there for one minute and the woman next to me will say, ‘My entire family had sex with me on an Easter basket on Easter morning’. Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. Why do they tell me this stuff? Because they think I’ll understand. And I do. I try to. I don’t judge people. I think that’s really the moral message of my movies. I would have been a good psychologist or criminal defence attorney.”
Now 65, Waters says his early films reflected his anger at being one of a marginalised minority, and that’s still, more or less, his demographic today.
The vexing problem with the young and angry now is that they’re not out in the streets. “They’re hactivists, they’re in front of their computers shutting down American Express. That’s the juvenile delinquent today – there’s no fashion in that!”
“But you can’t have a career for 40 years and remain marginalised. I’m tired of the word ‘outsider’. When I was young nobody wanted to be an outsider, and now everybody does, so I’m proud to be an insider, only because that’s the thing that nobody admits to being today.”
Besides, “to be angry at 65 I would be a total jerk. At 20 it’s sexy and fun to be crazy and angry. At 65 if you haven’t worked some things out you’re a loser. I certainly recognise and look back on it all with fondness, but I don’t want to be that person today.”
This Filthy World is a 70-minute monologue with subsequent Q&A session, which he describes as “the John Waters Impersonation Tour”, and since its debut in 2006 its evolution has been ongoing.
“It’s constantly rewritten. I wrote a whole new version for this trip. I have a horror version where I’m trying to channel the career of the late Vincent Price. I have an art version, a gay version, a prison version … I even have a big Christmas version that I’ll do when I get back to America.”
The 2007 DVD of the show reveals Waters as a natural performer, a quick wit and a raconteur, but oddly, he doesn’t enjoy performing in films. “I was only in my own movie once, and I hated it. I do a lot of small roles in other people’s movies, but it’s just fame maintenance.”
Currently trying to raise funds for his next film project, a “children’s Christmas movie called Fruitcake”, Waters is unimpressed with my suggestion that he con Sir Peter Jackson into funding the shoot in New Zealand. The location would have to look just like Baltimore. Although he admires Jackson’s Parker-Hulme murder movie, Heavenly Creatures, and “the same company that made Lord of the Rings [New Line] also made Pink Flamingos”, Jackson’s legendary budget blowouts contrast vastly with the dime-store Waters aesthetic. There may not be any high-powered financial negotiations during Waters’s visit, then, but he’s looking forward to dipping his toes into New Zealand culture.
“I’ve never been down to New Zealand except in the old days, when you used to have to land there on the way from America, and they came through the plane and sprayed for bugs. I’ve been sprayed for bugs in New Zealand but never got off the plane, so I’m very much looking forward to it.”
JOHN WATERS: THIS FILTHY WORLD, Opera House, Wellington, October 31; Civic Theatre, Auckland, November 2.