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Wearing lovingly mocking monikers such as “King of Camp,” “Baron of Bad Taste,” or “Pope of Trash” with pride and a pencil-thin mustache, filmmaker John Waters is an icon of queer cinema. His signature stylistic mark permeates every frame of his transgressive cult classics — often low-budget black comedies set in his native Baltimore and featuring recurring cast and crew from his Dreamland Productions. Waters’ gritty do-it-yourself aesthetic manifests itself in his filmmaking approach: frequently writes, directs, produces, photographs, and edits his own works. Waters’ darkly comedic work is deeply intertwined with queerness. He has long focused his films on people on the margins and pushes back against the confines of heteronormative society. His films explore the abject and transgressive, the people and ideas cast out of the mainstream. Underdogs, outsiders, weirdos, and self-described filth are not only featured in the films but are the protagonists. Drag queen and countercultural icon Divine stars in many of Waters’ works, including Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), and Female Trouble (1974), in which Divine plays the double role of Dawn Davenport and Earl Peterson. The films’ plotlines frequently revolve around sex, crime, or some combination of both, blurring the boundary between right and wrong or beautiful and ugly, or between good taste and bad taste. In Pink Flamingos, Divine plays a criminal who lives under the name of Babs Johnson and is widely known as “the filthiest person alive” — though rivals Connie and Raymond Marble are constantly trying to steal this title from her by proving their own filth. Babs secures her title in part by hacking up police with a meat cleaver and eating them. Multiple Maniac’s Lady Divine also goes on a murder spree, while Dawn Davenport gets set to the electric chair for strangling someone. All of their acts are outrageous, flamboyant, and over-the-top, creating sensationalized and sensational stories of blood and lust for flesh. Despite the horrific nature of some of the crimes, the films never take the murders too seriously. As Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” “the whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious.” Waters does just that–dethroning the serious stuffiness of the suburban bourgeoisie to take his place as the rightful king of camp. He constantly destabilizes and dismantles typical standards of beauty or propriety. In Hairspray (1988), Baltimore teenager Tracy Turnblad dances her way onto the Corny Collins Show. Tracy subverts the expectations of the atmosphere of racism and fatphobia that wants to bar anyone not white and skinny from the show, and finds herself via the social upheavals of the 1960s. Even though the main relationships in the film are heterosexual, queerness and camp pervade each frame. Divine plays Edna Turnblad, Tracy’s mother, and the film is deeply concerned with transgressing boundaries and making forbidden spaces accessible to those deemed “other.” After achieving fame on the show, Tracy declares that “now all of Baltimore will know I’m big, blonde, and beautiful!” The bright color palette, big hair, and inherent campiness of a musical all show that being different is something to celebrate. Excerpt pulled from: John Waters: King of Camp and Auteur of Cult Trash, By Katie Duggan [link] [comments] |
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