David Weissman | Beauties Without a Cause / 1986

beauty rebels

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Weissman (screenwriter and director) Beauties Without a Cause / 1986

 

David Weissman’s Beauties Without a Cause is pure low camp (if you agree with Christopher Isherwood’s hierarchy) in a manner that is not quite available today, given that we now exist in an age where far too often what is described as “camp” is itself a second-hand reference to something that originally played to a camp cult who already had complete knowledge of the language and images available.

     In 1986, a director like Weissman was still exploring tropes of the genre introduced by Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs, Andy Warhol, Ronald Tavel, The Cockettes, John Waters, and simultaneously in theater, through the works of Tavel and Charles Ludlam.

 

    When Weissman made Beauties Without a Cause it was still a developing genre, available to only a few, and exploring territory still fresh. Today such a film, in the context of the popularity of camp sensibility, can only appear as an intentional overstatement, an exaggerated travesty. But in 1986 it seemed a ridiculously silly, in the best sense of the word, performance aligned with drag the drag sensibility.

     The drag performers in this film include Lulu who stands near an electronic bank teller just waiting for Silvana Nova to finish her seafood dinner and stop by the teller for her carefully wrapped golden bag of cash which the machine delivers up. Lulu slugs out Silvana, gets into her own white Cadillac and speeds off.

      Her first stop is to pick up Theresa McGinley, who works as a pizza waitress, fed up with Silvana’s endless indetermination of what to order from the menu. When Lulu honks, Theresa delivers up a pizza to Silvana’s head, grabs the jug of wine on the table, and hurries off to join her friend, who waves the stolen money and tosses some of it up into the air for the sheer joy of having had it.

 

     Meanwhile Teena Rosen, cutting Silvana’s stringy, spaghetti-covered hair and is only too happy, when she hears Lulu’s honk, to have the opportunity to sprinkle bleach upon her customer's and race off to join her friends.

      More money is tossed into the air, as Theresa readily shares her wine.  

    Again Lulu floors it, as the Cad speeds off, the girls thrilled with the wind blowing against their bodies.

      Good girl, Tommy Pace is attending her porcelain Mary and Christ at her personal shrine when Lulu drives up and calls her out with a honk. Crossing herself, with a cheerleader pom-pom in one hand and a crucifix in the other, she becomes the fourth of the “four beauties.” More money is tossed into the air as Lulu once again heads off down the highway.

     But suddenly the car is forced to come to a stop as they meet up with the now thoroughly disgruntled Silvana suffering a black eye and now blonde hair still entwined with spaghetti, while holding in her hands a fresh bag of groceries. Lulu points the car in her direction and guns the pedal for a direct hit, Silvana trying to warn them off without success. They now share the groceries, Lulu, a bit like John Waters’ Divine might have done, biting into an entire head of celery stalks.

      Just as suddenly, the cops are on their tail, Tommy taking up her tommy gun and shooting it at the cops while straddling Teena almost as if engaged in mad lesbian sex.

     Alas, a moment later the team comes to what can only be described as a Thelma & Louise-like ending (one wonders whether Ridley Scott ever saw this little gem before making his 1991 movie), crashing into the black emptiness of the end of this charmingly silly movie.  

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).