John Waters | Female Trouble / 1974

where these people come from?

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Waters (screenwriter and director) Female Trouble / 1974

 

Dawn Davenport (Divine), furious for not receiving her desired “Cha-cha heels for Christmas,” pulls the tree down upon her mother and punches out her father before “leaaavin’” home forever.   

       In her escape she catches a ride with low-life garage mechanic Earl Peterson (also Divine), is raped—mostly with great pleasure—and left pregnant, bearing the baby by herself, forced even to cut the umbilical cord with her own teeth. Without payment from Peterson or any other source of money, Dawn joins her friends Concetta (Cookie Mueller) and Chiclette (Susan Walsh) as a robber and sometime prostitute, raising her “retarded” daughter Taffy (Hilary Taylor and Mink Stole) with hate and punishment before falling in love and marrying her hairdresser-neighbor Gater Nelson (Michael Potter).

     When she and Gater are about to split, she falls into the clutches of the Lipstick Beauty Salon owners, Donald and Donna Dasher (David Lochary and Mary Vivian Pearce), who voyeuristically photograph her with the intention of proving that beauty is commensurate with criminal behavior.     

      Providing Dawn with drugs, money, and even more radically ugly clothes and hairdos, they make her so famous that she loses all sense of reality and sanity, refusing to even feed Taffy, let alone care for her, and warring with her neighbor, Gator’s aunt Ida, who blames Dawn for her beloved Gator’s escape to Detroit to work in the auto industry, and in revenge tosses a bottle of acid into Dawn’s lovely face.

      Now even more hideous looking to the average eye, Dawn is convinced by the Dashers that she is more beautiful than ever and prepares for a nightclub act while the Dashers put Ida into a birdcage encouraging Dawn to chop of her hand with an axe in punishment.

      Dawn, finally ready for her act, kills Taffy in the green room for having joined the Hare Krishna movement before stumbling on stage where she models, sings a song, and does somersaults on a trampoline before taking out a gun and killing several of the audience members.

       Is it any wonder that even though her lawyer argues for insanity, Dawn is found guilty and sentenced to the electric chair, where she fries with the satisfaction of having been able to give one last grand performance before her fellow inmates and audience, her imagined public who take such great pleasure in watching her one last performance?

      I’m glad I got all that off my mind. Now perhaps we can really talk about Waters’ hallucinatory side-show of a movie, made obviously only for those who truly enjoy the circus freak show or get their jollies from anything truly perverse. As gay critic Rex Reed not so very innocently asked: “Where do these people come from? Where do they go when the sun goes down? Isn't there a law or something?”

      The question, however, might be recontextualized by asking who he means by “all these people.” Is he talking about the film’s several trios such as the classroom dropouts Dawn, Concetta, and Chiclette; the three queer hairdressers of the Lipstick Beauty Salon Wink (Ed Peranio), Dribbles (George Figgs), and Butterfly (Paul Swift); the social representatives such as incompetent school teacher (George Hulse), the cop who shoots more members of the audience in order to control their terror than does Dawn, or the sleazy courtroom prosecutor (Channing Wilroy)? Or is Reed talking about the movie’s desperate duos: the sicko/psycho Dashers; Gator and his Auntie Ida who is so very disappointed that her son has not become gay and settled down with nice male beautician; Dawn’s absolutely clueless parents (Betty Woods and Roland Hertz); the two disapproving bailiffs attending to Dawn at the film’s end; or Dawn and her monstrous “Bad Seed” child Tammy? No one gets off free in Waters’ 1974 vision of the American nightmare.

      His world, in fact, is simply that of the cinema world of the 1950s and early 60s just a little more exaggerated than it truly was, as if like Divine herself, the movies, their themes, and their actors were simply enlarged, given steroids, and colored with deeper hues of the technicolor lens.

      In the witchcraft transformations of Water’s cinema laboratories, he tosses a smidgen of Blackboard Jungle (1955), with just a drop of East of Eden (1955), teen angst, bad girl and boy classroom behavior, along with a prostitute mother denied by the would-be preacher dad, along with a good stir of Rebel without a Cause (1955) just for a little more angst, sexual confusion, and unlikely allies on the run along with a heavy dose of the aforementioned Wild Seed (1956) just for Tammy’s sake! And while Waters was at it he obviously threw in Godzilla (1956), Creature of the Black Lagoon (1954), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), all stirred up with an entire stick of The House of Wax (1953) and a handful of Caged (1950) for the cheesy horror of everything we witness upon his screen. As for the cinematographer, surely Waters must have hired Diane Arbus, from whom he admits he stole the idea for some of Divine’s hairdos.

      The important thing is to get a drag queen like Divine to play your central character and a whole host of nonconforming, larger than life figures that define the Dreamlander performers of his many films such as Edith Massey, Cookie Mueller, Mink Stole, George Figgs, Ed Peranio, and David Lochary, who are trans, gay, lesbian, and just confused but, nonetheless, agree with the director that up is down, in is out, and normal very strange. Waters’ world is inverted from one you read about in textbooks.        

     They come from the streets of Baltimore and every American town, large and small, where people are made to feel uncomfortable for being who they are. So there are a very great many of these unreasonable freaks, Rex, walking the US streets just looking to get into trouble—not only female trouble, as Cookie Mueller described her pelvic inflammation which named this movie, but the kind of trouble involved with sex, drugs, and art all mixed up. They’re very silly and, if you put away any sense of reality that may have accidentally brought with you to the movie house, they are a great deal fun in their larger-than-life presentations of the American experience. Like Albee’s George and Martha, Ginsberg’s “best minds” “destroyed by madness, running hysterical naked,” or Williams’ “pure products of America” who go crazy, and those who performed in Ronald Tavel’s and Charles Ludlam’s “Theater of the Ridiculous.” Waters’ characters go racing through the streets in twos and threes just waiting to greet you. So, Rex, as Ed Woods advised, “Be afraid, very afraid.”

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).