Eric De Kuyper | Casta diva / 1982, released 1983

expectations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric De Kuyper (screenwriter and director) Casta diva / 1982, released 1983

 

The figures of filmmaker Eric De Kuyper, in this experimental film from 1982, almost all represent variations of Narcissus, looking into space, into the images of other bodies, and mirrors in search, so it appears, of love without being able to achieve it. The act of looking and posing, a sophisticated kind of cruising, makes their actions almost comic as they endlessly preen and beg for attention, but seem to pull away or move off the moment it comes near. In almost every sequence of this quite static film—reminding one of the endless long shots of Hungarian director Bella Tarr—figures of great beauty and allure (performed by friends, models, and actors Paul Ruven, Ben Kettenis, Jan Simons, Paul Verstraten, Walter Nuyens, Jacques Castelot, Marina Berti, Gérard Lemaître, Hugo Hilgers, Rik Roesems) seem ridiculously unable to achieve their desires or even their simplest of acts. They are pure and chaste gods, not of their own choice necessarily, but because they are all unable to meet up to the expectations that they and others put upon them. In De Kuyper’s beautiful black-and-white “scenarios” or in some cases tableaux-vivants, they fail because of they are untouchable, gods who cannot come down to earth in order to participate in the real world.

 

    Similarly, the director himself continually delivers the unexpected, contrarily presenting us with the opposite of what we had imagined. In the very first scenario, a young man returns time and again from inside his apartment to his large terrace-like balcony as if he were waiting for somebody, and is attempting to look for his arrival. Actually, we eventually discover, that he is not only looking for someone but allowing others to see him, at one point removing his shirt before reentering his apartment, and returning wearing a vest, he looks off in all directions without apparently finding anyone he seems to be seeking or without observing someone who might see him. This beauty is absolutely frustrated by his chasteness, desperate for an encounter. As if he were in a film—which, of course, he is engaged in—he poses, smokes, and stares into empty space as if he might engage someone other than the viewers of the film, who are real in his “fictional” world.

     Just when he and we have given up on that possibility, however, the director presents us, apparently directly across the way, with a man who appears to be staring back at the model seeking his voyeur. But strangely, the original

seems not to be aware of the other’s existence and stares of in another direction, missing out, so it appears, on precisely what he has been seeking.

    In the second scenario, another good-looking, presumably gay man seems to be readying himself for a night on the town. He begins by cleaning up the bathroom tub, an act, one imagines, in preparation for a shower. But instead, he turns to the small sink over which hangs a mirror. Our young man strips and washes his body slowly and thoroughly, even giving himself a sort of douche. He then, just as completely, dries off his body.

    Just when we imagine he has finally finished, however, he takes up a bottle of lotion or oil and carefully applies the lotion to his body from top to bottom, almost seeming to undo the acts of cleaning himself he has previously accomplished. Just the length of his sink-bound shower seems to suggest he prefers the act of cleaning himself over any effects in my have in terms of others to whom he might later present such a lean and fresh figure.

       If we have no idea whether this young god is chaste, we certainly do know by the time the sequence is finished that he is squeaky clean and scented.

      The third of our male “models” is first seen in the kitchen preparing a meal in a pot, perhaps a kind of stew. On a small table in the foreground are table settings and napkins for two and a vase of flowers in the center. He soon opens a bottle of wine, moving the flowers to side ledge, and putting out the wine.

    Yet no one shows up, and he soon brings out what appears to be salad, finally seating himself on the empty place between the settings, and eating the salad leaves by hand, one by one.

    He brings a newspaper to the table and soon after, a newspaper. A book engages him soon after, and finally he leaves to bring in a typewriter.

     The pot of stew, looking more like a soup is finally also brought to the table, some of which, along with the wine he pours into a cup and a bowl. Ultimately he also brings to the small table a TV set. It is as if the lovely table setting is an image of something which has no reality in his real world, a shared dining space that never is realized. It reminds be a little of a scene in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), where “Buddy Boy” Baxter, despite his best intentions, is left yet another night alone without any one to share his meal. Or perhaps yet another movie, Hitchcock’s Rear Window where the central figure played by James Stewart watches a lonely female neighbor pretend to serve up a meal for another who isn’t there.

     We don’t know who or what this man was expecting for his dinner. Was he stood up? Yet, here it is made even more sad and absurd by the final preponderance of objects on the table, the fact that this cook eats his soup or stew directly from the pot, fishes his pickles with a fork out of the bottle, and has little time to ponder the taste of anything he has so carefully prepared.

    Others with high expectations, but low results follow, including a truly beautifully coiffed young gay man who decides to give himself, again in the mirror, a little trim. But a snip with the scissors at one point, leads to yet another, and another, and on until we’re not sure at the end of haircut he looks better or worse than when he began.

     In yet another sequence a young man living in a near-barren room with his entire wardrobe apparently slung over and upon two chairs, tries on a pair of pants before looking into the mirror, and quickly decides to change into another pair, and then into yet another. He does the same maneuvers with shirts, equally unhappy with the results. Finally, he puts on a pair and shorts and a T-shirt with which he ultimately seems pleased. But instead of going anywhere—sits down on another chair and drinks from a bottle of milk and eats on of three apples laying in the foreground.

All of his efforts at dressing up appear to be for naught.

    And in the very next sequence we observe basically the opposite of the previous scenario, as a man, staring into the mirror attempts to button the three-way gathering of the collars and final button of a tuxedo before attempting to formally tie a bowtie.

    At a swimming pool a swim-suited boy anxious, it seems, to make a hookup, bruises a bearded man across the way, who for interminable moments sits on his haunches while looking in the opposite direction of the parading male across from him. Finally, a pool boy enters the scene, closing the curtains of the various shower stalls before also attempting to engage the crouching lion of a man. Although the latter does talk to the bearded man, he seems to get no further in encouraging him to exist his hunkering pose. You might almost cite this “expectation” as the kind of cruising event we saw in the first sequence, except here all players are far more obvious in their intentions, the two cute boys trying to seduce the sad man in thought. Although the stand-off seems to last for hours, no one budges, and once more there is little interaction between the seemingly desirous participants. Each of these individuals seem to caught up their voyeuristic poses to actually engage with others.

    In two of the sequences, handsome gay men meet up with machines, in the first case a man simply trying to install a light over his bathroom sink find that despite his careful measurements and box of tools that the bolts he attempts to affix into wall either will not fully enter or can not easily be pulled out. The holes he has made grow larger and larger until one wonders whether he can ever get the fixture to align. But with dogged determination, he finally achieves his goal, lighting up his narcissistic mirror image.

   One of the most visually fascinating of the sequences is in a vast field, at the far end of which is a typical Belgian road lined with trees.

    In the center of this field is a car with both its engine hood and back truck opened wide. Nearby sits a man (perhaps the same model as in the swimming sequence above) lying on the grass, as if frustrated by trying to repair his automobile has taken a rest or even a picnic.

  Eventually, however, he determines to continue in restoring the engine, pulling our wrench after wrench from his tool box and from within the car itself to find just the right tool for the nuts and bolts which keep his engine and the other parts in place. In utter frustration he returns to the driver’s seat and pulls out a beer, but even that does not relieve whatever bothers him as he puts his head down pulling his arms over it as if in deep grief. But he too seems aware of a possible audience, eyes each passerby who happens down the road in the far distance, as if someone might cross the field to help or at least commiserate?

    In the next sequence we watch a handyman wash and dry a gigantic mirrored wall of a major ballet company, an act that he achieves through a careful pattern of the application of water, the spreading of it, and the wiping away of the liquid.

    In this section’s last few moments, customed dancers enter of go through their steps in front of the now glistening clean mirror.

     One of the most fascinating of the sequences is held in a large room wherein the camera basically scans its long walls, reviewing versions of nearly all the characters we have seen until this moment—each of them poised in a position of exhibitionist stature, without any of them playing the voyeur, each looking off into space as if they were the object of the film goers viewpoint. Once more there is no interchange here, as the camera takes yet another voyage around the room to reassure us that not one of these figures seems to be allured by the others. One might argue that this represents the very essence of the misconceptions of these men, caught up in themselves so intensely that they have lost touch with the very sexuality which they intend to incarnate.

    It is as if all those gestures, the cleaning of their bodies, the clothes they put of their bodies and remove, the mechanical gestures they employ to amplify and engage the other has been for naught. This is a vast space of empty stares, of sexualized bodies that have lost their purpose. Even the art of seeming disengaged with which we have observed the director teaching them in the previous sequence has lost its meaning; and we are left with a vacuum that no longer enchants.

    Even the glorious music by Bellini (whose song “Casta diva” from Norma is sung by the chaste Druid princess to the moon), Puccini, Dalida, and Offenbach can no longer awaken these frozen mannikins. Their beauty and sexuality has been robbed from them in the artificiality of their gestures, in their frozen stare into nowhere.

Los Angeles, July 22, 2025 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Vicente del Río Laya and Hans von Marées Pedede | Antes de que te vayas (Before You Go) / 2022

nostalgia for a love that never occurred

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vicente del Río Laya and Hans von Marées Pedede (screenwriters and directors) Antes de que te vayas (Before You Go) / 2022 [14 minutes]

 

Friends Franco (Joaquín Batarce) and Daniel (Nícola Vilander) are camping in Patagonia when from a cliff, Daniel accidentally drops their backpack that contains their tent. Rain and winds force them to break into a nearby cabin.

     There they drink, celebrating their last few days before Franco leaves for college in the city, Daniel wishing that he wouldn’t leave and fearing for the problems he hears about in urban Chile.

It’s also clear that Daniel has special feelings for Franco, the latter of whom may also be gay since they speak of homophobia in the city and Daniel suggests that one of their friends is Franco’s boyfriend.

    They spend the night together, but when Daniel awakens in the morning, he finds Franco gone. Searching for him, he discovers that Franco has retrieved the backpack, but has received a sprained ankle in the process. Together the boys find their way to a nearby lake, where Daniel applies mud to Franco’s ankle, and Franco falls comfortably asleep with head resting in Daniel’s lap, a sort of paradisiacal work the two inhabit temporarily.

      Back at the cabin, they decide to slit each other’s eyebrows as a memory of their last days together. Daniel succeeds in gently slitting Franco’s eyebrow, but before Franco can do the same to Daniel, they hear the cabin owners arriving, and they are forced to grab their gear and escape.

     At a safe distance they peer back at the cabin, and before they can even explain their actions, they find themselves in a deep kiss. Yet the fact that it is all momentary given Franco’s imminent departure, Daniel finally pulls away.

     In the last scene of the film, we see them being picked up as hitchhikers, both ensconced in the back of a pick-up truck, their gazes turned away from one another. But finally, a slight smile appears on Daniel’s lips as he recalls what recently happened between them as he turns to see Franco facing off in another direction.

     Daniel returns to gazing off, as a vaguely similar smile finds its way to Franco’s face, he too turning his gaze slightly toward Daniel, boy boys realizing that despite their expression of love, it is now too late. Their love for one another has no space and time in which to develop into anything other than a nostalgia for what might have been.

     It is clear, in this understated story of friendship, love, and farewell, however, that both boys have something to remember each other by for the rest of their lives.

     The Chilean writing and directing team, Vicente del Río Laya and Hans von Marées Pedede’s work is not profound, but in its quiet narrative and its excellent cinematography by Natalia Mejías, this short film remains memorable in a period when far more histrionic queer works slip the mind after viewing.

 

Los Angeles, July 22, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Arvind Caulagi | Taps / 2023

an uncertain future

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arvind Caulagi (screenwriter and director) Taps / 2023 [15 minutes]

 

There’s not much to Indian director Arvind Caulagi’s short film Taps. Rohan (Ullas Samrat), a medical doctor, is off for a year’s residency in Baltimore in the US, and his lover Akshay (Rohit Mehra) has been working hard to pack his bags and wrap gifts for the people who have helped him attain the position and others. But he has forgotten one important thing, the “five taps for Rohan.”

    We don’t quite know what the “taps” are or mean, except that they clearly remain an in-joke for the couple, presumably something sexual, but also necessary for Rohan’s safe journey and their continued love while he is away.

     But Akshay, clearly troubled by an entire year alone and the fact that Rohan has put all the preparations for that journey in his hands, is clearly upset, not as we might say, “in the mood for love,” despite the fact that it is his and Rohan’s last night together until Rohan’s eventual return.

     We get the sense that even the talk about the fact that Rohan has given Akshay the okay to see others during his absence has upset him. The very fact that he has “permission” suggests a difference that he cannot quite accept in their deep relationship.

     Returning home from work, accordingly, Rohan does not find his usual playful and loving Akshay, but a man that doesn’t what to be hugged and snuggled. He becomes particularly upset when Rohan wants to pack up a bag of pickles Rohan bought especially for Akshay in order to bring it to “Dan,” the person most responsible for help Rohan get his temporary residency, presumably in the famed Johns Hopkins Hospital. In a phone argument with Rohan earlier, he has also accidentally broken the gift Rohan was planning to bring Dan.

    It all ends in words that both men regret, with Akshay telling him to leave already, and Rohan angrily storming off. Eventually, after failed phone calls, they hook up again and wait for the Uber cab to arrive. Clearly this was not the way that either of them imagined they would spend their last night together for an entire year.

    Yet they kiss and make-up—much to the disdain and shock of the Uber driver—Akshay finally revealing something about the “five taps,” as he quickly looks around to see if anyone might be watching, and hits his cock with his hands at least four times before complaining that “it hurts,” sending Rohan off with a remembrance of his source of sexual satisfaction.

     But, in fact, such a long distance from one another will hurt, and can cause damage to a permanent relationship.

     The critic for Gaysi, jhanvi believes, contrarily:

 

“As most short films are, they either show us the journey that characters go through right before something is about to end or begin—but what sets TAPS apart is it’s set right in the middle of Rohan and Akshay’s relationship. It’s already established, and it’s more at a turning point for them. It’s not an ending nor a beginning, just a couple venturing into a different mode of their relationship.”

 

     I can tell you, however, that such a different shift in a relationship can change everything and put to an end to what already seems established. What if the lonely Akshay actually does visit a gay bar and meets someone less demanding that Rohan, or Rohan, in visiting a new world, discovers a more open society that can help him more fully express love? These clearly are the fears of the far more organized and troubled Akshay, while Rohan appears to be self-assured, relying on others like Akshay to make his travels go smoothly. “Out there,” where he is suddenly headed, he may seek out someone to make his life as easy, seek out someone like Dan, which is perhaps why Akshay is not so ready to give up his pickles.

 

Los Angeles, July 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

Radley Metzger | Score / 1974

elivra & betsy & jack & eddie

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerry Douglas (screenplay), Radley Metzger (director) Score / 1974

 

Having become recognized as one of the best of US erotic filmmakers of the day, Radley Metzger, had already successfully tackled soft heterosexual porn in his Camile 2000 (1969) and The Lickerish Quartet (1970), as well as having distributed several European films that showed causal nudity that deemed them unworthy of being released in the good ole USA, when he decided to dabble with bisexuality, one of the earliest to do so, in Score of 1974, one of the first such US pictures to feature frontal nudity and dramatically present both lesbian and male gay sex. The film received such glowing reviews one might think that Metzger was a kind of cinematic genius.

     Watching this in 2021, however, the fact that it was passed off as a “first”—particularly given the fact that in the very same year Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. presented a far more intelligent and sexually explicit vision of gay sex in Passing Strangers of the same year, and that only a year later Sidney Lumet would tackle a far more complex issue of a transgender, potentially transsexual relationship that leads to a major bank robbery and hostage situation in Dog Day Afternoon, without even mentioning the fact that in Europe and Asia filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti, Lino Brocka, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Chantal Ackerman, and others were delivering up far more professional and daring LGBTQ movies—Score doesn’t particularly impress me given its  laughably bad script, acting, and cinematic tricks, as well as its garish sets and silly presentation of its admittedly “naughty” intentions. In hindsight Score looks like an amateurish production of someone determined to wake up suburban married couples who just loved Paul Muzursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and are ready to move up to something slightly kinkier.

    Let me be clear, Metzger’s film has very little do with being gay or lesbian, nor does it have anything at all to do with love. Both Elvira (Clarie Wilbur) and Jack (Gerald Grant), the seducing couple of Metzger’s film, admit that they’d have sex with a porcupine if they found the species attractive.

     That is not to say that if you perceive it as a comedy of seduction in the same way that you can read Mark Robson’s Valley of the Dolls (1967) as a comedy of aging actresses and their drugs that Metzger’s film doesn’t provide a great deal of campy fun. The “true” seductress of the couple, Elvira has been busy grooming the young married convent-trained Betsy (Lynn Lowry) for a lesbian encounter, while her husband Eddie (Calvin Culver) seems, unknown to either of them, ripe and ready to try out a fling in bed with another man. He’s even brought home from a convention, along with his several porno mags of females one magazine of male nudes, so we later discover from the devout Catholic Betsy’s bedtime confessions. Why she’s even discovered him masturbating in the bathroom when he should be focused on his morning shave!

     Everything that matters here, accordingly, is how to go about the seduction. Since Jack has a successful career as a porno and fashion photographer and the couple can afford a nice moderne home in a lovely seaside Croatian village where Metzger filmed the movie, they spend much of their time playing the game of who can succeed at seducing heterosexuals for same-gender sex. Ads for tourist couples in the local paper everyday haven’t panned out, the previous evening having produced a lot of empty wine glasses, a pot of roaches, and tossed off undergarments without, evidently, a “score.” And the clock is running down on their bet. Elvira only has 24 more hours to get Betsy into her bed and to put her tongue into Elvira’s “pussy.” As part of their bet, she’ll pick up Eddie on his way out....that is if Jack doesn’t jack him off first.    

     Meanwhile, there’s the telephone repairman (Carl Parker) to contend with, while Betsy has unexpectedly arrived earlier in the morning on the same evening Elvira and Jack have invited the couple over for the “last supper.” Elvira gets the idea that she might get Betsy in the mood by allowing her to watch while the repairman services her personal line. Betsy’s intrigued but runs home out of modesty and almost refuses to come to dinner.

      The fact that Eddie arrives early as well and is already making fast friends with Jack quickly cures Betsy’s headache as the poor girl comes running, willing to play her role for the rest of the evening as a mix of the ditzy blondes who Goldie Hawn’s been forced to play for most of career and the woman “on the verge of a bathroom upchuck” who Sandy Dennis was asked to perform in the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and, even worse, to play “Chopsticks.”   

     A little bit of wine and a lot of grass, however, is the perfect cure, and before Elvira and Jack can even begin to play “Getting the Guests,” Betsy has stripped and put on a negligee that purposely reveals what most such articles of clothing pretend to hide, while Eddie has eagerly pulled the cowboy regalia out of their host’s deeply stocked costume trunk suddenly convinced that he is Billy the Kid.

       Eddie is almost ready to be seduced, but Metzger refuses to hurry the plot, and nearly bores us to death with the stumbling straight couples’ purposeful misreading of event, and with the terrace conversations of the frustrated seducers. And when, finally, things begin to unravel, Metzger’s camera goes all out of focus as it attempts to show us a truly artsy series of doubled images to signify lesbian sex while becoming suddenly terribly shy about showing the two males going after anything but a few French kisses. The seducers of this film evidently believe amyl nitrate to be an aphrodisiac, and spend more time sniffing than smooching, screw-ing, and scrogging. Yet, obviously, both Jack and Elvira eventually score.       

     The next day Eddie has the “morning after druthers,” while the convent girl has evidently been completely converted to the devil’s ways. Indeed Eddie and Betsy are nearly set to go their own ways, as Betsy jumps into bed with both Elvira and Jack ready for a second act, while Eddie is about to wander home to ponder his new homoself.

      Fortunately, the telephone repairman always rings twice, returning just in time to take along Eddie and Betsy on another call, forcing the slightly disappointed Jack and Elvira to look elsewhere, finding a new object of possible interest in a male waiter they’d never before spotted at a local café. 

 

Los Angeles, December 31, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).

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).