CINEMA: William Pretorius
IF, as Situationist Guy Debord announced would happen in the 1960s, the rise of the mass media has turned society into spectacle, then serial killers are the prime exhibits. They are no longer regarded as murderers, but as gruesome celebrities.
That’s why Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers got it right: the movie had nothing to do with serial murders, but a lot to do with the media as a circus of blood.
Director John Water’s Serial Mom, starring Kathleen Turner as a mom — well, supermom — who merrily murders to keep her family happy, has nothing to do with serial murder either, but a lot to do with family sitcoms.
To judge by his book, Shock Value, Waters is a prime user of murder as spectacle. When he read The Basement, Kate Millet’s book about Gertrude Baniszweski, who took in foster children and horribly mutilated and killed a little girl, he commissioned Baniszweski’s portrait (as a Serial Mom prototype?) and a cake decorated with “I am a prostitute and proud of it”, the words she carved on to her victim’s chest. He served the cake with the torture instruments Baniszweksi used.
Grim, yes, but Waters isn’t serious: he’s flippant and humorous about murder. That can be very disturbing if you take him seriously.
New York writer Fran Lebowitz thought his book had boyish charm. She was close — he’s like a little kid trying to shock. Waters doesn’t enjoy murder or violence, but focuses rather on his own fascination with it. He’s all attitude about himself, all “look-at-me”. This approach turns the morbid fascination the media has with murder in on itself by making it a personal obsession.
So does Serial Mom: the film is funny, hitting exactly the right balance between off-hand camp and situation comedy. It’s all bright colours, happy suburbia and clean kitchens, an inversion of David Lynch’s grim Blue Velvet.
If Waters has one good film in him, this is it — his best to date. Serial Mom is a highly humorous confluence of his obsessions — violence as comical shock, the repressive morality of his childhood Baltimore, cans of worms in squeaky clean suburbia.
Debord finally committed suicide in despair: society as spectacle meant the end of other kinds of human transformation. But Stone and Waters wouldn’t commit suicide. They enjoy the angst and comedy, the spectacle, of murder too much. They’ve replaced truth with spectacle — and proved Debord right.