Shaun de Waal Live-action movie of the week
In the Seventies John Waters made himself the Tsar of Trash with movies such as Mondo Trasho, Female Trouble and Pink Flamingos, in which laughably outrageous characters did risibly odd and sometimes disgusting things. Waters created an inverted aesthetic in which kitsch triumphs and bad taste is good.
Waters was also highly sensitive to the value of shock; there was, for instance, his penchant for puke. As he wrote in a memoir, ”Ingmar Bergman really influenced me by his dramatic use of realistic regurgitation.”
There was, too, notoriously, the scene in Pink Flamingos in which the rather ro- tund drag queen Divine ate doggie-do.
But since the early Eighties Waters appears to have left his terrorist phase behind him. Perhaps he decided that after the outrages of Pink Flamingos and Desperate Living (don’t ask) there wasn’t much further to go in that direction. Whatever the case, his more recent works have been just to the margin of the mainstream rather than full-scale subversions of it.
His newest movie, Pecker, tells the tale of a young guerrilla-style photographer (Edward Furlong) in Waters’s native Baltimore, the setting off all his films.
There are hints of autobiography – Waters’s earliest movies were made on stolen film, and his Catholic parents were (are?) somewhat ambivalent about his work – but this is more fable than gritty recollection.
Waters touches on the subject of the artist’s responsibilities toward the people whose bodies, faces and lives are his raw material, but he touches on it very lightly.
He seems more interested in the vagaries of cultural success, a subject he must know all about. Pecker’s informal shots catch the interest of New York’s culture vultures, and a tussle for Pecker’s soul ensues.
Waters is obviously taking a swipe at art- establishment pretensions, setting them against the charmingly ugly but somehow more solid, more human, world of suburban Baltimore.
It is hard, though, to feel this conflict very deeply or to be more than amused by Pecker. Waters’s vision is, after all, a benign one, as benign in its way as Disney’s. Everything turns out for the best, and the worst that can happen to anyone is humiliation.