John Waters still remembers the day his 1988 comedy Hairspray was awarded a PG certificate. \u201cIt was horrible,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Until then, Waters, christened the \u201cPope of Trash\u201d by the novelist William S Burroughs, was notorious for filming the unfilmable. In Eat Your Makeup<\/a>, he recreated JFK\u2019s assassination only five years after the event, casting the boisterous Divine<\/a> in drag as Jackie Kennedy. He invented a blasphemous sex act called the \u201crosary job\u201d in Multiple Maniacs<\/a>, which also featured a rape-by-giant-lobster. Most repulsively, in Pink Flamingos<\/a>, he persuaded Divine to scoff a fresh dog turd on camera.<\/p>\n Now here he was making a bubblegum comedy about the teen heart-throbs on a fictional early-1960s TV dance show. Hairspray is not without its eccentricities: there are affectionate dabs of token ugliness (vomit on a fun-fair ride, a rat interrupting a moonlit tryst), the glorious sight of Debbie Harry smuggling a bomb under her beehive wig, and Divine in the dual roles of a Baltimore housewife and a racist TV boss. The result, in the words of Rolling Stone magazine, was a family film that \u201cboth the Bradys and the Mansons could adore\u201d.<\/p>\n Scuzzy fairytale \u2026 Edith Massey and friend in Desperate Living. Photograph: Steve Yeager\/courtesy Warner Bros<\/p>\n Speaking from his home in the seaside idyll of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Waters shudders at the memory of that first and only PG: \u201cI was scared. I thought my fans were going to turn on me.\u201d<\/p>\n The 80-year-old provocateur has his camera switched off for our early-morning video call but the voice is sonorous enough to make it feel as if he is right here in the room: the languid drawl, the high notes of confected comic outrage, the disdainful purr suggesting an audible curling of the lip. I ask him to describe his appearance today, feeling a little like a phone-sex heavy-breather in one of his movies, and he helpfully obliges: \u201cI have on a turtleneck, a pair of pants and Paul Smith socks\u201d. Unmentioned but implied is the pencil moustache which he once said he hoped would give him the look of \u201ca high-school principal who might be a child molester\u201d.<\/p>\n Though Waters has kept busy writing books and touring his spoken-word live show (which is coming to the UK in February), he hasn\u2019t directed a film since A Dirty Shame<\/a>, his 2004 comedy about small-town sexual hysteria. He failed to raise funding a few years ago for an adaptation of his feel-bad novel Liarmouth, even with Aubrey Plaza attached, and there are no new movies in the pipeline. Thank goodness, then, for the old ones: the boutique label Criterion has given the bells-and-whistles Blu-ray treatment to Hairspray<\/a> and the gloatingly scuzzy 1977 adult fairytale Desperate Living<\/a>, which is set in Mortville, a miscreants\u2019 ghetto ruled by the crazed Queen Carlotta (played by the goofy, grandmotherly Edith Massey).<\/p>\n \u2018I thought my fans were going to turn on me\u2019 \u2026 Ricki Lake in Hairspray. Photograph: Henny Garfunkel\/courtesy Warner Bros<\/p>\n It\u2019s an odd double-bill. Hairspray marked the start of Waters\u2019 unlikely foray into mainstream Hollywood, paving the way for barbed but unthreatening comedies with actual stars: Johnny Depp (Cry-Baby<\/a>), Kathleen Turner (Serial Mom<\/a>), Christina Ricci (Pecker<\/a>). It also spawned a multiple Tony award-winning Broadway musical in 2003 as well as a second movie version starring John Travolta in 2007.<\/p>\n Desperate Living, on the other hand, remains the runt of his filmography. \u201cIt didn\u2019t do well when it came out,\u201d he admits. The absence of Divine may have had something to do with that. Originally cast in the film as a snarling lesbian who undergoes both a phalloplasty and an abortion, he was tied up with theatre instead. \u201cI think he also wanted to get away from me a little bit, to prove what a good actor he was,\u201d says Waters.<\/p>\n double quotation markThe dog we ran over was already dead \u2013 and it got to be in a movie<\/p>\n Scandalously funny it may be, but Desperate Living feels heavier and less high-spirited than much of Waters\u2019 other work. \u201cIt\u2019s my angriest movie,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd my ugliest.\u201d Gratuitously so. What about the moment when a car drives over a dog? \u201cIt wasn\u2019t that disgusting,\u201d protests Waters, who sourced the animal from the freezer at a hospital laboratory. \u201cIt was already dead. And it got to be in a movie.\u201d I was thinking more of the fact that the dog wasn\u2019t fully defrosted, so bits of it stuck to the axle and had to be painstakingly removed for a second take. \u201cOh yes, that\u2019s true,\u201d he concedes with a throaty chuckle. \u201cThe glamorous world of film-making.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018It wasn\u2019t that disgusting\u2019 \u2026 John Waters today. Photograph: Greg Gorman<\/p>\n Desperate Living was also the first of his movies written without the aid of marijuana. \u201cMost people when they have success, they become cocaine addicts or something. But the minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs.\u201d Why? \u201cI wanted to keep going and not be distracted.\u201d He has tried it all. \u201cI hated heroin. All that itching and scratching. Luckily, I\u2019m not a jazz musician, so I didn\u2019t need it.\u201d Special derision is reserved for ecstasy. \u201cA drug that makes you love everybody is not for me,\u201d he scoffs.<\/p>\n Watched back-to-back, similarities emerge between these two superficially dissimilar movies. There is the obsession with rats and roaches: in Desperate Living, a cockroach scuttles over the naked body of stripper turned actor Liz Renay, and the opening credits show a skinned rat being served on fine china. Later, more dead rats are stirred into a cauldron; it\u2019s a wonder the cast and crew didn\u2019t come down with hantavirus. As well as the rodent cameo in Hairspray, that film also features a dance called the Roach, which the hero Tracy Turnblad (future chat-show host Ricki Lake) performs in a cockroach-patterned dress while pretending to squash bugs underfoot. \u201cWhy don\u2019t we have gimmick dances today?\u201d Waters asks, sounding peeved. \u201cWhy was there no Covid dance and no Covid novelty song? I miss novelty songs \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markWhy don\u2019t we have gimmick dances today? Why was there no Covid dance and novelty song? I miss novelty songs<\/p>\n His favourite rat moment crops up in Pecker, his comparatively sweet 1998 comedy about a young Baltimore photographer feted by the New York cognoscenti. \u201cThere\u2019s a scene where rats are fucking in the garbage can,\u201d says Waters. \u201cWe had a trainer but the rats wouldn\u2019t do anything. I tried talking dirty: \u2018Eat that rat dick, bitch!\u2019 Then the prop master came over, grabbed the rats from below and shook them. It looked perfect.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2019, President Trump dismissed Baltimore, Waters\u2019 birthplace, as a \u201crat and rodent-infested mess\u201d, earning a vehement response from the director: \u201cGive me the rats and roaches of Baltimore any day over the lies and racism of your Washington, Mr Trump.\u201d Little effort is needed now to draw parallels between the current US president and Queen Carlotta, who casually insults her subjects (\u201cHi stupid! Hi ugly!\u201d) and issues capricious decrees: \u201cEvery word I ever utter is to be taken as a direct proclamation!\u201d Carlotta\u2019s plot to inject the people of Mortville with rabies even calls to mind the current administration\u2019s cavalier attitude to public health. \u201cThat lunatic RFK Jr,\u201d Waters huffs. \u201cHow did he ever get appointed?\u201d He launches into a chant: \u201c\u2018Hey, hey, RFK\/ How many Covid kids d\u2019ya kill today?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Beehive bomb \u2026 Debbie Harry in Hairspray. Photograph: New Line\/REX\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n But one shouldn\u2019t confuse the on-screen chaos and carnage of Desperate Living with moral anarchy. When I go to suggest that there are no rules in his movies, Waters stops me dead. \u201cNo, there are rules,\u201d he says. \u201cThe rules are: mind your own business and don\u2019t judge people if you don\u2019t know the whole story. The people who win always follow that. The people who lose are jealous and judgmental. But there are definitely rules.\u201d<\/p>\n Nor should the comedy in either film disguise their underlying seriousness. Hairspray may treat the Civil Rights era with a deft touch but its indignation is palpable. Both movies celebrate resistance in the face of racism, fascism and tyranny. What do these movies have to say about the US in 2026? \u201cI think they say that anger can be good, but the way you change things is through humour.\u201d Is there anything he wouldn\u2019t joke about? \u201cI\u2019m certainly not going to go into Israel and that whole situation. It\u2019d be a lose-lose for me to even try. But I\u2019ve always walked the edge of what you can\u2019t make fun of. In all my movies, I make fun of things I like, not things I hate. That\u2019s why I\u2019ve been getting away with this for 60 years.\u201d<\/p>\n It feels unbelievable that nearly two-thirds of that time has elapsed since Divine\u2019s death, three weeks after the release of Hairspray, at the age of 42. \u201cI\u2019m still shocked,\u201d says Waters. \u201cAnd he lives today in so many ways. I believe he changed drag queens. When we were young, they were very normal and square. Today, every drag queen has some kind of edge, and I think that\u2019s because of Divine. Being overweight, wearing scars on his face, carrying a chainsaw \u2013 he was punk before there was such a thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Desperate Living and Hairspray are released by Criterion on 20 July<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Waters still remembers the day his 1988 comedy Hairspray was awarded a PG certificate. \u201cIt was horrible,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":694340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-694339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/694340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}