Saw Desperate Living, a zany John Waters film about a hysterical housewife who is on the run after murdering her husband. She winds up in Mortville, a filthy shanty-town ruled by a fat, stupid, ugly Queen Carlotta. There's transexuals and creative sexual practices and filthiness and casual lesbianism. It's a romp!
The film is very typical of John Waters. This film clearly had more money spent on it than Multiple Maniacs or any other early Waters film, but still everything is very cheap and tawdry-looking on purpose. As an example: the house where most of the action takes place seems to be assembled mostly from plywood and billboard scraps. More tawdriness: you see many breasts and a few penises. It's all quite provocative stuff, especially for the 70s. Heck, even to this day, you still very seldom see a wiener in a film.
John Waters is a man who likes filth and bad taste. This enjoyment of "unmentionable" things is far far better than the usual, stuffy intolerance for those things (mental illness, drug usage, sex work, etc) but the celebration of the bad is just the flip-side of condemning it - we're still designating things as bad, we just like them now. Homosexuality, for example, is treated with the same sinister adoration as necrophilia. The film is fairly fun however, in the end, and we never really mine the full depths of human cruelty.
If you've seen a John Waters film before, you'll know what to expect. This is an exemplar of the Watery art.
No comments:
Post a Comment