“They always refer to my films as cult movies and I’m never quite sure what they mean,” John Waters wrote in his infinitely readable sleaze-memoir “Shock Value,” released in 1981. “All cult really means today is that something is popular and no one foresaw its success.”
For Waters, the term has always been doubly strange because, especially in the second half of his career, he has been anointed the patron saint of demented pop culture. He’s an easily recognizable figure who is more likely to show up on popular television shows and write New York Times bestsellers than gross people out in the cinema, while at the same time being wholly embraced by an art world that would have dismissed him not long ago. And let’s not forget the popular musical that was based on one of his films. Who would have ever expected that the maven of the midnight-movie would be touted on the Great White Way?
The move into the mainstream isn’t a criticism. Waters’s interests have not changed much in the 50 years since he made his first film; it’s just that pop culture caught up. We now have easily available YouTube videos that rival anything Waters created in terms of filth and campiness, and people love it. So it makes perfect sense that the Film Society of Lincoln Center, housed in the highest of high-art institutions, would host the first full retrospective of Waters’s work in the United States, appropriately titled “Fifty Years of John Waters: How Much Can You Take?”
The answer to the question is most likely more than you expect. Waters, who wrote in “Shock Value” that if “someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation,” is pretty tame by today’s standards of cinematicshock. Yes, the dog feces scene in “Pink Flamingos” (1972) is still disgusting, and there are frightening hysterics in most of the films he made through “Polyester” (1981). But I’d propose they’re more interesting in hindsight for the way they subvert the traditional norms of popular Hollywood genres and throw in our face our own obsessiveness with the lower rungs of society. By embracing the idea of trash culture, Waters is simultaneously making fun of our love of it.
I’ve always been a fan of the second half of his career, which is dominated by films that dial down on the lunacy. The best work of this period is undoubtedly “Pecker” (1998), a bizarrely sweet skewering of the art world’s obsession with marginal subjects. The film also sketches a trajectory similar to Waters’s own. Pecker (Edward Furlong) is a fry cook who is constantly taking pictures of the people who occupy his small neighborhood in Baltimore. When a New York gallerist (Lili Taylor) stumbles upon his work while passing through town, his photos take the New York art world by storm. Suddenly his work is featured on the cover of Artforum and the Whitney Museum is offering him his own solo show, while back home his friends and family are treated like freaks due to their newfound fame.
In a movie that includes drooling candy-obsessed children and a grandmother who speaks through a statue of the Virgin Mary, Waters positions his parade of grotesqueries as residing firmly in Manhattan. When Pecker has his first solo show, he is enamored with their strange and vile behavior, taking snapshots as they circle the gallery, one critic loudly and hilariously proclaiming that Pecker is “a humane Diane Arbus with a wonderful streak of kindness.” (I think about the line of dialogue very often and hope that when I write about art, my words don’t sound nearly as ridiculous as that critic.)
But Waters has more on his mind than simple social satire. The spirit of “Pecker” is more democratic, and offers a way to look at much of his work as more than exercises in filth. The fun isn’t simply in observing eccentricity, but in realizing that behavior thought to exist on the margins of society is more prevalent than we realize. We just needed somebody to carry it up to the top of the ivory tower.
“Fifty Years of John Waters: How Much Can You Take?” runs at the Film Society of Lincoln Center September 5-14.
