And while we're on the subject...

Last week, I let a friend of mine borrow my copy of Desperate Living - he recently told me he'd been in a play with Mink Stole (OMG!) and yet had never seen the movie. Well, I had to rectify that situation. Thing is, he really didn't like it. Said it felt like "some bad student film." Which isn't NOT true...but, at any rate, I responded in unexpectedly long-winded fashion. Before I get to what I said, let's have some context, shall we?

First off, no Divine here - she was on tour and couldn't be there for the shoot. So, that's unfortunate, but on the upside, we do get Liz Renay. I also just learned this from Wikipedia: "This was also Waters' first film without David Lochary, who bled to death after accidentally cutting himself whilst on PCP just before production." Sounds about right.

The film opens with Peggy (Mink Stole) going crazy:

"SODOMITES! CAUGHT RIGHT IN A SEX ORGY!" "NUDE, NUDE NUDE!" "OH GOD, THE CHILDREN ARE HAVING SEX!" Hilarious.

Then Peggy murders her husband (George Stover), and Grizelda (Jean Hill) goes on the lam with her:

"I DON'T WANT NO WHITE MAN LOOKING AT MY TAMPAX!" I love how Mink Stole is about five feet away from her husband's head when she "hits" him with the bottle.

So they go on the lam, some gross stuff happens, and they get a choice: prison or an outlaw town outside Baltimore known as Mortville. Good ol' Mortville. Home of our kind of people. Oh, who am I kidding, Wikipedia does a fine job with the rest of the plot: Most of Mortville's social outcasts — criminals, nudists, and sexual deviants — conspire to overthrow Queen Carlotta (the incomparable Edith Massey), who banishes her daughter Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce) after she elopes with a garbage collector, who is later shot to death by the guards. Coo-Coo hides in Peggy and Grizelda's house with her dead lover. Peggy calls for the guards who fight with Grizelda, soon the house collapses and Grizelda dies. Peggy Gravel, however, joins the queen in terrorizing her subjects, even infecting them (and Princess Coo-Coo) with rabies.

Eventually, Mortville's denizens, led by Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe), overthrow Queen Carlotta and execute Peggy Gravel by shooting a gun up her anus. To celebrate their freedom, the townsfolk roast Queen Carlotta on a spit and serve her, pig-like, on a platter with an apple in her mouth."

Filthy, filthy stuff. And wonderful. Here's the ending:

"Raaaaa-bieeees!" There's a very sweet little scene in here with Liz Renay preaching love and acceptance. She's a real crusader for goodness. And how 'bout that castle, huh? "Give 'er the chomp of life." All these Murrland accents are making me nostalgic. "We don't like social cuh-limbers innnnnn Mortville!"

Anyway, here's my argument for Desperate Living:

"Well, like I said before - Desperate Living is aggresively bad. What I mean is, I don't think Waters or anybody in the cast or crew set out to make anything like a "good" movie, at least not in any traditional sense. Their goal was more about making something grotesque and depraved and putting it on the silver screen, thereby subverting and probably literally shitting on concepts of beauty or glamor that had always left them out entirely. They were fighting a war on propriety, albeit in a sort of goofy and club-footed way, which is probably what I find so funny and charming about the films. Maybe charming is the wrong word.

In his HBO special (was that the one you'd watched?) Senor Waters tells a story about how he and Divine did a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination back in high school - way, way too soon. When Divine's mom found the bloodied Jackie outfit in the trunk of her car, Divine couldn't say, "Well, I like to wear women's clothes. I'm a big ol' drag queen, maybe even trans. Just not sure yet." Instead, she said, "I am Jackie Kennedy!" And I think that's the meat of what I like about Waters, and about Divine, and on down the line towards, I don't know, even Gwar or the Dead Milkmen - taking the exaggeration to a step beyond its logical conclusion is very funny to me.

The grotesque as just as compelling as the glamorous, right? Maybe it is even more so, if the obsession with Octomom and Jon & Kate (or, say, attendance at hangins' or dime museums back in the day) is any indication. I guess the appeal of Waters films, particularly his earlier, junkier work, is that of the freak show taking over and hacking away at the examples of normative influence, revealing it (and them) to be just as freakish and disgusting as the bottom-feeders we're usually rooting for in these films, that we (or I) find that we relate to. That the films are literally of poor quality sort of adds to that, to me.

Ha! Well, I had a lot more to say about that than I thought I did. Brevity is the soul of somebody else, certainly not me. In any case, Desperate Living is, in all honesty, a lot like a bad student film, but I sure like it a lot. So I don't blame you. To each his own and all that. " EDIT: It's actually really funny how earnest I am bout John Fucking Waters. SHIT IS MEANINGFUL, YOU KNOW?

After watching these clips, though, I just can't understand why anybody wouldn't love this little gem of a film. Fuckin' hilarious. As "B movies" go, I suppose John Waters is pretty pedestrian, and not so far underground. But who cares? This stuff was loony then, and it's still delightfully, decadently, grotesque. 5 stars.

Tyler made this for me, and I think it properly illustrates exactly how I feel when I think about this PIECE OF ART/SHIT