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Pope of Trash
Once a purveyor of trash, now an international treasure
O
nce a purveyor of trash, now an international treasure. One wonders if John Waters himself – writer, high priest of filth and cult filmmaker – would be surprised by the stunning trajectory of his three-decade career.
And so it is chronicled in Role Models, a collection of painstakingly researched essays on the various men, women and inhabitants of Baltimore who provided Waters with inspiration and salvation.
As one might expect from the self-anointed “Pope of Trash”, Waters’ array of role models are wonderfully recondite – each united and defined by their spirited opposition to the establishment.
A legendary iconoclast, Waters resisted the urge to suckle at Hollywood’s comforting teat, roundly rejecting its celebration of bourgeois values. It was, of course, the inclemency of these values that handed him an imprimatur for the foundation of his career. (Waters has often referred to the celebration of stifling bourgeois values as an example of “bad bad taste”.)
For the uninitiated, Waters made his name as a transgressive filmmaker, constantly redrawing the boundaries of taste in seminal trash films such as Pink Flamingoes, Female Trouble and Desperate Living.
In later decades he courted a more mainstream audience (in an oddball way) with Hairspray, Serial Mom and Cry-Baby. His world is one where humanity is consistently perverse and derelict – but always framed in a humorous light. Fortunately, Role Models makes a decent attempt at explaining the “how” and the “why” of Waters’ world.
Waters traverses the subjects of his idolatry with an eloquence that is charming and irreverent. The opening chapter where Waters meets velvet crooner Johnny Mathis is surprisingly moving. He begins in earnest.
“I want to be Johnny Mathis,” he writes. “So mainstream. So popular. So unironic, yet perfect.
Effortlessly boyish at over 70 years old, with a voice that makes all of America want to make out.” Even when verging on bawdy, Waters is still a gentleman.
But Waters’ tender affections are also punctuated with moments of desperate longing – even if only for a brief instant – to be Johnny Mathis.
To be that paragon of unadulterated perfection is of endless fascination to Waters, who describes himself as just the opposite: “a cult filmmaker whose core audience, no matter how much [he’s] crossed over, consists of minorities who can’t even fit in with their own minorities.”
And despite the impressive research Waters has compiled on each of his idols as evidenced by the lengthy bibliography, these essays unearth even more about Waters: his vulnerabilities and his occasional bouts of loneliness.
The interview with Mathis reveals that perfection is painful but reality markedly less so. At times Waters veers dangerously into solipsistic territory, but his ability to pull out a witty one-liner at unexpected moments spares the reader from too much self-indulgence.
Those who long for Waters at his most unashamedly grotesque will also be satisfied with Role Models.
An eye-opening chapter on pornographer Bobby Garcia – who videotaped himself having sex exclusively with US Marines – will counter some of the cries from diehard acolytes who think their hero has lost his edge.
It is more likely he has mellowed with age. Even the chapter on pornography – which highlights Waters’ acute sense of the ridiculous – is laden with a wistful, nostalgic sentiment. It is, perhaps, impossible to be objective about the people one so ardently admires.
Throughout the book Waters seems completely aware that his outrageousness is less shocking – but is seemingly unperturbed by it. It’s an interesting shift for a man who once staked his identity on the politics of shock and awe.
For Waters, everyone has a story worth telling. The chapters on Little Richard, Rei Kawakubo (the designer behind Comme des Garcons) and Leslie van Houten (one of the Manson murderers) exemplify Waters’ identification and fondness for those who are party to social and cultural exile.
The chapter on Leslie van Houten – one of Waters’ closest friends and confidantes – is easily the most conflicted and interesting. He has been a long-time advocate for her parole, arguing that she’s spent more time in jail than any Nazi war criminal.
It is the only time in Role Models where Waters is completely serious – contrite, even. But by arguing van Houten’s case, he has to admit that he too is “guilty of using the Manson mur-ders in a jokey, smart-ass way … without the slightest feeling for the victims’ families or the lives of the brainwashed Manson killer kids ”. This is an explicit reference to his film Multiple Maniacs, a burlesque farce about the Manson murders that was released three months after the killings.
Nevertheless, it is hard to believe this outpouring of guilt comes from a man who once famously declared: “I pride myself on the fact that my work has no socially redeeming value”. It certainly doesn’t apply to Role Models, which serves as a tale of Waters’ own redemption through the worship of his idols.
While parts of Role Models are definitely tailored for the most diehard of fans, Waters’ fluid prose and vast knowledge on literature, art and pop culture should be enough to charm those with only a brief acquaintance of his work.
While the jeremiad against suburban dystopia and the hierarchies of taste may seem a little overdone at times, Waters never takes himself too seriously. He’s sentimental without being overly saccharine; he’s still wacky but in that amusing, “inappropriate uncle” kind of way. His avant-garde days may be over, but he remains a contrarian to a very humorous end.
Role Models
Author: John Waters
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2010
Pages: 320
