Maybe it was the mono sound of my budget-priced video recorder, which the salesperson at Saturn Hansa had dubbed the ‘Trabant’ (der Trabi, das Symbol eines verschwundenen Landes, the symbol of a disappeared country, hat heute längst Kultstatus erreicht, has long since attained cult status) of VCRs. Maybe it was the parallelepiped PAL cassette’s lack of THX Home Cinema Certification for its ‘film transfer onto video’ sound processing technology. Maybe it was poor original tech work, some sort of bit oversampling or multi-microphone acoustic signal mixer confusion, at the inaugural amplifier link of the sound reproduction and media storage chain. Maybe it was an intentional Director’s Cut, a willful reduction in the spectral distribution and reverberation of the direct and reflected sound fields, or a deliberate blunting or compression of dynamic range and differences in tonality. I don’t know, but, after the opening scene on the front doorstep of a stately ‘upper-class home’, all of the characters in John Waters’ 1977 Trash Art film Desperate Living seemed to me to be constantly screaming. It was as if all voice timbres had been equalized and limited to the coarsest level of granularity of sound wave radiation, as if one dimension of reality had been taken away. Close one eye, and you lose your three-dimensional depth perception. Close one ear wide shut, and the multimedia switching computer which your brain and biotech auditory devices are alleged to be lose their relativistic sense of position, velocity, and distance.
Those human emblems of everyday authority, the distinguished psychiatrist (uncredited actor) and the ‘understanding,’ moneymaking husband-father (George Stover as Bosley Gravel), are calmly discussing the improving mental health of the highly neurotic Mrs. Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole), as they stand at the outdoors user interface to the wealthy interior home, while children play baseball on the lawn. Once past this gateway from pastoral surface to entangled innards, it is ninety-nine minutes of nonstop frantic screeching. Language itself, for the ruled as well as for those who rule, becomes an unadorned, permanent, desperate outcry of the needy individual for some personal attention. Extreme caricature of a functional-dysfunctional cultural citizen of the upper crust, the near-anorexic, paranoid, just-released-from-the-mental-hospital, female outpatient Peggy Gravel, experiences perpetual mortal terror at the ordinary real-time ‘accidental connections’ of suburban technological life, a wrong-number phone call or a bedroom window smashed by the projectile of a home run hardball. Extreme parody of a societal outcast, the thieving, alcoholic, obese, 350-pound black maid Grizelda Brown (Jean Hill), commits a capital felony at Peggy’s instigation, using her own fatter-than-fat buttocks as the murder weapon. The two sisters-in-crime are suddenly on the run together in the family Mercedes.
Beneath the apparent serenity of the quotidian ‘American way of life’ lies the limitless violence, desolation, madness, corruption, and vulgarity which John Waters the artist must summon into overt existence. Nothing is given, yet this very remainder banished from the dominant systems of accumulation and value provides the raw material necessary to meet head-on the challenge of ‘rousing the principle of evil’ (although others have preferred lateral approaches). Just as Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe) has the oculomotoric nerve to commit double-homicide in the sub-culturally marginal Jesse Ventura Wrasslin’ Ring, and Muffy St. Jacques (played by Las Vegas strip joint burlesque star Liz Renay) is able to flagitiously divert the banal accoutrements of commonplace 1970s consumerism into a fatal dog food facial for the trippin’ babysitter who preserved the baby in the refrigerator, and into a lethal automobile electrical power window head-squeeze’n’drive for her irresponsible drink’n’drive male spouse, thus succeeding in making a twin killing, so John Waters himself employs the media of the screenplay and the feature film to attempt to pry apart the effectively non-copulative binary system of smug middle-class morality and the scapegoated residuals which it excludes, sequesters, or declares to be useless. But like his shrieking lesbian anti-heroes, Waters aspires to invent a certain alternative numerical system, between the one and the two of Haraway, rather than seeking to unpack dualistic opposition into some mere self-multiplying ultra-hi-res virtual reality or quadraphonic hyper-dimensionality.
The two chronological parts of the movie, separated by the gruesome scene with Turkey Joe as the sexually perverted motorcycle cop who offers to not haul the all-points bulletin fugitives Peggy and Grizelda off to jail if they agree in return to help him get off his jollies, paint dramatically divergent ‘realities’, each of which has an inherently differing aesthetic status. In the film’s first segment, we find ourselves in the habitual environment of the polyester ennui and average white band families which John Waters, in his anger and in his art, strives to satirize. In the film’s lengthier second portion, we are transported to a realm of wretched devastation, to the abject misery which is the scorched earth town of Mortville and the crying lot of its inhabitants. Perhaps it is a ‘monstrous, revisionist, inverted fairy tale’ of the wicked, tyrannical Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey of 1972 Pink Flamingos ‘Mama Edie the Egglady’ fame) and her sadomasochistic Nazi henchmen in their plywood castle headquarters, as Waters himself claims. Perhaps it is rather a science fiction scenario of a Paul Auster-like In the Country of Last Things (dystopian epistolary novel published in 1987), where a township owned by a tourist industry mega-corporation named Charm City Productions has set up an alternative prison service with squallid ‘living’ circumstances for its inmates to provide an entertaining atrocity exhibition for the cruel voyeuristic amusement of its anti-theme park vacationer-customers. My best clue here is that John tells us in the essay “101 Things I Hate” (in the book Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters) that he despises science fiction, and that he considers it to be the worst cinema genre of all.1
In the article “Going to Jail” (also in the book Crackpot), I learned about the lately-gone-uptown director’s critique of the American institutional system of crime and punishment. The hatred of violent criminals by the God-fearing Baltimorean masses is, according to John, based on the erroneous assumption of the purported ethical superiority of the ‘normal character’ to that possessed by the scorned delinquents. Boiling resentment and internecine family warfare of the roses are conditions endemic to all of our lives, and they are the concrete prerequisites which could turn any one of us at any time into a ready-made serial killer. It is therefore hypocritical of us to presume to judge offenders, and to condemn them through the instrument of the penal system to decades of harsh confinement or even death. John taught film studies and ‘sex education’ to prisoners with life sentences at the experimental Patuxent Correctional Facility in the State of Maryland. In the prurient movie currently under investigation, the Rarefied Authority of the Law and the Righteous Scales of Justice are represented by the pivotal character of Turkey Joe the transvestite motorcycle cop. In one speculative sense, the whole story of Desperate Living begins and ends within the first ten minutes of the film, culminating in the instant of Big Joey’s frenetic bliss, the moment of real material production of his desiring-machine. Everything that happens after the furious rush to orgasm, the entire sojourn of the viewer and of the Dreamland players in Mortville, might just be a deliriously wayward side-effect of the Wild Turkey’s ejaculation.
The leather- and lingerie-clad Law Enforcement Officer with the bad case of drooling gingivitis is a disgusting low-life panty thief who is ready at the drop of a trouser to forego his sworn duty to arrest the suspected female murderers if they are willing to participate in the bizarre erotic ritual activity which will bring him to climax. The Man’s own special Thang is wearing women’s hosiery, and getting a big slurpy kiss from the complicit woman who must reach down and hand over her undies to him. Then Baltimore’s Finest writhes around on the ground for a few trices of ecstasy and shoots off his load. But just after finally achieving his release from tension, Sheriff Shitface, as Grizelda calls him, momentarily feels a pang of guilt or embarrassment over the depravity of his actions. He unexpectedly declares, “What are you hogs looking at? Go on — the show’s over!” This univocal utterance announces the end of the movie, at least in the traditional mode of realism, the end of that libidinal economy which establish(m)e(nt)s what is called reality. Taking off hurriedly into the misty woods, Grizelda and Peggy emerge seconds later in Mortville, a ‘trash aesthetic’ domain which perhaps only exists in reverie as the phantasmagoric waste byproduct or castoff negative rectal underbelly of the motorcycle cop’s fetishistic sex fantasy. “I like the feel of that cold nylon on my big butt!” (Turkey Joe). It is John Q. Law, lampooned upholder of the Social Order and of the Prison System, who will, from this point on, ‘tell the story’ of Mortville.
In Shantytown Mortville, nearly everything is running backwards, inside out, or in reverse. On the illustrious Holiday known as Backwards Day, you have to walk backwards and wear your clothes backwards, or face the penalty of immediate execution by firing squad. Mass extermination by injected rhabdovirus will also be gloriously commemorated, since “history will not forget this holiday of death,” as Peggy Gravel, the substitute Princess and latter-day architect of Project Rabies, proclaims. Owning a lottery ticket in Mortville practically means a guaranteed win, and bankbooks are as good as worthless. Makeover artists are ‘ugly experts.’ Nourishment is available from the daily ‘food dump,’ and mangy dogs eat discarded penises. Prominent nudists are obsessed with the sublimity of collector’s items of garbage. The love poem of Herbert the nudist garbageman (George Figgs) to Princess Coo Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce): “every piece of trash… reminded me of you.” Coo Coo is eventually ‘punished’ for her ‘transgression’ of heterosexuality with death. The shooting set and soundstage of Mortville were themselves constructed almost completely out of garbage. John Waters recounts how difficult it was to gain access to the ‘wonderful world’ of official refuse. He and Art Director Vincent Peranio were chased away from garbage dumps and junkyards with due force by trash owners and their watchdogs, obliged to swallow as they ran the bitter accusation hurled at their backs of not being ‘real junk dealers.’ But most of all, Mortville is about the double-negative paradox of the accursed share or ‘le rien’: “There ain’t nothing here,” as Mole McHenry so succinctly puts it.
It is thus by winning the lottery that the ‘lesbian melodrama about the revolution’ against the repressive corporatist monarchy and the leather fascist goons can finally take place. Mole travels to the drugstore Lotto office in Baltimore to pick up her thousand dollars. With cash in hand, she then goes on a shopping spree and buys three things: her penis implant, new clothes for Muffy, and weapons. The new organ fails to stick, but guns and bras make the revolution. The brassiere’s support for her breasts and the stunning gown give Muffy the self-confidence to seduce on the drawbridge the Nazi officer who will become the first kill of the uprising. The pistols and revolvers enable the indignant rebels to storm the castle. As reality accelerates into hyperreality, as the technicians of practical knowledge add the fourth and umpteenth dimensions to image and sound, garbage reenters the scene, scaling moat and rampart from just the opposite direction to save the day. Resurging from its assigned place, it returns to reinhabit what had rejected it and spewed it out. Trash Art or filmmaking takes away one dimension from reality. Shut one ear wide and listen to this sound of one hand clapping, to the two-sided screaking of Trash Art.
NOTE
1 – Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters (New York: Vintage, 1987, reprinted 2003).