‘Somehow I became respectable. I don’t know how, the last film I directed got some terrible reviews and was rated NC-17. Six people in my personal phone book have been sentenced to life in prison. I did an art piece called ‘Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot’, which was composed of close-ups from porn films, yet a museum now has it in their permanent collection and nobody got mad. What the hell has happened? I used to be despised but not I’m asked to give commencement addresses at prestigious colleges, attend career retrospectives at both the Film Society of Lincoln Centre and the British Film Institute, and I even got a medal from the French government for ‘furthering the arts in France.’ This cockeyed maturity is driving me crazy!’ (‘Mr. Know-It-All’)
John Waters has had a long and ignoble history in filmmaking, producing movies to shock the liberals and conservatives alike and amuse the weirdos. His early work featured a cast made up of his delinquent circle of friends from the wrong side of Baltimore, none more so than Divine who would later achieve fame in her own right. From the downright profane (‘Roman Candles’) to the disgusting (‘Pink Flamingos’ – in which Divine actually ate dog shit) – to the subversive (Waters wrote and directed the original ‘ Hairspray’ upon which the musical was based) and back again (his last film, ‘A Dirty Shame’ (2004) features Tracy Ullman as a woman who becomes a sex obsessive after a car accident), Water’s films were camp, funny, scandalous and downright fantastic. Always taking the side of the outsider, Water’s films praised the vulgar and the cheap, the dirty and the crude, turned serial killers into heroes and queers into icons.
The fact that he has been unable to make a film in 18 years is a travesty, but not surprising when you consider that Water’s wicked humour has, from rough cult beginnings, filtered down into the mainstream. Apart from guest appearances on everything from ‘The Simpsons’ (in the episode ‘Homer’s Phobia) to Ru Paul’s Drag Race, his vision, camp and humour are now part of our everyday. From the freaks who inhabit the edges of his films – from ‘Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions’ in Multiple Maniacs (1970) to the encyclopaedic catalogue of sexual kinks in ‘A Dirty Shame’ – to the sexual proclivities and addictions of his characters (mainlining liquid eyeliner in ‘Female Trouble’ springs to mind) Water’s has always dedicated his films to filth and Waters always admitted that he took elements of his sick fairy tales from real life, at the time (most) audiences just weren’t ready to face up to this filthy world. Now, thanks to the pornification of everyday life and an increasingly desperate search for ‘shocks’ leading us down a seedy rabbit hole, has this filthy world has overtaken Waters’ fictionalised account?
And so to ‘Liarmouth’ a book which Waters has been working on for 8 years and which comes in lieu of a new film. ‘Liarmouth’ is John Waters through and through. No one else could have written this novel. It features everything the Waters groupie would want and expect from him: This is the story of Marsha Sprinkle, who finds telling the truth as difficult as she finds suitcase stealing at airports easy. Her family hate her: her daughter, Poppy who runs with a gang of adult trampoline fanatics, who have discovered that the best cure for emotional trauma is nonstop bouncing. When Marsha shows up at the fun park and robs everyone in sight, Poppy bursts into a matricidal rage. She has been crossed by her mother one too many times. Marsha must die. Marsha’s mother is Adora Sprinkle, an unlicensed Upper East Side plastic surgeon who performs cosmetic tweaks on pets. She has pioneered, along with Pekingese butt lifts and dachshund leg extensions, the implantation of faux testicles that can restore the stolen swagger of a neutered dog. The three women, along with various male appendages (including Daryl Hotchkins, Marsha’s crime partner and sex slave who happens to have a talking penis with a gay bent) travel across the States to Cape Cod for a showdown. Like all Water’s films, the plot is merely another appendage on which to pin these grotesques and exude Waters’ fixations and fulsome dialogue. Is the world ready for the ‘Anilingus’ festival which the characters stumble across (‘Eating Ass is a Gas!)? or the blasphemous: ‘Everyone hated her. Her employees, her poor deceased ex-husband, her own daughter, and yes, her mother too. Even God thought she was a cunt.’?
And yet…I found it a little bit of chore to read. As I implied earlier, perhaps, the modern world is now beyond satire, beyond bad taste – something which Waters recently acknowledged: ‘Trump ruined it. As soon as Trump was president, it just ended the humour of it. He was the nail in the coffin. He’s the first person who had accidental bad taste that wasn’t funny.’ We now see in morning newspapers the very stories which Waters brought to the screen:
‘A shoe fetishist who attacked a teenager for her high heels was yesterday ordered to wear a new accessory – an electronic ankle tag. Mark Barrie, 35, crept up on 18 year old Fiona Berwick in busy Perth town centre at 5pm on January 23, assaulted her and dragger her off her shoe. The kitchen fitter admitted he was sexually attracted by her footwear – and that he would often spend hours gazing in the windows of shoe shops. Stuart Richards, prosecuting told the court, ‘Without warning, she felt someone taking hold of her ankles form behind. She saw the accused on the ground holding on the her ankles, He managed to pull off one of her shoes. By this stage she began screaming and he dropped the shoe and ran off.’
‘Police are hunting a man accused of approaching several girls, removing their shoes and sniffing their feet in an act of fetishism. Five incidents have been reported in the last five months neat Bristol and Gloucester.’
But, perhaps more than Waters’ vision being eclipsed by the modern world, I also suspect that Waters work and vision just isn’t a good fit for a novel: Waters always made sure that his films were 90 minutes long, short, and sharp and quick fired. They weren’t intended to be ‘lived in’ in the same way which a novel invites the reader deep inside its world. Perhaps too long in Waters’ world doesn’t make us sick with revulsion or chortle at the ass-licking obscenity. Rather, it drags the short, sharp wit into and endless parade, Marsha’s roadtrip turning from a scramble to a drag . Honestly, I greeted the arrival at the anilingus festival with a jaded ‘is that all you’ve got’?
His films also benefitted from the cock-eyed casting, which brought Hollywood celebrity to runs shoulders with Baltimore’s finest bohemians. Anyone who thinks of Waters’ films cannot but think of Mink Stole, Kathleen Turner, Edith Massey, Tracy Ullman, Patty Hurst, Divine, Cookie Mueller to name but a few – and without these outstanding turns, Waters’ scripts become a little flat.
But, ultimately, I love John Waters. I love his films, his writings and his vision. This novel is a miss-step, but a miss-step by Waters is a miss-step like no one else’s. And for that, I am grateful.
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