In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 15 Trash Comes Home: Gender/Genre Subversion in the Films of John Waters Derek Kane-Meddock “The only gross [movies] people try to make now are in Hollywood. The golden age of trash is over.” —John Waters, 2001 John Waters’s career trajectory is commonly described as a process of assimilation . His early films earned him prominence as a nonconformist, and he seemed to revel in being perceived as a social misfit. When the controversial director published two books in the early 1980s, Shock Value and Crackpot, their titles drew on the image of Waters as outsider that he had cultivated from the beginning of his career. Yet, for many critics, Waters’s transgressive reputation has been undermined by his transformation into an eccentric but essentially mainstream filmmaker in the 1980s. The seemingly obvious differences between Waters’s first few movies, fantastically perverse works shot on 16mm film with initial funding supplied by parental loan, and his later films, produced with studio money and targeting a wider audience, have encouraged this fragmented approach to his career. Indeed, even Waters himself has explained the changes in his filmmaking style in terms of appropriation: “First I made underground movies, and then there were no underground movies. Then it was midnight movies, and they disappeared. Then independent movies, but they were co-opted by Hollywood. Now it’s all the same. So I make Hollywood movies” (quoted in Pela 2002, 147). This comment suggests an enduring tendency to organize films generically, but it simultaneously reveals an underlying volatility in the meaning and viability of these cultural categories. Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble, sees gender as a similarly persistent phenomenon that is nevertheless fraught with concealed ambiguities. Butler i-xii_1-262_Gled.indd 205 12/13/11 11:18 AM 206 Derek Kane-Meddock insists that sex and gender are neither natural nor universal, instead offering a performative theory that emphasizes the constructed and conditional nature of gender. In a brief discussion of Waters in the introduction to her landmark work, Butler notes the subversive potential of the director’s cross-dressing star, Divine: “Her/his performance destabilizes the very distinctions between the natural and the artificial, depth and surface, inner and outer through which discourse about genders almost always operates” (1999 [1990], viii). It is this tension between recycling familiar representational tropes and ironically deconstructing their social power that animates Waters’s work. Although his subversive parodies of gender and genre share an emphasis on performativity, they have been mistakenly perceived as the products of two self-contained and diametrically opposed filmmaking spaces, underground cinema and Hollywood, neither of which are as consistent or as isolated as is frequently implied. The propensity to brand Waters as a provocateur who lost his edge in Hollywood belies the fact that his films have always acknowledged a wide variety of influences, from Herschell Gordon Lewis and Andy Warhol to William Castle and Douglas Sirk. With the residue of “trash” cinema finding its way into mainstream Hollywood, Waters’s industry films have often been characterized as tepid, unable to effectively recapture the rebellious spirit of the 1970s. This familiar refrain, used to account for the demise of many alternative modes of filmmaking in 1980s American cinema, is exemplified by Jonathan Rosenbaum in the 1991 addendum to Midnight Movies: “You can say that midnight movies succeeded rather than failed, in the sense that the major figures in this movement . . . have all made it into the mainstream. But it’s a kind of success that resembles failure on certain fronts” (Hoberman and Rosenbaum 1991, 322). What this popular conception of Waters has overlooked is a significant affinity between the two periods of the director’s career. This affinity, derived from his ambivalence about all forms of social categorization, is manifested on screen in the form of a performative excess that foregrounds artifice and denaturalizes the familiar.1 Whereas Waters’s early works overtly flaunt their contempt for traditional gender roles, most visibly through the ambiguity of Divine, his later films show a similar disregard for generic integrity. Both gender conventions and genres are parodied and combined in atypical ways, recycled in order to cast a critical eye on that evocative symbol of normalcy and repository of morality, the family. In order to demonstrate the structural link between gender and genre in Waters ’s work, I will examine three of the director’s films: Pink Flamingos (1972), representing his early career, Polyester (1981), which marks his transition to Hollywood , and...

Share