John Waters: The Pope of Trash

William Burroughs called him the Pope of Trash, and John Waters has spent the decades since wearing the title like a papal ring. It is a good joke and a slightly misleading one, because underneath the calculated bad taste sits one of American cinema’s most disciplined satirists. Waters set out to offend, certainly. He also built, film by film, a coherent worldview: a love of the outcast, a hatred of respectability, and a Baltimore-rooted belief that the people polite society finds disgusting are the only ones worth filming. The trash was always in the service of something.

The Dreamland underground

Waters grew up in Baltimore obsessed with the lurid — exploitation films, tabloid crime, the local grotesques — and he started making shorts and features in the 1960s with a repertory troupe of friends he dubbed the Dreamlanders. Chief among them was Divine, born Harris Glenn Milstead, a childhood acquaintance whom Waters transformed into one of cinema’s great outsized creations, a drag performer of ferocious commitment who became the director’s muse and alter ego. The early films — Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970) — were shot on almost no money in and around Baltimore, deliberately amateurish, gleefully blasphemous, and aimed squarely at the midnight-movie circuit then coalescing around underground cinema.

These are not easy films to defend on conventional terms, and Waters would be the first to say he never meant them to be. They are provocations built to be shown to a rowdy midnight crowd, and their energy comes from a genuine avant-garde nerve underneath the crudeness. Waters had absorbed both the transgressive theatre of the era and the sleaze of the exploitation grindhouse, and he fused them into something entirely his own.

It is worth being precise about what Waters was reacting against. He came of age in a Baltimore he found suffocatingly conformist, and his early cinema is a direct assault on the values of the postwar American suburb — its cleanliness, its piety, its horror of anything unusual. The Dreamlanders were his answer: a chosen family of drag performers, eccentrics and self-styled degenerates who became his stock company for two decades. Filming them lovingly, as stars rather than freaks, was itself the political act. Long before the mainstream caught up, Waters was putting queer and outsider bodies at the centre of the frame and treating them as the most glamorous thing in the room.

Pink Flamingos and the limits of taste

Then, in 1972, came Pink Flamingos, the film that made his name and very nearly ended any hope of mainstream acceptance. A competition between two households for the title of “filthiest people alive”, it is a catalogue of transgressions building to a closing act so notorious it has kept the film banned, censored and whispered about for half a century. I will not describe it; the reputation precedes it and the squeamish should stay well clear. What matters critically is the intent. Waters was staging an assault on the entire concept of good taste, testing how far an audience could be pushed, and doing it with a satirist’s glee rather than a pornographer’s leer. The film is genuinely funny, in a way that curdles in the throat, and it turned Divine into an international cult figure overnight.

Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977) extended the Dreamland aesthetic with slightly more resources and sharper writing. Female Trouble, in particular, is the strongest of the early run, a demented mock-melodrama about a delinquent who comes to believe that crime and beauty are the same thing, with Divine giving a performance of real comic force. The trilogy of filth, as it is sometimes called, is Waters at his most uncompromising, and it is where the cult was forged.

What distinguishes Waters from the pure shock merchants of the era is craft and structure. His scripts are tightly plotted little melodramas, his dialogue is quotable and precise, and his sense of comic timing is impeccable. He revered classical Hollywood melodrama — Douglas Sirk, the women’s pictures of the forties — and his films are affectionate parodies of those forms as much as they are provocations. That love of a well-built story is why the transgression lands: the filth is mounted inside a genuinely sturdy comic frame, and the contrast between the polished form and the outrageous content is the whole joke. Compare the calculated escalation of his work to the anything-goes gross-out of a film like Visitor Q and Waters looks, oddly, like a classicist. That double life — grindhouse provocateur and secret classicist — is the key to the whole filmography.

The long crossover

The remarkable second act of Waters’s career is his slow, deliberate march toward the mainstream without ever quite surrendering to it. Polyester (1981) was the hinge — a suburban melodrama parody starring Divine opposite the faded Hollywood heart-throb Tab Hunter, released with a scratch-and-sniff “Odorama” card so audiences could smell along with the film. It kept the gimmickry of the underground while flirting with the conventions of a real movie.

Then, in 1988, Waters made Hairspray, and everything changed. A bright, warm-hearted comedy about a plus-sized Baltimore teenager fighting to integrate a segregated television dance show, it earned a PG rating and a genuine popular audience, and it did so without softening Waters’s core sympathies for the misfit and the excluded. It was also Divine’s last film; the performer died days after its release, robbing Waters of his muse at the moment of his breakthrough. Hairspray would later become a Broadway musical and a second Hollywood film, carrying Waters’s Baltimore vision to a mass audience that had no idea it had been smuggled in by the Pope of Trash.

The mainstream run that followed is genuinely fine work. Cry-Baby (1990) is a rockabilly musical parody that helped make Johnny Depp a star by teasing his teen-idol image. Serial Mom (1994) is the underrated masterpiece of Waters’s later career, with Kathleen Turner as a picture-perfect suburban homemaker who murders anyone who breaches her code of etiquette — a savage, hilarious satire on American respectability and the true-crime appetite that dovetails perfectly with everything Waters had been saying since the sixties. Pecker (1998), Cecil B. Demented (2000) and A Dirty Shame (2004) kept the flag flying with diminishing commercial returns.

Serial Mom deserves a closer look because it shows how completely Waters had absorbed the mainstream while keeping his sensibility intact. Turner plays her murderous housewife entirely straight, as a chirpy paragon of suburban virtue, and the comedy comes from the gap between her sunny domesticity and her body count. The film skewers the American obsession with true crime years before the genre swallowed television whole, and it does so with a lightness that makes the satire go down easy. It is Waters proving he could work with real stars, a real budget and a studio release, and still make a film about the rot under the manicured lawn.

The elder statesman of filth

Waters has not directed a feature since 2004, yet he has hardly slowed down. He reinvented himself as an author, spoken-word performer and art-world fixture, touring his one-man show, publishing genuinely excellent books — Role Models, Carsick, Mr Know-It-All — and becoming a beloved cultural elder, the rare provocateur who lived long enough to be embraced by the establishment he spent his youth appalling. There is a delicious irony in the man who made Pink Flamingos now being feted with retrospectives and honorary degrees, and Waters savours it more than anyone.

The through-line across sixty years is unbroken. From the Dreamlanders to Serial Mom, Waters has made films about the gap between how respectable people present themselves and what they actually want, and he has always taken the side of the freaks. The bad taste was a method, a way of clearing the polite audience out of the room so the real business could proceed. His influence runs everywhere the mainstream has learned to embrace the transgressive with affection — through camp comedy, through the entire aesthetic of trash-as-art, through any film that finds the outcast more interesting than the respectable.

For anyone starting out, the ideal path is chronological and cautious. Pink Flamingos is the historically essential film and by far the most extreme; approach it knowing exactly what it is. Female Trouble is the best of the early work. Hairspray is the warmest and the perfect gateway for the squeamish. And Serial Mom is the one to convince a sceptic that the Pope of Trash was, all along, a moralist in a very convincing disguise. If your appetite for gleeful transgression survives that, the wider grubby-satire tradition is worth exploring, and Troma’s grubby superhero satire in The Toxic Avenger makes a fitting, filthy companion piece.